Twenty five years ago today, a young Bill Gates unveiled Windows 1.0 at the New York Helmsely Palace Hotel. The final product would not hit store shelves for almost another two years, but Gates staked the claim that by 1984 his new graphical OS would be running on nearly 80% of PCs by 1984. The final product came a year late, and the MS Windows marketshare is currently at approximately 80% in 2008. Go figure.

The OS competition at the time was Topview from IBM and GEM from Digital Research. There was of course Apple in its early years too…

Welcome to Cascade Labeling and Lanier & Associations Engineering, the newest members of our company directory. We are pleased to add these excellent companies to our growing list of corporate friends.

Today we published several upgrades to company profiles and the products directory.  Company profiles have been expanded to included additional products and product information, more company news, and additional contact information. There are still a few upgrades coming over the next few days that will further improve the useability of the company and product directories.

The Research and Innovation Channel has taken significant steps forward and is nearly complete.  In Research & Innovation you will find articles, whitepapers, research, and success stories. Some articles are technical research and the published results. Others are success stories, or implementation stories about how new technologies are being used in commercial, industrial, agricultural, and other environments to solve problems.

We welcome your submissions and will publish all reasonably verifiable articles, papers, and stories. Send your submissions to press@ElectricalEngineer.com

For the past few months, the URLs on ElectricalEngineer.com have been cryptic, hard to remember, and even harder to type.  We are building a pretty detailed content management system that relies on a bunch of parameters to deliver you the content you want and the point you want it.  Those parameters made our URLs read like a bad tale from the Crypt(ic) URL Keeper.  Yesterday we implemented an URL generator that replaces the cryptic URLs with words and eliminates the overly long URLs. This change will make bookmarking channels, articles, and other content much easier and should improve the overall experience with the site.

Our new user forums came online late yesterday and have been undergoing testing today. While the look and feel is not quite finished yet, most of the functionality is in place and working. You can register, log in, post, comment, and interact now using the Forums Channel.

Send us your feedback please.

It’s currently open season for engineering students. Companies from across the Country are out hunting for interns, co-op students, and graduating engineering students.

Today we are at the University of Akron participating in the fall career fair.  There are a bunch of companies here today - I mean a bunch. This event is one of the best co-op recruiting events in the Country. Seriously, UA is graduating some very talented engineers and they are in high demand.

Just returned from the NECA trade show in Chicago. Lot’s of new and innovative products are coming to the market very soon. We will be featuring some new products that debuted at the NECA show in coming days.

From my perspective, the show was well attended. Traffic seemed to be good throughout most of the show. The location was great (fall is probably Chicago’s finest season), the facilities are excellent, and the people were very engaging.

As expected, there was an entire section of the show dedicated to GREEN initiatives that featured new products mostly related to solar and wind energy. There were also training sessions related to green power throughout the event. More about the products, services, and training related to the renewable power initiatives coming soon.

Our newest university partners are:

Idaho State University

Minnesota State University

The University of Mississippi

We appreciate their participation!

Here is an hour of free continuing education and training on the coming changes to NFPA 70E and NESC Arc Flash rules. “5 Strategies for Understanding & Implementing the 2009 Arc Flash Rules” is an excellent introduction to the coming changes, the risks, and how to reduce those risks in your facility.

Over 530 people registered for the live presentation of this training session.

View the Video Here