The company's philanthropic arm has previously donated money to fund gifting Raspberry Pi microcomputers to UK schoolkids.
|
|
Early PCs based on Intel chips were referred to as microcomputers, and companies like DEC dismissed them as toys.
|
|
Pfaff restored the saved game of Adventureland, a text command game released for microcomputers by Scott Adams in 1978.
|
|
I really pushed the machines to the limits by building microcomputers, really hitting the processor hard and trying new programmes.
|
|
It was Mr Allen who came up with the name Microsoft, a combination of the words "microcomputers", as PCS were then called, and "software".
|
|
These companies faced growing competition from dramatically cheaper "microcomputers," known today as PCs, some of which were designed by Silicon Valley companies like Apple.
|
|
When the company was founded, in 1975, the machines were known as microcomputers, to distinguish the desktop computers from the hulking machines of the day.
|
|
"In some respects, it was similar to microcomputers that came four or five years later, such as the Commodore Pet or the TRS-211," the Wang21992.
|
|
But Boston's minicomputer companies faced growing competition from dramatically cheaper "microcomputers," known today as PCs, some of which were designed by Silicon Valley companies like Apple.
|
|
The exhibit, called Avatars, is made up of 16 different objects equipped with cameras, microphones, and microcomputers that allow them to be operated remotely over the internet.
|
|
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has been incredibly successful at sparking all sorts of creativity via its low cost microcomputers, which arrived in the market back in 2012.
|
|
The Dash is already an impressive set of microcomputers you can fit in your ears, but just imagine where they'll be like five years down the line.
|
|
Each 663-foot device contains around 266 sensors and 213 microcomputers to produce the best, freshest, locally sourced cheeseburger that $26 can get you in America's most expensive city.
|
|
The amount of technology incorporated into these small devices is rather impressive; they're more like small microcomputers than earbuds, even though they look much less obtrusive than you may expect.
|
|
Hacker at workGostomelsky wanted to be able to identify exactly who was doing the broadcasting, so he included in his five suitcases four microcomputers with software-defined radios—devices that decipher radio signals.
|
|
A year later, the company moved to selling pre-assembled machines, the Apple II. The Apple II was one of the first mass-produced microcomputers and it helped kickstart the personal computing revolution.
|
|
Some of the treasures up for bidding: unused microcomputers, transistor radios, clock radios, original brick cellphones, answering machines, and old catalogs featuring the trendiest consumer electronics of the '60s and '70s and beyond.
|
|
The console uses a type of PSG (programmable sound generator) sound chip, found in early gaming models and microcomputers, that a niche community of musicians have repurposed to make a unique subgenre of electronic music.
|
|
I had a TRS-80, which was one of the first microcomputers, and I wrote some programs and some software and I would try and get them published and I got some published in some magazines but mostly they got rejected.
|
|
Products like Joule and Intel's Quark, Edison, and now Curie line of microcomputers for wearables are designed to keep the company competitive as more new devices — many of them everyday objects like accessories, clothing, and appliances — come online every day.
|
|
Four and a half years later, with more than 10 million of its single board Pi microcomputers now sold, the Foundation evidently feels it's time to put a cherry on top of the project with its own shiny white starter kit.
|
|
Category:Apple II clones Clones Category:Early microcomputers Category:Home computers Category:ITT Inc.
|
|
Rubinstein began his involvement with microcomputers as director of marketing at IMSAI.
|
|
Of the early "box of switches"-type microcomputers, the MITS Altair 8800 (1975) was arguably the most famous. Most of these simple, early microcomputers were sold as electronic kits—bags full of loose components which the buyer had to solder together before the system could be used. Microcomputer module LSI-11/2 The period from about 1971 to 1976 is sometimes called the first generation of microcomputers. Many companies such as DEC, National Semiconductor, Texas Instruments offered their microcomputers for use in terminal control, peripheral device interface control and industrial machine control.
|
|
32-bit microcomputers are computers in which 32-bit microprocessors are the norm.
|
|
The Intellec computers were a series of early microcomputers Intel produced in the 1970s as a development platform for their processors. The Intellec computers were among the first microcomputers ever sold, predating the Altair 8800 by at least two years.
|
|
"Ryo Kawasaki: Sonic Innovator". Commodore Microcomputers. Issue 32 (Vol.5, No.5). Pp.54–57.
|
|
Their best-known products were the Challenger series of microcomputers and Superboard single-board computer kits.
|
|
Intel also marketed the Intellec microcomputer development system as a system for developing other OEM microcomputers.
|
|
Towards the mid-1970s, he also conducted research on teaching and learning of the metric system. As microcomputers began to make their way to educational institutions in the early 1980’s, Bitter conducted research on the use of microcomputers in education. Most of his work in this area dealt with training teachers to use computers and the right software and hardware for microcomputers to be used in schools. His research also focused on how teachers can be evaluated for computer literacy.
|
|
Microcosm Ltd is a UK company established in 1979. Its early claims to fame included Silicon Disk System in 1981 and Microcache (the world's first disk cache for microcomputers) in 1982.Peter Cheesewright, Microcomputers Come of Age. The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 32(10):932–933, October 1981.
|
|
Tanenbaum originally developed MINIX for compatibility with the IBM PC and IBM PC/AT microcomputers available at the time.
|
|
Hardware reviews were notable for including coverage of the large number of home microcomputers released during the early 1980s.
|
|
More immediately, the Intel 8008 was adopted by very early microcomputers including the SCELBI, MCM/70 and Micral N.
|
|
77 a scarce resource in computer installations of the early era (as well as in early microcomputers two decades later).
|
|
It also bears a strong resemblance to the BASIC interpreters found on microcomputers in the 1980s, differing primarily in syntax details.
|
|
The S5/8 standard was adopted by a few British microcomputers, such as the Thorn EMI Liberator and the CST Thor XVI.
|
|
BASIC implementations like Tiny BASIC were designed to be lightweight so that these could run on microcomputers of the 1980s, because of memory constraints.
|
|
Further developing microcomputers, integrated circuits, and national databases were all declared priorities. Maier, J. H. (1980). "Information Technology in China." Asian Survey 20(8): 861-866.
|
|
Prior to microcomputers, the machine manufacturer generally provided an operating system and compilers for several programming languages. The calling convention(s) for each platform were those defined by the manufacturer's programming tools. Early microcomputers before the Commodore Pet and Apple II generally came without an OS or compilers. The IBM PC came with Microsoft's fore-runner to Windows, the Disk Operating System (DOS), but it did not come with a compiler.
|
|
The company was built on the early work of Prewitt using his business and personal computer development experiences. This was the period during the creation of the first microcomputers, the launch of the Altair 8800 and founding of Microsoft. He was selling and programming Minicomputers and assembling these microcomputers, attaching computer peripherals, programming and building them into business computer systems. Core was created under a different business model.
|
|
Leaders of the $50 million, five-year project at MIT included Michael Dertouzos, director of the Laboratory for Computer Science; Jerry Wilson, dean of the School of Engineering; and Joel Moses, head of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. DEC agreed to contribute more than 300 terminals, 1600 microcomputers, 63 minicomputers, and five employees. IBM agreed to contribute 500 microcomputers, 500 workstations, software, five employees, and grant funding.
|
|
Microcomputers fit well on or under desks or tables, so that they are within easy access of users. Bigger computers like minicomputers, mainframes, and supercomputers take up large cabinets or even dedicated rooms. A microcomputer comes equipped with at least one type of data storage, usually RAM. Although some microcomputers (particularly early 8-bit home micros) perform tasks using RAM alone, some form of secondary storage is normally desirable.
|
|
The programme's working title was Syntax Era. The titles use green 'computer' lettering similar to the real 1980s monitors to which BBC Microcomputers would have typically been connected.
|
|
Commodore BASIC v2.0 on the Commodore 64 MSX BASIC version 3.0 "Train Basic every day!"—reads a poster (bottom center) in a Russian school (c. 1985–1986). The introduction of the first microcomputers in the mid-1970s was the start of explosive growth for BASIC. It had the advantage that it was fairly well known to the young designers and computer hobbyists who took an interest in microcomputers, many of whom had seen BASIC on minis or maingrams. Despite Dijkstra's famous judgement in 1975, "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration", BASIC was one of the few languages that was both high-level enough to be usable by those without training and small enough to fit into the microcomputers of the day, making it the de facto standard programming language on early microcomputers.
|
|
On microcomputers, which became available from the mid 1970s onwards, BASIC became the dominant programming language. Nevertheless, some microcomputers provided APL instead - the first being the Intel 8008-based MCM/70 which was released in 1974 and which was primarily used in education. Another machine of this time was the VideoBrain Family Computer, released in 1977, which was supplied with its dialect of APL called APL/S."VideoBrain Family Computer", Popular Science, November 1978, advertisement.
|
|
This is a list of early microcomputers sold to hobbyists and developers. These microcomputers were often sold as "DIY" kits or pre-built machines in relatively small numbers in the mid-1970s. These systems were primarily used for teaching the use of microprocessors and supporting peripheral devices, and unlike home computers were rarely used with pre-written application software. Most early micros came without alphanumeric keyboards or displays, which had to be provided by the user.
|
|
Oxford University Press. 15 February 2014. The term is most commonly associated with the most popular all-in-one 8-bit home computers (such as the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, BBC Micro, and TRS-80) and small-business CP/M-based microcomputers. Because an increasingly diverse range of devices based on modern microprocessors lack the most common characteristic of "microcomputers," having an 8-bit data bus, they are not referred to as such in everyday speech.
|
|
Elwro was a Polish company that manufactured mainframe and microcomputers from 1959 until 1989. Its plant was in Wroclaw. Computer models included Odra mainframe systems, and the Elwro 800 Junior microcomputer for education.
|
|
The PL/M programming language (an acronym of Programming Language for Microcomputers) is a high-level language conceived and developed by Gary Kildall in 1973 for Hank Smith at Intel for its microprocessors.
|
|
At that time it was not so clear the microcomputers will be the future and some experts believe that the microcomputers are mainly for games and home usage. It happened that in 1981 the first microcomputer in Eastern Europe called Imko II then (in 1982) called Pravetz 82 (with 8 bit processor) has been released in Bulgaria. This was Apple II compatible microcomputer and it came to life just after Apple II. This situation placed Bulgaria in the leadership role in microcomputers production not only in Eastern Europe but also in the Middle East and even in the Central Europe. A huge plants have been built exporting thousands of Pravetz 82 and later Pravetz 16 (with 8086/88 processor) to all Eastern bloc countries and to Arabic countries.
|
|
Disk User was a bi-monthly magazine for the BBC Micro range of 8-bit microcomputers. The first issue was available from . Its coverdisks contained graphical demos and pre-release previews of upcoming software.
|
|
The Professional 325 (PRO-325), Professional 350 (PRO-350), and Professional 380 (PRO-380) were PDP-11 compatible microcomputers introduced in 1982 by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) as high-end competitors to the IBM PC.
|
|
In the 1970s, the MOS microprocessor was the basis for home computers, microcomputers (micros) and personal computers (PCs). This led to the start of what is known as the personal computer revolution or microcomputer revolution.
|
|
In 1981, four years after the first microcomputers for mainstream consumers appeared, the Ontario Ministry of Education sensed that microcomputers could be an important component of education. In June the Minister of Education, Bette Stephenson, announced the need for computer literacy for all students and formed the Advisory Committee on Computers in Education to guide their efforts.Mangan 1994, pg. 266 She stated that: > It is now clear that one of the major goals that education must add to its > list of purposes, is computer literacy.
|
|
Rob Hubbard (born 1955ZZAP! 64, October 1985Happy Computer, July 1986 in Kingston upon Hull, England) is a British composer best known for his musical and programming work for microcomputers of the 1980s, such as the Commodore 64.
|
|
Japanese jazz fusion artist, Ryo Kawasaki, performed with the Commodore 64 at the Summer CES (June 3–June 6 at Chicago) as a demo for the Kawasaki Synthesizer.Herrington, Peggy. "The 20th Century One-Man Band". Commodore Microcomputers.
|
|
Nikon Corporation using Renesas flash microcomputers Renesas The ARM-based Expeed in the Nikon 1 series with its dual ARM core needs no additional I/O processors. The Nikon 1 series also includes an Epson graphic processor.
|
|
A collection of early microcomputers, including a Processor Technology SOL-20 (top shelf, right), an MITS Altair 8800 (second shelf, left), a TV Typewriter (third shelf, center), and an Apple I in the case at far right.
|
|
The Apple II was targeted for the masses rather than just hobbyists and engineers, and influenced many of the microcomputers that followed it. Unlike preceding home microcomputers, it was sold as a finished consumer appliance rather than as a kit (unassembled or preassembled). The Apple II series eventually supported over 1,500 software programs. An Apple IIgs Apple marketed the machine as a durable product, including a 1981 ad in which an Apple II survived a fire started when a cat belonging to one early user knocked over a lamp.
|
|
The renovation included the removal of the Annex from Old Main, improvement to the athletic fields, updated office education equipment including mini and microcomputers, and air conditioning the entire school. The cost of this renovation was about $13 million.
|
|
Affordable 8-bit microprocessors with 16-bit addressing also led to the first general-purpose microcomputers from the mid-1970s on. The first use of the term "microprocessor" is attributed to Viatron Computer SystemsViatron Computer Systems. "System 21 is Now!" (PDF).
|
|
Ohio Scientific Challenger 2P, with optional double-disk unit. On display at the Musée Bolo, EPFL, Lausanne. Ohio Scientific Inc. (also known as Ohio Scientific Instruments) was an Ohio-based computer company that built and marketed microcomputers from 1975 to 1981.
|
|
NewDos/80 is a third-party operating system for the Radio Shack TRS-80 line of microcomputers released in 1980. NewDos/80 was developed by Apparat, Inc. of Denver, Colorado. NewDos/80 version 2.0 was released in August of 1981.
|
|
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System (or JPLDIS) is a file management program written in FORTRAN. JPLDIS is important because it was the inspiration and precursor to dBASE, arguably one of the most influential DBMS programs for early microcomputers.
|
|
Before Altair BASIC, microcomputers were sold as kits that needed to be programmed in machine code (for instance, the Apple I). During the Altair period, BASIC interpreters were sold separately, becoming the first software sold to individuals rather than to organizations; Apple BASIC was Apple's first software product. After the MITS Altair 8800, microcomputers were expected to ship bundled with BASIC interpreters of their own (e.g., the Apple II, which had multiple implementations of BASIC). A backlash against the price of Microsoft's Altair BASIC also led to early collaborative software development, for Tiny BASIC implementations in general and Palo Alto Tiny BASIC specifically.
|
|
Sydney Development Corporation ("SDC"), was the first publicly-traded software company in Canada. Founded by Tarrnie Williams, SDC developed an online real- time project management system for the IBM System z mainframe computer, then various different business applications for microcomputers such as the Apple II, and eventually became the first developer and publisher of computer games for microcomputers in Canada. In 1981, SDC agreed to publish Evolution by Don Mattrick and Jeff Sembers, after Williams's 10-year-old son enjoyed a demo of the game. Evolution sold over 400,000 copies, and Mattrick and Sembers went on to found Distinctive Software.
|
|
Today, there are fewer and fewer general business computing requirements that cannot be met with off-the- shelf commodity computers. It is likely that the low-end of the supermicrocomputer genre will continue to be pushed upward by increasingly powerful commodity microcomputers.
|
|
ViewSheet is a spreadsheet program produced in the 1980s by Acornsoft for use with the BBC Micro and Acorn Electron microcomputers. It was distributed as a pre-installed ROM with some computer models, such as the Master. ViewSheet was written by Mark Colton.
|
|
MikroMikko 4 TT m216 desktop computer MikroMikko was a Finnish line of microcomputers released by Nokia Corporation's computer division Nokia Data from 1981 through 1987. MikroMikko was Nokia Data's attempt to enter the business computer market. They were especially designed for good ergonomy.
|
|
It became the first developer and publisher of computer games for microcomputers in Canada. SDC was the fastest-growing public company in Canada in the five-year period 1978 to 1983 with fiscal year 1983 revenues of $21 million (equivalent to $ million in ).
|
|
He was Editor of the School Science and Mathematics from 1982-1988. In 1980, Bitter founded the Microcomputers in Education Conference and served as its Director until 2000. He has been a consultant to many school districts as well as computer hardware and software companies.
|
|
Article in Practical Computing magazine from 1982 reviewing Silicon Disk System and MicroCache. The Silicon Disk System was the first commercially available RAM disk for microcomputers.Peter Cheesewright, Microcomputers Come of Age. The Journal of the Operational Research Society, 32(10):932–933, October 1981.
|
|
Shadow RAM, on the Acorn BBC Micro, Master-series and Acorn Electron microcomputers is the name given to a special framebuffer implementation to free up main memory for use by program code and data. Some implementations of shadow RAM also permit double-buffered graphics.
|
|
Like in other fields of innovation, the use of small but powerful microcomputers and digital signal processors facilitates the development of efficient blood pressure measurement instruments. These processors enable complex and computationally intensive mathematical functions in small inexpensive devices, which are necessary for this purpose.
|
|
The Micro Focus logo circa 1985. The company was founded in 1976. In 1981, it became the first company to win the Queen's Award for Industry purely for developing a software product. The product was CIS COBOL, a standard-compliant COBOL implementation for microcomputers.
|
|
CP/M, originally standing for Control Program/Monitor and later Control Program for Microcomputers, is a mass-market operating system created in 1974 for Intel 8080/85-based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc. Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors. The combination of CP/M and S-100 bus computers was loosely patterned on the MITS Altair, an early standard in the microcomputer industry. This computer platform was widely used in business through the late 1970s and into the mid-1980s.
|
|
The IBM PC was introduced in 1981 and immediately began displacing Apple IIs in the corporate world, but commodity computing as we know it today truly began when Compaq developed the first true IBM PC compatible. More and more PC-compatible microcomputers began coming into big companies through the front door and commodity computing was well established. During the 1980s microcomputers began displacing larger computers in a serious way. At first, price was the key justification but by the late 1980s and early 1990s, VLSI semiconductor technology had evolved to the point where microprocessor performance began to eclipse the performance of discrete logic designs.
|
|
The first major operating system for microcomputers was CP/M. This operating system was compatible with Altair 8800-like microcomputers, made by Gary Kildall in conjunction with the programming language PL/M, and was licensed to computer manufacturers by Kildall's company Digital Research after it was rejected by Intel. The Intel 8080 used by these computers was an 8-bit processor, with 16-bit address space, which allowed it access up to 64 KB of memory; .COM executables used with CP/M have a maximum size of 64 KB due to this, as do those used by DOS operating systems for 16-bit microprocessors.
|
|
Article written December 2005, retrieved 2006-12-15. (ii) Usage in the titles of Christopher Evans' books "The Mighty Micro" () and "The Making of the Micro" (). Other books include Usborne's "Understanding the Micro" (), a children's guide to microcomputers. but has now fallen out of common usage.
|
|
MIL also produced a series of early microcomputers using this chip, including the MIL CPS-1, which may be the earliest example of a microcomputer system that was shipped in completed form, as opposed to a kit that had to be assembled. Several other upgraded models followed.
|
|
"and plug in instead of relying on battery power." Laptops were followed by lighter models, so that in the 2000s mobile devices and by 2007 smartphones made the term almost meaningless. The 2010s introduced wearable computers such as smartwatches. Portable computers, by their nature, are generally microcomputers.
|
|
It was written by Jerry Karlin in 1979/80. Karlin was joined by Peter Cheesewright, and their company Microcosm Research Ltd. marketed the product for a number of years. The product was available as a standalone and also bundled with a number of different microcomputers and RAM-board products.
|
|
IE-24, No. 1, February 1987, pp. 83-88. # "Increasing Throughput of Multiprocessor Systems" (with H. D. Toong), IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, Vol. IE-32, No. 3, August 1985, pp. 260-267. # "Microcomputers in Industrial Control Applications" (with H. D. Toong), IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, Vol.
|
|
Special courses are held from time to time, e.g., courses on microcomputers, lasers, plasmas, etc. The Institute publishes a quarterly journal (Jurnal Fizik Malaysia) to report up-to-date research findings in physics. A newsletter, Berita Fizik, is published quarterly to report current and future activities of the Institute.
|
|
Yost created the Antic Software publishing unit for Antic Magazine in 1984 after Jack Tramiel bought Atari Computer from Warner Communications and shut down the Atari Program Exchange. Yost met Tom Hudson at the Fall 1985 Comdex trade show and they began planning a suite of 3D animation tools for the Atari ST line of microcomputers, which became the Cyber Studio suite of animation products, beginning with CAD-3D 1.0, released autumn 1986. Stereo CAD-3D 2.0, released in late 1987, was built on an open-architecture framework and incorporated support for creating stereoscopic animations using the Tektronix “StereoTek” liquid crystal shutter 3D display. The StereoTek display was the first low-cost mass-market 3D display for microcomputers.
|
|
See BASIC interpreters Tiny BASIC was designed to use as little memory as possible, and this is reflected in the paucity of features as well as details of its interpreter system. Early microcomputers lacked the RAM and secondary storage for a BASIC compiler, which was more typical of timesharing systems. Like most BASICs of the era, Tiny Basic was interactive with the user typing statements into a command line. As microcomputers of the era were often used with teletype machines or "dumb" terminals, direct editing of existing text was not possible and the editor instead used takeout characters, often the backslash, to indicate where the user backed up to edit existing text.
|
|
Minicomputers such as the PDP-11, and microcomputers ("personal computers") such as the TRS-80, Apple II and IBM-PC were able to implement delimiterless input as part of their design specification. Microcomputers, generally having only one user connected to them, could afford to support the less efficient delimiterless input capability as keyboard input could be handled by less expensive circuitry than that used on more expensive machines. This would then lead to the development of much more powerful games for personal computers. While games existed even on some of the largest computers, most of them were written, same as any other program, to either operate on line-at-a-time or screen-at-a-time input.
|
|
This baroque style of front panels began to die out in 1964 when Seymour Cray designed his CDC 6600 supercomputer with a very simple and elegant display console containing only 2 CRT displays and a keyboard, replacing all the hundreds of switches, buttons, and blinking lights. The 6600 had support from ten supporting "peripheral processors" whose duties included reading the keyboard and driving the graphics displays. Early microcomputers such as the 1975 Altair 8800 also relied on front panels, but since the introduction of the Apple II, TRS-80, and Commodore PET during the home computer boom of 1977, the vast majority of microcomputers came with keyboards and connections for TV screens or other monitors.
|
|
A Prentice Hall subsidiary, Reston Publishing, was in the foreground of technical-book publishing when microcomputers were first becoming available. It was still unclear who would be buying and using "personal computers", and the scarcity of useful software and instruction created a publishing market niche whose target audience yet had to be defined. In the spirit of the pioneers who made PCs possible, Reston Publishing's editors addressed non-technical users with the reassuring, and mildly experimental, Computer Anatomy for Beginners by Marlin Ouverson of People's Computer Company. They followed with a collection of books that was generally by and for programmers, building a stalwart list of titles relied on by many in the first generation of microcomputers users.
|
|
The data/parity/stop (D/P/S) conventional notation specifies the framing of a serial connection. The most common usage on microcomputers is 8/N/1 (8N1). This specifies 8 data bits, no parity, 1 stop bit. In this notation, the parity bit is not included in the data bits.
|
|
World Computer Speed Chess Championship is an annual event where computer chess engines compete against each other at blitz chess time controls. It is held in conjunction with the World Computer Chess Championship. Up to 2001, it was held in conjunction with the World Microcomputer Chess Championships and restricted to microcomputers.
|
|
Front of the Koffler Center The Koffler Technology Center is Bryant's computer center. More than 200 terminals, microcomputers, and workstations are located here. Facilities offer individual workstations for hands-on learning and shared workstations for group projects. The Koffler center is also home to the university's TV and radio stations.
|
|
RCS has evolved through a variety of versions over a number of years as understanding of the complexity and sophistication of intelligent behavior has increased. The first implementation was designed for sensory-interactive robotics by Barbera in the mid 1970s.A.J. Barbera, J.S. Albus, M.L. Fitzgerald (1979). "Hierarchical Control of Robots Using Microcomputers".
|
|
Actuaries began to forecast losses using models of random events instead of deterministic methods. Computers further revolutionized the actuarial profession. From pencil-and-paper to punchcards to microcomputers, the modeling and forecasting ability of the actuary has grown exponentially. Another modern development is the convergence of modern financial theory with actuarial science.
|
|
Futrell was a tenured Associate Professor at Gallaudet University in Washington, DC. She has also co-authored several books with her husband, including, The Well-Trained Computer: Designing Systematic Instructional Materials for the Classroom Microcomputer (1984), Teachers, Computers, and Curriculum: Microcomputers in the Classroom (1999), and Different Drummers: Nonconforming Thinkers in History (1999).
|
|
Several electronics labs were used to teach analog and digital electronics; these labs were equipped with electronic test equipment such as multiple-trace oscilloscopes, digital voltmeters and microcomputers. Each associate-degree student was given a portable prototyping breadboard system on which to construct electronic circuits. This patented training system was developed by ITC.
|
|
Many early computers, or small microcomputers, support only an absolute object format. Programs are not relocatable; they need to be assembled or compiled to execute at specific, predefined addresses. The file contains no relocation or linkage information. These files can be loaded into read/write memory, or stored in read-only memory.
|
|
Isometric graphics were commonly used in video games during the 1980s and 1990s, as the technique provided a limited 3D effect that could be achieved with the constrained resources of microcomputers of the era. The style is also used for sprites and pixel art, achieving a characteristic style still used in retrogaming.
|
|
8-inch floppy disk The first floppy disk was 8 inches in diameter, was protected by a flexible plastic jacket and was a read-only device used by IBM as a way of loading microcode. Read/write floppy disks and their drives became available in 1972 but it was IBM's 1973 introduction of the 3740 data entry system that began the establishment of floppy disks, called by IBM the "Diskette 1", as an industry standard for information interchange. The formatted diskette for this system stored 242,944 bytes. Early microcomputers used for engineering, business, or word processing often used one or more 8-inch disk drives for removable storage; the CP/M operating system was developed for microcomputers with 8-inch drives.
|
|
The cassette tape was a common low-cost and low-performance mass storage device for a generation of home computers The home computers between 1977 and about 1995 were different from today's uniform and predictable machines. During this time it made economic sense for manufacturers to make microcomputers aimed at the home user. By simplifying the machines, and making use of household items such as television sets and cassette recorders instead of dedicated computer peripherals, the home computer allowed the consumer to own a computer at a fraction of the price of computers oriented to small business. Today, the price of microcomputers has dropped to the point where there's no advantage to building a separate, incompatible series just for home users.
|
|
Ian McNaught- Davis (known as 'Mac') was once again the anchorman but Chris Serle and Gill Nevill were absent, instead various experts were brought in as required to demonstrate some of the more technical aspects of the microcomputers and their uses. John Coll was the main technical 'bod' (he had also written the User Guide for the BBC Micro along with other manuals) and Ian Trackman also featured - he wrote most of the software that was used for demonstrating certain features of the microcomputer, not only for this series but also The Computer Programme and Computers in Control. The programme also featured location reports to demonstrate various practical and business uses of microcomputers. The title and incidental music was by Roger Limb of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
|
|
The history of the personal computer as mass-market consumer electronic devices effectively began in 1977 with the introduction of microcomputers, although some mainframe and minicomputers had been applied as single-user systems much earlier. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals. After the development of the microprocessor, individual personal computers were low enough in cost that they eventually became affordable consumer goods. Early personal computers – generally called microcomputers– were sold often in electronic kit form and in limited numbers, and were of interest mostly to hobbyists and technicians.
|
|
He later invented the Prolog language in 1972 after returning to France and becoming a university professor in Marseille-Luminy. As the engine of the Q-systems is highly non- deterministic, and the manipulated data structures are in some ways too simple, without any types such as string or number, Chandioux encountered limitations in his efforts to raise translation quality and lower computation time to the point he could run it on microcomputers. In 1981, Chandioux created a new SLLP, or metalanguage for linguistic applications, based on the same basic algorithmic ideas as the Q-systems, but more deterministic, and offering typed labels on tree nodes. Following the advice of Bernard Vauquois and Colmerauer, he created GramR, and developed it for microcomputers.
|
|
The Sabreman series of games was released by Ultimate Play the Game for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the 1980s. Some of the instalments were also released on other popular home microcomputers, namely the Amstrad CPC, BBC Micro, Commodore 64 and MSX. The series stars Sabreman, who is depicted wearing khakis and a pith helmet.
|
|
In 1979, the launch of the VisiCalc spreadsheet (initially for the Apple II) first turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a business tool. After the 1981 release by IBM of its IBM PC, the term personal computer became generally used for microcomputers compatible with the IBM PC architecture (PC compatible).
|
|
He is the owner of a huge collection of historical computers, calculators, peripherals, electronic games, and more than a tonne of technical documentation. It contains more than 200 microcomputers dating from 1968 onwards and a number of larger machines, including significant VAXes and old PDPs. The collection is not currently available for public view.
|
|
Single-board "keypad and calculator display" microcontrollers of this type were very similar to some low-end microcomputers of the time, such as the KIM-1 or the Microprofessor I. Some of these microprocessor "trainer" systems are still in production today, used as very low-cost introductions to microprocessors at the hardware programming level.
|
|
Most dialects of BASIC trace their history to the Fourth Edition, and left out more esoteric features like matrix math. In contrast to the Dartmouth compilers, most other BASICs were written as interpreters. This allowed them to run in the limited main memory of early microcomputers. Microsoft BASIC is one example, designed to run in 4 kB of memory.
|
|
ACE's Forth Vocabulary Its most distinctive characteristic was the choice of Forth, a structured language allowing programs to be written that would run almost as fast as the compiled languages loaded by more expensive computers. Forth was considered well adapted to microcomputers with their small memory and relatively low- performance processors.Byte Magazine."Editorial". 1980,August. Special Edition.
|
|
It was developed on homemade Motorola 6800-based microcomputers in assembler code. It was used extensively by amateur radio operators in the 1980s and 1990s but has now fallen out of use as improved PC-based data modes are now used and teleprinters became out of fashion. AMTOR improves on RTTY by incorporating error detection or error correction techniques.
|
|
Frank James Butterfield (14 February 1936 – 29 June 2007) was a Toronto-based computer programmer, author, and television personality known for his work with early microcomputers. He is particularly noted for associations with Commodore Business Machines and the Toronto PET Users Group, for many books and articles on machine language programming, and for educational videos and TV programs.
|
|
In May 1976 Butterfield became intensely interested in microcomputers, purchasing a MOS KIM-1 and eventually coauthoring a book about the machine. He soon published games and applications for many computers, and became a regular contributor, and in some cases a columnist or associate editor, for computer magazines such as COMPUTE!, COMPUTE!'s Gazette, The Transactor, and Printout.
|
|
Potter founded Psion in 1980. In its early years, Psion became a leader in software for home microcomputers. In 1984, Psion invented 'The Organizer', the world's first volume hand-held computers for personal use and information. In 1988, Potter led Psion's flotation on the London Stock Exchange and saw Psion's scale and value multiply many times.
|
|
George Morrow (January 30, 1934 – May 7, 2003) was part of the early microcomputer industry in the United States. Morrow promoted and improved the S-100 bus used in many early microcomputers. Called "one of the microcomputer industry's iconoclasts" by Richard Dalton in the Whole Earth Software Catalog, Morrow was also a member of the Homebrew Computer Club.
|
|
Thus, only the interpreter must be compiled. Early computers had relatively little memory. For example, most Data General Nova, IBM 1130, and many of the first microcomputers had only 4 kB of RAM installed. Consequently, a lot of time was spent trying to find ways to reduce a program's size, to fit in the available memory.
|
|
Arduino Uno, a popular microcomputer. A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit (CPU). It includes a microprocessor, memory and minimal input/output (I/O) circuitry mounted on a single printed circuit board (PCB). Microcomputers became popular in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of increasingly powerful microprocessors.
|
|
Dedicated in 1985, Pearson Library is a selective depository for government documents and also provides typewriters, video-recorders, microcomputers, and audiovisual equipment. Through the Online Computer Library Center, it has access to resources at over 3,000 additional libraries. The library is adjacent to the 250-seat Preus-Brandt Forum Theatre. It is located at 135 Chapel Lane.
|
|
Attached Resource Computer NETwork (ARCNET or ARCnet) is a communications protocol for local area networks. ARCNET was the first widely available networking system for microcomputers; it became popular in the 1980s for office automation tasks. It was later applied to embedded systems where certain features of the protocol are especially useful. An ARCNET adapter for an Amiga 500 computer.
|
|
Subsequently, computer music was mainly researched on the expensive mainframe computers in computer centers, until the 1970s when minicomputers and then microcomputers became available in this field. In Japan, experiments in computer music date back to 1962, when Keio University professor Sekine and Toshiba engineer Hayashi experimented with the TOSBAC computer. This resulted in a piece entitled TOSBAC Suite.
|
|
Musgrave was born August 19, 1935, and grew up in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, but considers Lexington, Kentucky, to be his hometown. He is the son of Marguerite (Swann) and Percy Musgrave. He has seven children, one of whom is deceased. His hobbies are chess, flying, gardening, literary criticism, poetry, microcomputers, parachuting, photography, reading, running, scuba diving, and soaring.
|
|
A continuation of the series was seen with the 1990 release of Indiana Jones a zlatá soška Keltů, programmed by Jiří Fencl. Fencl also wrote a text adventure named Tom Jones. Due to the series' success, the games were ported to other eight-bit home microcomputers by various authors, sometimes containing only text and sometimes with graphics.
|
|
Jenny's Journeys was used in schools to teach children about maps. Curriculum Review wrote that the game has a "sound educational purpose and efficient method of operation."Curriculum review Creative Computing noted that the game "reinforced map reading and cognitive skills." Educational resources for Microcomputers stated that the game makes good use of the computer's ability to create simulations.
|
|
This DEC machine easily outperformed the PC, but was more expensive than, and completely incompatible with IBM PC hardware and software, offering far fewer options for customizing a system. Unlike CP/M and DOS microcomputers, every copy of every program for the Professional had to be provided with a unique key for the particular machine and CPU for which it was bought. At that time this was mainstream policy, because most computer software was either bought from the company that built the computer or custom-constructed for one client. However, the emerging third-party software industry disregarded the PDP-11/Professional line and concentrated on other microcomputers where distribution was easier. At DEC itself, creating better programs for the Professional was not a priority, perhaps from fear of cannibalizing the PDP-11 line.
|
|
Coherent system startup and login prompt Viewing the root directory and system information Coherent is a clone of the Unix operating system for IBM PC compatibles and other microcomputers, developed and sold by the now-defunct Mark Williams Company (MWC). Historically, the operating system was a proprietary product, but it became open source in 2015, released under a 3-clause BSD License.
|
|
In June 1986, Voyager Software Corp acquired Lifeboat Associates. Later in 1986, Programmer's Paradise was started by Voyager Software as a catalog marketer of technical software. In 1988, Voyager acquired Corsoft Inc., a corporate reseller founded in 1983, and combined it with the operations of the Programmer's Paradise catalog and Lifeboat Associates, both of which marketed technical software for microcomputers.
|
|
1976: Cray-1 supercomputer. The powerful supercomputers of the era were at the other end of the computing spectrum from the microcomputers, and they also used integrated circuit technology. In 1976, the Cray-1 was developed by Seymour Cray, who had left Control Data in 1972 to form his own company. This machine was the first supercomputer to make vector processing practical.
|
|
In 1997 Synnex Information Technologies, a national distributor of microcomputers and communication, networking, peripheral and storage products, purchased substantially all the assets of Merisel FAB Inc., including the ComputerLand franchise. Synnex created ComputerLand Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Synnex, consisting of the ComputerLand and Datago businesses. On October 9, 1998, Inacom purchased Vanstar for a reported $465 – $480 million.
|
|
PolyMorphic Systems' first products were several interface boards based on the then-popular S-100 bus. These were compatible with other microcomputers such as the Altair 8800 and IMSAI 8080. The first was an A/D and D/A converter board. This was followed by a video terminal interface (VTI) card which became the primary display device for their systems.
|
|
"Project Assignments – Development". Memorandum, Informatics General Corporation, June 8, 1984. The overall goal was a product that could span across mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers. Applications could be built and tested in one environment, such as an IBM mainframe in a data center, and then run in another environment, such a minicomputer located in a regional location or a microcomputer located in the field.
|
|
BYTE in 1981 called Olympic Decathlon (1980) "the first true party game for microcomputers". Another early example is Starpath's Party Mix. Party video games are commonly designed as a collection of simple minigames, designed to be intuitive and easy to control, and allow for competition between many players. Some like the Mario Party series and Sonic Shuffle, are played on simulated game boards.
|
|
A program is thus syntactically similar to a single procedure or function. This is similar to the block structure of ALGOL 60, but restricted from arbitrary block statements to just procedures and functions. Pascal became very successful in the 1970s, notably on the burgeoning minicomputer market. Compilers were also available for many microcomputers as the field emerged in the late 1970s.
|
|
At the time, microcomputers were 8-bit single-user, relatively simple machines running simple program-launcher operating systems like CP/M or MS-DOS, while minis were much more powerful systems that ran full multi-user, multitasking operating systems, such as VMS and Unix, and although the classical mini was a 16-bit computer, the emerging higher performance superminis were 32-bit.
|
|
At that time, the Lexitron Corporation also produced a series of dedicated word-processing microcomputers. Lexitron was the first to use a full-sized video display screen (CRT) in its models by 1978. Lexitron also used 5 inch floppy diskettes, which became the standard in the personal computer field. The program disk was inserted in one drive, and the system booted up.
|
|
MEGAlink is a file transfer protocol for modem-equipped microcomputers written by Paul Meiners in 1987. Like many protocols of the era, MEGAlink is an expanded version of the seminal XMODEM. While it was a relatively simple and high-performance system, it remains relatively obscure because it was overshadowed by ZMODEM, which had been released a year earlier and saw rapid uptake.
|
|
Commodore Microcomputers stated that "Dream House is not exactly a game ... but it is just as entertaining and challenging as any traditional game out there". The reviewer concluded that it "has not replaced nor diminished my old stand-by dream-weaving habitual hobby" of drawing homes on graph paper, but "with Dream House, dreaming comes that much closer to coming true".
|
|
The B20 was a line of microcomputers from Burroughs Corporation. The systems, introduced in 1982, consist of two models, the B21 and the B22. The B20 computers were rebadged Convergent Technologies AWS workstations incorporating an Intel 8086 CPU. They ran the BTOS operating system, which was a version of Convergent's CTOS OS, as well as CP/M and MS-DOS.
|
|
Commodore 128D on display at the Musée Bolo, EPFL, Lausanne. The Musée Bolo is an exhibition at the School of Computer And Communication Sciences at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Lausanne, Romandy, Switzerland. Each exhibit has a different theme such as original microcomputers, video game consoles, and computers organized by country. Posters next to each display case explain the exhibits.
|
|
Steve Punter in BBS: The Documentary Steve Punter (born 1958 in Toronto, Ontario) is a Toronto-based programmer and media personality. Punter is noted for his work with Commodore microcomputers. He created WordPro, the first major word processor for the Commodore PET and Commodore 64 computers. He is also the designer of the Punter binary file transfer protocols which bear his name.
|
|
One notable early disk operating system was CP/M, which was supported on many early microcomputers and was closely imitated by Microsoft's MS-DOS, which became widely popular as the operating system chosen for the IBM PC (IBM's version of it was called IBM DOS or PC DOS). In the 1980s, Apple Computer Inc. (now Apple Inc.) abandoned its popular Apple II series of microcomputers to introduce the Apple Macintosh computer with an innovative graphical user interface (GUI) to the Mac OS. The introduction of the Intel 80386 CPU chip in October 1985, with 32-bit architecture and paging capabilities, provided personal computers with the ability to run multitasking operating systems like those of earlier minicomputers and mainframes. Microsoft responded to this progress by hiring Dave Cutler, who had developed the VMS operating system for Digital Equipment Corporation.
|
|
The museum curator, David Larsen, has collected computer artifacts and memorabilia for over forty years. He was interested in electronics at an early age and had his start in computers in 1957 with a Navy assignment at Remington Rand UNIVAC St. Paul. His entire career has involved electronics and microcomputers. This includes thirty one years as a Virginia Tech faculty member teaching instrumentation and automation.
|
|
Wide dissemination finally led to standardization of the language. Common practice was codified in the de facto standards FORTH-79 and FORTH-83 in the years 1979 and 1983, respectively. These standards were unified by ANSI in 1994, commonly referred to as Forth. Forth became popular in the 1980s because it was well suited to the small microcomputers of that time, being compact and portable.
|
|
DES had already fulfilled nine of them. The three that DES did not fulfill were: # Any possible key should produce a strong cipher. (Meaning no weak keys, which DES has.) # The length of the key and the text should be adjustable to meet varying security requirements. # The algorithm should be efficiently implementable in software on large mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers, and in discrete logic.
|
|
By the 1980s, both the diversity and the number of installed systems for machine translation had increased. A number of systems relying on mainframe technology were in use, such as Systran, Logos, Ariane-G5, and Metal. As a result of the improved availability of microcomputers, there was a market for lower-end machine translation systems. Many companies took advantage of this in Europe, Japan, and the USA.
|
|
The PET conversion changed most of the terminology back to Star Wars, and added this character graphics splash screen. Micklus had written several commercial programs before Dog Star, mostly for the TRS-80. Micklus credits the original Colossal Cave Adventure for inspiring him to write Dog Star. Adventure was written in FORTRAN on the PDP-10, a system with considerably more memory than early microcomputers.
|
|
The Jupiter Ace by Jupiter Cantab was a British home computer of the early 1980s. The Ace differed from other microcomputers of the time in that its programming environment used Forth instead of the more popular BASIC. Page 1 After Jupiter Cantab ceased trading, the brand was acquired by Boldfield Computing Ltd in 1984, before eventually being sold to Paul Andrews's company Andrews UK Limited in 2015.
|
|
There is also a free platform (GPLv3) called LIKO-12, inspired by the PICO-8 fantasy console and using LÖVE, allowing to develop applications in a limited resolution, backup/restore in the modified PNG format, in the same way as the video game cartridges of the game consoles or some of the first microcomputers, and export them to HTML5 or to systems supported by LÖVE.
|
|
MSX BASIC is a dialect of the BASIC programming language. It is an extended version of Microsoft's MBASIC Version 4.5, adding support for graphic, music, and various peripherals attached to MSX microcomputers. Generally, MSX-BASIC is designed to follow GW-BASIC, released the same year for IBM PCs and clones. During the creation of MSX-BASIC, effort was made to make the system flexible and expandable.
|
|
TIM-600 computer system TIM-600 was an important PC computer system of the series of the TIM microcomputers, from Mihajlo Pupin Institute-Belgrade, developed 1987-1988 (see ref.Lit. #1, #2 and #6). It was based on the Intel microprocessor types 80386 and 80387. It has word-length of 32 bits, basic cycle time of 20 MHz and operating system Unix V.3 (ref.Lit.
|
|
Electronic Communications: interpret plans, catalogs, manuals, electrical, and electronic symbols for communication equipment; perform preventive and corrective maintenance; repair communication equipment breakdowns; build, install, and repair antennas and make frequency adjustments. Digital Electronics & Microcomputers: develop and monitor assembly of hardware and information processing equipment; install, repair, and maintain microprocessors and microcontrollers; interpret blueprints, electrical and electronic equipment symbols; perform electrical maintenance, preventive and corrective.
|
|
Another popular product was the CUTS Tape I/O Interface S-100 board. The CUTS board offered standard interface for saving and reading data from cassette tape, supporting both the Kansas City standard format, as well as their own custom CUTS format. Lee Felsenstein was key participant of the development of Kansas City standard format, the first cross-system data transfer standard for microcomputers.
|
|
These stores are the first retail outlets for personal computers. Items could be purchased as either complete assembled and tested, or as kits. In 1975, Borrill was one of the participants of the Kansas City symposium, which established the Kansas City standard, a standard format for recording data on audio cassette tapes. The Kansas City standard format allowed for exchange of data between microcomputers.
|
|
Examples of standalone word processor typefaces c. 1980–1981 Brother WP-1400D editing electronic typewriter (1994) Electric Pencil, released in December 1976, was the first word processor software for microcomputers. Software-based word processors running on general-purpose personal computers gradually displaced dedicated word processors, and the term came to refer to software rather than hardware. Some programs were modeled after particular dedicated WP hardware.
|
|
Norton was born in Aberdeen, Washington and raised in Seattle. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, graduating in 1965. Before discovering microcomputers, he spent a dozen years working on mainframes and minicomputers for companies including Boeing and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His earliest low-level system utilities were designed to allow mainframe programmers access to some previous RAM that IBM normally reserved for diagnostics.
|
|
Dickinson Associates were also the designers of the Gizmondo handheld console (originally the Gametrac). In 2014, he published concept designs for modern Sinclair microcomputers. The following year, Dickinson published a series of images of the ZX Spectrum Next re-imagining the original Spectrum design. In 2016, he designed a wireless patch for a medical system to allow expectant mothers to monitor fetal heart rates.
|
|
Compucolor is a series of color microcomputers introduced by Compucolor Corporation of Norcross, Georgia. It was the first color home computer system with built-in color graphics and floppy-based data storage. It used the Intel 8080 CPU. The first model was an upgrade kit for the company's color computer terminal, turning the Intercolor 8001 into the Compucolor 8001 by adding more RAM and a number of optional storage systems.
|
|
Kaleidoscope was written by Li-Chen Wang for the Cromemco Dazzler. It was only 127 bytes long, but it stopped traffic in New York City. The first color graphics interface for microcomputers, developed by Cromemco and called the Dazzler, was introduced in 1976 with a demonstration program called "Kaleidoscope" written by Wang. According to BYTE Magazine the program, written in 8080 assembly code, was only 127 bytes long.
|
|
With the advent of cheap microcomputers it became possible to have a computer dedicated to controlling the spectrometer, collecting the data, doing the Fourier transform and presenting the spectrum. This provided the impetus for the development of FTIR spectrometers for the rock-salt region. The problems of manufacturing ultra-high precision optical and mechanical components had to be solved. A wide range of instruments are now available commercially.
|
|
Tektronix 4051 computer graphics terminal. The Tektronix 4050 was a series of three computer graphics microcomputers produced by Tektronix in the late 1970s through the early 1980s. The display technology was similar to the Tektronix 4010 terminal, using a storage tube display to avoid the need for video RAM. They were all-in-one designs with the display, keyboard, CPU and DC300 tape drive in a single desktop case.
|
|
William Barden Jr. is an author of books and articles on computer programming. Barden's writings mainly covered microcomputers, computer graphics and assembly language and BASIC programming. He was a contributing editor for The Rainbow magazine in which he wrote a monthly column called Barden's Buffer on low-level assembly language programming on the TRS-80 Color Computer. Some of his books were published under the name William T. Barden.
|
|
In the 1980s the Graphical Kernel System (GKS) library, based on a 1970s specification with a similar basic geometry and command structure to NAPLPS, was widely implemented on microcomputers, and became the basis of Digital Research's GSX graphics system used in their GEM GUI. GKS was later extended into a 3D version, and additions to this resulted in PHIGS (Programmer's Hierarchical Interactive Graphics System), a competitor to OpenGL.
|
|
The universal asynchronous receiver-transmitter (UART) takes bytes of data and transmits the individual bits in a sequential fashion.Adam Osborne, An Introduction to Microcomputers Volume 1: Basic Concepts, Osborne-McGraw Hill Berkeley California USA, 1980 pp. 116–126 At the destination, a second UART re-assembles the bits into complete bytes. Each UART contains a shift register, which is the fundamental method of conversion between serial and parallel forms.
|
|
The term tends to be used quite a bit when comparing computer hardware. During the latter 1990s, the price–performance ratios of midrange and large mainframe systems fell tremendously in comparison to a number of smaller microcomputers handling the same load. Many companies were forced out of the industry as this happened, including DEC, Data General and many multiprocessor vendors such as Sequent Computer Systems and Pyramid Technology.
|
|
Roughly fifteen years after CHIP-8 was introduced, derived interpreters appeared for some models of graphing calculators (from the late 1980s onward, these handheld devices in many ways have more computing power than most mid-1970s microcomputers for hobbyists). An active community of users and developers existed in the late 1970s, beginning with ARESCO's "VIPer" newsletter whose first three issues revealed the machine code behind the CHIP-8 interpreter.
|
|
YMODEM is a file transfer protocol used between microcomputers connected together using modems. It was primarily used to transfer files to and from bulletin board systems. YMODEM was developed by Chuck Forsberg as an expansion of XMODEM and was first implemented in his CP/M YAM program. Initially also known as YAM, it was formally given the name "YMODEM" in 1985 by Ward Christensen, author of the original XMODEM.
|
|
Oxford University Press. 15 February 2014 IBM first promoted the term "personal computer" to differentiate the IBM PC from CP/M-based microcomputers likewise targeted at the small-business market, and also IBM's own mainframes and minicomputers. However, following its release, the IBM PC itself was widely imitated, as well as the term. The component parts were commonly available to producers and the BIOS was reverse engineered through cleanroom design techniques.
|
|
The KC 85 ('KC' meaning "Kleincomputer", or "small computer") were models of microcomputers built in East Germany, first in 1984 by VEB Robotron (the KC 85/1) and later by VEB Mikroelektronik "Wilhelm Pieck" Mühlhausen (KC 85/2, KC 85/3 and KC 85/4). Due to huge demand by industrial, educational as well as military institutions, KC 85 systems were virtually unavailable for sale to private customers.
|
|
The Rainbow 100 and the other two microcomputers which DEC announced at the same time (DECmate II and Pro-350) had two quirks that annoyed conservative users. The LK201 keyboard used a new layout that made some Teletype Model 33 and VT100 users unhappy. However, the VT220 style of this keyboard can clearly be seen in the layout of the enhanced 101-key keyboard adopted by IBM in 1985.
|
|
Learning Tree International was founded in 1974 by two engineers, David C. Collins, Ph.D., and Eric R. Garen under the name of Integrated Computer Systems. The first course offering was Microprocessors and Microcomputers. During the 2000s, the company focused on the changing learning requirements of information technology professionals. The AnyWare platform was developed to allow students anywhere in the world to attend live, instructor-led classes virtually from home or office.
|
|
However, by the 1980s (1990s on microcomputers), their use had largely been supplanted by higher-level languages, in the search for improved programming productivity. Today, assembly language is still used for direct hardware manipulation, access to specialized processor instructions, or to address critical performance issues. Typical uses are device drivers, low- level embedded systems, and real-time systems. Historically, numerous programs have been written entirely in assembly language.
|
|
VINES was unique at the time, because it went a step further - it allowed the network servers to interconnect, forming large corporate networks out of interconnected work groups. VINES accomplished this through a proprietary replicated directory service called StreetTalk. VINES also had the first integrated, enterprise-wide distributed email system for microcomputers, known as VINES Mail. Like all resources in the VINES environment, it used the StreetTalk directory service.
|
|
The Apple II series of computers had an enormous impact on the technology industry and expanded the role of microcomputers in society. The Apple II was the first personal computer many people ever saw. Its price was within the reach of many middle-class families, and a partnership with MECC helped make the Apple II popular in schools. By the end of 1980 Apple had already sold over 100,000 Apple IIs.
|
|
This hit the market just as the first microcomputers able to run the game were coming to market. BASIC Computer Games went on to become the first million-selling computer book, and versions of the game were available for almost all personal computers of the era. Additionally, dozens of variants and expansions were made for a variety of other systems, based either on Leedom's or the original Mayfield versions.
|
|
The dissociated press algorithm is described in HAKMEM (1972) Item #176. The name "dissociated press" is first known to have been associated with the Emacs implementation. Brian Hayes discussed a Travesty algorithm in Scientific American in November 1983. The article provided a garbled William Faulkner passage: Hugh Kenner and Joseph O'Rourke of The Johns Hopkins University discussed their frequency table-based Travesty generator for microcomputers in BYTE in November 1984.
|
|
Not only did it cover more subject areas but it also featured more microcomputers instead of its main focus being the BBC Micro. It regularly included stories from the United States and recorded various small but significant milestones, such as the first on-air transatlantic mobile phone call, made in a snowstorm from the top of a New York skyscraper to Lesley Judd sitting in a Sinclair C5 outside Television Centre.
|
|
Lamb did research in North American Indian languages specifically in those geographically centered on California. His contributions have been wide- ranging, including those to historical linguistics, computational linguistics, and the theory of linguistic structure. His work led to innovative designs of content-addressable memory hardware for microcomputers. Lamb is best known as the father of the relational network theory of language, which is also known as "stratificational theory".
|
|
JRT (Jim Russell Tyson) is an implementation of the Pascal programming language. It was available in the early 1980s on the CP/M operating system. At the end of the 1970s, the most popular Pascal implementation for microcomputers was UCSD Pascal, which many people considered overpriced at hundreds of dollars. The original basis for UCSD Pascal was the p-machine compiler from ETH Zurich, the originators of Pascal.
|
|
Cromemco Z2 advertisement, July 1977 Z-2 is a series of microcomputers made by Cromemco, Inc. which were introduced to the market in the middle to late 1970s. They were S-100 bus machines powered by the Zilog Z80 processor and typically ran on the CP/M operating system. They were originally available in assembled or kit form to serve both a commercial market and the computer enthusiast market.
|
|
An alternative to using tape was data transmissions from the BBC's Chip Shop programme in the UK, which broadcast software for several different microcomputers over the radio. A special program was loaded using the conventional tape interface. Then the radio broadcast was connected to the cassette tape interface. Tandy eventually replaced the CTR-41 unit with the CTR-80 which had built-in AGC circuitry (and no volume control).
|
|
MuLab is a digital audio workstation application for macOS (OS X) and Windows platforms. It is developed and maintained by a small company (MuTools, Belgium) led by Jo Langie, a pioneer in sequencer technology since early Atari microcomputers. While the main MuLab target is electronic music, it can be also used for other musical genres. It may be also of interest for educational purposes to people learning digital audio processing.
|
|
Intel also created one of the first microcomputers in 1973. Intel opened its first international manufacturing facility in 1972, in Malaysia, which would host multiple Intel operations, before opening assembly facilities and semiconductor plants in Singapore and Jerusalem in the early 1980s, and manufacturing and development centres in China, India and Costa Rica in the 1990s. By the early 1980s, its business was dominated by dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) chips.
|
|
The Software Toolworks was founded by programmer Walt Bilofsky, who, after studying at Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), had worked for the Institute for Defense Analyses, as a programmer for RAND Corporation, and as a consultant. In 1979, he acquired and assembled a Heathkit H89 microcomputer; he found that the microcomputer lacked important software and thus began developing new software and ports of his own, including a fullscreen editor and a compiler for the C programming language entitled C/80, the latter based on Ron Cain's public-domain compiler Small-C. Bilofsky subsequently contacted the Heath Company, which made the Heathkit series of microcomputers, to have it market his software and, in response, was told that the operating system and the BASIC programming language Heathkit microcomputers came with were sufficient. He instead turned to advertise his software in BUSS, a Heathkit hobbyist newsletter, starting in 1980, quickly receiving orders for his software.
|
|
Extensions to core PILOT include arrays and floating point numbers in Apple PILOT, and implementation of LOGO-inspired turtle graphics in Atari PILOT. Between 1979 and 1983 the UK PILOT User Group was run by Alec Wood a teacher at Wirral Grammar School for Boys, Merseyside UK. Several machine code versions of a mini PILOT were produced for the microcomputers of the time and a school in Scotland developed an interactive foreign language tutorial where pupils guided footprints around a town asking and answering questions in German, French, etc. An article in the December 1979 of Computer Age covered an early implementation called Tiny Pilot and gave a complete machine code listing. Versions of PILOT overlaid on the BASIC interpreters of early microcomputers were not unknown in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and Byte Magazine at one point published a non-Turing complete derivative of PILOT known as Waduzitdo by Larry Kheriarty as a way of demonstrating what a computer was capable of.
|
|
By the mid-1980s the rapid improvement in microcomputers, and especially the introduction of the graphical user interface and data-rich application programs like Lotus 1-2-3 led to an increasing interest in using personal computers as the client-side platform of choice in client-server computing. Under this model, large mainframes and minicomputers would be used primarily to serve up data over local area networks to microcomputers that would interpret, display and manipulate that data. For this model to work, a data access standard was a requirement – in the mainframe field it was highly likely that all of the computers in a shop were from one vendor and clients were computer terminals talking directly to them, but in the micro field there was no such standardization and any client might access any server using any networking system. By the late 1980s there were several efforts underway to provide an abstraction layer for this purpose.
|
|
CP/M increased the market size for both hardware and software by greatly reducing the amount of programming required to install an application on a new manufacturer's computer. An important driver of software innovation was the advent of (comparatively) low- cost microcomputers running CP/M, as independent programmers and hackers bought them and shared their creations in user groups. CP/M was displaced by DOS soon after the 1981 introduction of the IBM PC.
|
|
16-bit microcomputers are computers in which 16-bit microprocessors were the norm. A 16-bit register can store 216 different values. The signed range of integer values that can be stored in 16 bits is −32,768 (−1 × 215) through 32,767 (215 − 1); the unsigned range is 0 through 65,535 (216 − 1). Since 216 is 65,536, a processor with 16-bit memory addresses can directly access 64 KB (65,536 bytes) of byte-addressable memory.
|
|
Making the Most of the Micro is a TV series broadcast in 1983 as part of the BBC's Computer Literacy Project. It followed the earlier series The Computer Programme. Unlike its predecessor, Making the Most of the Micro delved somewhat deeper into the technicalities and uses that microcomputers could be put to, once again mainly using the BBC Micro in the studio for demonstration purposes. The series was followed by Micro Live.
|
|
The Capricorn family of microprocessors was developed by Hewlett-Packard in the late 1970s for the HP series 80 scientific microcomputers. Capricorn was first used in the HP-85 desktop BASIC computer, introduced in January 1980. Steve Wozniak was inspired to build the Apple to be a computer like the HP 9830, and in 1976 he offered HP rights to the Apple computer. He was turned down and was given a release.
|
|
MAC/65 is a 6502 assembler written by Stephen D. Lawrow and originally sold by Optimized Systems Software for the Atari 8-bit family of microcomputers. MAC/65 was first released on disk in 1982, requiring 16 KB RAM. A bank- switched "SuperCartridge" came later for US$99, only occupying 8 KB RAM. MAC/65 is structured similarly to the Atari Assembler Editor cartridge, combining a line editor, assembler, and debugger into a single package.
|
|
This problem was clearly apparent during gameplay, as nominally straight lines became curved. Indeed, the image on the front of the game packaging itself show this warping effect in action. It is clear that the memory limitations of the 8-bit microcomputers would preclude 10,000 landscapes being stored individually in the computer's memory. Instead, a procedural generation algorithm is used, with the random number generator initially seeded using the level number itself.
|
|
This was the first time that it was possible to use Computer-aided engineering (CAE) on microcomputers, and the product remained unique on the market for many years. Nemetschek AG headquarters in Munich In 1981 Nemetschek Programmsystem GmbH was founded and was responsible for software distribution; Georg Nemetschek's engineering firm continued to be in charge of program development. The main product, Allplan – a CAD system for architects and engineers, was launched in 1984.
|
|
Screenshot of Pong implemented in CHIP-8 Telmac 1800 running CHIP-8 game Space Intercept (Joseph Weisbecker, 1978) CHIP-8 is an interpreted programming language, developed by Joseph Weisbecker. It was initially used on the COSMAC VIP and Telmac 1800 8-bit microcomputers in the mid-1970s. CHIP-8 programs are run on a CHIP-8 virtual machine. It was made to allow video games to be more easily programmed for these computers.
|
|
The ROM monitor was accessed by holding the "C" key while switching from Reset to Run. The COSMAC VIP was shipped with 20 video games, which were programmed in CHIP-8. CHIP-8 was an early interpreted programming language that was used on this machine and other early microcomputers, such as the Telmac 1800. The video games that were provided came as a list of instructions that had to be typed in by the user.
|
|
Aggarwal and Kumar, pp. 307-312. Early microcomputers with disk-based storage often benefitted from the ability to diagnose and recover corrupted directory or registry data records, to "undelete" files marked as deleted, or to crack file password protection. Most mainstream debugging engines, such as gdb and dbx, provide console-based command line interfaces. Debugger front- ends are popular extensions to debugger engines that provide IDE integration, program animation, and visualization features.
|
|
Watford Electronics was a British computer electronics company. It was founded in 1972 in a bedroom belonging to brothers Nazir and Raza Jessa, and grew to become one of the best-known suppliers of microcomputers and micro peripherals during the 1980s. In the 1970s Watford Electronics sold components and kits, through advertising in electronics magazines, and a paper catalogue. They had one shop in Watford, but mostly traded as a mail-order company.
|
|
However, the definition has evolved to exclude devices with internal combustion engines and those with top speeds above /h. The term evokes a transition similar to that of microcomputing where the miniaturization of transport modes for short journeys parallels the miniaturization of microcomputers for personal use. The term was coined by business and technology analyst Horace Dediu, in a speech he delivered in 2017 at the Micromobility Summit in the Techfestival event in Copenhagen.
|
|
Heinz Nixdorf (April 9, 1925 – March 17, 1986) was a German computing pioneer, businessman and founder of Nixdorf Computer AG. Nixdorf was born in Paderborn. The 27-year-old Nixdorf, at the time a physics student, founded his first computer company in 1952. As the owner, he led this company to become an international electronics company with revenues of almost four billion Deutsche Mark at its peak. His microcomputers were competitors to IBM mainframes.
|
|
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) adopted Cromemco Z-2 microcomputers as the backbone of the CME trading floor, employing a total of 60 Z-2 systems. For a 10-year period every trade at the CME was processed by these Cromemco systems. In 1992 the Cromemco systems were replaced by IBM PS/2 computers. Cromemco Z-2 System with removable hard disk was deployed worldwide by the United States Air Force (1986).
|
|
The Sinclair ZX81 character set rendered in the system font. The ZX81 character set is the character encoding used by the Sinclair Research ZX81 family of microcomputers including the Timex Sinclair 1000 and Timex Sinclair 1500. The encoding uses one byte per character for 256 code points. It has no relationship with previously established ones like ASCII or EBCDIC, but it is related though not identical to the character set of the predecessor ZX80.
|
|
Commodore Power/Play was one of a pair of computer magazines published by Commodore Business Machines in the United States in support of their 8-bit home computer lines of the 1980s. The other was called Commodore Interface, changed to just Commodore in 1981, Commodore Microcomputer in 1983, and finally to Commodore Microcomputers in 1984 and for the rest of its run. The two magazines were published on an alternating, bimonthly schedule.
|
|
In 1988, the project broadened its focus beyond PLATO to accommodate the increasing availability and use of microcomputers. The broader scope resulted in renaming the project to The Illinois Technology-based Music Project. Work in the School of Music continued on other platforms after the CERL PLATO system shutdown in 1994. Over the 24-year life of the music project, its many participants moved into educational institutions and into the private sector.
|
|
Most early telephone-line modems used audio frequency- shift keying (AFSK) to send and receive data at rates up to about 1200 bits per second. The Bell 103 and Bell 202 modems used this technique. Even today, North American caller ID uses 1200 baud AFSK in the form of the Bell 202 standard. Some early microcomputers used a specific form of AFSK modulation, the Kansas City standard, to store data on audio cassettes.
|
|
Forth is also easy to implement, leading to a large number of implementations. At least one home computer, the British Jupiter ACE, had Forth in its ROM-resident operating system. The Canon Cat also used Forth for its system programming, and Rockwell produced single-chip microcomputers with resident Forth kernels, the R65F11 and R65F12. Insoft GraFORTH is a version of Forth with graphics extensions for the Apple II. ASYST was a Forth expansion for measuring and controlling on PCs.
|
|
Gary Kildall originally developed CP/M during 1974, as an operating system to run on an Intel Intellec-8 development system, equipped with a Shugart Associates 8-inch floppy disk drive interfaced via a custom floppy disk controller. It was written in Kildall's own PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers). Various aspects of CP/M were influenced by the TOPS-10 operating system of the DECsystem-10 mainframe computer, which Kildall had used as a development environment.
|
|
Bob Albrecht is a key figure in the early history of microcomputers. He was one of the founders of the People's Computer Company and its associated newsletters which turned into Dr. Dobb's Journal. He also brought the first Altair 8800 to the Homebrew Computer Club and was one of the main supporters of the effort to make Tiny BASIC a standard on many early machines. Albrecht has authored a number of books on BASIC and other computer topics.
|
|
Pioneering kit and assembled hobby microcomputers which generally required electronics skills to build or operate are listed separately, as are computers intended primarily for use in schools. A hobby-type computer often would have required significant expansion of memory and peripherals to make it useful for the usual role of a factory-made home computer. School computers usually had facilities to share expensive peripherals such as disk drives and printers, and often had provision for central administration.
|
|
Impressed by the success of the Atari Japan acquisition, Nakamura was interested in his company creating his own arcade games in-house. He purchased a surplus amount of PDA-08 microcomputers from NEC and instructed his employees to analyze the hardware to intentionally create video games. Namco's first in-house game was Gee Bee (1978), designed by Toru Iwatani. Namco's first major success in arcades was Galaxian (1979), credited as one of the first video games to use RGB.
|
|
Formerly known as the CARE Research and Development Laboratory (CRDL), CAPS has its historical roots in information technology development to advance traffic safety. This originated with the Critical Analysis Reporting Environment (CARE) that was initially developed to assist moderate sized cities process their traffic crash records in the mid to late 1980s on CPM-based microcomputers. CAREParrish, A., B. Dixon, D. Cordes, S. Vrbsky and D. Brown, “CARE: An Automobile Crash Data Analysis Tool,” IEEE Computer, vol. 36, no.
|
|
Many firearm enthusiasts object to smart guns on a philosophical and regulatory basis. Gun ownership advocate Kenneth W. Royce, writing under the pen name of "Boston T. Party", wrote that "no defensive firearm should ever rely upon any technology more advanced than Newtonian physics. That includes batteries, radio links, encryption, scanning devices and microcomputers." TechCrunch technology and outdoors journalist Jon Stokes summarizes the reliability concerns with smart guns stating, Jon Stokes. "Why Obama’s Smart Gun Push Will Misfire". TechCrunch.
|
|
In 1972, Gary Kildall, an instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, began working at Intel as a consultant under the business name Microcomputer Applications Associates (MAA). By 1974, he had developed Control Program/Monitor, or CP/M, the first disk operating system for microcomputers. In 1974 he incorporated as Intergalactic Digital Research, with his wife handling the business side of the operation. The company soon began operating under its shortened name Digital Research.
|
|
Delimiterless input is a special feature of some minicomputers and all microcomputers in which the computer can recognize and act upon a single character or keypress without requiring use of a "transmit" or "send" key. Older mini and mainframe computers generally operated on a line-at-a-time or screen-at-a-time basis. The line was sent to the computer by pressing the return, enter, send or transmit key, depending on what the key was called.
|
|
The predecessors to these computers, mainframes and minicomputers, were comparatively much larger and more expensive (though indeed present-day mainframes such as the IBM System z machines use one or more custom microprocessors as their CPUs). Many microcomputers (when equipped with a keyboard and screen for input and output) are also personal computers (in the generic sense).An early use of the term personal computer in 1962 predates microprocessor-based designs. (See "Personal Computer: Computers at Companies" reference below).
|
|
Hand began writing programs for microcomputers in 1977 with a desire to bring the benefits of fast and accurate calculations to the practice of astrology. Out of this effort, he founded Astro-Graphics Services in 1980 which later become Astrolabe, Inc. Hand founded Arhat Media in 1997. Arhat, which is an acronym for "Archive for the Retrieval of Historical Astrological Texts", procures, protects and publishes translations of historical astrological works and secondary source material for serious astrologers and scholars.
|
|
The GoMMC and GoSDC hardware extensions, produced by John Kortink from 2004, provide a virtual cassette playing capability. The accompanying PC tools import the cassette data from UEF files and store the extracted cassette stream on a memory card. In February 2012, Martin Barr released version 5.0 of UPURS, a ROM based suite of utilities to aid data transfer to real BBC Microcomputers. As part of that release, the tool UPCFS saw its first releaseBarr, Martin.
|
|
Early microcomputers lacked development tools, and programmers either developed their code on minicomputers or by hand. For instance, Dick Whipple and John Arnold wrote Tiny BASIC Extended directly in machine code, using octal. Robert Uiterwyk handwrote MICRO BASIC for the SWTPC (a 6800 system) on a legal pad. Steve Wozniak wrote the code to Integer BASIC by hand, translating the assembler code instructions into their machine code equivalents and then uploading the result to his computer.
|
|
Hermann Hauser and Chris Curry in Cambridge Curry and Hauser decided to pursue their joint interest in microcomputers and, on 5 December 1978, they set up Cambridge Processor Unit Ltd. (CPU) as the vehicle with which to do this. CPU soon obtained a consultancy contract to develop a microprocessor-based controller for a fruit machine for Ace Coin Equipment (ACE) of Wales. The ACE project was started at office space obtained at 4a Market Hill in Cambridge.
|
|
AutoCAD is a commercial computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting software application. Developed and marketed by Autodesk, AutoCAD was first released in December 1982 as a desktop app running on microcomputers with internal graphics controllers. Before AutoCAD was introduced, most commercial CAD programs ran on mainframe computers or minicomputers, with each CAD operator (user) working at a separate graphics terminal. Since 2010, AutoCAD was released as a mobile- and web app as well, marketed as AutoCAD 360.
|
|
The first microcomputer version of BASIC was co-written by Gates, Allen, and Monte Davidoff for their newly- formed company, Micro-Soft. This was released by MITS in punch tape format for the Altair 8800 shortly after the machine itself, immediately cementing BASIC as the primary language of early microcomputers. Members of the Homebrew Computer Club began circulating copies of the program, causing Gates to write his Open Letter to Hobbyists, complaining about this early example of software piracy.
|
|
When new microcomputers began to appear, notably the "1977 trinity" of the TRS-80, Commodore PET and Apple II, they either included a version of the MS code, or quickly introduced new models with it. By 1978, MS BASIC was a de facto standard and practically every home computer of the 1980s included it in ROM. Upon boot, a BASIC interpreter in direct mode was presented. Commodore Business Machines included Commodore BASIC, based on Microsoft BASIC.
|
|
In contrast to computer and Internet addiction, computer anxiety refers to "a state of heightened tension or a feeling of apprehensive expectation".Howard, G.S. (1986). Computer anxiety and management use of microcomputers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press. Behavioral presentations of computer anxiety include: "(1) avoidance of computers and the general areas where computers are located; (2) excessive caution with computers; (3) negative remarks about computers; and (4) attempts to cut short the necessary use of computers".
|
|
WordStar is a word processor application for microcomputers. It dominated the market in the early and mid 1980s, succeeding the market leader Electric Pencil. It was published by MicroPro International, originally written for the CP/M-80 operating system, and later written also for MS-DOS and other 16-bit PC OSes. Seymour I. Rubinstein was the principal owner of the company, and Rob Barnaby was the sole author of the early versions of the program.
|
|
The Commodore 8060, 8061, and 8062 are a series of 8" floppy disk drives developed by Commodore Business Machines. These disk drives use the parallel interface IEEE-488 to connect with Commodore's PET and CBM-II line of microcomputers. The 8060 is a single-disk model, while the 8061 and 8062 are both double-drive models similar to the later Commodore 8280 8" drive. The drives in the 806x series are full-height Shugart SA-800s.
|
|
The first software RAM drive for microcomputers was invented and written by Jerry Karlin in the UK in 1979/80. The software, known as the Silicon Disk System was further developed into a commercial product and marketed by JK Systems Research which became Microcosm Research Ltd when the company was joined by Peter Cheesewright of Microcosm Ltd. The idea was to enable the early microcomputers to use more RAM than the CPU could directly address. Making bank-switched RAM behave like a disk drive was much faster than the disk drives - especially in those days before hard drives were readily available on such machines. The Silicon Disk was launched in 1980, initially for the CP/M operating system and later for MS-DOS. Due to the limitations in memory addressing on Atari 8-bit, Apple II series and Commodore computers, a RAM drive was also a popular application on the Atari 130XE, Commodore 64 and Commodore 128 systems with RAM Expansion Units and on Apple II series computers with more than 64kB of RAM.
|
|
The free-play university version of Zork first became available on the MIT-DM PDP-10 in June 1977. It was then distributed by the Digital Equipment Corporation DECUS program and spread to many colleges in the United States and Canada. Blank graduated from medical school in 1979 but the call of Zork was irresistible. He and several friends spent the next year developing a specialized computer language that they could use to program text adventures like Zork on the new microcomputers.
|
|
The principals of Absoft, Peter Jacobson and Wood Lotz, met at the University of Michigan. Together they started an audio store, Absolute Sound, in 1975. In 1979, they noted the emergence of 16-bit microcomputers and saw a market for high quality Fortran compilers and built a compiler for the Western Digital WD16 microprocessor, which they released commercially in 1980. The name Absolute Software was used at first, but the shortened name Absoft was adopted as a more practical trademark.
|
|
LYS-16 was an early microcomputer based on the IMP-16 making it one of the first 16 bit microcomputers. It was designed and made by members of the Lysator academic computer club at Linköping University, Sweden It was introduced in April 1975 and the first computers were delivered in December the same year. Two batches were made by Lysator before the production was handed over to ATEW in Flen who continued to produce it until May 1978. About 1000 units were made.
|
|
From 1990 to 1995, he was a member of the Board of Directors of Autodesk, Inc., one of the best-known publishers of computer-aided design (CAD) programs for microcomputers, with AutoCAD as its flagship product. At the time, it was one of the largest microcomputer software publishers, with a market cap sometimes near a billion dollars. His tenure there including presenting Autodesk's position opposing software patents, and chairing the Board's CEO Search Committee that found and selected Carol Bartz as its CEO.
|
|
They were best known for supporting IBM's first business microcomputers such as the 5100, 5110 and 5120. With the introduction of the IBM PC and PC AT, the company provided an extensive line of disk drives, backup and personal computer products. Core became very well known as a leading industry developer of disk array and computer data storage. Many of Core's products were the first of their kind, had no direct competition and were widely regarded for their superior performance and reliability.
|
|
The Motorola 68000 microprocessor had a processing speed that was far superior to the other microprocessors being used at the time. Because of this, having a newer, faster microprocessor allowed for the newer microcomputers that came along after to be more efficient in the amount of computing they were able to do. This was evident in the 1983 release of the Apple Lisa. The Lisa was the first personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI) that was sold commercially.
|
|
271 – less expensive than most existing microcomputers. The entire program was politically explosive throughout its gestation as a result, causing a continual stream of news stories. Critics complained that other machines could be bought for half the cost, but supporters pushed back that no other machine at that price point supported the GEMS specifications. The release of the PC/AT in 1984 reopened the debate and made nightly news, as it used a newer and more advanced CPU than the ICON: the 80286.
|
|
In the late 1970s, a manual wargame called SEATAG was introduced by the United States Navy for exploring tactical options. It was available in both classified and unclassified versions. SEATAG was developed into a true tactical training game called NAVTAG that ran on three networked microcomputers for the Red Side, Blue Side, and Game Control. Former naval officer and future author Larry Bond's exposure to this system in 1980 while on active duty led to the eventual development of Harpoon.
|
|
MACRO SPITBOL is coded in MINIMAL, an assembly language for an abstract machine. The instruction set is carefully defined to allow some latitude in its implementation, so that hardware operations favorable to string processing can be exploited. An implementation of MINIMAL that was designed for interpretation on microcomputers was done by translating MINIMAL into MICRAL using a translator that was itself implemented in SPITBOL. The MICRAL version of MACRO SPITBOL, together with the MICRAL interpreter ran in under 40K bytes.
|
|
The Atari Falcon030 (usually shortened to Atari Falcon), released in 1992, was the final personal computer product from Atari Corporation. A high-end model of the Atari ST line, the machine is based on a Motorola 68030 CPU and a Motorola 56000 digital signal processor, a feature which distinguishes it from most other microcomputers of the era. It includes a new VIDEL programmable graphics system which greatly improves graphics capabilities. Shortly after release, Atari bundled the MultiTOS operating system in addition to TOS.
|
|
Although they did not contain any microprocessors, but were built around transistor-transistor logic (TTL), Hewlett-Packard calculators as far back as 1968 had various levels of programmability comparable to microcomputers. The HP 9100B (1968) had rudimentary conditional (if) statements, statement line numbers, jump statements (go to), registers that could be used as variables, and primitive subroutines. The programming language resembled assembly language in many ways. Later models incrementally added more features, including the BASIC programming language (HP 9830A in 1971).
|
|
Channel I/O is not unlike the Direct Memory Access (DMA) of microcomputers, only more complex and advanced. On large mainframe computer systems, CPUs are only one of several powerful hardware components that work in parallel. Special input/output controllers (the exact names of which vary from one manufacturer to another) handle I/O exclusively, and these, in turn, are connected to hardware channels that also are dedicated to input and output. There may be several CPUs and several I/O processors.
|
|
Cambridge Systems Technology (CST) was a company formed in the early 1980s by ex-Torch Computers engineers David Oliver and Martin Baines, to produce peripherals for the BBC Micro, and later, with Graham Priestley, Sinclair QL microcomputers. Products included IEEE 488, floppy disk and SCSI interfaces. Following the demise of the Sinclair QL in 1986, CST began producing the Thor series of QL-compatible personal computers. These had limited commercial success, and CST had ceased trading by the end of the decade.
|
|
The GeoNet logo GeoNet was an early international on-line services network built using microcomputers. Based on software developed in Germany by GeoNet Systems GmbH in the early 1980s and completed in the early 1990s, it was one of the first networks to offer a comprehensive on-line services platform, and was early to market with a number of innovations. Unlike other "mailbox" systems at the time, GeoNet had a user-friendly command interface and made extensive use of distributed processing technology.
|
|
Accessed on line November 26, 2008. The Russian-made Beriev Be-200 Altair seaplane is also named after the star.Press release #58, Beriev Aircraft Company, February 12, 2003. Accessed on line November 26, 2008. The Altair 8800 was one of the first microcomputers intended for home use. Altair is the name of three United States navy ships: , and USNS Altair (T-AKR-291). The Chevron 136,000-DWT Suezmax oil tanker originally named Condoleezza Rice (1993) was renamed Altair Voyager (2001).
|
|
Joyce Worley from Electronic Games said that "Movie Musical Madness is a merry-madcap sort of program. Designed for kids from about age 6 and over, it will nonetheless charm older computerists just as well as they build sets, pick the music, then guide the stars through their paces. The "movies" may never win Academy Awards, but the fun is in the creating! Tom Benford from Commodore Microcomputers said that "Movie Musical Madness is my personal choice for an Oscar.
|
|
Pascal became a major language in the programming world in the 1970s, with high-quality implementations on most minicomputer platforms and microcomputers. Among the later was the UCSD Pascal system, which compiled to an intermediate p-System code format that could then run on multiple platforms. Apple licensed UCSD and used it as the basis for their Apple Pascal system for the Apple II and Apple III. Pascal became one of the major languages in the company in this period.
|
|
PC DOS was an early personal computer OS that featured a command line interface. Mac OS by Apple Computer became the first widespread OS to feature a graphical user interface. Many of its features such as windows and icons would later become commonplace in GUIs. The first microcomputers did not have the capacity or need for the elaborate operating systems that had been developed for mainframes and minis; minimalistic operating systems were developed, often loaded from ROM and known as monitors.
|
|
Computer- supported collaborative learning emerged as a strategy rich with research implications for the growing philosophies of constructivism and social cognitivism. Though studies in collaborative learning and technology took place throughout the 1980s and 90s, the earliest public workshop directly addressing CSCL was "Joint Problem Solving and Microcomputers" which took place in San Diego in 1983. Six years later in 1989, the term "computer- supported collaborative learning" was used in a NATO-sponsored workshop in Maratea, Italy.Bannon, Liam J. (1989).
|
|
8000 Plus (renamed PCW Plus early in 1992) was a monthly British magazine dedicated to the Amstrad PCW range of microcomputers. It was one of the earliest magazines from Future plc, and ran for just over ten years, the first issue being dated October 1986 and the last (as PCW Plus) being issue 124, dated Christmas 1996. Science fiction writer David Langford wrote a regular column for 8000/PCW Plus, which ran (albeit not continuously) for the magazine's entire lifespan.
|
|
Soon after the introduction of the H89, Heathkit was purchased by Zenith to enter the microcomputer market.Sol Libes, "BYTE News..." in BYTE, Volume 4 Number 11, November 1979, pg. 81 They continued sales of the H89 with their own labeling on the front as the Zenith Z89. Eventually, Zenith Data Systems (Heathkit plus the computer division of Zenith) was purchased by Bull HN (CII Bull, Honeywell and Nippon Electric) because they needed a US maker of microcomputers to comply with government purchase requirements.
|
|
This minor planet was named after the acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, ASCII, a computer character code and the name of a major Japanese magazine on microcomputers. The name was proposed by Syuichi Nakano, who identified this asteroid during his stay at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory; a stay which was partially funded by articles he wrote for the principal Japanese ASCII magazine. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on 2 April 1988 ().
|
|
Rossen Petkov is born in Haskovo. In 1985 he graduated the Todor Velev Math High School, and in 1990 - the Technical University, Sofia. In 1987, while still a student, he started working on projects, developing algorithms and programs for electronic music and computer graphics.Article in Bulgarian: Musical Arts and microcomputers, , Sofia 1988 In 1991 – 1992 he is editor and writer of the Graphics with computer magazine,Article in Bulgarian: 3-D graphic program, , Sofia 1992 where he has his own column, Computer Arts.
|
|
SCELBAL, short for SCientific ELementary BAsic Language, is a version of the BASIC programming language released in 1976 for the SCELBI and other early Intel 8008 and 8080-based microcomputers like the Mark-8. Later add-ons to the language included an extended math package and string handling. The original version required 8 kB of RAM, while the additions demanded 16 kB. The language was published in book form, with introductory sections followed by flowcharts and then the 8008 assembler code.
|
|
Dynix menu The 1970s can be characterized by improvements in computer storage, as well as in telecommunications. As a result of these advances, ‘turnkey systems on microcomputers,’ known more commonly as integrated library management systems (ILS) finally appeared. These systems included necessary hardware and software which allowed the connection of major circulation tasks, including circulation control and overdue notices. As the technology developed, other library tasks could be accomplished through ILS as well, including acquisition, cataloguing, reservation of titles, and monitoring of serials.
|
|
In the beginning Adventure Soft operated out of Birmingham, converting the Adventure International games by Scott Adams to run on microcomputers found in the United Kingdom market which were not currently supported. Adventure Soft employed Brian Howarth, the author of the Mysterious Adventures series. After a time the rate of release of games by Adventure International slowed and the company began to write other games using the same system. The first and perhaps most successful of these was Gremlins - The Adventure (1984) based on the film Gremlins.
|
|
Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and had to settle class-action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison would later say that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake". Although IBM dominated the mainframe relational database market with its DB2 and SQL/DS database products, it delayed entering the market for a relational database on Unix and Windows operating systems. This left the door open for Sybase, Oracle, Informix, and eventually Microsoft to dominate mid-range systems and microcomputers.
|
|
Target, or TARG, was an action video game written by Steve Dompier for the VDM-1 video card for S-100 bus microcomputers. It is among the earliest computer video games, released some time in 1976 or 1977. The game used the VDM-1's graphics characters in a game that Dompier described as a "shoot the airplanes sort of game". The player had a gun that could be rotated left and right, firing at targets moving sideways across the top of the screen.
|
|
The world of the very near future > requires that all of us have some understanding of the processes and uses of > computers.Mangan 1994, pg. 267 According to several contemporary sources, Stephenson was the driving force behind the project; "whenever there was a problem she appears to have 'moved heaven and earth' to get it back on the tracks." The Ministry recognized that a small proportion of teachers and other school personnel were already quite involved with microcomputers and that some schools were acquiring first- generation machines.
|
|
In 1982, Commodore UK decided to construct a nationwide computer network for the use of teachers. The Commodore PET computer had been very successful. Nick Green developed the specification of what became PETNET with David Parkinson and Mike Bolley of Ariadne Software in The Albany pub (see "PETNET - data transmission system" in "Microcomputers in education" ed Dr I.C.H. Smith 1982 John Wiley ). In the Summer of 1982 Keith Hall of Commodore secured the money to commission the prototype which was run on an ADP DEC-10 machine.
|
|
Lords of Time is an interactive fiction computer game designed by Sue Gazzard and released by Level 9 Computing in 1983. Originally purely a textual adventure for 8 bit microcomputers, the game was later released as part of the Time and Magik compilation where graphics were added for all floppy disk versions. Like all Level 9 adventures of its time, it was written in the in- house A-code language which was platform-independent – this implementation of a virtual machine allowed for quick porting across platforms.
|
|
The Rugg/Feldman benchmarks are a series of seven short BASIC programming language programs that are used to test the performance of BASIC implementations on various microcomputers. They were published by Tom Rugg and Phil Feldman in the June 1977 issue of the US computer magazine, Kilobaud. The article reported that Integer BASIC, an interpreter program written by Steve Wozniak for the Apple II computer, was much faster than the other programs tested. This sparked widespread comments about the tests, including a lengthy letter from Bill Gates.
|
|
Behravesh is the author of Spin-Free Economics: A No-Nonsense, Nonpartisan Guide to Today's Global Economic Debates (McGraw-Hill). He has authored numerous articles in such publications as European Affairs and Credit Week, co-authored two books-Economics U$A and Microcomputers, Corporate Planning and Decision Support Systems and was a contributing author to a book on scenario analysis, entitled Learning From the Future. His op-ed pieces have also appeared in the Financial Times, Newsweek International, London Times and the Boston Globe.
|
|
SARGON was introduced at the 1978 West Coast Computer Faire where it won the first computer chess tournament held strictly for microcomputers, with a score of 5–0. This success encouraged the authors to seek financial income by selling the program directly to customers. Since magnetic media were not widely available at the time, the authors placed an advert in Byte magazine selling for $15 photocopied listings that would work in any Z80-based microcomputer. Availability of the source code allowed porting to other machines.
|
|
The SMP80/08, however, did not have a commercial release. After the first general- purpose microprocessor, the Intel 8080, was announced in April 1974, Sord announced the SMP80/x, the first microcomputer to use the 8080, in May 1974. Virtually all early microcomputers were essentially boxes with lights and switches; one had to read and understand binary numbers and machine language to program and use them (the Datapoint 2200 was a striking exception, bearing a modern design based on a monitor, keyboard, and tape and disk drives).
|
|
By 1977, the introduction of the second generation, known as home computers, made microcomputers considerably easier to use than their predecessors because their predecessors' operation often demanded thorough familiarity with practical electronics. The ability to connect to a monitor (screen) or TV set allowed visual manipulation of text and numbers. The BASIC language, which was easier to learn and use than raw machine language, became a standard feature. These features were already common in minicomputers, with which many hobbyists and early produces were familiar.
|
|
Though Tuck felt that Computer Space was a poor imitation of Spacewar! and his Galaxy Game a superior adaptation, many players believed both arcade games to be upgraded variants of Spacewar!. Byte magazine published an assembly language version of Spacewar! in 1977 that ran on the Altair 8800 and other Intel 8080-based microcomputers using an oscilloscope as the graphical display and a lookup table to approximate the calculations for orbits, as well as a three- dimensional variant in 1979 written in Tiny BASIC.
|
|
In 1977, two years after the MITS Altair 8800, Radio Shack introduced the TRS-80, one of the first mass-produced personal computers. This was a complete pre-assembled system at a time when many microcomputers were built from kits, backed by a nationwide retail chain when computer stores were in their infancy. Sales of the initial, primitive US$600 TRS-80 exceeded all expectations despite its limited capabilities. This was followed by the TRS-80 Color Computer in 1980, designed to attach to a television.
|
|
VideoBrain was a visionary attempt to skip years ahead in personal computers - before consumers were ready for it and before technology was prepared to support the vision. Although the public was largely oblivious to microcomputers in the late seventies, there were business people who believed passionately that personal computers would be an enormous market with tremendous impact. They were right in the long run but they were ahead of their time. VideoBrain was the first personal computer to make loading and running software easy and reliable.
|
|
This incremental approach broke new ground and by the end of the 1970s (before the first IBM PC was announced in 1981) over ten thousand ARCNET LAN installations were in commercial use around the world, and Datapoint had become a Fortune 500 company. As microcomputers took over the industry, well- proven and reliable ARCNET was also offered as an inexpensive LAN for these machines. ARCNET remained proprietary until the early-to-mid 1980s. This did not cause concern at the time, as most network architectures were proprietary.
|
|
As of mid-1982, three other mainframe and minicomputer companies sold microcomputers, but unlike IBM Hewlett-Packard, Xerox, and Control Data Corporation chose the CP/M operating system. Many other companies made "business personal computers" using their own proprietary designs, some still using 8-bit microprocessors. The ones that used Intel x86 processors often used the generic, non-IBM-compatible specific version of MS- DOS or CP/M-86, just as 8-bit systems with an Intel 8080 compatible CPU normally used CP/M.
|
|
Starting as an electronic music festival in 1989 Computer Space included graphics and animation sections next few years. Web design and mobile applications have been one of the fast-growing sections last years. During the 1980s Bulgaria specialized in producing microcomputers in the former communist bloc countries and the Soviet Union specialized in producing big machines and supercomputers. The Eastern bloc countries had the so-called Economic Inter-support Council and in the frame of that Council each country has been developing some economic area.
|
|
Tradecom purchased Grundy Business Systems in 1983 in order to fulfill a contract to supply microcomputers to schools and training centres in the Netherlands. They created a server to which several NewBrains could use its floppy discs to load programs down the serial cable and simple switching enabled the teacher to view the screen of the students. They also demonstrated a keyboard with predictive text laid out in a non-QWERTY fashion. They were given television coverage, but the NewBrain's part in this was not mentioned.
|
|
MCM Model 70 microcomputer, made by Micro Computer Machines, 1974 The MCM/70 was a pioneering microcomputer first built in 1973 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada"Idea nation". Canadian Business, Dec 25, 2006 Andy Holloway and released the next year. This makes it one of the first microcomputers in the world, the second to be shipped in completed form, and the first portable computer. The MCM/70 was the product of Micro Computer Machines, one of three related companies set up in Toronto in 1971 by Mers Kutt.
|
|
SM EVM (СМ ЭВМ, Система Малых ЭВМ, meaning "System of Small Electronic Computers") was an intergovernmental program for creating minicomputers, run by the Ministry of Instrument Making. The program initially included two major architectural lines based on DEC PDP-11 architecture and HP 2100 architecture. Later the program included a family of DEC VAX compatible computers and Multibus based microcomputers. Minicomputers developed within the framework of the program were intended for use as computer based control systems, measuring and computing systems and workstations for CAD systems.
|
|
The map was modified to make it more logical and seal off exits that led to no longer-existing areas. Berez became the president of Infocom. The new game was running on TOPS-20 ZIP and a new PDP-11 version of the Z-machine by the end of 1979. Scott Cutler created a TRS-80 version of ZIP in early 1980, and in February the company demonstrated Zork to Personal Software (PS), the distributors of VisiCalc and likely the first software distribution firm for microcomputers.
|
|
Upon graduating from Welham, she returned to Mumbai and studied commerce for two years at Mithibai College. Kapoor then registered for a three-month summer course in microcomputers at Harvard Summer School in the United States. She later developed an interest in law, and enrolled at the Government Law College, Mumbai; during this period, she developed a long- lasting passion for reading. However, after completing her first year, she decided to pursue her interest in acting, though she later regretted not having completed her education.
|
|
In the mid to late 1990s, microcomputers were becoming increasingly more popular. Most, if not all, of the government service were using these devices to perform an array of government related work. There were also a few offices that had established networks which allowed the sharing of information and equipment. During this time period, BCC was still utilizing the IBM System/34; the system however, had already reached the end of its support life cycle, and it was becoming more difficult to keep the functioning.
|
|
Analog technology has dominated the history of the communications system in Canada for almost 160 years. It formed the basis for the telegraph, beginning in the 1850s, the telephone in the 1880s, recorded sound, the 20th century, radio, the 1920s, computers and television, the 1950s and cable TV in the 1960s. However, digital technology has slowly replaced analog technology in all these domains in the past 40 years. The transformation began with the telephone system, in the 1970s and microchips and microcomputers in the early 1980s.
|
|
II Computing listed Rocky's Boots ninth on the magazine's list of top Apple II education software as of late 1985, based on sales and market-share data. Commodore Microcomputers stated that it "is intuitive and easy for kids of all ages to understand". The magazine approved of the game's lack of "nerve-wracking time limits or invading aliens" and encouragement of "exploratory learning" while teaching "nothing less than the fundamentals of digital computer logic from the ground up". Computer Gaming World called Rocky's Boots "outstanding".
|
|
SmartKey was the first macro processing program of its type, and the first TSR or terminate and stay resident program for PCs and CP/M microcomputers, their eight bit predecessors. Smartkey's "keyboard definitions" were first used with the early word processing program WordStar to change margins of screenplays. Literally thousands of other uses were made for the program. SmartKey was written by Nick Hammond, an admiral in the Royal Australian Navy, and published by Software Research Technologies, founded by Stan Brin and Reid H. Griffin.
|
|
Breakout 2000 was the first project developed by Mario Perdue of MP Games/L4 Software for the Atari Jaguar. Mario originally developed a game for Windows 3.1x called WalZ, which took inspiration from both Breakout and Arkanoid but it was never released due to its similarity with the former and fear of lawsuit from Atari Corporation. He worked for Atari Corp. in various projects for both Atari ST and Atari TT030 microcomputers but after dealing with health issues, he approached to Atari employee J. Patton after recovering.
|
|
In the mid-to-late 1980s the similarly sized Fujitsu Eagle, which used (coincidentally) 10.5-inch platters, was a popular product. With increasing sales of microcomputers having built in floppy-disk drives (FDDs), HDDs that would fit to the FDD mountings became desirable. Starting with the Shugart Associates SA1000 HDD Form factors, initially followed those of 8-inch, 5½-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disk drives. Although referred to by these nominal sizes, the actual sizes for those three drives respectively are 9.5″, 5.75″ and 4″ wide.
|
|
The Matsushita JR series was a line of microcomputers produced by Matsushita Electric Industrial (now Panasonic) during the 1980s. The JR series included four computer models: the JR-100, the JR-200, the JR-300 and the JR-800. A version of the JR-200 called the Panasonic JR-200U was developed for the North American and European markets and was announced in January 1983. A handheld model called JR-800 was launched some time after the JR-300, but it was not compatible with the previous JR computers.
|
|
During the 1980s, as microcomputers and personal computers became more powerful and more common, game developers turned their attention to designing tactical wargames for them. Some early tactical wargames for the computer included Gary Grigsby's series of games for the Commodore 64 and Apple II: Panzer Strike (1987), and Typhoon of Steel (1988). Battle Isle is a series of games developed starting in 1991 by Blue Byte. Set on a fictional planet, Chromos, and inspired by the Japanese game Nectaris (1989), the games feature futuristic tactical battles played on a hexagonal grid.
|
|
In DDL, students use the same types of tools that professional linguists use, namely a corpus of texts that have been sampled and stored electronically, and a concordancer, which is a search engine designed for linguistic analysis. Some tools have been specifically created for data-driven learning, such as SkELL, WriteBetter, and Micro-concord. Micro-concord was the first significant software designed for classroom use. It was developed for the MS-DOS microcomputers by Tim Johns and Mike Scott and published for DOS computers in 1993 by OUP.
|
|
Despite planning an extensive advertising campaign for 1980, Atari found competing with microcomputers from market leaders Commodore, Apple, and Tandy difficult. By mid-1981 it had reportedly lost $10 million on sales of $10–13 million from more than 50,000 computers. In 1982, Atari started the Sweet 8 (or "Liz NY") and Sweet 16 projects to create an upgraded set of machines that were easier to build and less costly to produce. Atari ordered a custom 6502, initially labelled 6502C, but eventually known as SALLY to differentiate it from a standard 6502C.
|
|
Apple DOS is the family of disk operating systems for the Apple II series of microcomputers from late 1978 through early 1983. It was superseded by ProDOS in 1983. Apple DOS has three major releases: DOS 3.1, DOS 3.2, and DOS 3.3; each one of these three releases was followed by a second, minor "bug-fix" release, but only in the case of Apple DOS 3.2 did that minor release receive its own version number, Apple DOS 3.2.1. The best-known and most-used version is Apple DOS 3.3 in the 1980 and 1983 releases.
|
|
Kildall briefly returned to UW and finished his doctorate in computer science in 1972, then resumed teaching at NPS. He published a paper that introduced the theory of data-flow analysis used today in optimizing compilers (sometimes known as Kildall's method), and he continued to experiment with microcomputers and the emerging technology of floppy disks. Intel lent him systems using the 8008 and 8080 processors, and in 1973, he developed the first high-level programming language for microprocessors, called PL/M. For Intel he also wrote an 8080 instruction set simulator named INTERP/80.
|
|
The use of Copyleft; All Wrongs Reserved in 1976 Li-Chen Wang (born 1935) is an American computer engineer, best known for his Palo Alto Tiny BASIC for Intel 8080-based microcomputers. He was a member of the Homebrew Computer Club and made significant contributions to the software for early microcomputer systems from Tandy Corporation and Cromemco. He made early use of the word copyleft, in Palo Alto Tiny BASIC's distribution notice "@COPYLEFT ALL WRONGS RESERVED" in June 1976. (NB. Source code begins with the following six lines.
|
|
National and Hitachi quite often depended on IBM's gradual and restrained roll-out of newer models to feed on IBM's technology and market share and hence NAS enjoyed occasional successes. However, IBM had invested and obtained significant success in semiconductor technologies which enabled them to build more powerful computers at lower costs. Meanwhile, the mainframe market itself was in decline as mini- and microcomputers, and the UNIX operating system gained popularity. Mainframe makers such as Sperry, Honeywell, Burroughs, NCR and Control Data were gradually being forced out of the mainframe market.
|
|
While working on videos for artists such as Kevin Saunderson, Queen Latifah and Spiritualized, Hex's collaborative work went on to incorporate 3D modelling, punk video art, and algorithmic visuals on desktop machines. The video for Coldcut's 'Christmas Break' in 1989 is arguably one of the first pop promos produced entirely on microcomputers. In 1988, Coldcut released Out To Lunch With Ahead Of Our Time, a double LP of Coldcut productions and re-cuts, and the various aliases under which the duo had recorded. This continued the duo's tradition of releasing limited available vinyl.
|
|
In the late 1970s, users of Columbia University's mainframe computers had only 35 kilobytes of storage per person. Kermit was developed at the university so students could move files between them and floppy disks at various microcomputers around campus, such as IBM or DEC DECSYSTEM-20 mainframes and Intertec Superbrains running CP/M. IBM mainframes used an EBCDIC character set and CP/M and DEC machines used ASCII, so conversion between the two character sets was one of the early functions built into Kermit. The first file transfer with Kermit occurred in April 1981.
|
|
International Rectifier was an American power management technology company manufacturing analog and mixed-signal ICs, advanced circuit devices, integrated power systems, and high-performance integrated components for computing. On 13 January 2015, the company became a part of Infineon Technologies. IR's products, as a part of Infineon Technologies' overall semiconductor portfolio, continue to be used in many applications including lighting, automobile, satellite, aircraft, and defense systems; as well as key components in power supply systems in electronics-based products that include especially microcomputers, servers, networking and telecommunications equipment.
|
|
The division ultimately produced the Monica family of microcomputers, the D-17B Minuteman I computer, and the D-37B and D-37C Minuteman II computers, in which micro-miniaturization reduced weight by two- thirds. Autonetics also developed and tested flight programs for the D37D Minuteman III computer. The 1966 Autonetics DDA integrator was the first MOS large scale array (LSA) using four-phase logic. After producing the DDA and other MOS-LSA circuits, the team involved decided to design a general purpose computer suitable for navigation (sometimes called the MOS GP computer).
|
|
Malhotra started his career in 1970, when he joined Delhi Cloth Mills as Senior Management Trainee. In 1972 along with Shiv Nadar he was assigned to set up marketing division for DCM Data Patterns to sell pocket calculators. In 1975, he quit DCM and partnered with Shiv Nadar, Ajai Chowdhry, D.S. Puri, Yogesh Vaidya and Subhash Arora to set up a company known as Microcomp Limited, which sold digital calculators, eventually becoming its Vice Chairman. Microcomp created a joint sector company named Hindustan Computers Limited and began manufacturing mini and microcomputers.
|
|
The Machine That Changed the World (1992) (broadcast under the alternative title "The Dream Machine" in the UK, with different narration) is a 5-episode television series on the history of electronic digital computers. It was written and directed by Nancy Linde, and produced by WGBH Television of Boston, Massachusetts, and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Backers included the Association for Computing Machinery, the National Science Foundation, and the UNISYS Corporation. The first three episodes deal with the history of fully electronic general-purpose digital computers from the ENIAC through desktop microcomputers.
|
|
The II Plus has a plastic case with a brass mesh running along the inside of the case. This mesh helped reduce the electromagnetic interference emitted from the computer, keeping the machine in compliance with newly implemented FCC regulations covering microcomputers. Small grids of plastic pins, and sometimes Velcro® Brand Fasteners, were used to hold the case's top onto the computer. In comparison, the original Apple II lacked RF shielding and was often unusable with certain TVs and monitors (Apple recommended Sony TVs as they had better RF insulation than other brands).
|
|
In 1979 he purchased a Sharp MZ80k, one of the early consumer microcomputers, the start of a lifelong interest in technology and computing. He first worked in Suva, Fiji, for his architectural 'in practice' year in 1982 at 'Architects Pacific', a practice led by Stuart Huggett. On completing his architecture degree Davidson moved to London and worked as an architect and architectural illustrator, using the Macintosh and Harvard University's 'Schema' beta software as a core part of his illustration process. In 1989 Alan resigned his role as an architect and founded 'Hayes Davidson'.
|
|
As a result, manufacturing of the System 9000 family was stopped in January 1986, and it remained in limited availability until it was discontinued on 2 December 1986.IBM Announcement Letter Number 186-165 Reasons cited for the failure of the System 9000 were its poor performance and high price, which led to the IBM PC being used where price was of concern, and to other 32-bit microcomputers being used where performance mattered. IBM closed its Instrument division in January 1987, reassigning the approximately 150 employees that had worked for it to other positions.
|
|
The System 9000 (S9000) is a family of microcomputers from IBM consisting of the System 9001, 9002, and 9003. The first member of the family, the System 9001 laboratory computer, was introduced in May 1982 as the IBM Instruments Computer System Model 9000.The Enhanced IBM System 9000 Computer IBM ad in Chem. Eng. News, March 26, 1984, 62 (13), pp 17–19 It was renamed to the System 9001 in 1984 when the System 9000 family name and the System 9002 multi-user general-purpose business computer was introduced.
|
|
Prior minicomputers were generally used in a fashion similar to modern microcomputers, used by a single user, and often dedicated to a single particular task like operating machinery. This was true for many contemporary designs like the PDP-8 and Data General Nova. It was the HP 2000's ability to perform timesharing that made it a success. The ability to support multiple users running different programs was previously limited to mainframe computers, and a further expansion of this capability was a key design concept for the original Omega.
|
|
A computer user group (also known as a computer club) is a group of people who enjoy using microcomputers or personal computers and who meet regularly to discuss the use of computers, share knowledge and experience, hear from representatives of hardware manufacturers and software publishers, and hold other related activities. They may host special interest workgroups, often focusing on one particular aspect of computing. Computer user groups meet both virtually and in hackerspaces. Computer user groups may consist of members who primarily use a specific operating system, such as Linux.
|
|
At the time there were no VAX microcomputers. When VAXELN was well under way, Cutler spearheaded the next project, the MicroVAX I--the first VAX microcomputer. Although it was a low-volume product compared with the New England-developed MicroVAX II, the MicroVAX I demonstrated the set of architectural decisions needed to support a single- board implementation of the VAX computer family, and it also provided a platform for embedded applications written in VAXELN. The VAXELN team made the decision, for the first release, to use the Pascal language as its system programming language.
|
|
Even computers such as the PDP-8 without memory- mapped I/O were soon implemented with a system bus, which allowed modules to be plugged into any slot. Some authors called this a new streamlined "model" of computer architecture. Many early microcomputers (with a CPU generally on a single integrated circuit) were built with a single system bus, starting with the S-100 bus in the Altair 8800 computer system in about 1975. The IBM PC used the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus as its system bus in 1981.
|
|
Dr. Brent Robinson (1951–1996, born Charles Brent Robinson) was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and author. He was a Fellow of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, and wrote books such as Microcomputers and the Language of Arts (English, Language and Education), and works relating to information technology use by teachers. He created the Journal of Information Technology For Teacher Education, in which he was also a researcher. His major interests were in teacher education, and he was formerly Vice President of the Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education.
|
|
As one of the earliest sets of BASIC benchmarks, the F/R tests were seen primarily in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was a standard among reviews in Kilobaud, used to compare the many new varieties of BASIC that continued to appear for early microcomputers. Compute! used it for their 1979 review of the Challenger 1P, and 68 Journal used it to demonstrate the extremely high performance of BASIC09. InfoWorld used it for their 1981 review of a new BASIC for the TRS-80, and the TRS-80 Color Computer as a whole.
|
|
MP/M (Multi-Programming Monitor Control Program) is a discontinued multi-user version of the CP/M operating system, created by Digital Research developer Tom Rolander in 1979. It allowed multiple users to connect to a single computer, each using a separate terminal. MP/M was a fairly advanced operating system for its era, at least on microcomputers. It included a priority- scheduled multitasking kernel (before such a name was used, the kernel was referred to as the nucleus) with memory protection, concurrent input/output (XIOS) and support for spooling and queueing.
|
|
The G-15 is sometimes described as the first personal computer, because it has the Intercom interpretive system. The title is disputed by other machines, such as the LINC and the PDP-8, and some maintain that only microcomputers, such as those which appeared in the 1970s, can be called personal computers. Nevertheless, the machine's low acquisition and operating costs, and the fact that it does not require a dedicated operator, meant that organizations could allow users complete access to the machine. Over 400 G-15s were manufactured.
|
|
During the latter 1990s, the cost–performance ratios of the larger mainframe systems fell tremendously in comparison to a number of smaller microcomputers handling the same load. As a result, many of the older computer companies were shut down and people were put out of work. However, most of them were able to be re- hired at the newer corporations after undergoing a series of re-training involving the newer technologies. In the business world, there is usually a value associated with a typical cost–performance ratio analysis.
|
|
The Sphere I was a personal computer completed in 1975 by Michael Donald Wise and Monroe Tyler of Sphere Corporation, of Bountiful, Utah.Sphere Advertisement (Page 94-95), Byte Magazine Volume 00 Number 01, Published September 1975, Internet Archive The Sphere I featured a Motorola 6800 CPU, onboard ROM, a full-sized CRT monitor, 4 KB of RAM, and a keyboard with a numeric keypad. The Sphere I was among the earliest complete all-in-one microcomputers that could be plugged in, turned on, and was fully functional.The first decade of personal computing.
|
|
A microcomputer used as an embedded control system may have no human-readable input and output devices. "Personal computer" may be used generically or may denote an IBM PC compatible machine. The Commodore 64 was one of the most popular microcomputers of its era, and is the best-selling model of home computer of all time. The abbreviation micro was common during the 1970s and 1980s,Proof of "micro" as a once-common term: (i) Direct reference: Graham Kibble-White, "Stand by for a Data-Blast", Off the Telly.
|
|
From 1984 to 1986, Neuman was a Senior Research Associate for the Educational Development Center (EDC) in Newton, Massachusetts. EDC is a nonprofit organization that designs, delivers and evaluates innovative programs to address urgent challenges in education, health and economic opportunity. While at EDC, Neuman worked on a US Department of Education field-based project focused on the use of microcomputers to facilitate writing development in learning disabled children. She also taught and conducted research as an associate professor at University of Massachusetts Lowell from 1984 to 1990.
|
|
VIDTEX is a family of telecommunication software developed for CompuServe for use with its online dial-up service. VIDTEX client software was available for Atari and Commodore 8-bit microcomputers, and was noted for its ability to directly display RLE graphics and its support for file transfers using the CompuServe B protocol. Its popularity led to third-party VIDTEX terminal emulators, such as CBterm/C64, as well as stand-alone programs for displaying VIDTEX graphics. Large collections of VIDTEX graphics could also be found on independently operated BBSes.
|
|
Loyola Polytechnic Institute ( or IPL) is an educational institution of basic and technological education in the Dominican Republic, founded by the Society of Jesus in 1952. Its Loyola Specialized Institute of Higher Education (IEESL) grants engineering degrees at the undergraduate and graduate level in the areas of agrobusiness, electrical, industrial, and telecommunications. Its school for intermediate education offers degrees in agronomy, industrial mechanics, automotive and diesel mechanics, electrical installation & maintenance, electronic communications, and digital electronics & microcomputers. An elementary school and an English and French language school are also a part of IPL.
|
|
In computer science, group coded recording or group code recording (GCR) refers to several distinct but related encoding methods for magnetic media. The first, used in bpi magnetic tape since 1973, is an error-correcting code combined with a run length limited (RLL) encoding scheme, belonging into the group of modulation codes. The others are different mainframe hard disk as well as floppy disk encoding methods used in some microcomputers until the late 1980s. GCR is a modified form of a NRZI code, but necessarily with a higher transition density.
|
|
In the software context, the relatively simple OSs for early microcomputers were usually inspired by minicomputer OSs (such as CP/M's similarity to Digital's single user OS/8 and RT-11 and multi-user RSTS time-sharing system). Also, the multiuser OSs of today are often either inspired by, or directly descended from, minicomputer OSs. UNIX was originally a minicomputer OS, while Windows NT kernel—the foundation for all current versions of Microsoft Windows-borrowed design ideas liberally from VMS. Many of the first generation of PC programmers were educated on minicomputer systems.
|
|
A precursor to the public bulletin board system was Community Memory, started in August 1973 in Berkeley, California. Useful microcomputers did not exist at that time, and modems were both expensive and slow. Community Memory therefore ran on a mainframe computer and was accessed through terminals located in several San Francisco Bay Area neighborhoods. The poor quality of the original modem connecting the terminals to the mainframe prompted Community Memory hardware person, Lee Felsenstein, to invent the Pennywhistle modem, whose design was highly influential in the mid-1970s.
|
|
SaskCOMP created a Minicomputer Division to provide minicomputer services to customers as readily as large-scale computers In 1977, SaskCOMP installed the IBM System/370 Model 168 computer to replace a model 158 computer. The Model 158 computer was sold for $640,000. In 1978 SaskCOMP had grown to become the twelfth largest service bureau in Canada! In 1979, SaskCOMP was part of a newly-formed committee with the Department of Education and the Saskatchewan Teacher's Federation to promote the effective use of - and guidelines for the installation of - microcomputers in primary and secondary schools.
|
|
The final step in word processing came with the advent of the personal computer in the late 1970s and 1980s and with the subsequent creation of word processing software. Word processing systems that would create much more complex and capable text were developed and prices began to fall, making them more accessible to the public. The first word processing program for personal computers (microcomputers) was Electric Pencil, from Michael Shrayer Software, which went on sale in December of 1976. In 1978 WordStar appeared and because of its many new features soon dominated the market.
|
|
The first release was therefore named COMAL 75. Christensen subsequently wrote a textbook on the language which evolved into Beginning COMAL. In 1978, Christensen began to adapt COMAL such that it would run on microcomputers, which were becoming available, worried that without such an implementation he would be required to teach and use BASIC again as Danish schools acquired the new machines. By 1980 a version of COMAL developed in conjection with a college group was able to run on the Zilog Z80, and thus COMAL 80 was released.
|
|
The Business Operating System, or BOS, was initially developed as an early cross-platform operating system, originally produced for Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 computers, then redeveloped for actual businesses and business models. The technology began subsequently for Zilog Z80-based computers, and then later for most microcomputers of the 1980s, then developed into a premium automated software solution for Investors and Asset Managers alike. CAP Ltd, a British company and at the time one of the world's largest Information Technology consulting firms, developed BOS. CAP designed BOS and BOS applications for platform-independence.
|
|
Elwro was a Polish company established in 1959 and based in based in Wrocław, Poland, that designed and manufactured mainframe and microcomputers. Its first release was the Odra 1001 mainframe in 1960, followed by the Odra 1002 in 1962 and the Odra 1003 in 1963. Witold Podgórski was a recent graduate of the Wrocław University of Technology, having majored in electronic engineering and specialized in mathematical machines. Having first heard about the existence of "electronic brains" in 1955 in high school, he embarked on five years of study toward the automation of "digital machines".
|
|
He wanted it to be a project anyone can undertake and received only the compensation for writing the magazine article itself, not the computer. At least 8,000 were built by do-it-yourself computer hackers. In 1983, his friend Zoran Modli launched a new section on his national radio show focused on microcomputers. Since data coding was performed in audio range (to fit the format of compact cassettes), Voja Antonić and his radio host friend started using the radio waves to transfer computer-generated data, their own online wireless technology of the predigital age.
|
|
This chip family allowed the design of powerful and low-cost microcomputers with performance comparable to minicomputers. The Z80-CPU had a substantially better bus structure and interrupt structure than the 8080 and could interface directly with dynamic RAM, since it included an internal memory-refresh controller. The Z80 was used in many of the early personal computers, as well as in video game systems such as the ColecoVision, Sega Master System and Game Boy. The Z80 is still in volume production in 2017 as a core microprocessor in various systems on a chip.
|
|
Digital setting circles (DSC) consist of two rotary encoders on both axis of the telescope mount and a digital readout. They give a highly accurate readout of where the telescope is pointed and their lit display makes them easier to read in the dark. They have also been combined with microcomputers to give the observer a large database of celestial objects and even guide the observer in correctly pointing their telescope. In contrast to a GOTO telescope mount, a mount equipped with DSC alone is sometimes called a "PUSH TO" mount.
|
|
Rhea J. Grundy of Home Computer Magazine compared it to a Revell V-8 engine model and said the game teaches an "increased awareness of your automobile" rather than the skill necessary to make repairs. Mark Cotone of Commodore Microcomputers wrote that Injured Engine will not replace mechanics or detailed manuals, but it can aid in learning proper maintenance. Joyce Worley of Electronic Games called it an easy game that can help novices to talk more knowledgeably to mechanics. Kiplinger's Personal Finance called it an easy way to learn the basics of car engines.
|
|
The company was sold in 1988 to Hughes Aircraft, which kept the Rediffusion name until it sold the company in 1994. Redifon (later Rediffusion) Computers was also part of the group and was based in Crawley, West Sussex. It initially started in the production of analogue computers to control flight simulators, then moved to produce minicomputers ("R range"), departmental Unix Servers and microcomputers ("teleputers"), specialising in data capture, enterprise accounting for local government and videotex systems. Michael Aldrich joined the company as Marketing Director in 1977 and became Managing Director and CEO in 1980.
|
|
Due to continuing industrialization and expanding trade, many significant changes of the century were, directly or indirectly, economic and technological in nature. Inventions such as the light bulb, the automobile, and the telephone in the late 19th century, followed by supertankers, airliners, motorways, radio, television, antibiotics, nuclear power, frozen food, computers and microcomputers, the Internet, and mobile telephones affected people's quality of life across the developed world. Scientific research, engineering professionalization and technological development—much of it motivated by the Cold War arms race—drove changes in everyday life.
|
|
A large variety of special-use software and applications have been developed for use with these operating systems. There have also been a multiplicity of hardware manufacturers which have produced a wide variety of personal computers, and the heart of these machines, the central processing unit, has increased in speed and capacity by leaps and bounds. There were 1,560,000 personal computers in Canada by 1987, of which 650,000 were in homes, 610,000 in businesses and 300,000 in educational institutions. Canadian producers of micro-computers included Sidus Systems, 3D Microcomputers, Seanix Technology and MDG Computers.
|
|
Bose held the Condra Chair of Excellence in Power Electronics at University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Bose organized its power electronics teaching and research program for 15 years. He is recognized as world-renowned authority and pioneer in power electronics for his many contributions that include high frequency link power conversion, advanced control techniques by microcomputers, fuzzy logic and neural networks, transistor ac power switch for matrix converters, adaptive hysteresis-band current control, etc. He also pioneered power electronics applications in environmental protection that help solving climate change problems.
|
|
Originally invented by URW employee Dr Peter Karow, Ikarus (German spelling of the mythical figure Icarus) got its name from the frequency with which it crashed in the early days of its development. It was designed to run on minicomputers such as DEC VAX and later adapted to microcomputers as they became increasingly powerful. In 1975, IKARUS was introduced at ATypI in Warsaw. By the 1980s a huge library of typefaces and logos existed as photographic film and needed to be input into computers for the latest generation of printing and sign-making devices.
|
|
IBM 370 Model 145 System Console Blinkenlights text The Harwell Dekatron Computer does arithmetic at approximately human speed. Watching the lights allows to follow the instructions and the changing data as it runs the Squares program displayed on the panels Blinkenlights on the NSA's FROSTBURG supercomputer from the 1990s. Blinkenlights is a neologism for diagnostic lights usually on the front panels on old mainframe computers, minicomputers, many early microcomputers, and modern network hardware. It has been seen on many artifacts of modern office machinery as well as, most notably, photocopiers.
|
|
McIDAS, the "Man computer Interactive Data Access System", is a weather forecasting tool developed at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in the 1970s and used continually to this day. In its early incarnations, it was widely used to generate graphics for television stations, but today is used primarily by the NOAA and related agencies. Users of the McIDAS system developed a similar version for microcomputers and sold by ColorGraphics Weather Systems that generated much of the computerized weather imagery seen on television in the US in the 1980s.
|
|
As MECC's Cyber 73 entered into service, microcomputers began to appear. In 1978 it appeared that features wished for in the classroom, such as a graphical display, were available. Through an evaluation and bidding process, the Apple II was chosen by MECC for state schools over other candidates, such as the Radio Shack TRS-80; the win was an important early deal in the history of Apple Inc. Any school in the state could buy Apple computers through MECC, which resold them at cost, without having to go through complex evaluation and purchasing procedures. Through what InfoWorld described as an "enviable showcase" for its products Apple sold more than 2,000 computers during the next three years and more than 5,000 by 1983,, making MECC's the company's largest reseller. In late 1981 MECC switched to a discount agreement for the Atari 400 and 800, and distributed software through the Atari Program Exchange. The use of microcomputers quickly increased, with 85% of school districts using them by 1981 compared to 75% for time-sharing, and the Cyber 73 shut down in 1983. By then each Minnesota public school had an average of three to four computers, compared to only 20 Milwaukee elementary schools of 110 with computers.
|
|
When a DEC research group demonstrated two prototype microcomputers in 1974—before the debut of the MITS Altair—Olsen chose to not proceed with the project. The company similarly rejected another personal computer proposal in 1977. At the time these systems were of limited utility, and Olsen famously derided them in 1977, stating "There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."Olsen later claimed he was referring to home automation, see "Ken Olsen" Unsurprisingly, DEC did not put much effort into the microcomputer area in the early days of the market.
|
|
None of these systems were available for microcomputers, and Hayes' initial concept was to offer similar products into this market. Hayes started producing such a system in his kitchen in April 1977 with his friend and co-worker, Dale Heatherington. Their first product was the 80-103A, a 300 bit/s Bell 103-compatible design for S-100 bus machines. At the time, it was illegal to connect any non-Bell hardware to the telephone network, so the 80-103A was designed to connect to a Bell-supplied Data Access Arrangement (DAA) which the user rented for a monthly fee.
|
|
It also added the `LEFT$` and `RIGHT$` functions, breaking the three-letter convention. As the number of microcomputers grew, and turned into the home computer market in the late 1970s, MS BASIC became the de facto standard. With this rapid change in the market, the Standard BASIC effort slowed further and was not formally ratified until 1987 as X3.113-1987. By this time, there was no real purpose to the standards; not only was MS BASIC everywhere, but by the mid-1980s the use of BASIC was declining as shrinkwrap software took over from type-in programs.
|
|
As customers requested the program for their specific computers and operating systems he ported the word processor to each, resulting in 78 versions including the NorthStar Horizon and TRS-80. Electric Pencil was the first program for microcomputers to implement a basic feature of word processors: word wrap, in which lines are adjusted as words are inserted and deleted. Electric Pencil's market dominance might have continued had Shrayer continued to update it. Many imitators appeared, however, including WordStar and Magic Wand, both of which surpassed the original's popularity as Shrayer became bored with programming and sold its rights to others.
|
|
It relies heavily on network resources (servers and infrastructure) for computation and storage. A diskless node loads even its operating system from the network, and a computer terminal has no operating system at all; it is only an input/output interface to the server. In contrast, a fat client, such as a personal computer, has many resources, and does not rely on a server for essential functions. As microcomputers decreased in price and increased in power from the 1980s to the late 1990s, many organizations transitioned computation from centralized servers, such as mainframes and minicomputers, to fat clients.
|
|
It would highlight different elements of BASIC programs and was implemented in an attempt to make it easier for beginners, especially children, to start writing code. Later, the Live Parsing Editor (LEXX) written for the VM operating system for the computerization of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1985 was one of the first to use color syntax highlighting. Its live parsing capability allowed user-supplied parsers to be added to the editor, for text, programs, data file, etc. On microcomputers, MacPascal 1.0 (October 10, 1985) recognized Pascal syntax as it was typed and used font changes (e.g.
|
|
Amstrad CPC 464 on display at the Living Computer Museum complete with games for public use The CPC 464 was the first personal home computer built by Amstrad in 1984. It was one of the bestselling and best produced microcomputers, with more than 2 million units sold in Europe. The British microcomputer boom had already peaked before Amstrad announced the CPC 464 (which stood for Colour Personal Computer) which they then released a mere 9 months later. Amstrad was known for cheap hi-fi products but had not broken into the home computer market until the CPC 464.
|
|
The compact cassette technology was originally designed for dictation machines, but improvements in fidelity led the Compact Cassette to supplant the stereo 8-track cartridge and reel-to-reel tape recording in most non-professional applications. Its uses ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers. The first cassette player (although mono) designed for use in car dashboards was introduced in 1968. Between the early 1970s and continuing through the 1990s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music, first alongside the LP record and later the compact disc (CD).
|
|
The Pascal MicroEngine was a series of microcomputer products manufactured by Western Digital from 1979 through the mid-1980s, designed specifically to run the UCSD p-System efficiently.Pascal "Cast in silicon" By Western Digital, InfoWorld, 11 Dec 1978, Page 2, ...under the trademarked name "Pascal Microengine," will be priced at $2995...First units are expected to be available in January, 1979... Compared to other microcomputers, which ran a machine language p-code interpreter, the Pascal Microengine had its interpreter implemented in microcode. So, p-code was, effectively, its native machine language. The most common programming language used on the p-System is Pascal.
|
|
The original MS-DOS advertisement in 1981. On microcomputers based on the Intel 8086 and 8088 processors, including the IBM PC and clones, the initial competition to the PC DOS/MS-DOS line came from Digital Research, whose CP/M operating system had inspired MS-DOS. In fact, there remains controversy as to whether QDOS was more or less plagiarized from early versions of CP/M code. Digital Research released CP/M-86 a few months after MS-DOS, and it was offered as an alternative to MS-DOS and Microsoft's licensing requirements, but at a higher price.
|
|
Magic Software Enterprises was founded in 1983 by David Assia and Yaki Dunietz as a spin-off from "Mashov Computers", a publicly traded Israeli company that provided business solutions on microcomputers. The new company was originally named "Mashov Software Export (MSE)", and developed software for the global market, specifically an application generator named Magic. Mashov’s major innovation was a metadata-driven approach to programming that required no compiling or linking, and also allowed instantaneous debugging. The Magic platform was originally designed and developed by Jonathan (Yoni) Hashkes, along with Miko Hasson who was responsible for programme management.
|
|
Other influential or typical software companies begun in the early 1960s included Advanced Computer Techniques, Automatic Data Processing, Applied Data Research, and Informatics General. The computer/hardware makers started bundling operating systems, systems software and programming environments with their machines. When Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) brought a relatively low-priced microcomputer to market, it brought computing within the reach of many more companies and universities worldwide, and it spawned great innovation in terms of new, powerful programming languages and methodologies. New software was built for microcomputers, so other manufacturers including IBM, followed DEC's example quickly, resulting in the IBM AS/400 amongst others.
|
|
Together the duo gained fame and wealth a year later with the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers. Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface (GUI). This led to the development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI. The Macintosh introduced the desktop publishing industry in 1985 with the addition of the Apple LaserWriter, the first laser printer to feature vector graphics.
|
|
However, the introduction of microcomputers also attracted capital to a budding software industry, and this ended the early period when most non- business software was created in universities; Starkweather thereafter turned his energy to administration. In the 1960s, Starkweather was the logical person to develop a computer center for UCSF, which he led for 15 years until its operation was ready for a non-faculty administrator. In 1983, he became Academic Vice Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, and made major contributions to departmental planning and advising junior faculty regarding faculty advancement. Starkweather held this position until his retirement in 1993.
|
|
History of Computing Project Between 1976 and 1979, he was involved with Steve Jobs, Charles Tandy, and Les Solomon,Stan Veit's History of the Personal Computer, 1993 with whom he co-authored the book Getting Involved With Your Own Computer. Veit became a writer and editor, publishing Using Microcomputers In Business, The Peripherals Book, and articles for Personal Computing and Byte magazines. In 1980, he became the computer editor of Popular Electronics magazine and later technical editor of Computers & Electronics magazine for Ziff Davis. He also became sysop of Ziff Davis' first online magazine on CompuServe.
|
|
It was founded in 1979 as Compudata, as an importer of American microcomputers. Compudata was the distributor for Europe for the Exidy Sorcerer, a Zilog Z80 based home computer. When Exidy gave up on the Sorcerer in 1979, Compudata licensed the design and manufactured them locally for several years. In 1983 it launched its own PC, the Tulip PC. To achieve 100% compatibility it simply copied the IBM PC, including the BIOS. IBM sued, and after years of litigation, Tulip and IBM settled out of court for an undisclosed amount in 1989. It was listed on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange in 1984.
|
|
Thomas Alan Rolander is an American entrepreneur, engineer, and developer of the multitasking multiuser operating system MP/M created for microcomputers in 1979 while working as the first employee of Digital Research with Gary Kildall, the "father" of CP/M. CP/M and MP/M laid the groundwork to later Digital Research operating system families such as Concurrent CP/M, Concurrent DOS and Multiuser DOS. He also developed CP/NET. Digital Research Employee Badge, THOMAS ROLANDER, I.D. #1 In 2013 he was granted with a 2013 Diamond Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence from the University of Washington (UW).
|
|
Eventually, Information and communication technology (ICT)—i.e. computers, computerized machinery, fiber optics, communication satellites, the Internet, and other ICT tools—became a significant part of the world economy, as the development of microcomputers greatly changed many businesses and industries. Nicholas Negroponte captured the essence of these changes in his 1995 book, Being Digital, in which he discusses the similarities and differences between products made of atoms and products made of bits. In essence, a copy of a product made of bits can be made cheaply and quickly, then expediently shipped across the country or the world at very low cost.
|
|
Theodore Christian "Ted" Hines (September 9, 1926 - June 25, 1983) was a Washington, D.C.-born pioneer in the use of microcomputers and microcomputer programs in libraries. He attended undergraduate school at George Washington University and received his Masters of Library Science (MLS) in 1958 and a PhD in 1960 both from Rutgers University. He began his career as a children's librarian, and later became a professor of Library Science at Rutgers, followed by Columbia University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. With his wife, Lois Winkel, he designed an indexing program called the Children’s Media Databank.
|
|
Developed in 1976, ARCNET (Attached Resource Computer NETwork) was the first widely available networking system for microcomputers. Datapoint had pioneered microprocessors; the challenge ARCNET addressed was how to facilitate the efficient transmission of information between different machines. In an interview with Len Shustek for the Computer History Museum, Murphy notes that Datapoint took ARCNET from concept to reality in "under a year and probably very much under a year." As the first commercial local area network, ARCNET found early success, but corporate struggles at Datapoint led to slower adoption in the 1980s, relative to other commercial alternatives like Ethernet.
|
|
For example, the Data General Nova minicomputer, and the Texas Instruments TMS9900 and National Semiconductor IMP-16 microcomputers used 16 bit words, and there were many 36-bit mainframe computers (e.g., PDP-10) which used 18-bit word addressing, not byte addressing, giving an address space of 218 36-bit words, approximately 1 megabyte of storage. The efficiency of addressing of memory depends on the bit size of the bus used for addresses – the more bits used, the more addresses are available to the computer. For example, an 8-bit-byte- addressable machine with a 20-bit address bus (e.g.
|
|
The company sold hardware and software products such as local area networks, disk drives, printers, personal computers, random access memory chips, central processing units and integrated circuit boards. The principal vendors of the company included Seagate Technology, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, IBM, Sun and Creative Labs, 3Com, Microsoft, Epson, and Intel. It was a leading international distributor of microcomputers, peripherals, and software to more than 130,000 resellers in 46 countries in Europe, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa, until its bankruptcy due to an investigation of tax fraud. The companies customers include assemblers of non branded component products and resellers.
|
|
The earlier separate dialers had this capability, but only at the cost of a separate port, which a microcomputer might not have available. Another solution would have been to use a separate set of "command pins" dedicated to sending and receiving commands, another could have used a signal pin indicating that the modem should interpret incoming data as a command. Both of these had hardware support in the RS-232 standard. However, many implementations of the RS-232 port on microcomputers were extremely basic, and some eliminated many of these pins as a cost saving measure.
|
|
The Burroughs MCP (1961) was the first computer for which an operating system was not developed entirely in assembly language; it was written in Executive Systems Problem Oriented Language (ESPOL), an Algol dialect. Many commercial applications were written in assembly language as well, including a large amount of the IBM mainframe software written by large corporations. COBOL, FORTRAN and some PL/I eventually displaced much of this work, although a number of large organizations retained assembly-language application infrastructures well into the 1990s. Most early microcomputers relied on hand-coded assembly language, including most operating systems and large applications.
|
|
Although microcomputers had limited memory and storage at the time, dBASE nevertheless allowed a huge number of small-to-medium-sized tasks to be automated. The value-added resellers (VARs) who developed applications using dBASE became an important early sales channel for dBASE. By the end of the fiscal year ending in January 1982, the firm had revenues of almost $3.7 million with an operating loss of $313,000 dollars. Among Cole's early acts was to hire an accountant to set up a financial system, install a management structure, and introduce processes to manage operations and orders.
|
|
The history... Facts concerning Bulgarian microcomputers The line of Bulgarian personal computers at the time of release, was prohibitively expensive for individuals and in addition were only sold to different government institutions - educational sector, military and administrative sector. Pravetz computers were of major importance in the economy of the Comecon. In October 2013, a privately held Bulgarian company claimed in their website to have the rights on the trademark and misleadingly announced that "Pravetz Computers are returning to market". In fact, the company has no link to the original "Pravetz" computers known during the Soviet Era.
|
|
Engineering enrollment tripled during this era under the leadership of Dean Wayne H. Chen, who increased efforts to attract under-represented students. Research funding rose from $4 million to $30 million during his 15-year tenure, which ended in 1988. Chen also emphasized the need for interdisciplinary research. Several centers and institutes were founded at the University of Florida in the 1980s, including the Center for Microcomputers in Transportation; the Innovative Nuclear Space Power and Propulsion Institute; the Software Engineering Research Center; and the Center for Intelligent Machines and Robotics, the first university robotics laboratory in the United States.
|
|
Small-C is both a subset of the C programming language, suitable for resource- limited microcomputers and embedded systems, and an implementation of that subset. Originally valuable as an early compiler for microcomputer systems available during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the implementation has also been useful as an example simple enough for teaching purposes. The original compiler, written in Small-C for the Intel 8080 by Ron Cain, appeared in the May 1980 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia. James E. Hendrix improved and extended the original compiler, and wrote The Small-C Handbook.
|
|
A complete system could be constructed for under with the purchase of the kit for only , and then adding a power supply, a used terminal and a cassette tape drive. Many books were available demonstrating small assembly language programs for the KIM, including The First Book of KIM by Jim Butterfield et al. One demo program converted the KIM into a music box by toggling a software-controllable output bit connected to a small loudspeaker. Canadian programmer Peter R. Jennings produced what was probably the first game for microcomputers to be sold commercially, Microchess, originally for the KIM-1.
|
|
" The word processing, spreadsheet, and other bundled software alone was worth $1,500; as InfoWorld stated in an April 1981 front-page article on the new computer after listing the included software, "In case you think the price printed above was a mistake, we'll repeat it: $1795". West Coast Computer Faire attendees stated, InfoWorld said, that the Osborne 1 "represented an advancement of the price/performance ratio for microcomputers". Adam Osborne agreed but emphasized the price, stating that its performance was "merely adequate": "It is not the fastest microcomputer, it doesn't have huge amounts of disk storage space, and it is not especially expandable.
|
|
An accumulator machine, also called a 1-operand machine, or a CPU with accumulator-based architecture, is a kind of CPU where, although it may have several registers, the CPU mostly stores the results of calculations in one special register, typically called "the accumulator". Almost all early computers were accumulator machines with only the high-performance "supercomputers" having multiple registers. Then as mainframe systems gave way to microcomputers, accumulator architectures were again popular with the MOS 6502 being a notable example. Many 8-bit microcontrollers that are still popular as of 2014, such as the PICmicro and 8051, are accumulator-based machines.
|
|
The IBM 700/7000 series scientific machines use sign/magnitude notation, except for the index registers which are two's complement. Early commercial two's complement computers include the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-5 and the 1963 PDP-6. The System/360, introduced in 1964 by IBM, then the dominant player in the computer industry, made two's complement the most widely used binary representation in the computer industry. The first minicomputer, the PDP-8 introduced in 1965, uses two's complement arithmetic as do the 1969 Data General Nova, the 1970 PDP-11, and almost all subsequent minicomputers and microcomputers.
|
|
The company produced a series of machines known as the PDP line, with the PDP-8 and PDP-11 being among the most successful minis of all time. Their success was only surpassed by another DEC product, the late-1970s VAX "supermini" systems that were designed to replace the PDP-11. Although a number of competitors had successfully competed with Digital through the 1970s, the VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space. As microcomputers improved in the late 1980s, especially with the introduction of RISC-based workstation machines, the performance niche of the minicomputer was rapidly eroded.
|
|
Until 1992 in Brazil, it was illegal to import microcomputers. Because of that, the illegal cloning industry of Apple II-based computers was strong there. In the early 1980s, there were around 20 different clones of Apple II Plus computers in that country, all of them using illegally copied software and hardware (since the Apple II and II Plus used commonly available TTL integrated circuits). Some of the names include Elppa ("Apple" spelled backwards), Maxtro, Exato MC4000 (by CCE), AP II (by Unitron), and even an "Apple II Plus" (manufactured by a company called Milmar, which was using the name illegally).
|
|
In the early 1960s, as disk drives became larger and more affordable, various mainframe and minicomputer vendors began introducing disk operating systems and modifying existing operating systems to exploit disks. Both hard disks and floppy disk drives require software to manage rapid access to block storage of sequential and other data. For most microcomputers, a disk drive of any kind was an optional peripheral; systems could be used with a tape drive or booted without a storage device at all. The disk operating system component of the operating system was only needed when a disk drive was used.
|
|
Steve Jobs extensively pushed to give the Apple II a case that looked visually appealing and sellable to people outside of electronics hobbyists, rather than the generic wood and metal boxes typical of early microcomputers. The result was a futuristic-looking molded white plastic case. Jobs also paid close attention to the keyboard design and decided to use dark brown keycaps as it contrasted well with the case. The first production Apple IIs had hand-molded cases; these had visible bubbles and other lumps in them from the imperfect plastic molding process, which was soon switched to machine molding.
|
|
In 1981, Doug Walker, Mike Richer and Marty Quinn founded Walker, Richer & Quinn (WRQ) to integrate microcomputers with existing IT environments. The company set its sights on the Hewlett-Packard market, launching the first commercially viable terminal emulator for the HP 3000. (Two subsidiaries, Express Metrix and NetMotion Wireless, had been spun off by WRQ in 2000 and 2001, respectively, and continued to operate successfully for years to come.) After buying both WRQ, Inc. and Attachmate Corporation, who had been long-time competitors in the host emulation business, the private equity firms announced that the companies would be merged.
|
|
The emergence of early microcomputers in the mid-1970s led to the development of a number of BASIC dialects, including Microsoft BASIC in 1975. Due to the tiny main memory available on these machines, often 4 kB, a variety of Tiny BASIC dialects was also created. BASIC was available for almost any system of the era, and naturally became the de facto programming language for the home computer systems that emerged in the late 1970s. These machines almost always had a BASIC interpreter installed by default, often in the machine's firmware or sometimes on a ROM cartridge.
|
|
Wilkinson shot several dozen takes before arriving at the image finally used for the cover, but only a few of them still exist. The photo accompanying Times article was of the Softporn Adventure advertisement."Software for the Masses" from TIME United Press International also covered the game's release. Although Benton's mother and On-Line Systems' Coarsegold, California neighbors disliked the game's erotic content, and the company received hate mail, the positive and negative publicity helped sell an estimated 50,000 copies, an unusually large number especially at a time when Apple had only sold a couple hundred thousand Apple II microcomputers.
|
|
In 1974 Ahl left DEC to start Creative Computing magazine. He re-acquired the rights to the book from DEC and re- published under the name BASIC Computer Games. It was around this time that the first hobbyist microcomputers started appearing in 1975, and it became quite popular with these owners. The release of the "1977 Trinity" machines (Apple II, Commodore PET, and TRS-80) was soon followed by a great many new competing microcomputer platforms featuring BASIC, along with the userbase to go with them, and demand for the book led to a second edition in 1978.
|
|
One example was the Microsoft BASIC interpreter supplied with most microcomputers that ran VisiCalc. This allowed skilled BASIC programmers to add features, such as trigonometric functions, that VisiCalc lacked. Bricklin and Frankston originally intended to fit the program into 16k memory, but they later realized that the program needed at least 32k. Even 32k was too small to support some features that the creators wanted to include, such as a split text/graphics screen. However, Apple eventually began shipping all Apple IIs with 48k memory following a drop in RAM prices, which enabled the developers to include more features.
|
|
A user-configurable option to set the help level released this space for user text. The help system could be configured to display help a short time after the first key of a command sequence was entered. As users became more familiar with the command sequences, the help system could be set to provide less and less assistance until finally all on-screen menus and status information was turned off. The original computer terminals and microcomputers for which WordStar was developed, many running the CP/M operating system, did not have function keys or cursor control keys (arrow keys, Page Up/Page Down).
|
|
May was born in Holmfirth, Yorkshire, England and attended Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield. From 1969 to 1972 he was a student at King's College, Cambridge, University of Cambridge, at first studying Mathematics and then Computer Science in the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory, now the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory. He moved to the University of Warwick and started research in robotics. The challenges of implementing sensing and control systems led him to design and implement an early concurrent programming language, EPL, which ran on a cluster of single-board microcomputers connected by serial communication links.
|
|
An implementation of Frotz running on an iPhone, playing Zork I.Interpreters for Z-code files are available on a wide variety of platforms. The Inform website lists links to freely available interpreters for 15 desktop operating systems (including 8-bit microcomputers from the 1980s such as the Apple II, TRS-80, and ZX Spectrum, and grouping "Unix" and "Windows" as one each), 10 mobile operating systems (including Palm OS and the Game Boy), and four interpreter platforms (Emacs, Java, JavaScript, and Scratch). According to Nelson, it is "possibly the most portable virtual machine ever created". Popular interpreters include Nitfol and Frotz.
|
|
In 1970, Karpiński decided to establish his own institution to work on his new idea, a minicomputer of original architecture, for which he sought backing from state officials. Karpiński was given permission to found Microcomputers' Construction Plant (Zakład Budowy Mikrokomputerów) in Warszawa-Włochy in 1970. The basis for the computer's construction was the fruit of the joint-venture agreement between the Polish state (represented by Metronex, a foreign trade office) and British private partners companies Data-Loop and MB Metals. Karpiński, who orchestrated the agreement, was appointed technical director, fully responsible for the engineering aspect of the venture.
|
|
Gee Bee was developed by Toru Iwatani and was Namco's first video game produced in-house. The company began their insertion into game development in July 1976, when Shigeichi Ishimura, a Namco electro-mechanical game designer, proposed the idea of creating a video arcade game utilizing a CPU, with information accumulated from his work on electro-mechanical games. Namco approved of the idea and purchased a surplus amount of PDA-08 microcomputers from NEC, employees being assigned to study the system's potential to create video games. In 1977, Toru Iwatani joined Namco, shortly after graduating college.
|
|
Rapid progress in technology, including microcomputers and speech synthesis, have paved the way for communication devices with speech output and multiple options for access to communication for those with physical disabilities. AAC systems are diverse: unaided communication uses no equipment and includes signing and body language, while aided approaches use external tools. Aided communication methods can range from paper and pencil to communication books or boards to speech generating devices (SGDs) or devices producing written output. The symbols used in AAC include gestures, photographs, pictures, line drawings, letters and words, which can be used alone or in combination.
|
|
A machine shop can be a capital intensive business, because the purchase of equipment can require large investments. A machine shop can also be labour- intensive, especially if it is specialized in repairing machinery on a job production basis, but production machining (both batch production and mass production) is much more automated than it was before the development of CNC, programmable logic control (PLC), microcomputers, and robotics. It no longer requires masses of workers, although the jobs that remain tend to require high talent and skill. Training and experience in a machine shop can both be scarce and valuable.
|
|
The first paper was presented to the Univac Users Group in Dallas, TX (Feb. 1973) and the second paper was presented to the National Science Foundation conference on Data Storage and Retrieval Methods at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri (July 1973). Hatfield left JPL in 1974 and the JPLDIS project was assigned to Jeb Long, another programmer at JPL, who added many advanced features plus a programming language. In 1978, while at JPL, Wayne Ratliff wrote a database program in assembly language for CP/M based microcomputers to help him win the football pool at the office.
|
|
The Bourne shell led to the development of the Korn shell (ksh), Almquist shell (ash), and the popular Bourne-again shell (or Bash). Early microcomputers themselves were based on a command-line interface such as CP/M, DOS or AppleSoft BASIC. During the 1980s and 1990s, the introduction of the Apple Macintosh and of Microsoft Windows on PCs saw the command line interface as the primary user interface replaced by the Graphical User Interface. The command line remained available as an alternative user interface, often used by system administrators and other advanced users for system administration, computer programming and batch processing.
|
|
In the 1980s, it was common in IBM PC/compatible microcomputers for the FPU to be entirely separate from the CPU, and typically sold as an optional add-on. It would only be purchased if needed to speed up or enable math-intensive programs. The IBM PC, XT, and most compatibles based on the 8088 or 8086 had a socket for the optional 8087 coprocessor. The AT and 80286-based systems were generally socketed for the 80287, and 80386/80386SX-based machines for the 80387 and 80387SX respectively, although early ones were socketed for the 80287, since the 80387 did not exist yet.
|
|
The earliest microcomputers, such as the Altair 8800 (released first in 1975) and an even earlier, similar machine (based on the Intel 8008 CPU) had no bootstrapping hardware as such. When started, the CPU would see memory that would contain executable code containing only binary zeros—memory was cleared by resetting when powering up. The front panels of these machines carried toggle switches for entering addresses and data, one switch per bit of the computer memory word and address bus. Simple additions to the hardware permitted one memory location at a time to be loaded from those switches to store bootstrap code.
|
|
In the late '70s, Davis moved from Maine to San Francisco, where he became one of the early personal computer pioneers working with CPM- based systems. Davis bought an original Apple II in 1977 and emerged as an early Apple II programmer, due to his prior knowledge of BASIC, the language that computer used. Davis was among the first computer engineers to successfully connect microcomputers to mainframes, connecting his Apple II with Stanford's DEC PDP-10 while conducting research on database publishing at Stanford. Davis also served as a computer consultant to large corporations and venture capitalists in the early days of the industry.
|
|
A number of other variant sizes were introduced over time, with limited market success. Floppy disks remained a popular medium for nearly 40 years, but their use was declining by the mid- to late 1990s. The introduction of high speed computer networking and formats based on the new NAND flash technique (like USB flash drives and memory cards) led to the eventual disappearance of the floppy disk as a standard feature of microcomputers, with a notable point in this conversion being the introduction of the floppy-less iMac in 1998. After 2000, floppy disks were increasingly rare and used primarily with older hardware and especially with legacy industrial computer equipment.
|
|
Originally designated as ZKJ-III and named as Poseidon-4, but later re-designated as ZKJ-3, ZKJ-3 is designed to replace minicomputers in earlier designs with microcomputers with multilayered architecture, using Intel 8086 microprocessors. ZKJ-3 CDS has multiple input/output interfaces, and the software can be expanded when needed thanks to its modular design. In comparison to earlier Type 673-II/ZKJ-I CDS, the capability of ZKJ-3 has been expanded. Some of the additional capability includes compatibility with Type 352 targeting radar for anti-ship missiles and Type 681A IFF, and providing info from SJD-5 sonar to antisubmarine depth charge launchers.
|
|
The second generation of microcomputers, those that appeared in the late 1970s, sparked by the unexpected demand for the kit computers at the electronic hobbyist clubs, were usually known as home computers. For business use these systems were less capable and in some ways less versatile than the large business computers of the day. They were designed for fun and educational purposes, not so much for practical use. And although you could use some simple office/productivity applications on them, they were generally used by computer enthusiasts for learning to program and for running computer games, for which the personal computers of the period were less suitable and much too expensive.
|
|
Communication was controlled by the CPU, which read and wrote data from the devices as if they are blocks of memory, using the same instructions, all timed by a central clock controlling the speed of the CPU. Still, devices interrupted the CPU by signaling on separate CPU pins. For instance, a disk drive controller would signal the CPU that new data was ready to be read, at which point the CPU would move the data by reading the "memory location" that corresponded to the disk drive. Almost all early microcomputers were built in this fashion, starting with the S-100 bus in the Altair 8800 computer system.
|
|
This continued Coldcut and Hex's pioneering of the use of microcomputers to synthesize electronic music visuals. After their success with Lisa Stansfield, Coldcut signed with her label, Arista. Conflicts arose with the major label, as Coldcut's "vision extended beyond the formulae of house and techno" and mainstream pop culture (CITATION: The Virgin Encyclopedia Of Nineties Music, 2000). Eventually, the duo's album Philosophy emerged in 1993. Singles "Dreamer" and "Autumn Leaves" (1994) sung by vocalist Janis Alexander were both minor hits but the album did not chart. "Autumn Leaves" had strings recorded at Abbey Road, with a 30-piece string section and an arrangement by film composer Ed Shearmur.
|
|
The clients wanted Cayce to refuse the job of tracking the film clips and it was Dorotea's responsibility to ensure this. Through a completely random encounter Cayce meets Voytek Biroshak and Ngemi, the former an artist using old ZX81 microcomputers as a sculpture medium, the latter a collector of rare technology (he mentions purchasing Stephen King's word processor, for example). Another collector, and sometime 'friend' of Ngemi's, Hobbs Baranov, is a retired cryptographer and mathematician with connections in the American National Security Agency. Cayce strikes a deal with him: she buys a Curta calculator for him and he finds the email address to which the watermark code was sent.
|
|
In addition to the academic curriculum, students take an "expanded core curriculum" that includes additional skills needed by the visually impaired, such as social interaction skills, career education, technology, independent living, and independent travel. NMSBVI has been a leader in using assistive technology. It was one of the first public schools of any type to make widespread use of the Internet, and by 1996 it had a campus network of more than 100 microcomputers. The school sport teams, the Golden Bears, compete in the South Central Association of Schools for the Blind, and NMSBVI is a member school of the New Mexico Activities Association.
|
|
When discussing Coleco's delay in releasing the Adam, Creative Computing in March 1984 stated that the company "did not invent the common practice of debuting products before they actually exist. In microcomputers, to do so otherwise would be to break with a veritable tradition". After Dyson's article, the word "vaporware" became popular among writers in the personal computer software industry as a way to describe products they believed took too long to be released after their first announcement. InfoWorld magazine editor Stewart Alsop helped popularize its use by giving Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, with a Golden Vaporware award for Microsoft releasing Windows in 1985, 18 months late.
|
|
The personal computer was made possible by major advances in semiconductor technology. In 1959, the silicon integrated circuit (IC) chip was developed by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor, and the metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) transistor was developed by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs. The MOS integrated circuit was commercialized by RCA in 1964, and then the silicon- gate MOS integrated circuit was developed by Federico Faggin at Fairchild in 1968. Faggin later used silicon-gate MOS technology to develop the first single-chip microprocessor, the Intel 4004, in 1971. The first microcomputers, based on microprocessors, were developed during the early 1970s.
|
|
Roy A. Allan, A Bibliography of the Personal Computer [electronic resource]: the Books and Periodical Articles, Allan Publishing – 2006, p. 73 Also in 1973 Hewlett Packard introduced fully BASIC programmable microcomputers that fit entirely on top of a desk, including a keyboard, a small one-line display, and printer. The Wang 2200 microcomputer of 1973 had a full-size cathode ray tube (CRT) and cassette tape storage. These were generally expensive specialized computers sold for business or scientific uses. Altair 8800 computer 1974 saw the introduction of what is considered by many to be the first true "personal computer", the Altair 8800 created by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS).
|
|
Simtel originated as SIMTEL20, a software archive started by Keith Petersen in 1979 while living in Royal Oak, Michigan. The original archive consisted of CP/M software for early 8080-based microcomputers. The software was hosted on a PDP-10 at MIT that also ran a CP/M mailing list to which Petersen subscribed. When access to the particular MIT computer was removed in 1983, fellow CP/M enthusiast Frank Wancho, then an employee at the White Sands Missile Range, arranged for the archive to be hosted on a DECSYSTEM-20 computer with ARPANET access, accessible via FTP at `simtel20.arpa`, later known as `wsmr- simtel20.army.mil`.
|
|
Mikro-Gen was a UK software company based in Bracknell, Berkshire that produced games for home computers in the early to mid-1980s. The company was formed by Mike Meek and Andrew Laurie in 1981, in order to capitalise on the growing boom of microcomputers in the home. The company had a solid reputation but became more prominent with its series of games featuring Wally Week and his family, all of which got excellent reviews in the highly respected computer magazine Crash. Later, the company invested £130,000 in producing the Mikro Plus, which shadowed the Spectrum's 16K ROM with RAM, allowing 64K of data for games.
|
|
Liquid Kids is a 1990 platform arcade video game originally developed and published by Taito. Starring the platypus Hipopo, players are tasked with travelling through the land of Woody-Lake throwing water bombs, jumping on and off platforms to navigate level obstacles while dodging and defeating monsters in order to rescue Tamasun from her captor, the Fire Demon. Although first launched in arcades, the game was later ported to other platforms, each one featuring several changes compared with the original version, in addition of being re-released through compilations and digital distribution services for various consoles. Conversions for microcomputers were in development but none were officially released to the public.
|
|
Unfortunately, each of the many different brands of minicomputers had to stand on its own because there was no software and very little hardware compatibility between the brands. When the first general purpose microprocessor was introduced in 1974 it immediately began chipping away at the low end of the computer market, replacing embedded minicomputers in many industrial devices. This process accelerated in 1977 with the introduction of the first commodity-like microcomputer, the Apple II. With the development of the VisiCalc application in 1979, microcomputers broke out of the factory and began entering office suites in large quantities, but still through the back door.
|
|
The development in 1982 of the Compact Disc (CD) by Sony and Philips, and its later version designed to contain date, the CD-ROM, drew the attention of Publishing Companies due to the large capacity and low cost of these discs. At this time, Publisher Marin founded an engineering company called ComCal SA with the objective of making major reference works and large document datebases available through microcomputers. Jordi Ustrell had been the technical director of the Company since its foundation. ComCal developed the so called LST software, a software solution that converted reference works such as encyclopedias or pharmaceutical vademecums to large datebases, making those works computer-readable.
|
|
HP maintained a database of contributed-programs and customers could order them on punched tape for a nominal fee. Most BASICs of the 1970s trace their history to the original Dartmouth BASIC of the 1960s, but early versions of Dartmouth did not handle string variables and vendors added their own solutions. This led to two general styles; DEC introduced the `MID/LEFT/RIGHT` functions, while TSB used a system more akin to Algol 68, Matlab, Fortran 77 and other languages with array slicing. As microcomputers began to enter the market in the mid-1970s, many new BASICs appeared that based their parsers on DEC's or HP's syntax.
|
|
Colossus Chess 4.0 on Commodore 64 Colossus Chess 4.0 on Commodore 64 (3D chessboard) Bryant started Colossus Chess in 1983, using his White Knight Mk 11 program, winner of the 1983 European Microcomputer Chess Championship, as a basis. It was developed on an Apple II, but was first commercially released for Commodore 64 as Colossus Chess 2.0 (CDS Micro Systems, 1984). A number of releases for 8-bit microcomputers followed. Version 3.0 was released in 1984 for the Atari 8-bit family of computers (published by English Software), followed by 4.0 in 1985 which was released on most formats of the day (published by CDS).
|
|
After acquiring the struggling Japanese division of Atari in 1974, video game developer Namco began producing its own video games in-house, as opposed to simply licensing them from other developers and distributing them in Japan. Company president Masaya Nakamura created a small video game development group within the company and ordered them to study several NEC-produced microcomputers to potentially create new games with. One of the first people assigned to this division was a young 24-year-old employee named Toru Iwatani. He created Namco's first video game Gee Bee in 1978, which while unsuccessful helped the company gain a stronger foothold in the quickly-growing video game industry.
|
|
The history of the personal computer as a mass-market consumer electronic device began with the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time-sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals. After the development of the microprocessor, individual personal computers were low enough in cost that they eventually became affordable consumer goods. Early personal computers – generally called microcomputers – were sold often in electronic kit form and in limited numbers, and were of interest mostly to hobbyists and technicians.
|
|
The program was typically a small driver for an attached cassette tape reader, which would then be used to read in another "real" program. Later systems added bootstrapping code to improve this process, and the machines became almost universally associated with the CP/M operating system, loaded from floppy disk. The Altair created a new industry of microcomputers and computer kits, with many others following, such as a wave of small business computers in the late 1970s based on the Intel 8080, Zilog Z80 and Intel 8085 microprocessor chips. Most ran the CP/M-80 operating system developed by Gary Kildall at Digital Research.
|
|
Also, TUTOR was designed before the advent of the windows-oriented graphical user interface (GUI). The microTutor language was developed in the PLATO project at UIUC to permit portions of a lesson to run in terminals that contained microcomputers, with connections to TUTOR code running on the mainframe. The microTutor dialect was also the programming language of the Cluster system developed at UIUC and licensed to TDK in Japan; the Cluster system consisted of a small group of terminals attached to a minicomputer which provided storage and compilation. The Tencore Language Authoring System is a TUTOR derivative developed by Paul Tenczar for PCs and sold by Computer Teaching Corporation.
|
|
Monitors, keyboards and other devices for input and output may be integrated or separate. Computer memory in the form of RAM, and at least one other less volatile, memory storage device are usually combined with the CPU on a system bus in one unit. Other devices that make up a complete microcomputer system include batteries, a power supply unit, a keyboard and various input/output devices used to convey information to and from a human operator (printers, monitors, human interface devices). Microcomputers are designed to serve only one user at a time, although they can often be modified with software or hardware to concurrently serve more than one user.
|
|
Additionally, at that time, people were more likely to buy calculators than computers, and, purchasing agents also preferred the term "calculator" because purchasing a "computer" required additional layers of purchasing authority approvals. The Datapoint 2200, made by CTC in 1970, was also comparable to microcomputers. While it contains no microprocessor, the instruction set of its custom TTL processor was the basis of the instruction set for the Intel 8008, and for practical purposes the system behaves approximately as if it contains an 8008. This is because Intel was the contractor in charge of developing the Datapoint's CPU, but ultimately CTC rejected the 8008 design because it needed 20 support chips.
|
|
Around 1980, Dunn discovered CompuServe, an early online service popular with owners of 8-bit microcomputers. He served as the sysop of CBIG, a special interest group for users of CompuServe's CB Simulator chat service, where he went by the handle "Chrisdos". Dunn was the author of MU, an unofficial menu and mail notification program that ran on CompuServe's DEC PDP servers. (By 1984, it was no longer possible for customers to install and run server-side programs; MU was the sole exception.) In 1985, Dunn authored CBterm/C64, a terminal emulator for the Commodore 64 noted for its ability to directly display CompuServe's RLE graphics.
|
|
This Acorn machine was based around a 16-bit 65SC816 CPU, 128 KB RAM, expandable to 512 KB, plus additional battery-backed RAM. It had a new multi-tasking OS, had 4x internal ROM sockets, and shipped with 'View' based software. It also had an attached telephone, communications software and auto-answer/auto-dial modem.Communicator details Communicator details In February 1986, Acorn announced that it was ceasing US sales operations, and sold its remaining US BBC Microcomputers for $1.25M to a Texas company, 'Basic', which was a subsidiary of Datum, the Mexican manufacturer of the Spanish version of the BBC Microcomputer (with modified Spanish keyboards for the South American market).
|
|
Benson was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Geology from the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He spent 30 years associated with the computer field, spanning the era from the introduction of modern mainframe computers to the dominance of the computer industry by microcomputers. Benson's partner Hal Woodward invented modern full text computer indexing and searching in 1981 based on the Federal Acquisition Regulation – the search system was called FARA (FAR Automated), and Benson exploited the new field through companies he co-founded. Benson was active in the early days of Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
|
|
IEEE 488 stacking connectors IEEE 488 is a short-range digital communications 8-bit parallel multi-master interface bus specification developed by Hewlett- Packard as HP-IB (Hewlett-Packard Interface Bus). It subsequently became the subject of several standards, and is generically known as GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus). Although the bus was created in the late 1960s to connect together automated test equipment, it also had some success during the 1970s and 1980s as a peripheral bus for early microcomputers, notably the Commodore PET. Newer standards have largely replaced IEEE 488 for computer use, but it is still used by some test equipment.
|
|
The DWRL began in 1985 with the acquisition of twelve IBM microcomputers as a result of a Project QUEST grant to the University of Texas at Austin. English department faculty member Jerome Bump and his graduate students later arranged for the machines to be moved from the University Writing Center (housed in the English department) to vacant space in the basement of the Undergraduate Library. This space was deemed the Computer Research Lab (CRL) and marked the beginning of the research into computer-based writing at The University of Texas at Austin. In fall 1986 Bump offered a graduate seminar on rhetoric and computers, which he co-taught with Lt. Col.
|
|
The various previous applications have been more or less successful, but have suffered from bureaucratic clumsiness. The recent availability of "hypertext" data- structures and user interfaces—even on small microcomputers and moderately priced workstations—has allowed the design of IBISes which are much more "user-friendly" than their predecessors. Today, there are a number of IBIS programs, developed and implemented on a variety of machines. Some crucial old weaknesses of IBIS remain the same: the danger of getting lost in the web of cross-references, the lack of a "synoptic" overview of the state of resolution, and the "logic of the next question", i.e.
|
|
Many were sold indirectly to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for final end use application. During the two decade lifetime of the minicomputer class (1965–1985), almost 100 companies formed and only a half dozen remained. When single-chip CPU microprocessors appeared, beginning with the Intel 4004 in 1971, the term "minicomputer" came to mean a machine that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the smallest mainframe computers and the microcomputers. The term "minicomputer" is little used today; the contemporary term for this class of system is "midrange computer", such as the higher-end SPARC, Power ISA and Itanium-based systems from Oracle, IBM and Hewlett- Packard.
|
|
As microprocessors have become more powerful, the CPUs built up from multiple components – once the distinguishing feature differentiating mainframes and midrange systems from microcomputers – have become increasingly obsolete, even in the largest mainframe computers. Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was once the leading minicomputer manufacturer, at one time the second-largest computer company after IBM. But as the minicomputer declined in the face of generic Unix servers and Intel-based PCs, not only DEC, but almost every other minicomputer company including Data General, Prime, Computervision, Honeywell, and Wang Laboratories, failed, merged, or were bought out. DEC was bought by Compaq in 1998, while Data General was acquired by EMC Corporation.
|
|
A variety of companies emerged that built turnkey systems around minicomputers with specialized software and, in many cases, custom peripherals that addressed specialized problems such as computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing, process control, manufacturing resource planning, and so on. Many if not most minicomputers were sold through these original equipment manufacturers and value-added resellers. Several pioneering computer companies first built minicomputers, such as DEC, Data General, and Hewlett-Packard (HP) (who now refers to its HP3000 minicomputers as "servers" rather than "minicomputers"). And although today's PCs and servers are clearly microcomputers physically, architecturally their CPUs and operating systems have developed largely by integrating features from minicomputers.
|
|
In the early days of computers, there were no disk drives, floppy disks or modern flash storage devices. Early storage devices such as delay lines, core memories, punched cards, punched tape, magnetic tape, and magnetic drums were used instead. And in the early days of microcomputers and home computers, paper tape or audio cassette tape (see Kansas City standard) or nothing were used instead. In the latter case, program and data entry was done at front panel switches directly into memory or through a computer terminal / keyboard, sometimes controlled by a BASIC interpreter in ROM; when power was turned off any information was lost.
|
|
When computers were extremely large, expensive, and bulky (mainframes and minicomputers), the software was often bundled together with the hardware by manufacturers. If business software needed to be installed on an existing computer, this might require an expensive, time-consuming visit by a systems architect or a consultant. For complex, on-premises installation of enterprise software today, this can still sometimes be the case. However, with the development of mass market software for the new age of microcomputers in the 1980s came new forms of software distribution first cartridges, then Compact Cassettes, then floppy disks, then (in the 1990s and later) optical media, the internet and flash drives.
|
|
He also chose to rename the ruler to the more famous Babylonian king Hammurabi, misspelled as "Hamurabi". Dyment's game, sometimes retitled The Sumer Game, proved popular in the programming community: Jerry Pournelle recalled in 1989 that "half the people I know wrote a Hammurabi program back in the 1970s; for many, it was the first program they'd ever written in their lives". Around 1971, DEC employee David H. Ahl wrote a version of The Sumer Game in the BASIC programming language. Unlike FOCAL, BASIC was run not just on mainframe computers and minicomputers, but also on personal computers, then termed microcomputers, making it a much more popular language.
|
|
The second half of the 1980s saw the rise of popularity of IBM AT compatible among business users, and a slow movement towards 16-bits like Amiga and Atari ST computers in the enthusiast market, while mainstream home computing was still largely dominated by the ubiquitous C-64. Domestic computer hardware manufacturers produced a number of different IBM AT compatibles, such as TIM-microcomputers and Lira, and the first domestic Unix workstation (in one of the configurations, Iskra Delta's Triglav was shipped with Microsoft's Xenix) but their success was again limited to government-controlled companies that were required to purchase only domestic or legally imported technology.
|
|
The Nova was followed by the Supernova and Eclipse product lines, all of which were used in many applications for the next two decades. The company employed an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) sales strategy to sell to third parties who incorporated Data General computers into the OEM's specific product lines. A series of missteps in the 1980s, including missing the advance of microcomputers despite the launch of the microNOVA in 1977, and the Data General-One portable computer in 1984, led to a decline in the company's market share. The company did continue into the 1990s, however, and was eventually acquired by EMC Corporation (now Dell EMC) in 1999.
|
|
Cromemco production line of CS-250 computers for USAF Mission Support System (1986) In 1981, a study was commissioned by the United States Air Force Systems Command to select a microcomputer for the Theater Air Control System (TACS). From a field of 149 microcomputers the Final Technical Report concluded that “the equipment offered by Cromemco is the most responsive to the general selection criteria.” In the years following this study the United States Air Force became a major customer for Cromemco computers. Cromemco developed a special version of the CS-200 computer (called the CS-250) to meet the requirements of the Air Force's Mission Support System (MSS).
|
|
The dialect of BASIC bundled with the VIC-20, Commodore BASIC V2.0, was notorious for its sparse functionality. It didn't even match the features of Commodore's older line of computers, the PET which, at that time, already featured Commodore BASIC version 4.0. As a result, it was outdated by the VIC-20's release and seemed quite primitive compared to BASIC dialects available on other microcomputers. To be fair, the decision by Commodore to recycle the old BASIC, and the fact that it could fit in just ROM (including the KERNAL), helped keep the VIC-20's price to a minimum and so contributed to its huge success.
|
|
A selection of Apple IIe software, intended to be read through the Disk II system Disk II and original box. Apple did not originally offer a disk drive for the Apple II, which used data cassette storage like other microcomputers of the time. Apple early investor and executive Mike Markkula asked cofounder Steve Wozniak to design a drive system for the computer after finding that a checkbook-balancing program Markkula had written took too long to load from tape. Wozniak knew nothing about disk controllers, but while at Hewlett-Packard he had designed a simple, five-chip circuit to operate a Shugart Associates drive.
|
|
3D graphics hardware was a relatively new prospect for microcomputers at the time, and was unknown in the IBM personal computing world. 3D graphics software was mostly associated with PowerAnimator and Softimage or niche applications on the Amiga 3000, such as Video Toaster and Lightwave, or the Macintosh Quadra, such as StrataVision, and 3D graphics hardware was frequently associated with UNIX machines. In contrast, in the IBM personal computing world, VGA was just barely coming into the spotlight when IrisVision came out on the market. IrisVision presented an alternative few had ever imagined on the Intel platform: that of a 3D platform that used MS-DOS as the base operating system.
|
|
Wayne Green, the creator of many magazines such as 73, founded 80 Microcomputing as a spinoff of his Kilobaud Microcomputing solely for Tandy Corporation's Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I microcomputer. Like his other magazines it encouraged readers to submit articles and reviews. A 1980 advertisement for the magazine promised that it would "tell you the truth … the good things about the TRS-80 and the not so good" because "Wayne Green has never been one to mince words". By 1982 80 Micro was the third largest magazine in terms of obtaining advertising, selling 152,000 issues; Information Intelligence, Online Libraries, and Microcomputers, Volumes 1-2.
|
|
Joe Barr (October 19, 1944 - July 11, 2008) was an American technology journalist, an editor and writer for the SourceForge sites Linux.com and IT Manager's Journal. A former programmer, Barr had worked on everything from microcomputers like the TRS-80 Model I to IBM mainframes with acres of DASD, writing code in more than a dozen languages, including RPG II, 370 ALC, COBOL, BASIC, TIBOL, MASM, and C, much of that experience coming in his 13 years with Ross Perot's EDS. As a writer, Barr first gained notoriety and, according to Ziff-Davis' Spencer F. Katt, a cult-like following for his zine, The Dweebspeak Primer.
|
|
In 1973, the IBM Palo Alto Scientific Center developed a portable computer prototype called SCAMP (Special Computer APL Machine Portable) based on the IBM PALM processor with a Philips compact cassette drive, small CRT and full function keyboard. SCAMP emulated an IBM 1130 minicomputer in order to run APL\1130. In 1973, APL was generally available only on mainframe computers, and most desktop sized microcomputers such as the Wang 2200 or HP 9800 offered only BASIC. Because SCAMP was the first to emulate APL\1130 performance on a portable, single user computer, PC Magazine in 1983 designated SCAMP a "revolutionary concept" and "the world's first personal computer".
|
|
Distribution 5 1/4 inch diskettes and packaging for the last version (Version 4) of WordStar word processing program released for 8-bit CP/M. WordStar, one of the first widely used word processors, and dBase, an early and popular database program for microcomputers, were originally written for CP/M. Two early outliners, KAMAS (Knowledge and Mind Amplification System) and its cut-down successor Out-Think (without programming facilities and retooled for 8080/V20 compatibility) were also written for CP/M, though later rewritten for MS-DOS. Turbo Pascal, the ancestor of Borland Delphi, and Multiplan, the ancestor of Microsoft Excel, also debuted on CP/M before MS-DOS versions became available.
|
|
TRSDOS (which stands for the Tandy Radio Shack Disk Operating System) is the operating system for the Tandy TRS-80 line of eight-bit Zilog Z80 microcomputers that were sold through Radio Shack from 1977 through 1991. Tandy's manuals recommended that it be pronounced triss-doss. TRSDOS should not be confused with Tandy DOS, a version of MS-DOS licensed from Microsoft for Tandy's x86 line of personal computers (PCs). With the original TRS-80 Model I of 1977, TRSDOS was primarily a way of extending the MBASIC (BASIC in ROM) with additional I/O (input/output) commands that worked with disk files rather than the cassette tapes that were used by non-disk Model I systems.
|
|
Mainframe computers are computers used primarily by businesses and academic institutions for large-scale processes. Before personal computers, first termed microcomputers, became widely available to the general public in the 1970s, the computing industry was composed of mainframe computers and the relatively smaller and cheaper minicomputer variant. During the mid to late 1960s, many early video games were programmed on these computers. Developed prior to the rise of the commercial video game industry in the early 1970s, these early mainframe games were generally written by students or employees at large corporations in a machine or assembly language that could only be understood by the specific machine or computer type they were developed on.
|
|
IBM System/360 Model 30 mainframe computer at the Computer History Museum Mainframe computers are powerful computers used primarily by large organizations for computational work, especially large-scale, multi-user processes. The term originally referred to the large cabinets called "main frames" that housed the central processing unit and main memory of early computers. Prior to the rise of personal computers, first termed microcomputers, in the 1970s, they were the primary type of computer in use, and at the beginning of the 1960s they were the only type of computer available for public purchase. Minicomputers were relatively smaller and cheaper mainframe computers prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, though they were still not intended for personal use.
|
|
"POKE" is sometimes used to refer to any direct manipulation of the contents of memory, rather than just via BASIC, particularly among people who learned computing on the 8-bit microcomputers of the late 1970s and early 1980s. BASIC was often the only language available on those machines (on home computers, usually present in ROM), and therefore the obvious, and simplest, way to program in machine language was to use BASIC to POKE the opcode values into memory. Doing much low-level coding like this usually came from lack of access to an assembler. An example of the generic usage of POKE and PEEK is in Visual Basic for Windows, where DDE can be achieved with the LinkPoke keyword.
|
|
A number of early microcomputers were based on the 1802, including the COSMAC ELF (1976), Netronics ELF II, Quest SuperELF, COSMAC VIP, Comx-35, Finnish Telmac 1800 and Oscom Nano, Yugoslav Pecom 32 and 64, and the Cybervision systems sold through Montgomery Ward in the late 70s, as well as the RCA Studio II video game console (one of the first consoles to use bitmapped graphics). The Edukit single board computer (SBC) trainer system, similar to an expanded COSMAC Elf, was offered by Modus Systems Ltd. in Britain in the early 1980s. Infinite Incorporated produced an 1802-based, S-100 bus expandable console computer trainer in the late 1970s called the UC1800, available assembled or in kit form.
|
|
At that time the robots in Japan and the USA were controlled by minicomputers, not microcomputers like IMKO-1 and this demonstration was a real success as the whole system cost tens of times less than the Japanese or American analogues. As all computers of the Pravetz series this model has hardware Cyrillic support, but because the keyboard was using 7 bits for transmitting the character codes the Cyrillic letters were overlapping the lower case Latin letters and it was only possible to type with upper case Latin or Cyrillic letters. Ports/slots: Cassette player port, 8 expansion slots. The zero slot was used for attaching extra memory up to the 64KB limit.
|
|
Its gameplay consists of run and gun action mixed with platforming and exploration elements, with a main single-button configuration. Originally released for the Amiga microcomputers, Switchblade II was later ported to the Atari ST in May 1991 and the Atari Lynx handheld in 1992, with the latter being published by Atari Corporation in North America and Europe. Upon its original release on the Amiga, Switchblade II garnered very positive reception from critics who praised multiple aspects of the title such as the visuals, sound effects and gameplay. The Atari ST version also received positive reception from reviewers for its graphics and gameplay, while the Lynx version was met with a more mixed reception.
|
|
The French version of the game, however, despite being listed as "Sumer (French)", described itself not as a translation of the original game, but as a translation of "Hamurabi (The Sumer Game)", due to another version of the game which was already released by then. Around 1971, DEC employee David H. Ahl had written a version of The Sumer Game in the BASIC programming language. Unlike FOCAL, BASIC was run not just on mainframe computers and minicomputers, but also on personal computers, then termed microcomputers, making it a much more popular language. In 1973, Ahl published BASIC Computer Games, a best-selling book of games written in BASIC, which included his version of The Sumer Game.
|
|
As hardware became smaller, he developed the PILOT language (Programmed Inquiry, Learning Or Teaching) that made it easy for non-programmers to write sequences of machine-administered teaching or testing using the time-share terminals in use in 1970, and then microcomputers when they became available a decade later. The National Library of Medicine adopted PILOT as its primary computer language for the dissemination and exchange of computer-based instructional materials in the health sciences, and used it for instructing medical librarians in using MEDLINE. Starkweather chaired a working group for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers from 1987 through 1991 that established standards for PILOT. The language was in active use for many years.
|
|
The ZX Spectrum was popular among British hobbyist programmers and helped to kick off its video game industry in the 1980s. While the commercial sector of the video game industry was focused on the growing home video game console market in the late 1970s to early 1980s, a number of games for personal computers were released by one- or two-man teams, self-distributed in stores or sold through mail order. This was particularly true in the United Kingdom, where video game consoles had not gained as much traction as in the United States. There, the early microcomputers such as the ZX Spectrum were popular, launching a range of "bedroom coders" which initiated the UK's video game industry.
|
|
University of Munich The first wave was the creation of numerical control by John T. Parsons in the 1940s. The U.S. Air Force, looking for a faster, cheaper, and more efficient means of part and tool production for airplanes, played a large role in developing NC both politically and financially. The first implementation of NC in machine tools occurred in the 1950s and continued through the 1960s. The second wave of innovation, occurring during the 1970s and 1980s, is marked by the massive demand for microcomputers to be used to direct NC. The joining of computers marked the birth of Computer Numerical Control which once again revolutionized the ability of the cylindrical grinder.
|
|
The accompanying Berkeley sockets API is a de facto standard for networking APIs and has been copied on many platforms. During this period, many observers expected that UNIX, with its portability, rich capabilities, and support from companies like DEC and IBM, was likely to become an industry-standard operating system for microcomputers. Citing its much smaller software library and installed base than that of MS-DOS and the IBM PC, others expected that customers would prefer personal computers on local area networks to Unix multiuser systems. Microsoft planned to make Xenix MS-DOS's multiuser successor; by 1983 a Xenix- based Altos 586 with 512 KB RAM and 10 MB hard drive cost .
|
|
On the original PET 2001, the uppercase/graphics character set and upper/lowercase character set were reversed compared to how they would be on later machines; PET owners who upgraded their machines to the BASIC 2.0 ROMs often also swapped out the character ROMs for the newer version.Commodore PET ROM descriptions, (C) 1998-2013 André Fachat 391x391px Although the machine was moderately successful, there were frequent complaints about the tiny calculator-like keyboard, often referred to as a "chiclet keyboard" because the keys resembled the chewing gum it was named after. The key tops also tended to rub off easily. Reliability was fairly poor, although that was not atypical of many early microcomputers.
|
|
In 1972-1973 a team led by Dr. Paul Friedl at the IBM Los Gatos Scientific Center developed a portable computer prototype called SCAMP (Special Computer APL Machine Portable) based on the IBM PALM processor with a Philips compact cassette drive, small CRT and full function keyboard. SCAMP emulated an IBM 1130 minicomputer in order to run APL\1130.IBM Archives In 1973 APL was generally available only on mainframe computers, and most desktop sized microcomputers such as the Wang 2200 or HP 9800 offered only BASIC. Because it was the first to emulate APL\1130 performance on a portable, single-user computer, PC Magazine in 1983 designated SCAMP a "revolutionary concept" and "the world's first personal computer".
|
|
Although the Altair spawned an entire business, another side effect it had was to demonstrate that the microprocessor had so reduced the cost and complexity of building a microcomputer that anyone with an interest could build their own. Many such hobbyists met and traded notes at the meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club (HCC) in Silicon Valley. Although the HCC was relatively short-lived, its influence on the development of the modern PC was enormous. Members of the group complained that microcomputers would never become commonplace if they still had to be built up, from parts like the original Altair, or even in terms of assembling the various add-ons that turned the machine into a useful system.
|
|
The major advance that the Microtan 65 had over a lot of the competition at that time was that the video display was flicker free. At the time a lot of microcomputers would either access the screen memory asynchronously to the video timing (causing flicker and splats on the screen), or would write to the screen memory during a non-display period (which was slow). The Microtan 65 got over this problem by making use of an incidental feature of the 6502. The 6502 (unlike most other CPUs) has a regular period in each instruction cycle when all CPU activity is inside the chip, leaving the external memory available without using complex external arbitration logic.
|
|
The next entrant into the market was Excelerator from Index Technology in Cambridge, Mass. While DesignAid ran on Convergent Technologies and later Burroughs Ngen networked microcomputers, Index launched Excelerator on the IBM PC/AT platform. While, at the time of launch, and for several years, the IBM platform did not support networking or a centralized database as did the Convergent Technologies or Burroughs machines, the allure of IBM was strong, and Excelerator came to prominence. Hot on the heels of Excelerator were a rash of offerings from companies such as Knowledgeware (James Martin, Fran Tarkenton and Don Addington), Texas Instrument's CA Gen and Andersen Consulting's FOUNDATION toolset (DESIGN/1, INSTALL/1, FCP).
|
|
Examples of direct-connecting modems did exist, and these often allowed the host computer to send it commands to answer or hang up calls, but these were very expensive devices used by large banks and similar companies. With the introduction of microcomputers with expansion slots, like the S-100 bus machines and Apple II, it became possible for the modem to communicate instructions and data on separate lines. A number of modems of this sort were available by the late 1970s. This made the BBS possible for the first time, as it allowed software on the computer to pick up an incoming call, communicate with the user, and then hang up the call when the user logged off.
|
|
WordStar, released 1978 WordPerfect, first released for minicomputers in 1979 and later ported to microcomputers LibreOffice Writer, one of the most popular free and open-source word processors A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand- alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word processors are word processor programs running on general purpose computers. The functions of a word processor program fall somewhere between those of a simple text editor and a fully functioned desktop publishing program. However the distinctions between these three have changed over time, and were unclear after 2010.
|
|
Other companies in the emerging field quickly followed suit; Tymshare introduced SUPER BASIC in 1968, CompuServe had a version on the DEC-10 at their launch in 1969, and by the early 1970s BASIC was largely universal on general-purpose mainframe computers. Even IBM eventually joined the club with the introduction of VS-BASIC in 1973. Although time-sharing services with BASIC were successful for a time, the widespread success predicted earlier was not to be. The emergence of minicomputers during the same period, and especially low-cost microcomputers in the mid-1970s, allowed anyone to purchase and run their own systems rather than buy online time which was typically billed at dollars per minute.
|
|
Initially it was developed for SM-4 (a PDP-11/40 clone) and SM-1600. Later it was ported to Elektronika-1082, BESM, ES EVM, clones of VAX-11(SM-1700), and a number of other platforms, including PC/XT, Elektronika-85 (a clone of DEC Professional), and a number of Motorola 68020-based microcomputers. The development of DEMOS effectively ceased in 1991, when the second project of the DEMOS team, RELCOM, took priority. The originally suggested name was УНАС (UNAS), which was a volapukish word play on Unix; "у них" ("u nih") in Russian means "at theirs" or also "they have it", "у нас" ("u nas") means "at ours" or also "we have it".
|
|
A Tandy laptop computer, the 1400LT Tandy was one of three companies (along with Commodore International and Apple) that started the personal computer revolution in 1977 by introducing complete pre-assembled microcomputers instead of a kit. Their TRS-80 (1977) and TRS-80 Color Computer ("CoCo") (1980) line of home computers were popular in the years before the IBM PC became commonplace, and had wide distribution in Radio Shack stores at a time when there were few computer stores. By 1981, computers were the most important part of Tandy's sales. The company attempted to monopolize software and peripheral sales by keeping technical information secret and not selling third-party products in Tandy-owned stores.
|
|
Originally, CSM systems worked via batch processing. In the 1970s, CSM made the move to deploy its software to online minicomputer systems that were provided to customers as turnkey systems. Near the end of that decade, all of CSM's applications were converted to being implemented using the MUMPS programming language, which went on to become a common choice within the healthcare industry. For the most part, CSM operated independently of the rest of ACT's activities, but there were occasional collaborations, such as when the parent produced MUMPS implementations for the Digital Equipment Corporation PRO series microcomputers and Tandem Computers NonStop fault-tolerant product line, or when ACT's Network Processor product was used underneath CSM's Human Services Network Information System.
|
|
ELKS is free software and available under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It can work with early 16-bit x86 (8086, 80186 and 80286) computers like IBM PC compatible systems, and in virtual 8086 mode, a feature of the 32-bit Intel 80386 and later CPUs found in newer machines. Another useful area are single board microcomputers, intended as educational tools for "homebrew" projects (hardware hacking), as well as embedded controller systems (e.g. Automation).Introduction to ELKS ELKS also runs on Psion 3a and 3aR SIBO (SIxteen Bit Organiser) PDAs with NEC V30 CPUs,Introduction to ELKS providing another possible field of operation (gadget hardware), if ported to such a platform.
|
|
Paperboy on an Amstrad CPC 464 in 1988 Tandy Color Computer 3 411x411px Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user. These computers were a distinct market segment that typically cost much less than business, scientific or engineering-oriented computers of the time such as those running CP/M or the IBM PC, and were generally less powerful in terms of memory and expandability. However, a home computer often had better graphics and sound than contemporary business computers.
|
|
For administrative arrangements of the university could not be concluded, and became what is now the administrative building of the Faculty. On November 30, 1992, during the Dean of Mr. Mauro Segale Toscanini, the University Council approved the creation of the specialization of International Business Management, University of avalizada Tolousse of France, is a response to the need for personal prepared with knowledge of Economy, Trade, Management and Languages (English-French), expressed by different companies surveyed. This knowledge will facilitate the development of the functions of the Administrator in a globalized environment, where international forces affect even companies that operate in a country, must therefore include people who have mastered techniques of trade between countries. In the same Dean, microcomputers were purchased twenty-five DELL486-25 MHz.
|
|
Raid Over Moscow (Raid in some countries and on reissue) is a computer game by Access Software published in Europe by U.S. Gold for the Commodore 64 in 1984GamesDBase - Raid Over Moscow (Commodore 64 edition) and other microcomputers in 1985-1986. Released during the Cold War era, Raid Over Moscow is an action game in which the player (an American space pilot) has to stop three Soviet nuclear attacks on North America, then fight his way into and destroy a nuclear facility located in Moscow's Kremlin. According to the game's storyline, the United States is unable to respond to the attack directly due to the dismantlement of its nuclear arsenal. The game is famous in Finland due to the political effect of its content.
|
|
These systems are alternatives to a traditional limited-slip differential. The systems harness various chassis sensors such as speed sensors, anti-lock braking system (ABS) sensors, accelerometers, and microcomputers to electronically monitor wheel slip and vehicle motion. When the chassis control system determines a wheel is slipping, the computer applies the brakes to that wheel. A significant difference between the limited-slip differential systems listed above and this brake-based system, is that brake-based systems do not inherently send the greater torque to the slower wheel, plus the added brake friction material wear that results from the use of such a system if the vehicle is driven in an environment where the brake-based system will activate on a regular basis.
|
|
In addition to the MSX, Gradius was also ported to other microcomputers shortly after its release, such as the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 in Europe (as Nemesis: The Final Challenge), as well as the PC-8801 and X1 in Japan. A port for the X68000 computer was also included in the early models of the computer. The original Gradius is also included in collection such as Gradius Deluxe Pack for the PlayStation and Sega Saturn and Gradius Collection for the PlayStation Portable. The arcade version was digitally released on the PlayStation 4 in 2015 and Nintendo Switch in July 2020 as part of the Arcade Archives series, with the option to play all four regional variants of the game.
|
|
Historically, languages intended for beginners, such as BASIC and Logo, have often used garbage collection for heap-allocated variable-length data types, such as strings and lists, so as not to burden programmers with manual memory management. On early microcomputers, with their limited memory and slow processors, BASIC garbage collection could often cause apparently random, inexplicable pauses in the midst of program operation. Some BASIC interpreters, such as Applesoft BASIC on the Apple II family, repeatedly scanned the string descriptors for the string having the highest address in order to compact it toward high memory, resulting in O(n2) performance, which could introduce minutes-long pauses in the execution of string-intensive programs. A replacement garbage collector for Applesoft BASIC published in Call-A.
|
|
Ed Roberts had designed and manufactured programmable calculators and was familiar with the microprocessors available in 1974. He thought the Intel 4004 and Intel 8008 were not powerful enough (in fact several microcomputers based on Intel chips were already on the market: the Canadian company Microsystems International's CPS-1 built-in 1972 used a MIL MF7114 chip modeled on the 4004, the Micral marketed in January 1973 by the French company R2E and the MCM/70 marketed in 1974 by the Canadian company Micro Computer Machines); the National Semiconductor IMP-8 and IMP-16 required external hardware; the Motorola 6800 was still in development. So he chose the 8-bit Intel 8080. Wayne Green visited MITS in August 1975 and interviewed Ed Roberts.
|
|
Promoting itself as "your host from coast to coast", Holiday Inn added a call center after AT&T's introduction of +1-800 toll-free telephone number service in 1967, and updated its systems as desktop microcomputers, an invention of the 1970s, found their way into travel agencies. Branded as "The Nation's Innkeeper", the chain put considerable financial pressure on traditional motels and hotels, setting the standard for competitors like Ramada Inn, Quality Inn, Howard Johnson's, and Best Western. By June 1972, with over 1,400 Holiday Inns worldwide, Wilson was featured on the cover of Time magazine and the franchise's motto became "The World's Innkeeper". In the 1960s, Holiday Inn began franchising and opening campgrounds under the Holiday Inn Trav-L-Park brand.
|
|
When the patched program is run, execution is directed to the new code with branch instructions (jumps or calls) patched over the place in the old code where the new code is needed. On early 8-bit microcomputers, for example the Radio Shack TRS-80, the operating system includes a PATCH/CMD utility which accepts patch data from a text file and applies the fixes to the target program's executable binary file(s). Small in-memory machine code patches can be manually applied with the system debug utility, such as CP/M's DDT or MS-DOS's DEBUG debuggers. Programmers working in interpreted BASIC often used the POKE command to alter the functionality of a system service routine or the interpreter itself.
|
|
These acquisitions were uneven, varying in brand and model not just between school boards, but among schools within boards and even classroom to classroom.McLean 1988 Among the most popular were the Commodore PET which had a strong following in the new computer programming classes due to its tough all-in-one construction and built-in support for Microsoft BASIC, and the Apple II which had a wide variety of educational software, mostly aimed at early education. The Ministry wanted to encourage uses of microcomputers that supported its curriculum guidelines and was willing to underwrite the development of software for that purpose. However, the wide variety of machines being used meant that development costs had to be spread over several platforms.
|
|
The Federal Desktop Core Configuration is a list of security settings recommended by the National Institute of Standards and Technology for general- purpose microcomputers that are connected directly to the network of a United States government agency. The FDCC is a list of agreed upon Microsoft Windows operating system common core system functions, applications, files, and services that are changed in their configuration around which a framework for a more secure, and security-reliable MS Windows operating system was created. The standards were then made mandatory for every federal government computer effective Feb 1, 2008. If you wanted to connect to a federal office computer network your system had to meet or exceed the FDCC standard or you were denied access.
|
|
Because microcomputers in Japan were not powerful enough at the time to perform the complex tasks involved in designing and programming Space Invaders, Nishikado had to design his own custom hardware and development tools for the game. He created the arcade board using the latest microprocessors from the United States. The game uses an Intel 8080 central processing unit (CPU), displays raster graphics on a CRT monitor using a bitmapped framebuffer, and uses monaural sound hosted by a combination of analog circuitry and a Texas Instruments SN76477 sound chip. The adoption of a microprocessor was inspired by Gun Fight (1975), Midway's microprocessor adaptation of Nishikado's earlier discrete logic game Western Gun, after the designer was impressed by the improved graphics and smoother animation of Midway's version.
|
|
Byte in January 1980 announced in an editorial that "the era of off-the-shelf personal computers has arrived". The magazine stated that "a desirable contemporary personal computer has 64 K of memory, about 500 K bytes of mass storage on line, any old competently designed computer architecture, upper and lowercase video terminal, printer, and high-level languages". The author reported that when he needed to purchase such a computer quickly he did so at a local store for $6000 in cash, and cited it as an example of "what the state of the art is at present ... as a mass-produced product". By early that year Radio Shack, Commodore, and Apple manufactured the vast majority of the one half-million microcomputers that existed.
|
|
The force driving server virtualization is similar to that which led to the development of time-sharing and multiprogramming in the past. Although the resources are still shared, as under the time-sharing model, virtualization provides a higher level of security, dependent on the type of virtualization used, as the individual virtual servers are mostly isolated from each other and may run their own full-fledged operating system which can be independently rebooted as a virtual instance. Partitioning a single server to appear as multiple servers has been increasingly common on microcomputers since the launch of VMware ESX Server in 2001. The physical server typically runs a hypervisor which is tasked with creating, releasing, and managing the resources of "guest" operating systems, or virtual machines.
|
|
Developers first placed complete microcomputers on cards and packaged them in standard 19-inch racks in the 1970s, soon after the introduction of 8-bit microprocessors. This architecture was used in the industrial process control industry as an alternative to minicomputer-based control systems. Early models stored programs in EPROM and were limited to a single function with a small real-time executive. The VMEbus architecture () defined a computer interface that included implementation of a board-level computer installed in a chassis backplane with multiple slots for pluggable boards to provide I/O, memory, or additional computing. In the 1990s, the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group PICMG developed a chassis/blade structure for the then emerging Peripheral Component Interconnect bus PCI called CompactPCI.
|
|
These were a series of mini hi-fi systems launched in 2000, featuring a new design aesthetic. ;NV-301/701 The NV-301 and NV-701 both shared a three-layered half- mirrored design with the main difference lying in the specification of the two systems. The NV-301 was the basic model with two speakers and with a phono input (marked for MiniDisc and DVD players) while the NV-701 was a 5.1 Dolby surround sound model with A/V inputs. Both featured a three-disc carousel, a cassette player with Dolby B noise reduction, a natural display, intelligent features and the ability to save up to 40 radio stations, utilising microcomputers to reduce the size of the unit.
|
|
SPMD was proposed first in 1983 by Michel Auguin (University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis) and François Larbey (Thomson/Sintra) in the OPSILA parallel computerM. Auguin, F. Larbey, OPSILA : an advanced SIMD for numerical analysis and signal processing, in Microcomputers : developments in industry, business, and education / Ninth EUROMICRO Symposium on Microprocessing and Microprogramming, pp 311-318 Madrid, September 13–16, 1983 and next in 1984 by Frederica Darema at IBM for highly parallel machines like the RP3 (the IBM Research Parallel Processor Prototype), in an unpublished IBM memo.F. Darema, SPMD model: past, present and future, Recent Advances in Parallel Virtual Machine and Message Passing Interface: 8th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting, Santorini/Thera, Greece, September 23–26, 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2131, p.
|
|
Chandler trained as a schoolteacher at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and began his career teaching English in middle and secondary schools in the 1970s and 1980s. He adopted a progressive, constructivist philosophy of education at a time when microcomputers were first introduced into the classroom. Resisting the hyped image of computing in education as a boon to instructional productivity, \- \- Postman (1993), Technopoly: the Surrender of Culture to Technology, Vintage Books \- Chandler recognized the computer as a tool for learning, but he rejected a prevailing objectivism that considered data as information, and information as knowledge. He held a constructivist view that data is translated into information by human beings, not computers, and humans negotiate the meaning of information by means of dialog and discussion (Chandler, 1990a).
|
|
Vilnius BASIC on a BK-0010.01 The BK series was essentially a barebones machine, without any peripherals or development tools. The only software available at the launch (except ROM firmware) was an included magnetic tape with several programming examples (both for BASIC and FOCAL), and several tests. The ROM firmware includes a simple program to enter machine codes, BASIC and FOCAL interpreters. While the BK was somewhat compatible with larger and more expensive DVK professional model microcomputers and industrial minicomputers like the SM EVM series, its 32 KiB memory - of which only 16 KiB was generally available to programmers - (an extended memory mode supported 28 KiB, but limited video output to a quarter of the screen) generally precluded direct use of software for the more powerful machines.
|
|
In 1977, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Institute for Information Systems developed UCSD Pascal to provide students with a common environment that could run on any of the then available microcomputers as well as campus DEC PDP-11 minicomputers. The operating system became known as UCSD p-System. UCSD p-System was one of three operating systems, along with PC DOS and CP/M-86, that IBM offered for its original IBM PC. Vendor SofTech Microsystems emphasized p-System's application portability, with virtual machines for 20 CPUs as of the IBM PC's release. It predicted that users would be able to use applications they purchased on future computers running p-System; advertisements called it "the Universal Operating System".
|
|
Its contribution to these early virtual machines was to extend p-code away from its roots as a compiler intermediate language into a full execution environment. The UCSD Pascal p-Machine was optimized for the new small microcomputers with addressing restricted to 16-bit (only 64 KB of memory). James Gosling cites UCSD Pascal as a key influence (along with the Smalltalk virtual machine) on the design of the Java virtual machine. UCSD p-System achieved machine independence by defining a virtual machine, called the p-Machine (or pseudo-machine, which many users began to call the "Pascal-machine" like the OS--although UCSD documentation always used "pseudo-machine") with its own instruction set called p-code (or pseudo-code).
|
|
Strecker was one of the authors of the "Folha Newsroom Manual". After coordinating the Digitization of the Newspaper Archives Project in the early 90s, Strecker led a team that developed many high tech products like audiotext services (1993), the newspaper's full text annual CD-ROMs (1994–96) and a system similar to a BBS, which gave all the Folha de S.Paulo journalists and foreign correspondents access to the archives online, using telephone lines and microcomputers. Because of this work, Strecker was honored with the Folha Award on Journalism, Special Category, in 1995. Also in charge of the Folha News Agency since 1994, Strecker led the team which created the first website for Folha's Media Group in Brazil (launched on July 9, 1995).
|
|
Although very similar to the 400-kilobyte drive which newly replaced Apple's ill-fated Twiggy drive in the Lisa, there were subtle differences relating mainly to the eject mechanism. However, confusingly all of these drives were labelled identically. The Macintosh could only support one external drive, limiting the number of floppy disks mounted at once to two, but both Apple and third party manufacturers developed external hard drives that connected to the Mac's floppy disk port, which had pass-through ports to accommodate daisy-chaining the external disk drive. Apple's Hard Disk 20 could accommodate an additional daisy-chained hard drive as well as an external floppy disk. 3.5-inch single- sided floppies had been used on several microcomputers and synthesizers in the early 1980s, including the Hewlett Packard 150 and various MSX computers.
|
|
PCs/microcomputers incorporated in ZKJ-5 combat data system are the intelligence workstations to replace the dumb terminals used on previous systems. ZKJ-5 is a distributed system with duplex fiber optic Ethernet and video feed, incorporating dozens of software packages and data banks. ZKJ-5 is installed onboard Type 052 destroyers and Type 054A frigates, and as older ships of PLAN receive their upgrade, earlier CDS such as ZKJ-4 series have been replaced by ZKJ-5 CDS. ZKJ-5 CDS is able to receive orders from higher level on the chain of command, and coordinate the battle plan as whole, as well as providing the battle plan of the ship to the high level in the chain of command, which is essential in network centric warfare.
|
|
John Chowning's work on FM synthesis from the 1960s to the 1970s allowed much more efficient digital synthesis, eventually leading to the development of the affordable FM synthesis-based Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer, released in 1983. In addition to the Yamaha DX7, the advent of inexpensive digital chips and microcomputers opened the door to real-time generation of computer music. In the 1980s, Japanese personal computers such as the NEC PC-88 came installed with FM synthesis sound chips and featured audio programming languages such as Music Macro Language (MML) and MIDI interfaces, which were most often used to produce video game music, or chiptunes. By the early 1990s, the performance of microprocessor-based computers reached the point that real-time generation of computer music using more general programs and algorithms became possible.
|
|
Versions of PDO were available for Solaris, HP- UX and all versions of the OPENSTEP system. A version that worked with Microsoft OLE was also available called D'OLE, allowing distributed code written using PDO on any platform to be presented on Microsoft systems as if they were local OLE objects. PDO was one of a number of distributed object systems created in the early 1990s, a design model where "front end" applications on GUI-based microcomputers would call code running on mainframe and minicomputers for their processing and data storage. Microsoft was evolving OLE into the Component Object Model (COM) and a similar distributed version called DCOM, IBM had their System Object Model (SOM/DSOM), Sun Microsystems was promoting their Distributed Objects Everywhere, and there were a host of smaller players as well.
|
|
Screenshot showing Digital Research Apple CP/M on a Z-80 SoftCard for the Apple II IBM PC DOS (and the separately sold MS-DOS) and its predecessor, 86-DOS, was based on Digital Research's CP/M—the dominant disk operating system for 8-bit Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 microcomputers—but instead ran on Intel 8086 16-bit processors. The IBM Personal Computer (IBM 5150 PC) When IBM introduced the IBM PC, built with the Intel 8088 microprocessor, they needed an operating system. Seeking an 8088-compatible build of CP/M, IBM initially approached Microsoft CEO Bill Gates (possibly believing that Microsoft owned CP/M due to the Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard, which allowed CP/M to run on an Apple II). IBM was sent to Digital Research, and a meeting was set up.
|
|
Their main complaint is that the Ministry would select a standard that was not powerful enough for their needs. A secondary concern was that the time delay between announcing and introducing the computer would be lengthy, a period in which existing purchases could be funded instead. The first set of concerns were rendered moot when the specifications were introduced in March 1983 in the "Functional Requirements for Microcomputers for Educational Use in Ontario Schools—Stage I." The physical design required a PET-like all-in-one case, headphones output for voice and sound effects, and a trackball for mouse-like pointing support. Inside the case, the specification called for a processor and support systems to allow a multitasking operating system to be used, selecting the Intel 80186 as the CPU.
|
|
Over the next seven years, the phrase had gained enough recognition that Byte magazine referred to its readers in its first edition as "[in] the personal computing field", and Creative Computing defined the personal computer as a "non-(time)shared system containing sufficient processing power and storage capabilities to satisfy the needs of an individual user." In 1977, three new pre-assembled small computers hit the markets which Byte would refer to as the "1977 Trinity" of personal computing. The Apple II and the PET 2001 were advertised as personal computers, while the TRS-80 was described as a microcomputer used for household tasks including "personal financial management". By 1979, over half a million microcomputers were sold and the youth of the day had a new concept of the personal computer.
|
|
Shirley started his 25-year tenure at Radio Shack as a store department manager in Boston prior to the company's acquisition by the Tandy Corporation in 1963. Tandy Corporation founder Charles Tandy sent Shirley to open the first Radio Shack stores in California, then later sent him to Brussels, Belgium, to open the first European stores as merchandising vice president. Shirley was also responsible for Radio Shack's computer division and as vice president of computer merchandising, he was credited with propelling the Tandy Corporation and its 7,000 Radio Shack stores into its position as the world's largest merchandiser of microcomputers. Radio Shack was a large customer of the Microsoft Corporation and Shirley worked closely with Bill Gates, Microsoft co-founder, to create Radio Shack products utilizing Microsoft software.
|
|
This design allowed use of the large, readily available, and relatively inexpensive family of 8-bit-compatible support chips. IBM decided to use the Intel 8088 after first considering the Motorola 68000 and the Intel i8086, because the other two were considered to be too powerful for their needs.THE 8088, FIRST INTEL'S REALLY SUCCESSFUL CPU (JUNE 1979) – an article about the influence of the i8088 on old-computers.com. Although already established rivals like Apple and Radio Shack had many advantages over the company new to microcomputers, IBM's reputation in business computing allowed the IBM PC architecture to take a substantial market share of business applications, and many small companies that sold IBM-compatible software or hardware rapidly grew in size and importance, including Tecmar, Quadram, AST Research, and Microsoft.
|
|
Although most of the ABC models failed to reach the market in their original form, particularly after Olivetti's rescue of Acorn, several of the concepts were revisited in the BBC Master series of microcomputers. Like the ABC Personal Assistant, the Master 128 offers more memory than the original BBC Micro and includes the View and ViewSheet productivity software on-board. The Master Econet Terminal, like the ABC Terminal, emphasises network access and a lack of on-board software and local storage. Meanwhile, the Master Scientific was intended to offer some continuity with the 32016-based second processor solution provided by the Acorn Cambridge Workstation, and the Master 512 offers a 80186-based second processor with DOS Plus and GEM support, thus resembling the ABC 300 series in particular ways.
|
|
From the early 1970s the Unix operating system adapted the concept of a powerful command-line environment, and introduced the ability to pipe the output of one command in as input to another. Unix also had the capability to save and re-run strings of commands as "shell scripts" which acted like custom commands. The command-line was also the main interface for the early home computers such as the Commodore PET, Apple II and BBC Micro – almost always in the form of a BASIC interpreter. When more powerful business oriented microcomputers arrived with CP/M and later DOS computers such as the IBM PC, the command-line began to borrow some of the syntax and features of the Unix shells such as globbing and piping of output.
|
|
Even more than Byte magazine, kilobaud contained articles written for people who were building their own 8-bit microcomputers at home, or were writing homebrew software for these systems. kilobaud, (much more than Byte) contained articles written for electronic engineers (or hobbyists interested in electronics), rather than for people who were technically interested in computers but not in building their own computer from scratch. Articles like "Two Hobbies: Model Railroading and Computing" and the article (written by Don Lancaster) "Building a cheap video display for your Heathkit H-8" (a computer you could build yourself from a kit) are good examples. In the May 1982 issue an article about building the Sinclair ZX-81 kit, the first, (and probably last) "mainstream" "do-it-yourself" computer kit was published.
|
|
Multiuser DOS is a real-time multi-user multi-tasking operating system for IBM PC-compatible microcomputers. An evolution of the older Concurrent CP/M-86, Concurrent DOS and Concurrent DOS 386 operating systems, it was originally developed by Digital Research and acquired and further developed by Novell in 1991. Its ancestry lies in the earlier Digital Research 8-bit operating systems CP/M and MP/M, and the 16-bit single-tasking CP/M-86 which evolved from CP/M. When Novell abandoned Multiuser DOS in 1992, the three Master Value Added Resellers (VARs) DataPac Australasia, Concurrent Controls and Intelligent Micro Software were allowed to take over and continued independent development into Datapac Multiuser DOS and System Manager, CCI Multiuser DOS, and IMS Multiuser DOS and REAL/32.
|
|
A variable-width encoding is a type of character encoding scheme in which codes of differing lengths are used to encode a character set (a repertoire of symbols) for representation in a computer. Most common variable-width encodings are multibyte encodings, which use varying numbers of bytes (octets) to encode different characters. (Some authors, notably in Microsoft documentation, use the term multibyte character set, which is a misnomer, because representation size is an attribute of the encoding, not of the character set.) Early variable width encodings using less than a byte per character were sometimes used to pack English text into fewer bytes in adventure games for early microcomputers. However disks (which unlike tapes allowed random access allowing text to be loaded on demand), increases in computer memory and general purpose compression algorithms have rendered such tricks largely obsolete.
|
|
CP/M originally stood for "Control Program/Monitor", a name which implies a resident monitor—a primitive precursor to the operating system. However, during the conversion of CP/M to a commercial product, trademark registration documents filed in November 1977 gave the product's name as "Control Program for Microcomputers". The CP/M name follows a prevailing naming scheme of the time, as in Kildall's PL/M language, and Prime Computer's PL/P (Programming Language for Prime), both suggesting IBM's PL/I; and IBM's CP/CMS operating system, which Kildall had used when working at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS). This renaming of CP/M was part of a larger effort by Kildall and his wife/business partner, Dorothy McEwen to convert Kildall's personal project of CP/M and the Intel-contracted PL/M compiler into a commercial enterprise.
|
|
In later years, Halvorson's Microsoft Visual Basic Step by Step programming series was popular among new-to-topic developers who sought to learn Visual Basic for Windows and the Microsoft Visual Studio development system. Canadian-American software developer Tyler Menezes credits the slot machine program in Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Professional Step by Step (1998) for introducing him to game programming and coding initiatives. Ten editions of Visual Basic Step by Step were published between 1995 and 2013. In 2020, Halvorson published Code Nation: Personal Computing and the Learn to Program Movement in America (ACM Books / Morgan & Claypool), a history of computing that emphasizes the influence of computer literacy debates in America and the range of experiences that hobbyist and professional developers had when creating software for early microcomputers, IBM PCs and compatibles, the Apple Macintosh, and Unix systems.
|
|
The Altair also inspired the software development efforts of Paul Allen and his high school friend Bill Gates who developed a BASIC interpreter for the Altair, and then formed Microsoft. The MITS Altair 8800 effectively created a new industry of microcomputers and computer kits, with many others following, such as a wave of small business computers in the late 1970s based on the Intel 8080, Zilog Z80 and Intel 8085 microprocessor chips. Most ran the CP/M-80 operating system developed by Gary Kildall at Digital Research. CP/M-80 was the first popular microcomputer operating system to be used by many different hardware vendors, and many software packages were written for it, such as WordStar and dBase II. Many hobbyists during the mid-1970s designed their own systems, with various degrees of success, and sometimes banded together to ease the job.
|
|
The company was founded in 1973 as Research Machines in Oxford, England, by Mike Fischer and Mike O'Regan, respectively graduates of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Initially it traded under the name Sintel as a mail-order supplier of electronic components, mainly dealing with the hobbyist market. With the arrival of microprocessors in the mid-1970s, the company expanded into the design and manufacturing of microcomputers. The company shipped its first computer in 1977Research Machines, "Company Profile", RM.com, Accessed: 10 March 2009 to a customer in a Local Education Authority and has been involved with educational computing ever since. In the 1980s RM and its rival Acorn Computers sold thousands of computers to schools in the UK as part of the government's Microelectronics Education Programme. A key model of the time was RM's Z80-based RML 380Z.
|
|
SCAMP emulated an IBM 1130 minicomputer in order to run APL/1130. In 1973, APL was generally available only on mainframe computers, and most desktop sized microcomputers such as the Wang 2200 or HP 9800 offered only BASIC. Because SCAMP was the first to emulate APL/1130 performance on a portable, single user computer, PC Magazine in 1983 designated SCAMP a "revolutionary concept" and "the world's first personal computer".PC Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 6, November 1983, ‘'SCAMP: The Missing Link in the PC's Past?‘’ This seminal, single user portable computer now resides in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.. Successful demonstrations of the 1973 SCAMP prototype led to the IBM 5100 portable microcomputer launched in 1975 with the ability to be programmed in both APL and BASIC for engineers, analysts, statisticians, and other business problem- solvers.
|
|
Less than 20,000 lines of code almost all in C composed the Unix kernel as of 1983, and more than 75% was not machine-dependent. By that year Unix or a Unix-like system was available for at least 16 different processors and architectures from about 60 vendors; BYTE noted that computer companies "may support other [operating] systems, but a Unix implementation always happens to be available", and that DEC and IBM supported Unix as an alternative to their proprietary operating systems. Microcomputer Unix became commercially available in 1980, when Onyx Systems released its Zilog Z8000-based C8002 and Microsoft announced its first Unix for 16-bit microcomputers called Xenix, which the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) ported to the 8086 processor in 1983. Other companies began to offer commercial versions of Unix for their own minicomputers and workstations.
|
|
Boeing Calc was a spreadsheet package written by Boeing Computer Services, an independent subsidiary of aviation manufacturer Boeing. It had originally been developed as an in-house accounting tool, but was launched as a commercial product in April 1985 for IBM 4300 mainframes running IBM MVS and IBM PC microcomputers running DOS. The original launch price was $399 per copy for the PC version and $8,899 for a combined PC/mainframe bundle. Boeing Calc could read and later write standard Lotus 1-2-3 files. It supported a maximum spreadsheet size of 16,000 columns by 16,000 rows, and was notable for introducing the concept of 3D spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet could have up to 16,000 pages, with cells prefixed by the page number; the upper-left cell of the third page was referred to as 3A1, for example.
|
|
In this respect, it is pre-dated by the 1973 MCM/70, among others, but the Sphere included a full-sized display that these generally lacked. When Byte Magazine did its annual history of the computer, it always included Sphere 1, showing that prior microcomputers lacked the user I/O interface built into the Sphere I. The Sphere 1 also included a keyboard-operated reset feature consisting of two keys wired in series that sent a reset signal to the CPU triggering a hard reboot. Wise considered this to be the first keyboard activated reset -- a predecessor to the now-common Control-Alt-Delete combination.Vintage Sphere Computer at the "Bugbook Historical Microcomputer Museum", 2013-03-10 It is not clear how many systems were sold; production models were sent to computer stores, but the company disappeared shortly thereafter.
|
|
One of the strengths of the PC compatible design is its modular hardware design. End-users could readily upgrade peripherals and, to some degree, processor and memory without modifying the computer's motherboard or replacing the whole computer, as was the case with many of the microcomputers of the time. However, as processor speed and memory width increased, the limits of the original XT/AT bus design were soon reached, particularly when driving graphics video cards. IBM did introduce an upgraded bus in the IBM PS/2 computer that overcame many of the technical limits of the XT/AT bus, but this was rarely used as the basis for IBM compatible computers since it required licence payments to IBM both for the PS/2 bus and any prior AT-bus designs produced by the company seeking a license.
|
|
The original 6502 was designed in the era before microcomputers existed, when microprocessors were used as the basis for simpler systems like smart terminals, desktop calculators and many different industrial controller systems. This was also an era when memory devices were generally based on static RAM, which was very expensive and had low memory density. For both of these reasons, the ability to handle "large" amounts of memory was not required, and many processors had operating modes that worked with small portions of a larger address space in order to offer higher performance. Such was the case in the 6502, which used the first memory page, or "zero page", to provide faster access, and the second page, "page one", to hold a 256-byte stack. By the late 1970s, the original MOS Technology team that designed the 6502 had broken up.
|
|
Starting in the early 1980s, IBM APL development, under the leadership of Jim Brown, implemented a new version of the APL language that contained as its primary enhancement the concept of nested arrays, where an array can contain other arrays, and new language features which facilitated integrating nested arrays into program workflow. Ken Iverson, no longer in control of the development of the APL language, left IBM and joined I. P. Sharp Associates, where one of his major contributions was directing the evolution of Sharp APL to be more in accord with his vision. As other vendors were busy developing APL interpreters for new hardware, notably Unix-based microcomputers, APL2 was almost always the standard chosen for new APL interpreter developments. Even today, most APL vendors or their users cite APL2 compatibility, as a selling point for those products.
|
|
The downfall of NLS, and subsequently, of ARC in general, was the program's difficult learning curve. NLS was not designed to be easy to learn; it employed the heavy use of program modes, relied on a strict hierarchical structure, did not have a point-and-click interface, and forced the user to have to learn cryptic mnemonic codes to do anything useful with the system. The chord keyset, which complemented the modal nature of NLS, forced the user to learn a 5-bit binary code if they did not want to use the keyboard. Finally, with the arrival of the ARPA Network at SRI in 1969, the time-sharing technology that seemed practical with a small number of users became impractical over a distributed network; time-sharing was rapidly being replaced with individual minicomputers (and later microcomputers) and workstations.
|
|
The chip uses the index and stack registers effectively with several addressing modes, including a fast "direct page" or "zero page" mode, similar to that found on the PDP-8, that accesses memory locations from addresses 0 to 255 with a single 8-bit address (saving the cycle normally required to fetch the high-order byte of the address)--code for the 6502 uses the zero page much as code for other processors would use registers. On some 6502-based microcomputers with an operating system, the operating system uses most of zero page, leaving only a handful of locations for the user. Addressing modes also include implied (1-byte instructions); absolute (3 bytes); indexed absolute (3 bytes); indexed zero-page (2 bytes); relative (2 bytes); accumulator (1); indirect,x and indirect,y (2); and immediate (2). Absolute mode is a general-purpose mode.
|
|
The command is available in MS-DOS versions 2 and later. While the ultimate origins of using the three-character string `CLS` as the command to clear the screen likely predate Microsoft's use, this command was present before its MS-DOS usage, in the embedded ROM BASIC dialects Microsoft wrote for early 8-bit microcomputers (such as TRS-80 Color BASIC), where it served the same purpose. The MS-DOS dialects of BASIC written by Microsoft, BASICA and GW-BASIC, also have the `CLS` command as a BASIC keyword - as do various non-Microsoft implementations of BASIC such as BBC BASIC found on the BBC Micro computers. The `CLS` command is also present in BASIC versions for Microsoft Windows, however this generally clears text printed on the form, rather than the whole window or controls on the form.
|
|
Wafadrive packaging Rotronics Wafadrive shown with two Wafa tapes, a blank 64 kB and software release tape Front and back of a Rotronics 64 kB Wafa tape The Rotronics Wafadrive was a continuous tape loop storage (like conventional magnetic tape but arranged in a loop) peripheral launched in late 1984 for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 8-bit home computer, intended to compete with Sinclair's ZX Interface 1 and ZX Microdrive. The Wafadrive comprised two continuous loop "stringy floppy" tape drives, an RS-232 interface and Centronics parallel port. The drives could run at two speeds: High speed (for seeking) and low speed (for reading/writing, which was significantly slower than that of Microdrives). The cartridges (or "wafers"), the same as those used in Entrepo stringy floppy devices for other microcomputers, were physically larger than Microdrive cartridges.
|
|
Some of these were mainframe related, designed to allow programs running on those machines to translate between the variety of SQL's and provide a single common interface which could then be called by other mainframe or microcomputer programs. These solutions included IBM's Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA) and Apple Computer's Data Access Language. Much more common, however, were systems that ran entirely on microcomputers, including a complete protocol stack that included any required networking or file translation support. One of the early examples of such a system was Lotus Development's DataLens, initially known as Blueprint. Blueprint, developed for 1-2-3, supported a variety of data sources, including SQL/DS, DB2, FOCUS and a variety of similar mainframe systems, as well as microcomputer systems like dBase and the early Microsoft/Ashton-Tate efforts that would eventually develop into Microsoft SQL Server.
|
|
Application of a Professional 350 in a university department — a consumer's report, in: Proceedings Digital Equipment Computer Users Society. Amsterdam, p. 368. In addition, a new user would have to learn an awkward, slow, and inflexible menu-based user interface which appeared to be radically different from PC DOS or CP/M, which were more commonly used on the 8080- and 8088-based microcomputers of the time. A second offering, the DECmate II was the latest version of the PDP-8-based word processors, but not really suited to general computing, nor competitive with Wang Laboratories' popular word processing equipment. DEC Rainbow 100, floor-mounted The most popular early DEC microcomputer was the dual-processor (Z80 and 8088) Rainbow 100, which ran the 8-bit CP/M operating system on the Z80 and the 16-bit CP/M-86 operating system on the Intel 8088 processor.
|
|
For most of the 1970s and 1980s, the floppy drive was the primary storage device for word processors and microcomputers. Since these machines had no hard drive, the OS was usually booted from one floppy disk, which was then removed and replaced by another one containing the application. Some machines using two disk drives (or one dual drive) allowed the user to leave the OS disk in place and simply change the application disks as needed, or to copy data from one floppy to another. In the early 1980s, “quad density” 96-track-per-inch drives appeared, increasing the capacity to 720 KB. RX50 was another proprietary format, used by Digital Equipment Corporation's Rainbow-100, DECmate-II, and Pro-350. It held 400 KB80 × 1 tracks × 10 blocks/track × 512 bytes on a single side by using 96 tracks per inch and cramming 10 sectors per track.
|
|
During the late 1970s and 1980s, versions of C were implemented for a wide variety of mainframe computers, minicomputers, and microcomputers, including the IBM PC, as its popularity began to increase significantly. In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) formed a committee, X3J11, to establish a standard specification of C. X3J11 based the C standard on the Unix implementation; however, the non-portable portion of the Unix C library was handed off to the IEEE working group 1003 to become the basis for the 1988 POSIX standard. In 1989, the C standard was ratified as ANSI X3.159-1989 "Programming Language C". This version of the language is often referred to as ANSI C, Standard C, or sometimes C89. In 1990, the ANSI C standard (with formatting changes) was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 9899:1990, which is sometimes called C90.
|
|
Business customers were the main target for the features of the enhanced BASIC 4.0, and a good selection of prepackaged business software was available.Commodore Microcomputers Issue 31 A large line of 5.25-inch and 8-inch floppy drives were made for the PET family, and even 5 and 7 MB external hard disks. While they became fairly popular for business use in Europe, they failed to make much impact on the US market in part because the 6502-based PETs could not run CP/M, which had become the standard for business software. In addition, the PET's 32 KB of memory was a disadvantage against the Apple II and TRS-80, both of which could accommodate 48 KB. The 8000-series PETs had a motherboard connector for a daughterboard that added an additional 64k of RAM for 96k total; this was a standard feature on the 8096.
|
|
Following his release from prison, Scully was a lecturer in parapsychology at John F. Kennedy University (where he co-taught a course on psychotechnology and computers) and held a part-time appointment as an assistant research psychologist in the psychophysiology laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco's Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute. As the founder of Pacific Bionic Systems (reformed in 1980 as Mendocino Microcomputers, with Scully continuing as president and chairman), he consulted with such diverse entities as the Esalen Institute and the Children's Television Workshop on database management and computer games. He has published eight articles on the topic of biofeedback and as many on technical computer topics. He has retired from his career with Autodesk as an AutoCAD dealer (1983-1987), consultant (1987-2000) and senior software developer (2000-2005) and is currently researching a book on the underground history of LSD.
|
|
Originally referred to as the Gluon, a National Semiconductor 32016 second processor solution was apparently planned for the BBC Micro and for other 8-bit microcomputers, with the BBC Micro version employing the Tube interface and offering a quarter of a megabyte of RAM, whereas the "Universal Gluon" would be connected to a microcomputer acting as a terminal using a serial or parallel interface, offer up to 1 MB of RAM, up to 5 MB of hard disk storage, and either a minimal operating system or Unix. The product that was eventually delivered is a sophisticated second processor expansion sometimes branded as "Acorn Cambridge Co-Processor" with an Acorn logo, and sometimes as "BBC Microcomputer System 32016 Second Processor" along with the BBC Micro's owl logo. The device uses the 32016 CPU and 32081 FPU running at 6 MHz. It runs the non-graphical Panos operating system.
|
|
Initially released for the Atari ST platform, the title was later ported to other microcomputers and consoles including the Amiga, Amstrad CPC, Amstrad GX4000, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, each with several changes and additions from the original version. Since its original release on the Atari ST, Switchblade garnered mostly positive reception from critics who praised multiple aspects such as the anime-inspired presentation, visuals, sound design and gameplay but others criticized the game's slow pacing, controls and difficulty. Other versions of the game were met with a similarly positive response from reviewers. Its critical success would prompt the development of a sequel eight months later; Switchblade II, which was created by a new team at Gremlin Graphics without the involvement of Phipps and garnered a positive reception from the public as with the original title upon its release on Amiga, however it was not widely ported to the other platforms.
|
|
Olivetti acquired the company later that year and Dixons Retail acquired the remaining Electron inventory for less than manufacturing cost, bringing this particular attempt at targeting the home computing market to an end. Acorn subsequently released the Master Compact - a model in the Master series of microcomputers with fewer BBC Micro-style ports and a similar expansion connector - with the home audience specifically in mind. With hindsight, the large screen memory required too much processing power to manipulate and left too little space available to programs for the machine to take on the prevailing Spectrum (with less than 7K of screen memory) and Commodore 64 (with hardware sprites) in gaming. Despite this, several features that would later be associated with BBC Master and Archimedes were first features of Electron expansion units, including ROM cartridge slots and the Advanced Disc Filing System, a hierarchical improvement to the BBC's original Disc Filing System.
|
|
Dozens of 'Class II' systems were locally developed and maintained at the GSUs (General Support Units), later known as ISMOs (Information Systems Management Offices), providing undreamed-of functionality even as far as the company and deployed unit level. Systems developed included the waggishly named 'Standardized Wing Overseas Operation Passenger System' (SWOOPS – developed to generate Air Force passenger manifests from personnel databases) and 'Universal Random Integrity News Extract' (URINE – developed to provide names picked randomly from personnel databases for urinalysis screening), FLEAS (FLight Evaluation Administration System). Although a COBOL compiler was available as part of the software package sold to the Marine Corps with the Series/1, most Class I and Class II systems development was in EDL. In the middle 1980s, the ADPE-FMF equipment was gradually phased out in favor of IBM-PC class microcomputers running off-the-shelf software and Marine Corps developed applications written in Ada.
|
|
Spain's game industry of the 1980s collapsed in the early 1990s. Researchers have cited multiple reasons for the crash, including poor marketing and distribution chains, the rising popularity of game consoles over microcomputers and the inability of Spanish teams to adapt to the changing nature of game development itself. Garin and Martínez write, "Many indigenous companies and game studios went into bankruptcy, and while other countries were already adapting to the aesthetic and technological challenges of a new generation of consoles and computers, moving from 8-bit to 16-bit machines, the game industry in Spain seemed to enter a dark age." However, the researchers highlight five Spanish companies as "exceptions" to the industry's malaise in the 1990s: Bit Managers, Dinamic Multimedia, Gaelco, Pendulo Studios and Pyro Studios. Dinamic's PC Fútbol series, which began in 1992, became one of the most successful Spanish game products during the 1990s.
|
|
AY-3-8910 chip DIP 40 die The AY-3-8910 is a 3-voice programmable sound generator (PSG) designed by General Instrument in 1978, initially for use with their 16-bit CP1610 or one of the PIC1650 series of 8-bit microcomputers. The AY-3-8910 and its variants were used in many arcade games--Konami's Gyruss contains five--and pinball machines as well as being the sound chip in the Intellivision and Vectrex video game consoles, and the Amstrad CPC, Oric-1, Colour Genie, Elektor TV Games Computer, MSX, and later ZX Spectrum home computers. It was also used in the Mockingboard and Cricket sound cards for the Apple II and the Speech/Sound Cartridge for the TRS-80 Color Computer. After General Instrument's spinoff of Microchip Technology in 1987, the chip was sold for a few years under the Microchip brand.
|
|
A 1979 SAA5050 in a VDU card for Acorn Eurocard systemsThe Mullard SAA5050 was a character generator chip for implementing the Teletext character set. The SAA5050 was used in teletext-equipped television sets, viewdata terminals, and microcomputers, most notably the Philips P2000T homecomputer (1980), Acorn's System 2 (1980), and the BBC micro's teletext-compatible 'Mode 7' display mode (1982). This chip was also manufactured by Philips (now NXP Semiconductors) and Signetics. The chip generated appropriate video output for a 7-bit input character code representing the current character on the text line, while keeping track of the effect of any of the various control characters defined by the teletext standard that had previously occurred in that text line, which could be used to change the foreground and background colour, switch to or from the alternate block graphics character set, or various other effects. Full-screen resolution generated by the SAA5050 was 480×500 pixels, corresponding to 40×25 characters.
|
|
Baldies originally began its development in February 1993 as a project intended to be released for the Amiga microcomputers by Mindscape in December 1994, before publishing duties were moved on to GameTek and was now planned to be released in April/May 1995 instead. This initial incarnation of the game featured different visuals early in development compared with the final version and was being spearheaded by lead programmer and Creative Edge Software founder David Wightman. Several people were also involved with the development of the project on Amiga such as technical manager David Elliott and programmers Daniel Leyden, Duncan McDinkin and Sean Connolly while artists Alan Duncan, David Brown and Paul Docherty were responsible for creating the hand-drawn in-game artwork respectively. However this early version of the project was never released for unknown reasons, until it was transferred and finished on the Atari Jaguar CD instead as early as June 1995.
|
|
Wolfson Campus capitalizes on being at the center of downtown Miami's financial, government, and cultural hubs by offering programs in banking, business, microcomputers, paralegal studies, architecture, economics, hospitality management, engineering, the arts, humanities, and the social sciences. Academic programs are offered through the departments of Arts & Humanities; English; Natural Sciences, Math, Engineering, Health and Wellness; Languages and International Studies; Computers and Applied Technology; Social Sciences; English as a Second Language; The Law Center (Paralegal Studies Program), and Workforce and Community Development. The Wolfson Campus is directly served by the Miami Metrorail at the Government Center Station and the Historic Overtown/Lyric Theatre Station, as well as by the Metromover at the College North Station and the College/Bayside Station on the Downtown, Brickell, and Omni Loops. The Wolfson Campus is home to the Wolfson Archives and also houses the New World School of the Arts, a comprehensive high school and college program cataloged as one of the best art schools in the country.
|
|
Minicomputers (colloquially, minis) are a class of multi-user computers that lie in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the smallest mainframe computers and the largest single-user systems (microcomputers or personal computers). The term supermini computer or simply supermini was used to distinguish more powerful minicomputers that approached mainframes in capability. Superminis (such as the DEC VAX or Data General Eclipse MV/8000) were usually 32-bit at a time when most minicomputers (such as the PDP-11 or Data General Eclipse or IBM Series/1) were 16-bit. These traditional minicomputers in the last few decades of the 20th Century, found in small to medium-sized businesses, laboratories and embedded in (for example) hospital CAT scanners, often would be rack-mounted and connect to one or more terminals or tape/card readers, like mainframes and unlike most personal computers, but require less space and electrical power than a typical mainframe.
|
|
Rawitsch recreated the game in 1974 for the MECC, which distributed educational software for free in Minnesota and for sale elsewhere, and recalibrated the probabilities of events based on historical journals and diaries for the game's release the following year. After the rise of microcomputers in the 1970s, the MECC released several versions of the game over the next decade for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, and Commodore 64 computers, before redesigning it as a graphical commercial game for the Apple II under the same name in 1985. The game is the first entry in The Oregon Trail series; games in the series have since been released in many editions by various developers and publishers, many titled The Oregon Trail. The multiple games in the series are often considered to be iterations on the same title, and have collectively sold over 65 million copies and have been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame.
|
|
That year MECC began encouraging schools to adopt the Apple II microcomputer, purchasing large amounts at a discount and reselling them to schools. MECC began converting several of their products to run on microcomputers, and John Cook adapted the game for the Apple II; though the text-based gameplay remained largely the same, he added a display of the player's position along the trail on a map between rounds, and replaced the typing in the hunting and attack minigame with a graphical version in which a deer or attacker moves across the screen and the player presses a key to fire at it. A version for the Atari 8-bit family, again titled The Oregon Trail, was released in 1982. The Apple II version was included under the name Oregon as part of MECC's Elementary series, distributed to Minnesota schools for free and for profit to schools outside of the state, on Elementary Volume 6 in 1980.
|
|
However, CP/M's concept of separate user areas for files on the same disk was never ported to MS-DOS. Since MS-DOS had access to more memory (as few IBM PCs were sold with less than 64 KB of memory, while CP/M could run in 16 KB if necessary), more commands were built into the command- line shell, making MS-DOS somewhat faster and easier to use on floppy-based computers. Although one of the first peripherals for the IBM PC was a SoftCard-like expansion card that let it run 8-bit CP/M software, CP/M rapidly lost market share as the microcomputing market moved to the IBM-compatible platform, and it never regained its former popularity. Byte magazine, at the time one of the leading industry magazines for microcomputers, essentially ceased covering CP/M products within a few years of the introduction of the IBM PC. For example, in 1983 there were still a few advertisements for S-100 boards and articles on CP/M software, but by 1987 these were no longer found in the magazine.
|
|
A C2N Datassette recorder for Commodore computers The Hewlett Packard HP 9830 was one of the first desktop computers in the early 1970s to use automatically controlled cassette tapes for storage. It could save and find files by number, using a clear leader to detect the end of tape. These would be replaced by specialized cartridges, such as the 3M DC-series. Many of the earliest microcomputers implemented the Kansas City standard for digital data storage. Most home computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s could use cassettes for data storage as a cheaper alternative to floppy disks, though users often had to manually stop and start a cassette recorder. Even the first version of the IBM PC of 1981 had a cassette port and a command in its ROM BASIC programming language to use it. However, IBM cassette tape was seldom used, as by 1981 floppy drives had become commonplace in high-end machines. Nintendo's Famicom had an available cassette data recorder, used for saving programs created with the hardware's version of BASIC and saving progress in some Famicom games.
|
|
In early 1802-based microcomputers, the companion graphics Video Display Controller chip, RCA CDP1861 (for the NTSC video format, CDP1864 variant for PAL), used the built-in DMA controller to display black and white bitmapped graphics on standard TV screens. The 1861 was also known as the Pixie graphics system. Although the faster versions of 1802 could operate at 4-5 MHz (at 5 V; it was faster (6.4 MHz) at 10 V), it was usually operated at 3.58 MHz, divided by 2 (1.79 MHz) to suit the requirements of the 1861 chip, which gave a speed of a little over 100,000 instructions per second, though some ran at other speeds such as the ~2.8 MHz of the Comx or 5 MHz of the Pecom. The COSMAC VIP, which integrated the video chip with the processor as a single purpose-built computer (rather than as an add-on to a hobbyist kit), notably ran the 1802 much slower, synchronising it exactly with the 1861 - at a non-standard 1.76064 MHz, as recommended in the Pixie's spec sheet reference design.
|
|
Two Hitachi 68HC000 CPUs being used on an arcade-game PCB At its introduction, the 68000 was first used in high-priced systems, including multiuser microcomputers like the WICAT 150, early Alpha Microsystems computers, Sage II / IV, Tandy 6000 / TRS-80 Model 16, and Fortune 32:16; single-user workstations such as Hewlett-Packard's HP 9000 Series 200 systems, the first Apollo/Domain systems, Sun Microsystems' Sun-1, and the Corvus Concept; and graphics terminals like Digital Equipment Corporation's VAXstation 100 and Silicon Graphics' IRIS 1000 and 1200. Unix systems rapidly moved to the more capable later generations of the 68k line, which remained popular in that market throughout the 1980s. By the mid-1980s, falling production cost made the 68000 viable for use in personal and home computers, starting with the Apple Lisa and Macintosh, and followed by the Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, and Sharp X68000. On the other hand, the Sinclair QL microcomputer was the most commercially important utilisation of the 68008, along with its derivatives, such as the ICL One Per Desk business terminal.
|
|
Bromcom Computers plc (Bromcom) was founded in 1986 by computer scientist Ali Guryel as a private company serving business-to-business alongside sister company Frontline Technology Ltd. These companies were formed following the establishment of a sole proprietary company selling microcomputers. The initial entry of Bromcom into the education market was through the Education Reform Act 1988. Schools had been delegated local management and required their own "administration system". In the early 1990s, EARS (Electronic Attendance Registration System) was created by Bromcom. This initially was an A4 computer folder for teachers to take pupil attendance electronically, replacing the traditional paper register. It was popular within the education sector and was covered on national TV, radio, news, and other media; it appeared on BBC's Tomorrow's World in January 1994. In 1996 Bromcom enhanced wNET/Ears to include a number of new featuresprimarily Electronic GradeBook and the Two Way Link to SIMS Software. In 1998 Bromcom launched a new range of their computer folders with a larger LCD screen and PC-style QWERTY keyboard.
|
|
Various systems had already been proposed by Acorn early in the life of the BBC Micro before the Acorn Business Computer name had been publicly adopted. For instance, the machine that would eventually be known as the ABC 210 was described in mid-1982 in the context of an apparent deal with National Semiconductor, indicating a 1 MB system with hard disks and "Acorn, Unix or Idris operating systems" at an estimated price of around $3500, with a second processor product for the BBC Micro having only 256 KB RAM. The Gluon concept, offering a 32016 second processor solution for the BBC Micro and other microcomputers, featured prominently in the company's strategy to offer more powerful computing hardware and to provide the basis for more powerful machines. Meanwhile, the machine that would become known as the ABC 100 was described in mid-1983 as the Acorn Business Machine, being based on the BBC Micro with Z80 Second Processor, twin disk drives, running CP/M, with an anticipated launch the same year and a price of "under £2000".
|
|
The first applications of computers to medicine and health care in Brazil started around 1968, with the installation of the first mainframes in public university hospitals, and the use of programmable calculators in scientific research applications. Minicomputers, such as the IBM 1130 were installed in several universities, and the first applications were developed for them, such as the hospital census in the School of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto and patient master files, in the Hospital das Clínicas da Universidade de São Paulo, respectively at the cities of Ribeirão Preto and São Paulo campuses of the University of São Paulo. In the 1970s, several Digital Corporation and Hewlett Packard minicomputers were acquired for public and Armed Forces hospitals, and more intensively used for intensive-care unit, cardiology diagnostics, patient monitoring and other applications. In the early 1980s, with the arrival of cheaper microcomputers, a great upsurge of computer applications in health ensued, and in 1986 the Brazilian Society of Health Informatics was founded, the first Brazilian Congress of Health Informatics was held, and the first Brazilian Journal of Health Informatics was published.
|
|
Twenty-two-year-old Tim Paterson was hired in June 1978 by SCP's owner Rod M. Brock (26 August 1930 – 30 November 2018). At the time, SCP built memory boards for microcomputers, but after attending a local seminar on Intel's just-released 8086 in late summer 1978, Paterson convinced Brock that his company should design a CPU board for the new chip. Paterson had a prototype working by May 1979, and he took his "computer" over to Microsoft, who were working on an 8086 BASIC, which was working before the end of May. When the board began shipping in November, standalone Microsoft BASIC was offered as an option, but no operating system was available for it. Digital Research, whose 8-bit CP/M operating system was the industry standard, was working on an 8086-compatible version called CP/M-86, but the delay in its release was costing SCP sales. In order to fill this void, Paterson wrote QDOS (for Quick and Dirty Operating System) over a four-month period starting in April 1980.
|
|
Other large technology companies had entered it, such as Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments and Data General, and some large IBM customers were buying Apples. As early as 1980 there were rumors of IBM developing a personal computer, possibly a miniaturized version of the IBM System/370, and Matsushita acknowledged publicly that it had discussed with IBM the possibility of manufacturing a personal computer in partnership, although this project was abandoned. The public responded to these rumors with skepticism, owing to IBM's tendency towards slow-moving, bureaucratic business practices tailored towards the production of large, sophisticated and expensive business systems. As with other large computer companies, its new products typically required about four to five years for development, and a well publicized quote from an industry analyst was, "IBM bringing out a personal computer would be like teaching an elephant to tap dance." IBM had previously produced microcomputers, such as 1975's IBM 5100, but targeted them towards businesses; the 5100 had a price tag as high as $20,000.
|
|
He was a co-founder of Wandle Valley Radio (WVR) in 1984, still under the pseudonym "Roger Tate", broadcasting a soul/funk/hi-energy programme - he was a friend of the hi- energy artist Hazell Dean - alongside Alan Rogers and Paul James (both pseudonyms for obvious reasons). He provided the studio facilities for the station, which was amongst the pioneers of microwave links from the studio to the FM Band II transmitter, a technology later very widely used in pirate radio. Another technology which Tomalski pioneered was that of computer data transmission via Band II FM radio - raw data transmitted onto the audio signal with no subcarrier: WVR featured the "Roger Tate Computer Program Programme" with Tomalski introducing (after the music had ended for the night) half an hour of 8-bit data sounds played from a Nakamichi cassette deck, representing programs for the BBC Micro and the Tandy TRS-80 microcomputers, among others. Surprisingly, for such an innovation being broadcast into listeners homes late at night, the telephone and postal feedback on the programme was overwhelmingly positive; a tribute to Tomalski's broadcasting skills.
|
|
George Morrision funded a new library in 1962 in the corner of the historic family owned Gray Rock slave plantation was donated by Charles E. Miller who was attempting to create a housing subdivision. In 1965, a bookmobile serviced stops at Savage, Glenwood, and Glenelg. In The Savage Branch opens in the historic Carroll Baldwin Hall in 1966. In 1968, the Rouse Company signed an agreement to have the Howard County Library System lease one of its buildings for five years at an expense of $5,511 a year with the Columbia Association property assessments paying for furnishings. On January 4, 1981 the $4 million Central Branch opened in Columbia, becoming a facility with the 2nd highest number of items loaned in the county at the time with a computer system named "Gandalf". In 1984, the Miller Branch received a $3 million expansion from 7000sqft to 22,000sqft. and the Central Branch deploys two microcomputers available to residents who take a two-hour training lesson. In 1989, $1 million was budgeted to buy land for the $6.3 million 33,600 sqft East Columbia Branch, to be opened in 1991.
|
|
'8-bit' is also a generation of microcomputers in which 8-bit microprocessors were the norm. The term '8-bit' is also applied to the character sets that could be used on computers with 8-bit bytes, the best known being various forms of extended ASCII, including the ISO/IEC 8859 series of national character sets especially Latin 1 for English and Western European languages. The IBM System/360 introduced byte-addressable memory with 8-bit bytes, as opposed to bit-addressable or decimal digit-addressable or word-addressable memory, although its general purpose registers were 32 bits wide, and addresses were contained in the lower 24 bits of those addresses. Different models of System/360 had different internal data path widths; the IBM System/360 Model 30 (1965) implemented the 32-bit System/360 architecture, but had an 8 bit native path width, and performed 32-bit arithmetic 8 bits at a time. The first widely adopted 8-bit microprocessor was the Intel 8080, being used in many hobbyist computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, often running the CP/M operating system; it had 8-bit data words and 16-bit addresses.
|
|
Although conceived after the release of F1-Racer on the Amiga and planned for a 1995 release, World Tour Racing would not be released until a year after the Jaguar CD was officially discontinued. Lee A. Briggs, who was previously involved on various titles for microcomputers such as Round the Bend! (based on the British children's television series of the same name), Sharkey's Moll and International Truck Racing, worked as the sole programmer on a formula one racing game for the Amiga titled F1-Racer, which was released by F1 Licenceware in 1994 and became his last project created for the platform before joining with Teque London around the same period to work on World Tour Racing for the Atari Jaguar CD. On January 1997, Lee Briggs recounted about the development process of World Tour Racing in various posts at the Jaguar Interactive forum before the game's release. Lee stated that the development process took approximately 2 years and it was completed in January 1996, though he fixed various technical issues before the game was published and thanked Telegames for releasing it to the public.
|
|
The call CAMECO (Enhancement Course for Officers Combat Diver) lasts 41 weeks, is divided into four phases and aims to enable the military to operate diving equipment, weapons, explosives, tactics and techniques used for unconventional warfare and conflict low intensity, enabling them to perform, in short, the various types of Special Operations. Officials, of course, special emphasis is given to planning operations, but as a whole, the materials include: physical training and military defense; hygiene and first aid campaign, self-contained open-circuit, fighting techniques, riverine operations, demolition, weapons, communications, shore reconnaissance, submarine special operations, military planning process and case study, contemporary management, leadership; introduction to microcomputers, communications system of the Navy, and Intelligence. For enlisted (corporals or male sergeants with less than 30 years of age and able to reenlist), there is a C-ESP-MEC - Special Course Combat Divers, whose requirements for admission are the same as CAMECO. The duration is 42 weeks of instructional activities also drawn as to the officers, but those who endure the enormous physical and mental pressure of the course will be adequately prepared for the specialized tasks assigned to MECS.
|
|
Yuen began his career in 1973 as an instructor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Kasetsart University, where he has since continued working. He began working on software development for microcomputers in 1978, and worked on natural language processing algorithms from 1980. He and his team demonstrated the first interactive text editor for the Thai language in 1981, and released Thai Easy Writer, the first Thai word processing application, the following year... Yuen was among the proponents for the creation of a standard Thai language system for computers (over twenty had become available by 1984), and vice-chaired the committee for the development of the TIS 620-2529 character set and its subsequent version, TIS 620-2533.. The Microcomputer Research Laboratory, which Yuen was head of, also developed the Thai Kernel System, a hardware- independent system designed to promote system-intercompatibility for Thai- language application development, in 1990, but this failed to gain a user base as it lost ground to the expanding Microsoft Windows systems.. In his research, Yuen pioneered the utilization of dictionary databases for Thai word splitting and machine translation, created the first Thai language thesaurus. and developed word and sentence reconstruction methods for use in spell checking applications, among other things.
|
|
In 1988, BRED opened offices in London, acquired Crédit liégeois and opened a branch in Milan. In 1986, BRED acquired Société Betteravière d'Expansion Europe, which later became Société de Banque et d'Expansion (SBE), specializing in the concept of "site banking", i.e. directly within companies. During the 1980s, the branches of the network were renovated with windows open on the streets, and a new blue logo with stripes thus uniformizing the image of the bank across the country. In 1983, the entire network was equipped with financial terminals. In 1981, a telephone banking system was tested, enabling customers to bank by telephone or minitel. In 1984, "Télébred" had 200 corporate clients. In the late 1980s, all operations became tele-transmitted. However, the bank equipped its branches with microcomputers, continuing to rely on its "SIG_08", which allowed a direct connection to all databases. From 1979 to 1991, the bank's staff increased from 2,854 to 3,367. Over the same period, the bank's capital rose from 200 million to 1.250 billion francs, and the number of members rose from 79,000 to 170,000. In 1985, BRED established itself on Reunion Island by acquiring the 3 agencies of the BPFD (and opened a fourth one in Sainte- Clotilde).
|
|