Some of you might be too young to remember the space race: the frenzied decades of the '50s and '60s where the US and the USSR poured massive resources to be the First [Anything] in space.

We are often so focused on the end-user or business experience of the computers we use on a daily basis that we sometimes forget about the nuts-and-bolts side of IT--a side of technology where performance is king no matter what platform, operating system, and task is present.