A sad little footnote in the annals of computer publishing – we hear that CMP Publishing Inc’s Systems & Network Integration, which started life as Computer Systems News, the paper that first recognised that the industry was moving away from the mainframe and that there was a whole generation of computer people making and selling computers and peripherals for whom acronyms like MVS/SP 1.3 and DASD meant nothing, is shutting up shop after one more 40-page edition: the only computer paper that the cognoscenti rushed to see in its heyday, its position was gradually usurped by its stablemate Computer Reseller News, and in an effort to find it a new role, the publishers latched on to systems integration, journalistically as much of a graveyard subject for a whole magazine as are value-added resellers, because there simply isn’t enough new to say every week or month; we fondly imagined the scene at US press conferences where whenever the guy or gal from Systems & Network Integration stood up to ask a question, the whole room chorused What is the significance of this for systems integrators?
