In the recently published biography of the late Apple founder, Steve Jobs sums up the new HP as 'tragic.'

Hewlett Packard always held a special place in Steve Jobs’ heart. And while the two companies were sometimes competitors, Jobs took no comfort in HP’s corporate meltdown this summer.

In fact, he thought it was a tragedy.

“Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they left it in good hands,” Jobs told Apple staffers on his final visit to the company. “But now it’s being dismembered and destroyed. It’s tragic. I hope I’ve left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Ap...

John McCarthy, the man who coined the term artificial intelligence

When IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer won its famous chess rematch with then world champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997, the victory was hailed far and wide as a triumph of artificial intelligence. But John McCarthy — the man who coined the term and pioneered the field of AI research — didn’t see it that way.

As far back as the mid-60s, chess was called the “Drosophila of artificial intelligence” — a reference to the fruit flies biologists use to uncover the secrets of genetics — and McCarthy believed his successors in AI research ha...