502 Sentences With "minicomputer" | Random Sentence Generator

The minicomputer failed to register a match before he moved.

The PC market dwarfed the earlier mainframe and minicomputer markets.

Bill Gates was nineteen years old when MITS released the world's first minicomputer kit.

Something called a "minicomputer" had recently been introduced; it was the size of a refrigerator.

PARC researchers helped design the Alto, an early minicomputer that became widely used within Xerox.

So SITU loaded its multimedia presentation onto an Intel minicomputer and shipped it to Kiev.

Each core is like a minicomputer on the chip that can process its own tasks.

The police were rocking these glasses, with a camera that plugged into a smartphone-like minicomputer.

It also lost out because it was pursuing a technology, the minicomputer, from which the market was turning away.

Surveillance Detection Scout stores and analyzes its video on an Nvidia minicomputer that fits into a Tesla Model S's console.

In the 1980s, there was a thriving community of "minicomputer" makers led by a company called the Digital Equipment Corporation.

The camera is then connected by wire to a minicomputer that looks and works a bit like an oversize smartphone.

Ten years ago, Steve Jobs introduced a touchscreen minicomputer that wrapped in a digital music player, email, maps and web browsing.

The $35-a-pop minicomputer became an instant hit, sold like hotcakes worldwide, and has prompted the rise of amateur inventors.

Using the school's newly purchased minicomputer, Russell set out to create a game that simulated a dogfight between two planes in space.

After a huge amount of hassle, I was able to get a VAX minicomputer to connect across to the Swarthmore computers where I had accounts.

Developers have come up with ways to use it to power software for servers, and can even be used on hardware like the Raspberry Pi minicomputer.

The PC market turned out to be vastly larger than the minicomputer market, just as the mobile market is now much larger than the PC market.

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.

At it's unveiling, Oculus emphasized that the PC that typically powers VR headsets would be replaced with a small minicomputer placed in the rear of the head strap.

It is a minicomputer stuffed with every detail of a person's life: photos of children, credit card purchases, texts with spouses (and nonspouses), and records of physical movements.

The washing-machine-size minicomputer of the 1960s was displaced by the desktop PC in the 1980s, which was replaced by the pocket-size smartphone in the 2000s.

Premier Farnell, the biggest maker of the wildly popular Raspberry Pi minicomputer, is now being acquired by Daetwyler Holding AG, a Swiss industrial component supplier, for approximately $871 million.

But IBM is one of the few big tech companies from the mainframe and minicomputer era to adjust — if painfully — to personal computers and the early days of the Internet.

He switched on the Pi and attached another Ethernet cable from the minicomputer into an open port on a programmable automation controller, a microwave-sized computer that controlled the turbine.

"The major reason we posit for Silicon Valley's ascendence is that Route 128 was focused on the minicomputer and Silicon Valley was focused on the PC," Sichelman told me in a recent interview.

In the early 1980s, the Route 128 corridor outside Boston, birthplace of the minicomputer industry and long-gone tech giants like the Digital Equipment Corporation, was seen as the Silicon Valley of the East.

The Leeds-based company, which makes and sells the low-cost minicomputer, Raspberry Pi, said sales per day declined 6.9 percent and 5.1 percent in the third and fourth quarters respectively in the Americas.

Jason Staggs, a tall 28-year-old Oklahoman, quickly unplugged a network cable and inserted it into a Raspberry Pi minicomputer, the size of a deck of cards, that had been fitted with a Wi-Fi antenna.

In an author's note, Mr. Kidder explains that "A Truck Full of Money" is a kind of sequel to "The Soul of a New Machine" (1981), his Pulitzer Prize-winner about the race to build a next-generation minicomputer.

They did this for exactly the same reasons Intel dismissed the mobile market — selling a $2,000 PC was a lot less profitable than selling a $50,000 minicomputer, and DEC didn't expect PCs to be a big enough market to be worth the effort.

A video about a woman in India with an epileptic son who used an Intel Edison (a stamp-size minicomputer designed for the inventor audience) as a component in devising a glove that can detect oncoming epilepsy episodes will be released online on Monday.

Earlier tectonic shifts noted by Jefferies included the mainframe era in the 1950s; the minicomputer era in the 1970s; the personal computer era in the 1980s and 1990s; the cellphone/server era in the 2000s and the parallel processing IoT era we're just now entering.

The team settled on the centerfold, tearing out its top third so the paper would fit on the drum of their Muirhead wirephoto scanner, which they had tricked out with analog-to-digital converters for red, green, and blue, along with a Hewlett Packard 503 minicomputer.

In the society's early days, Weiss used his easy access to White House stationery, "an instrument so potent that it could be used in only the most direful circumstances," to wage "letterhead coups" with stunning effectiveness on more than one occasion, securing $10,0073 for an NSA auto-programmable minicomputer here and a million bucks to fund a Civil Technologies program there.

HP repositioned HP-150 as a workstation for the HP 3000 minicomputer.

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.

In 1992, Rich Page left NeXT. Within weeks of his resignation, several NeXT VPs also left. His experience in hardware and software design includes the development of microcode for Hewlett-Packard's HP 3000 minicomputer series. The HP3000 minicomputer is still in use today.

A stand-alone version of the 160 called the CDC 160-A was arguably the first minicomputer.

The RC 4000 Multiprogramming System is a discontinued operating system developed for the RC 4000 minicomputer in 1969.

The Data General-One (DG-1) was a portable personal computer introduced in 1984 by minicomputer company Data General.

The number 9067 represented on a Minicomputer. One device used throughout the program was the Papy Minicomputer, named after Frédérique Papy-Lenger – the most influential figure to the project – and her husband Georges Papy. A Minicomputer is a 2 by 2 grid of squares, with the quarters representing the numbers 1, 2, 4, and 8. Checkers can be placed on the grid to represent different numbers in a similar fashion to the way the binary numeral system is used to represent numbers in a computer.

The definition of minicomputer is vague with the consequence that there are a number of candidates for the first minicomputer, ranging from the CDC 160 circa 1960 to the DEC PDP-8 circa 1965.. An early and highly successful minicomputer was Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) 12-bit PDP-8, which was built using discrete transistors and cost from upwards when launched in 1964. Later versions of the PDP-8 took advantage of small-scale integrated circuits. The important precursors of the PDP-8 include the PDP-5, LINC, the TX-0, the TX-2, and the PDP-1. DEC gave rise to a number of minicomputer companies along Massachusetts Route 128, including Data General, Wang Laboratories, Apollo Computer, and Prime Computer.

It eventually faded into history with the end of the minicomputer era, when the PC became the more popular computing platform.

The ICL Series 39 was a range of mainframe and minicomputer computer systems released by the UK manufacturer ICL in 1985.

The 1980s saw the minicomputer age plateau as PCs were introduced. Manufacturers such as DEC and Hewlett-Packard continued to manufacture minicomputer compatible hard drive systems as industry demanded higher storage. Hewlett-Packard introduced the HP 7935 as one such drive. But it was clear that smaller Winchester storage systems were eclipsing large platter hard drives.

The 801 was an experimental minicomputer designed by IBM. The resulting architecture was used in various roles in IBM into the 1980s.

The DEC PDP-8 minicomputer had eight special locations (at addresses 8 through 15). When accessed via memory indirect addressing, these locations would automatically increment after use. This made it easy to step through memory in a loop without needing to use any registers to handle the steps. The Data General Nova minicomputer had 16 special memory locations at addresses 16 through 31.

Later generations of the series, though, switched away from this architecture to the EPIC-like VLIW CPUs. The Hewlett-Packard designers of the HP 3000 business system had used a B5500 and were greatly impressed by its hardware and software; they aimed to build a 16-bit minicomputer with similar software. Several other HP divisions created similar minicomputer or microprocessor stack machines.

MERA 302 MERA 300 was a Polish-built 8-bit minicomputer family. It was first introduced in 1974 at the Poznań Trade Fair and Exhibition.

The TACPOL compiler ran on and generated code for the AN/GYK-12, a militarized version of the Litton Industries L-3050 32-bit minicomputer.

An editor of Minicomputer News and his secretary posed as former lovers attempting to locate each other to test the service, with somewhat unsuccessful results.

The Cyber 18 is a 16-bit minicomputer which was a successor to the CDC 1700 minicomputer. It was mostly used in real-time environments. One noteworthy application is as the basis of the 2550—a communications processor used by CDC 6000 series and Cyber 70/Cyber 170 mainframes. The 2550 was a product of CDC's Communications Systems Division, in Santa Ana, California (STAOPS).

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 Prime 9950 computer system with CRT console showing PRIMOS on the screen, in Kean University computer room PRIMOS is an operating system developed during the 1970s by Prime Computer for its minicomputer systems. It rapidly gained popularity and by the mid-1980s was a serious contender as a mainline minicomputer operating system. With the advent of PCs and the decline of the minicomputer industry, Prime was forced out of the market in the early 1990s, and by the end of 2010 the trademarks for both PRIMEUS Trademark No. 73123025 and PRIMOSUS Trademark No. 73122880 no longer existed.abandoned,expired,"cancelled" Prime had also offered a customizable real-time OS called RTOS.

In 2011, he was listed at #6 on the MIT150 list of the top 150 innovators and ideas from MIT for his work on the minicomputer.

Patinho Feio was an 8-bit minicomputer with a memory of 8 kB and an instruction cycle of 2 microseconds. It was programmed in assembly language.

This made it the fastest available minicomputer for many years. However, the new memory was also very expensive and ran hot, so it was not widely used.

The computer bureau model shrank during the 1980s, as cheap commodity computers, particularly the PC clone but also the minicomputer allowed services to be hosted on-premises.

The K 1840 minicomputer was a clone of VAX-11/780 from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The export of western 32-bit minicomputers to Comecon countries was forbidden by the CoCom technology embargo. Therefore one had to be developed locally, using computer aided design (CAD) technology based on a 32-bit computer architecture. The K 1840 was the first 32-bit computer of the M 32 VAX-compatible minicomputer line.

Electronic mail use was initially restricted to a single minicomputer. Much later, Prime released email that worked with multiple Prime computers in a network, and a synchronised global directory system. Word processing was available either on dumb terminals like the PT25, PT45 and PST100, or on the partially intelligent PT65 terminal. The PT65 had to download the word processing software from the host minicomputer whenever the terminal was turned on.

Taimyr's Nord-1 turned out reliable for the time, with more than a year between failures. It was probably the first minicomputer to feature floating-point equipment as standard, and had an unusually rich complement of registers for its time. It also featured relative addressing, and a fully automatic context switched interrupt system. It was also the first minicomputer to offer virtual memory, offered as an option by 1969.

The machines were an immediate success, quickly becoming one of the best-selling systems in the timesharing market, and propelling HP to become the 3rd largest minicomputer vendor.

The Selenia Gp-16 was a general purpose minicomputer designed by the Italian company Selenia of STET group. It was followed by an upgraded version called Gp-160.

The earliest existence of this OTS angle being used in video games was in Spacewar! (1962), written for the DEC PDP-1 minicomputer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the same year as the 1130's introduction, Digital Equipment Corporation introduced the smaller, cheaper, and better-selling 12-bit PDP-8, recognized as the first successful minicomputer.

It quickly became commercially successful because of the rapid increase of computer communications speeds, and because of new minicomputer systems released to the market which required inexpensive operator consoles.

Donald Bruce Gillies (October 15, 1928 – July 17, 1975) was a Canadian computer scientist and mathematician who worked in the fields of computer design, game theory, and minicomputer programming environments.

The game that would be later named The Oregon Trail debuted to Rawitsch's class on December 3, 1971. Although the minicomputer's teletype and paper tape terminals that predate display screens were awkward to children, the game was immediately popular, and he made it available to users of the minicomputer time-sharing network owned by Minneapolis Public Schools. When the next semester ended, Rawitsch printed out a copy of the source code and deleted it from the minicomputer.

Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms of the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation. Their first product, the Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicomputer. This used their own operating system, Data General RDOS (DG/RDOS), and in conjunction with programming languages like "Data General Business Basic" they provided a multi-user operating system with record locking and built-in databases far ahead of many contemporary systems.

Key people in the SAM 2 development were Lars Monrad-Krohn, Per Bjørge and Rolf Skår. On the basis of SAM 2 they established Norsk Data and developed the Nord-1 minicomputer.

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 on display at the National Museum of American HistoryData General Nova, the first 16-bit minicomputer, on display at the Computer History MuseumA PDP-11, model 40, an early member of DECs 16-bit minicomputer family, on display at the Vienna Technical Museum A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller computers that was developed in the mid-1960s and sold for much less than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, The New York Times suggested a consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than (), with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC. The class formed a distinct group with its own software architectures and operating systems. Minis were designed for control, instrumentation, human interaction, and communication switching as distinct from calculation and record keeping.

Barr and Stroud constructed the first computer to be built in Scotland, the pioneering SOLIDAC minicomputer for the University of Glasgow, assembled between 1958 and 1963 as an attempt to expand into electronics.

For instance, a program on a GUI-based computer would send messages to a minicomputer to return small samples of a huge dataset for display. Remote procedure calls (RPC) already handled these tasks, but there was no standard RPC system. Soon the majority of the minicomputer and mainframe vendors instigated projects to combine the two, producing an OOP library format that could be used anywhere. Such systems were known as object libraries, or distributed objects, if they supported remote access (not all did).

The K-202 had two main rivals Data General SuperNOVA minicomputer (United States) and the CTL Modular One (United Kingdom). Some time afterwards, K-202 had its successor, , hundreds units of which were built.

This product had been developed before Digico was formed, so was an immediate source of income. Digico soon developed a 16-bit minicomputer series, the Micro 16, for which it was best known for.

DG/UX is a discontinued Unix operating system developed by Data General for its Eclipse MV minicomputer line, and later the AViiON workstation and server line (both Motorola 88000 and Intel IA-32-based variants).

The Multum from Information Computer Systems (ICS) was a 16-bit minicomputer developed in the early 1970s in Crewe, Cheshire by ex-employees of English Electric Company. It had a very early port of Pascal.

Inmac Ink ribbon cartridge for Dot matrix printer Inmac (International Minicomputer Accessories Corporation), which became a publicly traded company, was founded in 1975 in Silicon Valley. The company was first listed on the NASDAQ in 1987 and later merged with MicroWarehouse in 1996. Inmac was founded by Ken Eldred and Jim Willenborg, who met while in the MBA program at Stanford Business School. With $5,000 and a grocery bag full of connector parts, Eldred and Willenborg set out to serve minicomputer owners by mail order.

The PDP-8 is a 12-bit minicomputer that was produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was the first commercially successful minicomputer, with over 50,000 units being sold over the model's lifetime. Its basic design follows the pioneering LINC but has a smaller instruction set, which is an expanded version of the PDP-5 instruction set. Similar machines from DEC are the PDP-12 which is a modernized version of the PDP-8 and LINC concepts, and the PDP-14 industrial controller system.

In spite of its relatively high costs — the 2000F cost $105,000 in 1974, or about $ in — it was the first minicomputer to offer time-shared BASIC, which made it very popular in the early-to-mid 1970s.

Compared to similar LAN-based office initiatives of the same period, Geac's multi-user minicomputer-based offering provided significantly higher availability. And its software developers were exemplary in fixing bugs promptly and responding to requests for enhancements.

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.

Synex Systems products were diverse and targeted accounting, civil engineering, minicomputer thin client, and file compression utility markets. By 2001 the concentration was only on the accounting reporting product F9 and all other products were discontinued or sold.

The contemporary term for minicomputer is midrange computer, such as the higher-end SPARC, POWER and Itanium-based systems from Oracle Corporation, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, and the size is now typically smaller, such as a tower case.

Today, a PC running MUMPS can behave much as a large minicomputer of former years. Early versions of MUMPS did not require large memory or disk capacities and so were practical on smaller machines than some other systems required.

Ernesto is a widower and had no children. Although Omar hates his uncle, he hopes to become his heir. Ernesto Santelmo hires Mario Villarreal (Jorge Martínez), a prestigious Argentine computer engineer. Mario has an interesting project in mind: a minicomputer.

Unibus terminator/bootstrap card from a PDP-11/34. The Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputer Unibus systems used terminator cards with 178 Ω pullup resistors on the multi-drop address and data lines, and 383 Ω on the single-drop signal lines.

CADO Systems was a minicomputer and software manufacturer in 1976. In 1983 was acquired by Contel Business Systems. In 1989 Contel Business Systems merged with NDS and became VERSYSS. CADO was formed by former staff of McDonnell- Douglas Information Systems.

A major planning issue was the need for a minicomputer at the station. NDRE argued that it was fully capable of delivering such a system, but NTNF instead wanted to minimize risk by buying the PDP-8 from Digital Equipment Corporation in the United States. However, NDRE was awarded the contract, in part because of NTNF's obligation to support Norwegian technology and in part because NDRE agreed to purchase a suitable foreign computer if they could not successfully manufacture one themselves.Njølstad: 260 A new minicomputer, SAM-2, was built at NDRE and completed in April 1967.

The book opens with a turf war between two computer design groups within Data General Corporation, a minicomputer vendor in the 1970s. Most of the senior designers are assigned the "sexy" job of designing the next-generation machine in North Carolina. Their project, code-named "Fountainhead", is to give Data General a machine to compete with the VAX computer from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), which is starting to take over the new 32-bit minicomputer market. Meanwhile, at the corporate headquarters at Westborough, Massachusetts, the few remaining senior designers there are assigned the much more humble job of improving Data General's existing products.

However, with timesharing systems widely offering BASIC, and all of their competition in the minicomputer space doing the same, DEC's customers were clamoring for BASIC. After management repeatedly ignored their pleas, David H. Ahl took it upon himself to buy a BASIC for the PDP-8, which was a major success in the education market. By the early 1970s, FOCAL and JOSS had been forgotten and BASIC had become almost universal in the minicomputer market. DEC would go on to introduce their updated version, BASIC-PLUS, for use on the RSTS/E time- sharing operating system.

Rosenberg completed his Bachelor of Science with Honours at Monash University in 1975, and earned his Doctor of Philosophy in computer science in 1979, also at Monash. His PhD thesis was entitled The Concept of a Hardware Kernel and its Implementation on a Minicomputer.

Moreover, K-202 used memory segmentation with paging, the first minicomputer to do so. Additionally, it performed close to a million operations per second. These two things made K-202 faster than its potentially most dangerous competitors DEC's PDP-11 and CTL's Modular One.

A KA820-AA CPU module from a VAX 8200 minicomputer containing a V-11 microprocessor chip set The V-11, code-named "Scorpio", is a miniprocessor chip set implementation of the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA) developed and fabricated by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

Intel 8008 CPU The Mark-8 was introduced as a 'build it yourself' project in Radio-Electronics's July 1974 cover article, offering a US$5 booklet containing circuit board layouts and DIY construction project descriptions, with Titus himself arranging for $50 circuit board sets to be made by a New Jersey company for delivery to hobbyists. Prospective Mark-8 builders had to gather the various electronics parts themselves from a number of different sources.Mark-8 Minicomputer, Bryan's Old Computers, retrieved Feb 11 2009 A couple of thousand booklets and some one-hundred circuit board sets were eventually sold. The Mark-8 was introduced in R-E as "Your Personal Minicomputer".

The system, bundled as the HP 2000, was the first mini platform to offer time- sharing and was an immediate runaway success, catapulting HP to become the third-largest vendor in the minicomputer space, behind DEC and Data General (DG). DEC, the leader in the minicomputer space since the mid-1960s, had initially ignored BASIC. This was due to their work with RAND Corporation, who had purchased a PDP-6 to run their JOSS language, which was conceptually very similar to BASIC. This led DEC to introduce a smaller, cleaned up version of JOSS known as FOCAL, which they heavily promoted in the late 1960s.

TREK73 is a computer game based on the original Star Trek television series. It was created in 1973 by William K. Char, Perry Lee, and Dan Gee for the Hewlett-Packard 2000 minicomputer in HP Time-Shared BASIC. The game was played via teletype. Alt URL.

The MOMIK 8-B (MERA) minicomputer had been designed in Poland in 1973. In 1974 the MERA 300 (MERA ZSM), based on the previous model, was introduced. The same year, at the Poznań International Trade Fair and Exhibition, twelve more models were displayed. MERA 300 was designed by dr.

LINC-8 on display at Uppsala University LINC-8 was the name of a minicomputer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation between 1966 and 1969. It combined a LINC computer with a PDP-8 in one cabinet, thus being able to run programs written for either of the two architectures.

Chromatics Inc. was a color graphics display manufacturer based in Tucker, Georgia.InfoWorld 1982 Vol.4 week 23 p5 "Chromatics, a color-graphic-display manufacturer ..." Their systems predated the personal computer era of inexpensive graphics displays, and were typically used as peripheral devices, connected to a mainframe or minicomputer.

The VAX-11/780 minicomputer circa 1977. Early computers were physically large and heavy devices. As computers became more compact, the term boat anchor became popular among users to signify that the earlier, larger computer gear was obsolete, no longer useful,boat anchor @ Computer-Dictionary-Online.org or even damaged.

The company that created the minicomputer, a dominant networking technology, and arguably the first computers for personal use, had abandoned the "low end" market, whose dominance with the PDP-8 had built the company in a previous generation. Decisions about what to do about this threat led to infighting within the company that seriously delayed their responses. One group suggested that every possible development in the industry be poured into the construction of a new VAX family that would leapfrog the performance of the existing machines. This would limit the market erosion in the top-end segment, where profit margins were maximized and DEC could continue to survive as a minicomputer vendor.

A PDP-8 minicomputer on display at the National Museum of American History In 1971, DEC employee David H. Ahl converted two games, Hamurabi and Lunar Lander, from the FOCAL language to BASIC, partially as a demonstration of the language on the DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. Their popularity led him to start printing BASIC games in the DEC newsletter he edited, both ones he wrote and reader submissions. In 1973, he published 101 BASIC Computer Games, containing descriptions and the source code for video games written in BASIC. The games included were written by both Ahl and others, and included both games original to the language and ported from other languages such as FOCAL.

ECRM, Compugraphic (later purchased by Agfa) and others rapidly followed suit with machines of their own. Early minicomputer-based typesetting software introduced in the 1970s and early 1980s, such as Datalogics Pager, Penta, Atex, Miles 33, Xyvision, troff from Bell Labs, and IBM's Script product with CRT terminals, were better able to drive these electromechanical devices, and used text markup languages to describe type and other page formatting information. The descendants of these text markup languages include SGML, XML and HTML. The minicomputer systems output columns of text on film for paste-up and eventually produced entire pages and signatures of 4, 8, 16 or more pages using imposition software on devices such as the Israeli-made Scitex Dolev.

The system was initially pitched as a controller for Fairchild Instrumentation's new Sentry product, a software-controlled semiconductor testing system. This produced the 24-bit Fairchild FST-1, as well as the FACTOR programming language used to program the test suites. Although it was by most measures a general-purpose minicomputer, Fairchild was uninterested in marketing it as such. At the time, the timesharing market was developing rapidly, and had split into two solution classes; the minicomputer end was aimed at smaller users who would buy a complete system for in-house use, like the HP 2100, while at the other end were large mainframes that sold services on a per-minute basis to users on remote computer terminals.

Nord Programming Language, commonly abbreviated NPL, was a programming language by the Norwegian minicomputer manufacturer Norsk Data. It shipped as a standard component of the operating system SINTRAN III. The language was also used to implement SINTRAN III. I.e. the core and file system of SINTRAN III was written in NPL.

This unit was also sometimes known as Legal Information Services Operations. The other had its origins with Professional Software Systems, Inc., a Phoenix, Arizona-based firm that created law practice management software for U.S. law firms. Founded around 1976, it provided a turnkey solution that ran on the Wang VS minicomputer.

VEB Robotron RVS K 1840 in the Technische Sammlungen Museum, Dresden The K 1840, full name RVS K 1840 (, "computer system with virtual memory") was a minicomputer from the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Its development began in August 1985 at VEB Robotron Elektronik in Dresden, and it went into production in 1988.

Nokia designed and manufactured a series of mini-computers starting in 1970s. These included the Mikko series of minicomputers intended for use in the finance and banking industry, and the MPS-10 minicomputer that was extensively based the Ada programming language and was widely used in major Finnish banks in the late 1980s.

With a base price of $27,000 and designed for those not in need of the 18-bit PDP-4, yet having "applications needing solutions too complicated to be solved efficiently by modules systems" the PDP-5, when introduced in 1963, came at a time when the minicomputer market was gaining a foothold.

The Revolution was that corporate computer information systems had hitherto been in-house. From hereon consumers, customers, agents, distributors, suppliers and service companies would be connected on-line to the corporate systems and business would be transacted electronically in real-time.1980 TV paves the way for Information Brokerage, Minicomputer News p.

Stephen Wiesenfeld and Paula Polatschek were married in 1970. Stephen ran a minicomputer consulting business and had an irregular income. Paula taught mathematics at Edison High School and earned significantly more than her husband. When Paula died in childbirth from an amniotic embolism, Stephen became the sole provider for their newborn son, Jason.

ADM-3A In 1972, LSI manufactured the first video terminal -- the 7700A. Because the new minicomputer systems required inexpensive operator consoles (compared to teletype printers), the terminals became a success. In 1973, LSI hired the new head of engineering, Jim Placak. He and his team created the ADM-1 terminal in late 1973.

Mead, Johannsen, Edmund K. Cheng and others formed Silicon Compilers Inc. (SCI) in 1981. SCI designed one of the key chips for Digital Equipment Corporation's MicroVAX minicomputer. Mead and Conway laid the groundwork for the development of the MOSIS (Metal Oxide Semiconductor Implementation Service) and the fabrication of the first CMOS chip.

Initiall, model 3 (IBM 4953) and model 5 (IBM 4955) processors were provided. Later processors were the model 4 (IBM 4954) and model 6 (IBM 4956). Don Estridge had been the lead manager on the IBM Series/1 minicomputer. He reportedly had fallen out of grace when that project was ill-received.

Standard 80-column punch cards were an option for students if a card punch was available. Before the minicomputer, it was impossible for a class of Australian students to have hands-on access to a computer within a one-hour school period. Mainframes were too expensive for small schools and remote job entry equipment was typically limited to major corporations, universities and research centres. A group at Monash University under the leadership of Dr Len G. Whitehouse solved the problem with a small PDP-11 minicomputer system that could be used in the classroom. Mark sense cards were used, and a class of 30 children could each get two runs in a one-hour period. The Monash University series of Student FORTRAN predated and was an independent effort not associated with DEC's PDP-8 based EDUSYSTEM series which centred on the BASIC language. MONECS was optimised for the low end hardware of the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-11 minicomputer family. Typical installation would be a PDP-11/03, /04, /05 /10 or D. D. Webster Electronics' Spectrum-IIB (repackaged DEC LSI) processor with 32k Bytes memory.

The Minicomputer is laid out as follows: a white square in the lower right corner with a value of 1, a red square in the lower left with a value of 2, a purple square in the upper right with a value of 4, and a brown square in the upper left with a value of 8. Each Minicomputer is designed to represent a single decimal digit, and multiple Minicomputers can be used together to represent multiple-digit numbers. Each successive board's values are increased by a power of ten. For example, a second Minicomputer's squares – placed to the left of the first – will represent 10, 20, 40, and 80; a third, 100, 200, 400, and 800, and so on.

A 24-channel program tape for the Harvard Mark I When the first minicomputers were being released, most manufacturers turned to the existing mass-produced ASCII teleprinters (primarily the Teletype Model 33, capable of ten ASCII characters per second throughput) as a low-cost solution for keyboard input and printer output. The commonly specified Model 33 ASR included a paper tape punch/reader, where ASR stands for "Automatic Send/Receive" as opposed to the punchless/readerless KSR – Keyboard Send/Receive and RO – Receive Only models. As a side effect, punched tape became a popular medium for low-cost minicomputer data and program storage, and it was common to find a selection of tapes containing useful programs in most minicomputer installations. Faster optical readers were also common.

A few years later, in 1978, Tajima started manufacturing the TMBE Series Bridge Type Automatic Embroidery machines. These machines introduced electronic 6-needle automatic color change technology. In 1980 the first computerized embroidery machines were introduced to the home market. Wilcom introduced the first computer graphics embroidery design system to run on a minicomputer.

The STAR-100 uses I/O processors to offload I/O from the CPU. Each I/O processor is a 16-bit minicomputer with its own main memory of 65,536 words of 16 bits each, which is implemented with core memory. The I/O processors all share a 128-bit data bus to the SAC.

However, at the time the book was published, the minicomputer market was still quite healthy, and Olsen was known as a dependable and trustworthy employer. DEC's community service projects were well known, most specifically his commitment to higher education and his donations of PDP-8 computers to local high schools in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

TI-990 programmers panel The TI-990 was a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Texas Instruments (TI) in the 1970s and 1980s. The TI-990 was a replacement for TI's earlier minicomputer systems, the TI-960 and the TI-980. It had several unique features, and was easier to program than its predecessors.

PLANC (pronounced as "plank") is a high level computer programming language. The acronym stands for Programming LAnguage for Nd Computers. Compilers were developed by Norsk Data for several architectures, including the Motorola 68000, 88000, x86, and the Norsk Data NORD-10 minicomputer architecture and ND-500 superminicomputer. The language was designed to be platform independent.

Patinho Feio (Portuguese for "Ugly Little Duck", in reference to the fairy tale) was the first minicomputer designed and manufactured entirely in Brazil. It was made between 1971 and 1972 in the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo by the Digital Systems Laboratory (currently called Department of Computer Engineering and Digital Systems).

K-202 was 16-bit minicomputer built by Jacek Karpiński in 1971. It was faster and cheaper than most of the world's production at this time, and more advanced than IBM PC released decade later, but the production was never started because of political reasons and dependence on western parts; it was not compatible with the ES EVM standard.

The Intersil 6100 family consisted of a 12-bit microprocessor (the 6100) and a range of peripheral support and memory ICs. The microprocessor recognised the DEC PDP-8 minicomputer instruction set. As such it was sometimes referred to as the CMOS-PDP8. Since it was also produced by Harris Corporation, it was also known as the Harris HM-6100.

A series of systems were developed for use in the 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990 U.S. census. The first system, delivered in 1954 used vacuum tubes and analog processing. Later versions used software control with a PDP-11 minicomputer. FOSDIC used a flying-spot scanner to detect marks on forms that had previously been photographed on microfilm.

A year after the first MADIDDA was demonstrated, Steele and the MADDIDA design team left Northrop, and was joined by Irving S. Reed On July 16, 1950 they formed the Computer Research Corporation (CRC) in order to develop general-purpose computers. After developing the Cadac, an early minicomputer, CRC was sold to National Cash Register (NCR) in February 1953.

The system was also commonly used for road traffic control and industrial process automation. The GEC 2050 supported up to 64KiB of magnetic core memory in 4KiB, 8KiB and 16KiB modules. The system had a single Channel Controller for performing autonomous I/O, and used the same peripheral I/O controllers as the GEC 4000 series minicomputer.

In video game systems, bank switching allowed larger games to be developed for play on existing consoles. Bank switching originated in minicomputer systems. Many modern microcontrollers and microprocessors use bank switching to manage random-access memory, non-volatile memory, input- output devices and system management registers in small embedded systems. The technique was common in 8-bit microcomputer systems.

Starting life as Elliott Automation, the data processing computer products were transferred to ICT/ICL and non- computing products to English Electric as part of a reorganisation of the parent company forced by the British Government. Elliott Automation retained the real-time computing systems, the Elliott 900 series computers, and set about designing a new range of computer systems to carry them forward long- term. The rules of the reorganisation disallowed Elliott Automation to continue working on data processing computing products for some years after the split (and similarly, disallowed ICT/ICL to work on real-time computing products). Three new computer ranges were identified, known internally as Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Alpha became the GEC 2050 8-bit minicomputer, and beta became the GEC 4080 16-bit minicomputer with its unique Nucleus feature.

Implemented on the Data General Nova minicomputer, the program became the Singer Corporation Remote Batch Terminal. Both Singer and UCC sold their terminal divisions to Harris Corporation, which continued to market the products. In 1983, Barr developed hardware and software for performing HASP remote job entry communication on the IBM PC. His company, Barr Systems, Inc., marketed and sold Barr HASP,Pompili 1987.

The agreement was approved by the Parliament of Norway in mid 1966. Part of the reason for the Norwegian support was the opportunity of training Norwegians in pulse-code modulation and digital computing. The agreement involved that NDRE was to supply a minicomputer for Tromsø.Rødberg: 17 The choice of computer for the Tromsø station became a major part of the negotiations.

The machine had 30 photomultiplier tubes as detectors and completed a scan in 9 translate/rotate cycles, much faster than the EMI-scanner. It used a DEC PDP-11/34 minicomputer both to operate the servo-mechanisms and to acquire and process the images. Most importantly, ACTA could scan the entire body, whereas the EMI-scanner could only scan the head.

In 1973 the Wang 2200 was released, a desktop minicomputer with cassette tape storage. RETRIEVE was ported to this platform under the name RECALL. A report for the US Army detailed the differences in a single page and concluded "Differences between the two implementations are very minor." While working at JPL as a contractor, Wayne Ratliff entered the office football pool.

Introduction to Game Development The game was copied to several of the early minicomputer installations in American academic institutions, making it potentially the first video game to be available outside a single research institute.Understanding Digital Games, p. 22 The two-player game has the players engaged in a dogfight between two spaceships set against the backdrop of a randomly generated background starfield.

"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.

He was also an innovator in other areas of computer and information technology including large-scale data capture, mixed media scanning, minicomputer networking, voice response and handprint processing. He patented the world's first static signature recognition system in 1984. He founded ROCC Computers in 1984 after a management buy-out of Rediffusion Computers. The company traded mainly in the UK and Eastern Europe.

MACRO-11 is an assembly language with macro facilities for PDP-11 minicomputers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It is the successor to PAL-11 (Program Assembler Loader), an earlier version of the PDP-11 assembly language without macro facilities. The MACRO-11 assembly language was designed for the PDP-11 minicomputer family. It was supported on all DEC PDP-11 operating systems.

Panafacom was a conglomerate of the Japanese companies—formed by Fujitsu, Fuji Electric and the Matsushita Group on July 2, 1973. The company provided OEM manufacturing for Fujitsu and Matsushita, and developed one of the first commercially available 16-bit microprocessors, the MN1610. was a minicomputer manufacturer founded on November 1, 1960. became a distributor of its minicomputers to enter the computer business.

Heradstveit: 177 The company peaked its financial performance in 1986. That year Datamation ranked it the world's 75th largest information technology company, and the world's 13th largest minicomputer manufacturer. It was the world's third-most profitable and had the seventh-highest growth rate.Steine: 11 That year the company's profits hit a record-high NOK 475 million from a NOK 2,576 million revenue.

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.

The latter was the first 32-bit minicomputer in the world.Heradstveit: 73 This solution was chosen to allow the Nord-5 to act as a number cruncher while the Nord-1s would handle smaller tasks. One of these was used to collect information from a global network of weather stations.Heradstveit: 74 When the project finished Norsk Data was without orders.

SIMH was based on a much older systems emulator called MIMIC, which was written in the late 1960s at Applied Data Research."Preserving Computing's Past: Restoration and Simulation" Max Burnet and Bob Supnik, Digital Technical Journal, Volume 8, Number 3, 1996. SIMH was started in 1993 with the purpose of preserving minicomputer hardware and software which was fading into obscurity.

The term "minicomputer" developed in the 1960s to describe the smaller computers that became possible with the use of transistors and core memory technologies, minimal instructions sets and less expensive peripherals such as the ubiquitous Teletype Model 33 ASR. They usually took up one or a few 19-inch rack cabinets, compared with the large mainframes that could fill a room.

Therefore, text was routinely composed to satisfy the needs of Teletype machines. Most minicomputer systems from DEC used this convention. CP/M also used it in order to print on the same terminals that minicomputers used. From there MS-DOS (1981) adopted CP/M's + in order to be compatible, and this convention was inherited by Microsoft's later Windows operating system.

In the 1960s and 1970s, more and more departments started to use cheaper and dedicated systems for specific purposes like process control and laboratory automation. A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller computers that was developed in the mid-1960s and sold for much less than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors.

Gimmick! was conceived by lead designer Tomomi Sakai, who put a variety of ideas into the programming of the game. The game may have been developed with a MicroVAX minicomputer, but Sakai claims he could have made the game how he wanted regardless of what equipment was used. In order to rival the quality of Super NES games, a large staff was required.

WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS In 1979, Brigham Young University graduate student Bruce Bastian and computer science professor Alan Ashton created word processing software for a Data General minicomputer system owned by the city of Orem, Utah. Bastian and Ashton retained ownership of the software that they created. They then founded Satellite Software International, Inc., to market the program to other Data General users.

Schlumberger, originally an oil services company but looking to branch out, purchased Fairchild in 1979. This meant Fairchild was well capitalized and they continued to fight the lawsuits. In 1986, with the minicomputer market collapsing as newer IBM PC designs began to take over their market, DG decided to settle. In September 1986, DG agreed to pay Fairchild $52.5 million.

A Data General SuperNova S/200 minicomputer served as the maintenance control unit (MCU), which was used to feed the Cray Operating System into the system at boot time, to monitor the CPU during use, and optionally as a front-end computer. Most, if not all, Cray-1As were delivered using the follow-on Data General Eclipse as the MCU.

In the early 1970s, James Schuyler developed a system at Northwestern University called HYPERTUTOR as part of Northwestern's MULTI-TUTOR computer assisted instruction system. This ran on several CDC mainframes at various sites.. Between 1973 and 1980, a group under the direction of Thomas T. Chen at the Medical Computing Laboratory of the School of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign ported PLATO's TUTOR programming language to the MODCOMP IV minicomputer.. Douglas W. Jones, A.B. Baskin, Tom Szolyga, Vincent Wu and Lou Bloomfield did most of the implementation. This was the first port of TUTOR to a minicomputer and was largely operational by 1976.. In 1980, Chen founded Global Information Systems Technology of Champaign, Illinois, to market this as the Simpler system. GIST eventually merged with the Government Group of Adayana Inc.

An early commercial use was the 1965 SDS 92. IBM first used ICs in computers for the logic of the System/360 Model 85 shipped in 1969 and then made extensive use of ICs in its System/370 which began shipment in 1971. The integrated circuit enabled the development of much smaller computers. The minicomputer was a significant innovation in the 1960s and 1970s.

Operational Control Language (OCL) is the control language of the IBM System/32, System/34 and System/36 minicomputer family. It is similar to the older control languages JCL (System/370) and System/3, and unrelated to the later control languages including CL (System/38 and AS/400), and REXX (AS/400). The facility of DOS to use batch files is also a control language.

The original typeface was rendered by hand. It was then perfected on a PDP-8 minicomputer. How VAG Rounded was born In 1978, the whole Volkswagen and Audi Dealer Organization worldwide was re-branded as V.A.G using the distinct V.A.G Rounded (or V.A.G Rundschrift) as the font for all signage, and for all headlines in their advertising. The V.A.G logo did not use the font.

Nanocomputer refers to a computer smaller than the microcomputer, which is smaller than the minicomputer. Microelectronic components that are at the core of all modern electronic devices employ semiconductor transistors. The term nanocomputer is increasingly used to refer to general computing devices of size comparable to a credit card. Modern Single-Board Computers such as the Raspberry Pi and Gumstix would fall under this classification.

The first computers were large, expensive and proprietary. The move towards commodity computing began when DEC introduced the PDP-8 in 1965. This was a computer that was relatively small and inexpensive enough that a department could purchase one without convening a meeting of the board of directors. The entire minicomputer industry sprang up to supply the demand for 'small' computers like the PDP-8.

The AN/UYK-44 is the standard 16-bit minicomputer of the United States Navy. The AN/UYK-44 was developed in the early 1980s by Sperry Corporation and was completed in early 1984. The AN/UYK-44 was used in surface ships, submarines, ground C4I platforms, radar and missile control systems.AN/UYK-44 Computer The system was designed to replace the older AN/UYK-20 model.

An earlier 12-bit computer, named LINC has been described as the first minicomputer and also "the first modern personal computer." It had 2,048 12-bit words, and the first LINC was built in 1962. DEC's founder, Ken Olsen, had worked with both it and a still earlier computer, the 18-bit 64,000-word TX-0, at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. Neither of these machines was mass-produced.

Similar to Job Control Language (JCL), DCL and other systems on mainframe and minicomputer systems, batch files were added to ease the work required for certain regular tasks by allowing the user to set up a script to automate them. When a batch file is run, the shell program (usually COMMAND.COM or cmd.exe) reads the file and executes its commands, normally line-by-line.

GCOS-62, the operating system for another 32-bit low-end line of machines, the Level 62 series, was designed in Italy. GCOS-61 was the operating system for a new version of a small system made in France (Model 58, later Level 61/58), and the operating system for a new 16-bit minicomputer line from Massachusetts (Billerica), the Level 6, got the name GCOS 6.

Data General Corp. v. Digital Computer Controls, Inc. was a 1971 case in which the Delaware Court of Chancery determined that widespread, confidential disclosure of trade secrets does not necessarily compromise their secrecy. Data General Corporation distributed design documentation with its Nova 1200 minicomputer, notifying owners of the confidentiality of these design drawings through contractual agreements and explicit text on the drawings (essentially a shrinkwrap license).

In 1968, Hewlett Packard introduced the HP 2000, a system that was based around its HP Time-Shared BASIC interpreter. In 1969, Dan Paymar and Ira Baxter wrote another early BASIC interpreter, for the Data General Nova. By the early 1970s, BASIC had become almost universal in the minicomputer market, with the rise of Business BASIC, and competitors to BASIC, like FOCAL and JOSS, had been forgotten.

Falling ore prices caused the company's first post-war deficit in 1976, of NOK 214.7 million. In wait for better times, production was continued and the pellets stored for later export. The company invested in a HP 3000 minicomputer in 1977 and the following year transferred its public utility services to the municipality. The company transferred its residential real estate to a housing cooperative.

None of the alphanumeric 'computer' typefaces like Westminster could be read magnetically. The work was presented to Letraset, who declined to buy it, but soon after released their own rival typeface, Data 70. Other contemporary typefaces based on E-13B include Moore Computer (recognisable by its dots underneath the letters M and N), Gemini, Orbit-B, and Countdown. Later, Typodermic released another derivative, Minicomputer.

In contrast, the performance of conventional multiprocessor systems is limited by the speed of some shared memory, bus, or switch. Adding more than 4–8 processors in that manner gives no further system speedup. NonStop systems have more often been bought to meet scaling requirements than for extreme fault tolerance. They compete well against IBM's largest mainframes, despite being built from simpler minicomputer technology.

In the T/16, error detection was by some added custom circuits that added little cost to the total design; no major parts were duplicated just to get error detection. TANDEM T/16 memory board The T/16 CPU was a proprietary design. It was greatly influenced by the HP 3000 minicomputer. They were both microprogrammed, 16-bit, stack-based machines with segmented, 16-bit virtual addressing.

Today only a few proprietary minicomputer architectures survive. The IBM System/38 operating system, which introduced many advanced concepts, lives on with IBM's AS/400. Great efforts were made by IBM to enable programs originally written for the IBM System/34 and System/36 to be moved to the AS/400. The AS/400 was replaced by the iSeries, which was subsequently replaced by the System i.

Later it was sold ready to use. It consisted of several Eurocard PCB's with DIN 41612 connectors, and a backplane all based on a 19-inch rack configuration. It was the first commercially available Dutch personal/home computer.Except perhaps for the Holborn 9100 computer which was a few months earlier, but which was designed and sold as a minicomputer at ten times the price of the Aster.

The Talking Propellerheads was a high technology satire/rock/comedy band performing from 1982 through 1996. The group was composed of employees of Data General Corporation. They were notable as the "corporate band" for Data General for over 14 years, playing at industry events and company functions. Their songs documented the fall of the minicomputer industry of the 1980s with their songs about Wang, DEC, Prime, IBM and other companies.

NTNF and ESRO were also working on the establishment of Kongsfjord Telemetry Station in Ny-Ålesund. The agreement to build the station was approved by the Parliament of Norway in mid 1966. Part of the reason for the Norwegian support was the opportunity of training Norwegians in pulse-code modulation and digital computing. For NDRE the station was a chance to apply its latest minicomputer, the Simulation for Automatic Machinery (SAM).

JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs) is an open-source, Emacs-like text editor, primarily intended for Unix-like operating systems. It also supports MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. JOVE was inspired by Gosling Emacs but is much smaller and simpler, lacking Mocklisp. It was originally created in 1983 by Jonathan Payne while at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts, United States on a PDP-11 minicomputer.

Wang's first computer, the Wang 3300, is an 8-bit integrated circuit general purpose minicomputer specifically designed to be the central processor for a multi- terminal time-sharing system. Byte oriented it also provides a number of double byte operand memory commands. Core memory ranges from 4,096 to 65,536 bytes in 4,096 byte increments.3300 Computer Reference Manual Development began shortly after hiring Rick Bensene in June 1968.

VSI BASIC began as BASIC-PLUS, created by DEC for their RSTS-11 operating system and PDP-11 minicomputer. Programming language statements could either be typed into the command interpreter directly, or entered into a text editor, saved to a file, and then loaded into the command interpreter from the file. Errors in source code were reported to the user immediately after the line was entered. Programs were stored as a .

These were used for its VAX 9000 mainframe computers. Years later, the manufacturing difficulties of the copper/polyimide technology restricted DEC's ability to ship its mainframes. At the end of 1985, Gene Amdahl, as company chairman, decided to stop all Trilogy development and use the remaining $70 million of the raised capital to buy Elxsi, a minicomputer start-up company. In 1989, Gene Amdahl left the merged company.

Over time Decision Strategy Corporation fell under financial stress and went through a significant downsizing. In October 1980, it was acquired by Informatics. Bauer stated that Informatics wanted an entré into the minicomputer market and Frank had been looking for a while for a transaction- and terminal-based application building system. As part of the acquisition, Informatics created a TAPS Division in New York with Parrella as its head.

In July 1974 Radio-Electronics published the Mark-8 Personal Minicomputer based on the Intel 8008 processor.Jonathan A. Titus The publishers noted the success of Radio-Electronics and Arthur P. Salsberg took over as Editor in 1974. Salsberg and Technical Editor, Leslie Solomon, brought back the featured construction projects. Popular Electronics needed a computer project so they selected Ed Roberts' Altair 8800 computer based on the improved Intel 8080 processor.

Minicomputers largely freed these organizations from the batch processing and bureaucracy of a commercial or university computing center. In addition, minicomputers were relatively interactive and soon had their own operating systems. The minicomputer Xerox Alto (1973) was a landmark step in the development of personal computers because of its graphical user interface, bit-mapped high resolution screen, large internal and external memory storage, mouse, and special software.Rheingold, H. (2000).

In 1969 in London, Moggridge founded his first company, Moggridge Associates, in the top floor of his home. His first industrial design to reach the market was a toaster for Hoover UK. In 1972, he worked on his first computer project, a minicomputer for Computer Technology Ltd, UK, that was never produced. In 1973, another Hoover UK design, for a space heater, got on the cover of a UK design magazine.

Software on fanfold paper tape for the Data General Nova minicomputer Fanfold paper tape Data was represented by the presence or absence of a hole at a particular location. Tapes originally had five rows of holes for data. Later tapes had six, seven and eight rows. An early electro-mechanical programmable calculating machine, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator or Harvard Mark I, used paper tape with 24 rows.

In 1971, he became a part of the IBM task force that proposed the creation of MVS, and managed the project until its release in 1974. In 1977, he took over the management of the development of the IBM DPPX for the IBM 8100 minicomputer. In 1991, he became vice president of technology of the IBM Consulting Group. He was named an IBM Fellow in recognition of his contributions to IBM.

Its 'Dumb Terminal' nickname came from some of the original trade publication ads, and quickly caught on industry wide. Due to two emerging trends the device immediately became the best selling in the industry. Computer communications speeds were rapidly increasing, and a wave of general purpose and dedicated single application minicomputer systems were hitting the market from dozens of manufacturers. These required inexpensive operator consoles that could match the speeds.

The Rome Air Development Center soon showed that the idea was practicable. Stewart Brand's interviews Paul Baran about his work at RAND on survivable networks. Using the minicomputer technology of the day, Baran and his team developed a simulation suite to test basic connectivity of an array of nodes with varying degrees of linking. That is, a network of n-ary degree of connectivity would have n links per node.

In 1987 Tandem introduced the NonStop CLX, a low-cost less- expandable minicomputer system. Its role was for growing the low end of the fault-tolerant market, and for deploying on the remote edges of large Tandem networks. Its initial performance was roughly similar to the TXP; later versions were about 20% slower than a VLX. Its small cabinet could be installed into any "copier room" office environment.

In September 1973 Radio Electronics published Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter, a low cost video display. In July 1974 Radio Electronics published the Mark-8 Personal Minicomputer based on the Intel 8008 processor. The editors of Popular Electronics needed a computer project so they selected Ed Robert's Altair 8800 computer based on the improved Intel 8080 processor. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics had the Altair computer on the cover.

MCSs also provide the backbone of large-scale transaction processing. The MCS talked with an external co-processor, the DCP (Datacomm Control Processor). This was a 24-bit minicomputer with a conventional register architecture and hardware I/O capability to handle thousands of remote terminals. The DCP and the B6500 communicated by messages in memory, essentially packets in today's terms, and the MCS did the B6500-side processing of those messages.

The original design of both the technically complicated hardware interface and disk operating system came from Lloyd Sponenburgh and Roy Southwick of Fiscal Information, Inc., a now-defunct Florida-based turnkey vendor of minicomputer-based medical information systems. Fiscal demonstrated a working prototype in 1984 and starting advertising the system for sale early in 1985. It immediately found a niche with some Commodore software developers and bulletin board SysOps.

PC12 by Artronix was a minicomputer built with 7400-series TTL technology and ferrite core memory. Computers were manufactured at the Artronix facility in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. The instruction set architecture was adapted from the LINC, the only significant change was to expand addressable memory to 4K, which required addition of an origin register. It was an accumulator machine with 12-bit addresses to manipulate 12-bit data.

Formally added to its company structure in March 1984, NCR's OEM System's Division spearheaded the design, sales revenue and market awareness and acceptance of NCR's Tower family. Part of the cause of this success was the decision by NCR senior management to hire reseller industry veterans for key positions within the fledgling operation and have that unit work with, but not answerable to, NCR's traditional management structure. The industry shift from minicomputers brought personnel with minicomputer and reseller backgrounds such as the division head, Dan Kiegler (ex-Datapoint marketing), marketing manager and later Director of Field Sales, Dave Lang (ex-DEC reseller marketing director and salesperson) and other critical contributors at corporate levels; who then hired a complementary field sales organization primarily made up of proven people from DEC, Wang and other faltering minicomputer firms. NCR office buildings in Augsburg, Germany In the 1980s, NCR sold various PC compatible AT-class computers, like the small NCR-3390 (called an "intelligent terminal").

In 1971, Barr created the first non-IBM HASP terminal emulator. Marketed by the University Computing Company (UCC), the HASP emulator gave a significant performance increase over the IBM 2780 emulator he had developed for UCC in 1969. The emulators were developed on the PDP-8 minicomputer and allowed COPE terminals to communicate with the IBM/360 and IBM/370. In 1971, Barr also implemented the HASP workstation for M & M Computer Industries, Orange, California.

Njølstad: 258 The development of SAM arose in the NDRE's servo division. Led by Karl Holberg, it was working on Terne, an anti-submarine warfare system. The system relied on an analogue electromechanical computer and NDRE saw the possibility of using digital computers instead. Yngvar Lundh wrote his master's thesis in engineering at NDRE in 1957 and then studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US where he encountered the TX-2 minicomputer.

Texas Instruments sometimes uses Texan English in its products. The TIFORM software for its TI-990 minicomputer sometimes displayed "Shut 'er Down Clancey She's a-Pumping Mud" as a humorous error message. The Texan accent gained nationwide fame with the presidency of native Texan Lyndon B. Johnson. A lifelong resident of the Texas Hill Country, Johnson's thick accent was a large part of his personality and brought attention and fame to the dialect.

Third generation minicomputers were essentially scaled-down versions of mainframe computers, whereas the fourth generation's origins are fundamentally different. The basis of the fourth generation is the microprocessor, a computer processor contained on a single large-scale integration (LSI) MOS integrated circuit chip. Microprocessor-based computers were originally very limited in their computational ability and speed, and were in no way an attempt to downsize the minicomputer. They were addressing an entirely different market.

The Century series was followed by the Criterion series in 1976, NCR's first virtual machine system. During this period, NCR also produced the 605 minicomputer for in-house use. It was the compute engine for the 399 and 499 accounting machines, several generations of in-store and in-bank controllers, and the 82xx/90xx IMOS COBOL systems. The 605 also powered peripheral controllers, including the 658 disk subsystem and the 721 communications processor.

The "core router" was a dedicated minicomputer called an IMP Interface Message Processor.IMP – Interface Message Processor, LivingInternet Accessed June 22, 2007.Looking back at the ARPANET effort, 34 years later, Dave Walden, Accessed June 22, 2007.A Technical History of the ARPANET – A Technical Tour , THINK Protocols team, Accessed June 22, 2007. Link speeds increased steadily, requiring progressively more powerful routers until the mid-1990s, when the typical core link speed reached 155 Mbit/s.

The Wang 2200 was one of the first desktop computers with a large CRT display and ran a fast hardwired BASIC interpreter. The Wang VS system was a multiuser minicomputer whose instruction set was very close to the design of IBM's System/370. It was not binary-compatible because register usage conventions and system call interfaces were different. The Wang VS serial terminals could be used in data processing mode and word processing mode.

In 1978 Rand Jaslow tried to build a computer program to handle customer management, billing, accounting, inventory management and other functions for Jaslow Dental Laboratories. He gave up after a few months and hired Strohl Systems to do the job. The software was built by the half-owner of Strohl, Elaine Whelan, and delivered in March 1979. It was written in the EDL language and ran on an IBM Series/1 minicomputer.

The July 1974 issue of Radio-Electronics: "Build The Mark-8: Your Personal Minicomputer". The Mark-8 is a microcomputer design from 1974, based on the Intel 8008 CPU (which was the world's first 8-bit microprocessor). The Mark-8 was designed by Jonathan Titus, a Virginia Tech graduate student in Chemistry. After building the machine, Titus decided to share its design with the community and reached out to Radio-Electronics and Popular Electronics.

They attempted to incorporate under several names, including Longhorn Instruments and Texas Digital, but all were rejected. Finally, they settled on the current name of National Instruments. With a $10,000 loan from Interfirst Bank, the group bought a PDP-11/04 minicomputer and, for their first project, designed and built a GPIB interface for it. Their first sale was the result of a cold call to Kelly Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas.

He invented the continuation to solve a double recursion problem for one of the users of his Lisp implementation. In 1962, Russell created and designed Spacewar!, with the fellow members of the Tech Model Railroad Club at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), working on a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1 minicomputer. Spacewar! is widely considered to be the first digital video game and served as a foundation for the entire video game industry.

Before receiving the computer, Digital Computer Controls requested the accompanying design documentation from the seller and subsequently photocopied the drawings. The drawings explicitly stated that they could not be used to manufacture similar items without the written permission of Data General Corp. Digital Computer Controls then used the design drawings to create the D-116 minicomputer, which the court determined was "substantially identical in design" Data General Corporation v. Digital Computer Controls, Inc.

From the early years of ePRO there has been concern about whether all patients can cope with computer technology. This is important, as if significant numbers of patients refuse to take part in clinical trials because of dislike of computers then there will be bias in the study population. One of the earliest ePRO studies used a LINC-2 minicomputer to collect patient data. The majority of patients preferred the computer to paper data collection.

With every minicomputer and mainframe IBM installed (almost all were leased – not sold), a blue plastic sign was placed atop the operator's console, with the text "Think" printed on an aluminum plate. For decades IBM had also distributed small notepads with the word "THINK" emblazoned on a brown leatherette cover to customers and employees. The name "ThinkPad" was suggested by IBM employee Denny Wainwright, who had one such notepad in his pocket.Hamm, Steve (2008).

Realizing that a Problem-Oriented Language (POL) could be used to make a general-purpose computer function as a differential analyzer, the MADDIDA design team left Northrup in 1950 to focus on designing general- purpose computers, leading to them to found the CRC.Reilly 2003, p. 164. After developing the Cadac, an early minicomputer, the CRC was sold to National Cash Register (NCR) in February 1953, launching NCR into the digital computing business.Reilly 2003, p. 164.

In 1977, Digital announced the VAX series, their first 32-bit minicomputer line, described as "super- minis". The first products would not ship until February 1978. This coincided with the aging 16-bit products (notably the PDP-11), which were coming due for replacement. Data General immediately launched their own 32-bit effort in 1976 to build what they called the "world's best 32-bit machine", known internally as the "Fountainhead Project".

Also in 1973, Control Data Corporation introduced the first of its series of SMD disk drives using conventional disk pack technology. The SMD family became the predominant disk drive in the minicomputer market into the 1980s. Smaller diameter media came into usage during the 1970s and by the end of the decade standard form factors had been established for drives using nominally 8-inch media (e.g., Shugart SA1000) and nominally 5.25-inch media (e.g.

The Xerox Alto workstation was developed at Xerox PARC. In 1970, under company president C. Peter McColough, Xerox opened the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox PARC. The facility developed many modern computing technologies such as the graphical user interface (GUI), laser printing, WYSIWYG text editors and Ethernet. From these inventions, Xerox PARC created the Xerox Alto in 1973, a small minicomputer similar to a modern workstation or personal computer.

AN/GYK-12 CPU The AN/GYK-12 is an obsolete 32-bit minicomputer developed by Litton Industries for the United States Army. The AN/GYK-12 is a militarized version of the L-3050 computer ruggedized for use in the TACFIRE tactical fire direction system. The design dates from the 1960s. In 1980 the Army introduced the Nebula instruction set architecture (MIL-STD-1862), intended as an upgrade to the AN/GYK-12.

BATCH-11/DOS-11, also known simply as DOS-11, is a discontinued operating system by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts. The first version of DOS-11 (V08-02) was released in 1970 and was the first operating system to run on the Digital PDP-11 minicomputer. DOS-11 was not known to be easy to use even in its day and became much less used in 1973 with the release of the RT-11 operating system.

By 1964, over 50 systems were built. The CDC 3600, which added five op codes, succeeded the 1604, and "was largely compatible" with it. One of the 1604s was shipped to the Pentagon to DASA (Defense Atomic Support Agency) and used during the Cuban missile crises to predict possible strikes by the Soviet Union against the United States. A 12-bit minicomputer, called the CDC 160, was often used as an I/O processor in 1604 systems.

Vector General (VG) was a series of graphics terminals and the name of the Californian company that produced them. They were first introduced in 1969 and were used in computer labs until the early 1980s. The terminals were based on a common platform that read vectors provided by a host minicomputer and included hardware that could perform basic mathematical transformations in the terminal. This greatly improved the performance of operations like rotating an object or zooming in.

The ROMP's architecture was based on the original version of the IBM Research 801 minicomputer. The main differences were a larger word size (32 bits instead of 24), and the inclusion of virtual memory. The architecture supported 8-, 16-, and 32-bit integers, 32-bit addressing, and a 40-bit virtual address space. It had an instruction pointer register and sixteen 32-bit general-purpose registers. The microprocessor was controlled by 118 simple 16- and 32-bit instructions.

While FOCAL was becoming popular on DEC machines, BASIC was becoming a more popular alternative on other platforms. By the late 1960s, a number of companies were making inroads in DEC's minicomputer stronghold selling similar machines running timeshared versions of BASIC. Notable among these was the HP 2100 series, running HP Time-Shared BASIC. David H. Ahl had recently joined DEC's PDP-8 Group, just as the company became interested in selling the machine into educational settings.

Wander was created in 1973 by Peter Langston. It was initially created by Langston in HP BASIC at Evergreen State College, likely on an HP2000 minicomputer like his 1972 Empire. Langston rewrote the game in C in 1974 while at Harvard University and released it to other users of the mainframe system. He maintained the game through the rest of the decade, with a release in 1980 as part of his PSL Games Collection package of games for Unix.

The HP 3000 series is a family of minicomputers from Hewlett- Packard.Computerworld, "Midis Challenge Medium-Size Systems", June 25, 1975, p. S/6. It was designed to be the first minicomputer with full support for time-sharing in the hardware and the operating system, features that had mostly been limited to mainframes to that point. First introduced in 1972, the last models reached end-of-life in 2010, making it among the longest-lived machines of its generation.

HYPERchannel, sometimes rendered Hyperchannel, was a local area networking system for mainframe computers, especially supercomputers, introduced by Network Systems Corporation in the 1970s. It ran at the then-fast speed of 50 Mbits/second, performance that would not be matched by commodity hardware until the introduction of Fast Ethernet in 1995. HYPERchannel ran over very thick coax cable or fibre optic extensions and required adaptor hardware the size of a minicomputer. The networking protocol was entirely proprietary.

The LINC (Laboratory INstrument Computer) is a 12-bit, 2048-word transistorized computer. The LINC is considered by someFor example see William H. Calvin letter The Missing LINC, BYTE magazine April 1982 page 20 the first minicomputer and a forerunner to the personal computer. Originally named the "Linc", suggesting the project's origins at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, it was renamed LINC after the project moved from the Lincoln Laboratory. The LINC was designed by Wesley A. Clark and Charles Molnar.

Prime Computer, Inc. was a Natick, Massachusetts-based producer of minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. With the advent of PCs and the decline of the minicomputer industry, Prime was forced out of the market in the early 1990s, and by the end of 2010 the trademarks for both PRIMEUS Trademark No. 73123025 and PRIMOSUS Trademark No. 73122880 no longer existedabandoned,expired,"cancelled" The alternative spellings "PR1ME" and "PR1MOS" were used as brand names or logos by the company.

Before the advent of VLSI devices, TTL integrated circuits were a standard method of construction for the processors of minicomputer and mainframe computers; such as the DEC VAX and Data General Eclipse, and for equipment such as machine tool numerical controls, printers and video display terminals. As microprocessors became more functional, TTL devices became important for "glue logic" applications, such as fast bus drivers on a motherboard, which tie together the function blocks realized in VLSI elements.

In 1970 Data General Corporation released the Nova 1200, a minicomputer twice as fast as previous models. Upon purchaser's request, Data General Corporation would include with the computer design documentation intended to allow customers to maintain and repair their own computers. These design drawings were annotated as confidential, and customers received a contractual agreement of confidentiality with their purchase. In March 1971, the president of Digital Computer Controls purchased a secondhand Nova 1200 from a third party.

Heradstveit: 41 As "Nordata" was already registered by a company in Trondheim, the name was changed to A/S Norsk Data-Elektronikk on 20 July.Heradstveit: 47 A Nord-1 minicomputer The company's first offices were located at Ole Deviks vei 10 in Oslo, which was located in the facilities of a fan manufacturer. Operations commenced on 19 September with the three founders, Monrad-Krohn, Skår and Bjørge.Heradstveit: 43 They received the same wages as they had at NDRE.

The decision fell on Norsk Data, with the contract signed in January 1973. The computer was delivered and accepted on 12 July 1973, twelve days after the contract specified.Heradstveit: 99 The contract included twenty-four computers and a revenue of NOK 12 million.Heradstveit: 101 Norsk Data took a strategic decision to abandon their role as system supplier for a few, large customers and decided to become a European-wide minicomputer supplier which could compete directly with American manufacturers.

The 7400 series offered data-selectors, multiplexers, three-state buffers, memories, etc. in dual in-line packages with one-tenth inch spacing, making major system components and architecture evident to the naked eye. Starting in the 1980s, many minicomputers used VLSI circuits. At the launch of the MITS Altair 8800 in 1975, Radio Electronics magazine referred to the system as a "minicomputer", although the term microcomputer soon became usual for personal computers based on single-chip microprocessors.

Bell's law of computer classes formulated by Gordon Bell in 1972 plots various mainframe and emerging minicomputer by function and price. describes how types of computing systems (referred to as computer classes) form, evolve and may eventually die out. New classes of computers create new applications resulting in new markets and new industries. Bell considers the law to be partially a corollary to Moore's law which states "the number of transistors per chip double every 18 months".

OS4000 was ported to the GEC Series 63 minicomputer where it was known as OS6000. This required the addition of a software Nucleus emulation, as this was not a feature of the GEC Series 63 hardware. GEC Computers dropped OS6000, and the source code was given to Daresbury Laboratory who was the main user of it, and they continued to keep it in step with OS4000 releases for the lifetime of their two GEC Series 63 systems.

The Nord-100 was a 16-bit minicomputer series made by Norsk Data, introduced in 1979. It shipped with the Sintran III operating system, and the architecture was based on, and backwards compatible with, the Nord-10 line. The Nord-100 was originally named the Nord-10/M (M for Micro) as a bitsliced OEM processor. The board was laid out and finished and tested when they realized that the CPU was far faster than the Nord-10/S.

A Technical History of the ARPANET - A Technical Tour , THINK Protocols team, Accessed June 22, 2007. An IMP was a ruggedized Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer with special-purpose interfaces and software. In later years the IMPs were made from the non-ruggedized Honeywell 316 which could handle two- thirds of the communication traffic at approximately one-half the cost. An IMP requires the connection to a host computer via a special bit-serial interface, defined in BBN Report 1822.

In 1979 University of Virginia 4th year students Kelton Flinn and John Taylor started work on a game for the Hewlett-Packard HP 2000F time sharing minicomputer. Known simply as S, the game supported up to eight players on directly connected 2400 baud terminals. Much of what would become MegaWars III was present in S, but greatly simplified. This included ship-to- ship combat, the galaxy layout and creation engine, and a simple planetary economics system.

The prototype of what later became Lode Runner was a game developed by Douglas E. Smith, who at the time was an architecture student at the University of Washington. This prototype, called Kong, was written for a Prime Computer 550 minicomputer limited to one building on the UW campus. Shortly thereafter, Kong was ported to VAX minicomputers, as there were more terminals available on campus. The game was programmed in Fortran and used ASCII character graphics.

The IBM RT PC (RISC Technology Personal Computer) is a family of workstation computers from IBM introduced in 1986. These were the first commercial computers from IBM that were based on a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture. The RT PC used IBM's proprietary ROMP microprocessor, which commercialized technologies pioneered by IBM Research's 801 experimental minicomputer (the 801 was the first RISC). The RT PC ran three operating systems: AIX, the Academic Operating System (AOS), or Pick.

"Unplayed By Human Hands" are the titles of two album recordings made in the mid-1970s of computerized organ performances recorded at the All Saints Church in Pasadena, California on their 90-rank Schlicker pipe organ. The project was headed by Prentiss Knowlton, a student of computer science at the University of Utah. The computer employed for the task of controlling the pipe organ was a PDP-8 minicomputer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1965.

Systime Computers Ltd was a British computer manufacturer and systems integrator of the 1970s and 1980s. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Systime become the second largest British manufacturer of computers, specializing in the minicomputer market. The company was based in Leeds, England, and founded in 1973. Its success was based on selling systems built around OEM components from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), and it grew to have over 1,300 employees with turnover peaking around £60 million.

With peak performance of 1600 MIPS and a price $2.2 million, it was $1375/MIPS, compared to a contemporary Alliant FX/40 minicomputer at $4650/MIPS. A 1989 Computerworld review of the market for mid-range high-performance machines showed only one machine in the same class, the Connection Machine CM-2. The new leftmost-rightmost algorithm had a fatal flaw. In high-contention cases the "middle" units would never be serviced, and could stall for thousands of cycles.

The game was copied to several of the early minicomputer installations in American academic institutions after its initial release, making it potentially the first video game to be available outside a single research institute. Spacewar was extremely popular in the small programming community in the 1960s and was widely recreated on other minicomputer and mainframe computers of the time, later migrating to early microcomputer systems. Early computer scientist Alan Kay noted in 1972 that "the game of Spacewar blossoms spontaneously wherever there is a graphics display connected to a computer," and contributor Martin Graetz recalled in 1981 that as the game initially spread it could be found on "just about any research computer that had a programmable CRT". Although the game was widespread for the era, it was still very limited in its direct reach: the PDP-1 was priced at and only 55 were ever sold, most without a monitor, which prohibited the original Spacewar or any game of the time from reaching beyond a narrow, academic audience.

This project, presented in 2015, proposes a new versatile mobile device and a sonification method specifically designed to the pedestrian locomotion of the visually impaired. It sonifies in real-time spatial information from a video stream acquired at a standard frame rate. The device is composed of a miniature camera integrated into a glasses frame which is connected to a battery-powered minicomputer worn around the neck with a strap. The audio signal is transmitted to the user via running headphones.

Unlike its mainframe and minicomputer contemporaries, the original Unix system was developed solely for dumb terminals, and that remains the case today. A terminal is a character-oriented device, comprising streams of characters received from and sent to the device. Although the streams of characters are structured, incorporating control characters, escape codes, and special characters, the I/O protocol is not structured as would be the I/O protocol of smart, or intelligent, terminals. There are no field format specifications.

On February 22, 1973, Ahl was let go during a downsizing at DEC. But before he received his last paycheck, he was hired by a different department to help develop new low-end versions of the DEC minicomputer line. During this period he collected many user submissions to Edu and convinced DEC to publish 101 BASIC Computer Games in the summer of 1973. This was a hit, and eventually ran three publishing runs; July 1973, April 1974, and March 1975.

Bipolar Integrated Technology was a semiconductor company based in Beaverton, Oregon which sold products implemented with ECL technology. The company was founded in 1983 by former Floating Point Systems, Intel, and Tektronix engineers. The initial product was a Floating point coprocessor chip set. Later, the company produced the B5000 SPARC ECL microprocessor (never reached production in a Sun Microsystems product, though used by Floating Point Systems) and the R6000 MIPS ECL microprocessor (which did reach production as a MIPS minicomputer).

Digistar was driven by a VAX-11/780 minicomputer, with custom graphics hardware related to the E&S; Picture System 2. The Digistar 2 used a DEC MicroVAX 2, driving a custom version of a PS/300. The original Digistar and Digistar 2 had a physical control panel that was used for running the star shows. This control panel was approximately 3' x 4' and contained a keyboard, a 6 DOF joystick, and a large array of back-lit buttons.

Pertec's primary line of computer products was aimed at the key-to-disk minicomputer systems that were used as front-end data processors for the IBM 360/370 and similar systems. This line was opened in the first half of the 1970s by the Pertec PCC-2100 data entry system, which was essentially different from the PCC-2000 mentioned above. The system was able to serve up to 16 coaxial terminals, two D3000 disk drives and one T1640 tape drive.

Correction; The original PC-VS hardware was using the 928 terminal emulator board, the WLOC © boards were used in the subsequent 80286 machines. These PC's later formed the basis for the system console on VS7000 and later series of the Wang mid frame series, being used for the initialisation of the boot process. One of the distinguishing features of the Wang PC was the system software. Similar to the Wang VS minicomputer, the command line was not immediately evident.

With the creation of the VAX minicomputer, DEC ported BASIC-PLUS-2 to the new VMS operating system, and called it VAX BASIC. VAX BASIC used the standard VMS calling standards, so object code produced by VAX BASIC could be linked with object code produced by any of the other VMS languages. Source code for BASIC Plus 2 would usually run without major changes on VAX BASIC. When DEC created their Alpha microprocessor, VMS was ported to it and renamed OpenVMS.

It is uncommon to have the registers be fully general purpose, because then there is no strong reason to have an expression stack and postfix instructions. Another common hybrid is to start with a register machine architecture, and add another memory address mode which emulates the push or pop operations of stack machines: 'memaddress = reg; reg += instr.displ'. This was first used in DEC's PDP-11 minicomputer. This feature was carried forward in VAX computers and in Motorola 6800 and M68000 microprocessors.

It features two spaceships, "the needle" and "the wedge", engaged in a dogfight while maneuvering in the gravity well of a star. Both ships are controlled by human players. The initial prototype, which cost Pitts and Tuck to build, was composed of a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 minicomputer attached by a cable to a wooden console with a monitor, controls, and seats. It charged players 10 cents per game or 25 cents for three, and drew crowds "ten-deep".

K-202 was a 16-bit minicomputer, created by a team led by Polish scientist Jacek Karpiński between 1970–1973 in cooperation with British companies Data- LoopData-Loop and M.B. Metals. Approximately 30 units were claimed to be produced. All units shipped to M.B. Metals were returned for service. Due to friction resulting from competition with Elwro, a government-backed competitor, the production of K-202 was blocked and Karpiński thrown out of his company under the allegations of sabotage and embezzlement.

The target was the ICL 1900 series. This compiler, in turn, was the parent of the Pascal compiler for the Information Computer Systems (ICS) Multum minicomputer. The Multum port was developed – with a view to using Pascal as a systems programming language – by Findlay, Cupples, Cavouras and Davis, working at the Department of Computing Science in Glasgow University. It is thought that Multum Pascal, which was completed in the summer of 1973, may have been the first 16-bit implementation.

In 1963, DEC introduced what is considered to be the first commercial minicomputer in the form of the PDP-5. This was a 12-bit design adapted from the 1962 LINC machine that was intended to be used in a lab setting. DEC slightly simplified the LINC system and instruction set, aiming the PDP-5 at smaller settings that did not need the power of their larger 18-bit PDP-4. The PDP-5 was a success, ultimately selling about 50,000 examples.

Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline. Although the company produced many different product lines over their history, they are best known for their work in the minicomputer market starting in the mid-1960s.

Looking for another design they could purchase, Packard was led to the five-person Data Systems, Inc. (DSI) of Detroit. DSI was owned by Union Carbide, and when Packard asked how it was that Union Carbide came to own a computer company, HP Labs manager Barney Oliver replied, "We didn't demand an answer to that question." Bill Hewlett initially refused to consider the development of a "minicomputer", but when Packard reframed it as an "instrument controller" the deal was approved.

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.

It could run on various terminals from dumb typewriters up to the Imlac PDS-1 graphical minicomputer. On the PDS-1, it supported multi-window WYSIWYG editing and graphics display. The PDS-1 used a light pen, not a mouse, and the light pen could be "clicked" using a foot-pedal. FRESS allowed multiple users to collaborate on as set of documents, which could be of arbitrary size, and (unlike prior systems) were not laid out in lines until the moment of display.

Data General (DG) was founded by several engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation who were frustrated with DEC's management and left to form their own company. The chief founders were Edson de Castro, Henry Burkhardt III, and Richard Sogge of Digital Equipment (DEC), and Herbert Richman of Fairchild Semiconductor. The company was founded in Hudson, Massachusetts in 1968. Edson de Castro was the chief engineer in charge of the PDP-8, DEC's line of inexpensive computers that created the minicomputer market.

In 1979, the company was acquired by the British General Electric Company (not to be confused with the American company General Electric). In the early 1980s, following this acquisition, A. B. Dick was involved with GEC Computers in the production of the ill-fated GEC Series 63 minicomputer. In 1988, the company acquired Itek Graphix, a leading manufacturer of plate-makers for duplicators (small format offset presses). By the late 1990s, A. B. Dick was a division of the Nesco company of Cleveland.

The PC explosion in the late 1980s and early 1990s signalled the end of the road for proprietary DNC terminals. With some exceptions, CNC manufacturers began migrating to PC-based controls running DOS, Windows or OS/2 which could be linked in to existing networks using standard protocols. Customers began migrating away from expensive minicomputer and workstation based CAD/CAM toward more cost- effective PC-based solutions. Users began to demand more from their DNC systems than secure upload/download and editing.

As part of this assignment, Rubinstein went to San Francisco. Two years later, Rubinstein moved to the Bay Area and landed an assignment to implement a law office management system on a Varian Data Machines minicomputer. Following this, he formed the Systems Division of Prodata International Corporation which was subsequently acquired by Varian Data Machines. As a consequence, Rubinstein temporarily moved to Zürich, Switzerland to utilize the technology he developed as part of a branch banking system for Credit Suisse.

In 1979 at the University of Hamburg, motivated and supported by his advisor Frieder Schwenkel, Alexander Reinefeld designed the chess program Murks, partly implemented in microcode for an Interdata M85 minicomputer. Reinefeld claimed that world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik played against Murks during his visit. In 1980/81, a team of four students, Manfred Allers, Dirk Hauschildt, Dieter Steinwender and Alexander Reinefeld, ported Murks to a Motorola 68000 microprocessor, then dubbed MicroMurks. They built their own MC68000 microcomputer from scratch.

MUMPS was soon ported to a number of other systems including the popular DEC PDP-8, the Data General Nova and on DEC PDP-11 and the Artronix PC12 minicomputer. Word about MUMPS spread mostly through the medical community, and was in widespread use, often being locally modified for their own needs. By the early 1970's, there were many and varied implementations of MUMPS on a range of hardware platforms. Another noteworthy platform was Paul Stylos' DEC MUMPS-11 on the PDP-11, and MEDITECH's MIIS.

When he returned to NDRE, Lundh started working on a digital computer named Lydia for Bridge, an anti-submarine system. Holberg became director of the telecommunications division in 1962 and Lundh's group moved there.Njølstad: 259 Holberg gave the go-ahead for the development of a minicomputer in mid 1962 and was to be a further development of Lydia. The goal was not to make a computer that could compete with commercial models, but instead be tailored for use internally in NDRE for research of computers and simulation.

This machine had 30 photomultiplier tubes as detectors and completed a scan in only nine translate/rotate cycles, much faster than the EMI-Scanner. It used a DEC PDP11/34 minicomputer both to operate the servo- mechanisms and to acquire and process the images. The Pfizer drug company acquired the prototype from the university, along with rights to manufacture it. Pfizer then began making copies of the prototype, calling it the "200FS" (FS meaning Fast Scan), which were selling as fast as they could make them.

Another influential early mainframe game was Baseball, a sports game that was created on a PDP-10 minicomputer at Pomona College in 1971 by English major Don Daglow. Baseball was the first baseball video game that allowed players to manage the game as it unfolded, rather than just picking players at the beginning of a game. The program is documented at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. Baseball was continually updated through 1974, and distributed to other PDP-10 installations.

There was some competition in digital logic projects between Radio-Electronics and Popular Electronics. In September 1973, Radio- Electronics published Don Lancaster's "TV Typewriter" and in July 1974 it published Jon Titus's "Mark-8 Personal Minicomputer". However, Popular Electronics published the most famous project in January 1975 with the MITS Altair 8800 computer. After Popular Electronics went under after attempting to become a computer magazine in the early 1980s, Radio-Electronics published many eye-catching feature projects like a series on cable TV descramblers.

PCC had traditionally operated in the mid-range segment, providing boards to New England-based minicomputer companies. Sarmanian bought state-of-the-art equipment to keep pace with the industry, but he always did it as a follower. At the beginning of the 1980s, Sarmanian saw that volumes in the low-end were beginning to explode and decided to diversify. By 1995, only 50% of PCC's revenues came from its traditional mid-range customers; the other 50% came from low-end consumer electronics manufacturers.

The operating system supported inter- system communication, job submission and file transfer between CP-6 systems and between CP-6 and CP-V and to and from IBM and other HASP protocol systems. The system used communications and terminal interfaces through a Honeywell Level 6 minicomputer-based front-end processor. Asynchronous, bisynchronous and TCP/IP communications protocols were supported. The Honeywell hardware system for CP-6 consisted of a mainframe host processor (L66, DPS8, DPS8000, DPS90), to which connected disks, tapes, printers, and card equipment were connected.

A full game of Rocket, one of the early versions of the game type. The player has only spent fuel at the last moment, and as a result has crashed into the Moon. The original Lunar Lander game was a 1969 text-based game called Lunar, or alternately the Lunar Landing Game. It was originally written in the FOCAL programming language for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 minicomputer by Jim Storer while a student at Lexington High School in the fall of 1969.

Yourdon obtained his B.S. in applied mathematics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1965, and did graduate work in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and the Polytechnic Institute of New York. In 1964 Yourdon started working at Digital Equipment Corporation developing FORTRAN programs for the PDP-5 minicomputer and later assembler for the PDP-8. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he worked at a small consulting firm and as an independent consultant. In 1974 Yourdon founded his own consulting firm, YOURDON Inc.

Microsoft used the same floating-point formats in their implementation of Fortran and for their macro assembler MASM, although their spreadsheet Multiplan and their COBOL implementation used binary-coded decimal (BCD) floating point. Even so, for a while MBF became the de facto floating-point format on home computers, to the point where people still occasionally encounter legacy files and file formats using it. VAX-11/780 minicomputer In a parallel development, Intel had started the development of a floating-point coprocessor in 1976.

The terminal allowed the user to work on one page at a time, which was periodically saved to the minicomputer. This "intelligent workstation" concept for word processing was similar to the functions of popular systems from rival Wang Laboratories. Prime's intelligent workstation for word processing was faster because it used RS232C cabling runs instead of the coaxial links that Wang's systems used. Nonetheless, the word processing was not of the highest quality, and the PT65 was subject to software errors that scrambled the documents being worked on.

The minicomputer ancestors of the modern personal computer used early integrated circuit (microchip) technology, which reduced size and cost, but they contained no microprocessor. This meant that they were still large and difficult to manufacture just like their mainframe predecessors. After the "computer-on-a-chip" was commercialized, the cost to manufacture a computer system dropped dramatically. The arithmetic, logic, and control functions that previously occupied several costly circuit boards were now available in one integrated circuit, making it possible to produce them in high volume.

Because the trio were still employed by the University of Texas, in 1977 they hired their first full-time employee, Kim Harrison-Hosen, who handled orders, billing, and customer inquiries. By the end of the year they had sold three boards, and, to attract more business, the company produced and sent a mailer to 15,000 users of the PDP-11 minicomputer. As sales increased, they were able to move into a real office space in 1978, occupying a office at 9513 Burnet Road in Austin, Texas.

The company was founded in Herkimer, NY by George Cogar, Lauren King, and Ted Robinson, former Univac employees. Their success in selling their first product, a Key-to-Tape Data Entry device that allowed doing away with Keypunch devices, brought them enough cash to also grow via acquisition. Among their acquisitions was the developer of a minicomputer, the Atron 501 and 502. From the know-how acquired and absorbed, Mohawk expanded into the areas of controlling line printers and also Remote Job Entry (RJE).

Rematerialization or remat is a compiler optimization which saves time by recomputing a value instead of loading it from memory. It is typically tightly integrated with register allocation, where it is used as an alternative to spilling registers to memory. It was conceived by Gregory Chaitin, Marc Auslander, Ashok Chandra, John Cocke, Martin Hopkins and Peter Markstein and implemented in the Pl.8 compiler for the 801 Minicomputer in the late 1970s. Later improvements were made by Preston Briggs, Keith D. Cooper, and Linda Torczon in 1992.

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.

The CDC 160 series was a series of minicomputers built by Control Data Corporation. The CDC 160 and CDC 160-A were 12-bit minicomputers built from 1960 to 1965; the CDC 160G was a 13-bit minicomputer, with an extended version of the CDC 160-A instruction set, and a compatibility mode in which it did not use the 13th bit. The 160 was designed by Seymour Cray - reportedly over a long three-day weekend. It fit into the desk where its operator sat.

The pilot project used vector and raster map data digitized from USGS base maps, from aerial imagery, and maps provided by other agencies. The Pilot project was successful and allowed additional enhancements and bug fixes to be accomplished for deploying MOSS for production use. By 1979, a user accessible version of MOSS was available on the CDC mainframe. In late 1979, the FWS purchased a Data General computer (AOS Operating System) and required MOSS to be ported from the CDC mainframe to the DG minicomputer.

Two adjacent NORD-10/S systems Nord-10 was a medium-sized general-purpose 16-bit minicomputer designed for multilingual time-sharing applications and for real-time multi-program systems, produced by Norsk Data. It was introduced in 1973. The later follow up model, Nord-10/S, introduced in 1975, introduced CPU cache, paging, and other miscellaneous improvements. The CPU had a microprocessor, which was defined in the manual as a portmanteau of "microcode processor" - not to be confused with the then nascent microprocessor.

The Nord-1 Nord-1 was Norsk Data's first minicomputer and the first commercially available computer made in Norway. It was a 16-bit system, developed in 1967 from the Simulation for Automatic Machinery. The first Nord-1 (serial number 2) installed was at the heart of a complete ship system aboard the Taimyr, a Japanese-built cargo liner. The system included bridge control, power management, load condition monitoring and the first ever computer-controlled, radar-sensed anti-collision system (Automatic Radar Plotting Aid).

It stored its video & audio content on disk pack drives supplied by Memorex for instant random access of the video content. The 600 was paired with the CMX-200, which took the edit decision list created by the 600, and automatically controlled several VTRs to auto-assemble the final program. The 600 was controlled using a Digital PDP-11 minicomputer, and the 200 used a Teletype Model 33 terminal to input EDLs from the 600. CMX also developed the CMX-300 in 1972, a system used for online editing (and CMX's first online product).

In the late 1970s Data General was sued (under the Sherman and Clayton antitrust acts) by competitors for their practice of bundling RDOS with the Data General Nova or Eclipse minicomputer. When Data General introduced the Data General Nova, a company called Digidyne wanted to use its RDOS operating system on its own hardware clone. Data General refused to license their software and claimed their "bundling rights". In 1985, courts including the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled against Data General in a case called Digidyne v.

One definition from 1970 required a minicomputer to cost less than US$25,000. In contrast, regular mainframes could cost more than US$1,000,000. By the end of the 1960s, mainframe computers and minicomputers were present in many academic research institutions and large companies such as Bell Labs. While the commercial video game industry did not yet exist at that point in the early history of video games and would not until the early 1970s, programmers at these companies created several small games to be played on their mainframe computers.

In the minicomputer ancestors of the modern personal computer, processing was carried out by circuits with large numbers of components arranged on multiple large printed circuit boards. Minicomputers were consequently physically large and expensive to produce compared with later microprocessor systems. After the "computer-on-a-chip" was commercialized, the cost to produce a computer system dropped dramatically. The arithmetic, logic, and control functions that previously occupied several costly circuit boards were now available in one integrated circuit which was very expensive to design but cheap to produce in large quantities.

The book was written after the book The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, which was highly influential in local computing circles. That book documents the competition between Data General and DEC to create a 32-bit minicomputer. Both companies missed the opportunity to launch successful micro-computers and by the time the book was published, the IBM PC had already become a de facto standard. The year 1988 heralded a financial crisis that hit both companies hard, and started a downward slide in sales from which they never recovered.

The protocol became a de facto data communications standard for transferring files between dissimilar computer systems, and by the early 1990s it could convert multilingual character encodings. Kermit software has been used in many countries, for tasks ranging from simple student assignments to solving compatibility problems aboard the International Space Station.International Space Station Incorporates Kermit (December 2003) It was ported to a wide variety of mainframe, minicomputer and microcomputer systems down to handhelds and electronic pocket calculators. Most versions had a user interface based on the original TOPS-20 Kermit.

An 8.3 filename (also called a short filename or SFN) is a filename convention used by old versions of DOS and versions of Microsoft Windows prior to Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.5. It is also used in modern Microsoft operating systems as an alternate filename to the long filename for compatibility with legacy programs. The filename convention is limited by the FAT file system. Similar 8.3 file naming schemes have also existed on earlier CP/M, TRS-80, Atari, and some Data General and Digital Equipment Corporation minicomputer operating systems.

RETRIEVE was highly influential and spawned a number of relatively direct clones. Wang Laboratories's RECALL on the Wang 2200 minicomputer was almost identical to RETRIEVE, to the point the differences were detailed in a single page. JPL made a version known as JPLDIS for the UNIVAC 1108 in 1973 that was also very similar. Wayne Ratliff, a contractor at JPL for many years, was inspired by JPLDIS to port it to the IMSAI 8080 to manage his football pool, later releasing it commercially as Vulcan for CP/M in 1979.

The Design of an Optimizing Compiler (Elsevier Science Ltd, 1980, ), by William Wulf, Richard K. Johnson, Charles B. Weinstock, Steven O. Hobbs, and Charles M. Geschke, was published in 1975 by Elsevier. It describes the BLISS optimizing compiler for the PDP-11, written at Carnegie Mellon University in the early 1970s. The compiler ran on a PDP-10 and was one of the first to produce well-optimized code for a minicomputer. Because of its elegant design and the quality of the generated code, the compiler and book remain classics in the compiler field.

The system had a terminal-and-server paradigm, using modified DEC PDP-11 minicomputer hardware running a custom Atex multi-user operating system. Terminals were little more than keyboards, with the servers directly generating video signals for each terminal. The memory-mapped screen images were monochrome and not high resolution, but they could scroll quickly and fluidly without the constraints imposed by conventional serial data connections, which at the time were not very fast. The servers were paired for redundancy; each story saved to disk was written to two separate systems.

Whitehead together with Miller, Crane and Kaplan co-founded Activision, the first third-party video game developer, in October 1979. There, with others, he created a VCS development system with an integrated debugger and minicomputer-hosted assembler. It was used for most of Activision's VCS titles. He also developed a "venetian blinds" animation technique: an algorithm that horizontally reused and vertically interlaced sprites several times while rendering each frame, to give the illusion that the system had more than the maximum number of sprites allowed by the hardware.

Systems Programming Language, often shortened to SPL but sometimes known as SPL/3000, was a procedurally-oriented programming language written by Hewlett- Packard for the HP 3000 minicomputer line and first introduced in 1972. SPL was used to write the HP 3000's primary operating system, Multi-Programming Executive (MPE). Similar languages on other platforms were generically referred to as system programming languages, confusing matters. Originally known as Alpha Systems Programming Language, named for the development project that produced the 3000-series, SPL was designed to take advantage of the Alpha's stack-based processor design.

VSI BASIC for OpenVMS is the latest name for a dialect of the BASIC programming language created by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and now owned by VMS Software Incorporated (VSI). It was originally developed as BASIC-PLUS in the 1970s for the RSTS-11 operating system on the PDP-11 minicomputer. It was later ported to OpenVMS, first on VAX, then Alpha, and most recently Integrity. Past names for the product include: BASIC-PLUS, Basic Plus 2 (BP2 or BASIC-Plus-2), VAX BASIC, DEC BASIC, Compaq BASIC for OpenVMS and HP BASIC for OpenVMS.

At the beginning of the 1970s, video games existed almost entirely as novelties passed around by programmers and technicians with access to computers, primarily at research institutions and large companies. One of these games was Spacewar!, created in 1962 for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1 minicomputer by Steve Russell and others in the programming community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The two- player game has the players engage in a dogfight between two spaceships, set against the backdrop of a starfield, with a central star exerting gravitational force upon the ships.

TATA Elxsi was a minicomputer manufacturing company established in the late 1970s along with a host of other competitors (Trilogy Systems, Sequent, Convex Computer) in Silicon Valley, USA. The Elxsi processor was an Emitter Coupled Logic (ECL) design that featured a 50-nanosecond clock, a 25-nanosecond backpanel bus, IEEE floating-point arithmetic and a 64-bit architecture. It allowed multiple processors to communicate over a common bus called the Gigabus, believed to be the first company to do so. The operating system was a message based operating system called EMBOS.

Although Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX minicomputer was introduced October 25, 1977 and Vax UK Ltd was formed months later, DEC (for a while) still had a trademark problem. In 1986-87 and some later advertisements, the company adopted the slogan, "Nothing sucks like a Vax!" This echoed its competitor's slogan from the 1960s, "Nothing sucks like Electrolux". Playing on the double meaning of the word "sucks", the slogan "Nothing sucks like a VAX!" was used by critics of the VAX computer and complex instruction set computers in general.

HP Time-Shared BASIC (HP TSB) is a BASIC programming language interpreter for Hewlett-Packard's HP 2000 line of minicomputer-based time-sharing computer systems. TSB is historically notable as the platform that released the first public versions of the game Star Trek. The system implements a dialect of BASIC as well as a rudimentary user account and program library that allows multiple people to use the system at once. The systems were a major force in the early-to-mid 1970s and generated a large number of programs.

Milestones of a Revolution: an IBM 360 represents the coming of age of mainframe computers for commercial applications. The emergence of computer programming languages was featured in a milestone showing how for the first time, different computers were programmed to accept a common language - COBOL. A 1970s vignette portrayed a PDP-8 minicomputer being used backstage to control theater lighting, and applications to scientific computer were shown with a CRAY-1 at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. A student publishing her school newspaper using a Macintosh showed the beginning of personal computing.

Once the layout and > schematics final edits were manually checked to confirm their accuracy, the > multiple layers of the physical circuitry were sent to a film plotter to > create masks for fabrication. > The central processing unit consists of a minicomputer, a computer console > and page printer, a magnetic tape transport and a magnetic disk memory unit. > Other optional peripheral devices such as card readers and paper tape > punches are also available. These components are interfaced with Calma- > designed and manufactured controllers, and integrated into a single unit > with system software designed and programmed by Calma.

While the high price of a minicomputer prevented such a game from being feasible then, in 1971 Tuck and Bill Pitts created a prototype coin-operated computer game, Galaxy Game, with a PDP-11, though they never produced more than two prototypes exhibited at Stanford. Around the same time, a second prototype coin-operated game based on Spacewar!, Computer Space, was developed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, which would become the first commercially sold arcade video game and the first widely available video game of any kind.

The HP 2000 system was designed to run time-shared BASIC as its primary task. BASIC, as a streamlined language designed with integrated line editing in mind, was naturally suited to porting to the minicomputer market, which was emerging at the same time as the time-sharing services. These machines had very small main memory, perhaps as little as 4 kB in modern terminology and lacked the high-performance storage like hard drives that make compilers practical. In contrast, an interpreter would take fewer computing resources, at the expense of performance.

Corporate logo from 1976 to 1992 Norsk Data (ND) was a Norwegian manufacturer of minicomputers which operated between 1967 and 1992. The company was established as A/S Nordata – Norsk Data-Elektronikk on 7 July 1967 and took into use the Norsk Data brand in 1975. The company was founded by Lars Monrad- Krohn, Rolf Skår and Per Bjørge, three computer engineers working at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment which had just built the minicomputer SAM 2. ND's first contract was the delivery of a Nord-1 computer to Norcontrol.

The Z800 was, in most ways, a minicomputer-inspired "super Z80" that would run existing, and larger, programs at considerably higher speeds. However the address and data buses were multiplexed and the chip was, also in other respects, somewhat complicated to program and interface to. Calculation of exact execution times was also very much harder to do than for the Z80. Moreover, the plain Z80 were good enough for most applications at the time so the extra computing power was, in many cases, not worth the added complexity.

Signetics 2650 introductory ad, October 30, 1975 Signetics 2650AN PC1001 evaluation board Signetics 2650 chip magnified Signetics 2650A chip The Signetics 2650 was an 8-bit microprocessor introduced in mid-1975. According to Adam Osborne's book An Introduction to Microprocessors Vol 2: Some Real Products, it was "the most minicomputer-like" of the microprocessors available at the time. A combination of missing features and odd memory access limited its appeal, and the system saw little use in the market. Signetics became better known as a second-source supplier for the MOS 6502.

The chip contained seven 8-bit general-purpose registers, although only four were visible at any time. It was limited to a 15-bit address space (thereby addressing a maximum of 32 KB of memory), since the upper bit of a 16-bit memory reference was reserved to indicate that the indirect memory addressing mode was to be used (a minicomputer-like feature). The address space was further limited by the use of another two bits of the address to indicate the indexing mode for all logical and arithmetic (i.e. non branch) instructions.

From 1957 until 1992, DEC's headquarters were located in a former wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts. The headquarter buildings were vacated in 1993, renamed Clock Tower Place, and subsequently redeveloped as Mill & Main Place, a 1.1 million square foot facility for offices and light industry. Initially focusing on the small end of the computer market allowed DEC to grow without its potential competitors making serious efforts to compete with them. Their PDP series of machines became popular in the 1960s, especially the PDP-8, widely considered to be the first successful minicomputer.

In addition to the language itself, Kemeny and Kurtz developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System (DTSS), which allowed multiple users to edit and run BASIC programs at the same time. This general model became very popular on minicomputer systems like the PDP-11 and Data General Nova in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Hewlett-Packard produced an entire computer line for this method of operation, introducing the HP2000 series in the late 1960s and continuing sales into the 1980s. Many early video games trace their history to one of these versions of BASIC.

The HP 2000 system was designed to run time-shared BASIC as its primary task. BASIC, by its very nature of being small, was naturally suited to porting to the minicomputer market, which was emerging at the same time as the time-sharing services. These machines had very small main memory, perhaps as little as 4 kB in modern terminology, and lacked high-performance storage like hard drives that make compilers practical. On these systems, BASIC was normally implemented as an interpreter rather than a compiler due to the reduced need for working memory.

Spacewar! video game written at MIT in 1962, on an early PDP-1 minicomputer Guest speakers at meetings of the Society have included Hugo Gernsback (whose 1963 address to the Society has been published as "Prophets of Doom"), Frederik Pohl, John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Hal Clement, and Larry Niven, and more recently John Scalzi and Charles Stross. The Society was instrumental in the first Boskone science fiction convention, in NESFA founding, and in the Noreascon in 1971, among others. The World Science Fiction Society, which sponsors the Hugo awards, is still located in Cambridge.

The SuperPaint system was a custom computer system built around a Data General Nova 800 minicomputer CPU and a hand-wired shift register framebuffer. This system had 311,040 bytes of memory and was capable of storing 640 by 480 pixels of data with 8 bits of color depth. The memory was scattered across 16 circuit boards, each loaded with multiple 2-kilobit shift register chips. While workable, this design required that the total framebuffer be implemented as a 307,200 byte shift register that shifted in synchronization with the television output signal.

The Gp-16 was minicomputer designed mainly for industrial customers, whose concept in design was similar to PDP-8. The design took place in Rome during the mid-sixties under the supervision of Saverio Rotella, when the production was carried in Fusaro (Napoli) in the second half of that decade.Il Mondo The most known uses were in control tower in airports, as done in Venice; a modified upgraded version was used in Gruppi Speciali of CSELT, the second electromechanical phone switch in Europe. The Gp16 was later adopted also by Olivetti.Olivettiani.

In 1963, he was invited by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard to become the administrative head of the research department at Hewlett-Packard. He was the first general manager of HP's computer divisions, credited with helping shepherd HP's entry into the minicomputer business. During the 1960s, he also started University Laboratories, which was later merged into Spectra-Physics. At University Laboratories he was the co-developer of the first low-cost He-Ne laser, having had the idea of how to directly integrate the laser cavity mirrors inside the plasma tube.

Rawitsch was initially hesitant, as the unit needed to be complete within two weeks, but Heinemann and Dillenberger felt it could be done if they worked long hours each day on it. The trio then spent the weekend designing and coding the game on paper. The Minneapolis school district had recently purchased an HP 2100 minicomputer, and the schools the trio were teaching in, like the other schools in the district, were connected to it via a single teleprinter. These teleprinters could send and print messages from programs running on the central computer.

Other teachers at the school came up with "flimsy excuses" for their students to try the game as well. The trio adjusted the game's code as the students played in response to bugs found, such as purchasing clothes for negative money. As the school district shared a single central minicomputer, schools across the city began to play the game as well. When the semester and their student teaching term ended, the team printed out copies of the source code—about 800 lines of code—and deleted the program from the computer.

Data General Business Basic was a BASIC interpreter (based on a version from MAI Basic Four) marketed by Data General for their Nova minicomputer in the 1970s, and later ported to the Data General Eclipse MV and AViiON computers. Most business applications for the Nova were developed in Business Basic. Business Basic was an integer-only language inspired by COBOL, and contained powerful string-handling functions and the ability to manipulate indexed files very quickly. It also provided full control over the display screen, with cursor positioning, attribute setting, and region-blanking commands.

HP Vectra was a line of business-oriented personal computers manufactured by Hewlett-Packard. It was introduced in October 1985 as HP's first IBM- compatible PC. Hewlett-Packard, which originally made its name through selling test equipment, made its move into the computing field in 1967 with HP 1000/2100 minicomputers. Further minicomputer and terminal products followed in the coming years, and in 1983, the company finally released a microcomputer, the HP 150 series. It only lasted two years before HP embraced the IBM PC standard with the Vectra line.

Other such companies included Stratus Computer, Tolerant Systems, Sequoia Systems, Synapse Computer, Auragen Systems, No Halt Computers, Corinthian Systems, Enmasse, and Computer Consoles Inc. Parallel Computers made systems that featured redundant hardware elements from processors and storage to power supplies, and that self-detected error situations. Their systems fit into the supermicrocomputer to minicomputer ranges in size. The difficulties of building fault-tolerant systems were considerable, however, including the unsuitability of Unix in that era for that purpose, and Parallel Systems like the other new companies in the space severely underestimated the engineering tasks involved.

PL/8 (or PL.8), is a dialect of PL/I developed by IBM Research in the 1970s by compiler group, under Martin Hopkins, within a major research program that led to the IBM RISC architecture. It was so-called because it was about 80% of PL/I. Written in PL/I and bootstrapped via the PL/I Optimizing compiler, it was an alternative to PL/S for system programming, compiling initially to an intermediate machine-independent language with symbolic registers and machine- like operations.The compiler is described in: The 801 Minicomputer.

Modified PDP-7 under restoration in Oslo, Norway PDP-7 at living computer museum The PDP-7 was a minicomputer produced by Digital Equipment Corporation as part of the PDP series. Introduced in 1964, shipped since 1965, it was the first to use their Flip-Chip technology. With a cost of , it was cheap but powerful by the standards of the time. The PDP-7 is the third of Digital's 18-bit machines, with essentially the same instruction set architecture as the PDP-4 and the PDP-9.

HP 1000 E-Series minicomputer with a 9895A dual 8-inch "flexible disc memory" drives. The HP 2100 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers that were produced by Hewlett-Packard (HP) from the mid-1960s to early 1990s. Tens of thousands of machines in the series were sold over its twenty-five year lifetime, making HP the fourth largest minicomputer vendor during the 1970s. The design started at Data Systems Inc (DSI), and was originally known as the DSI-1000. HP purchased the company in 1964 and merged it into their Dymec division. The original model, the 2116A built using integrated circuits and magnetic-core memory, was released in 1966. Over the next four years, models A through C were released with different types of memory and expansion, as well as the cost-reduced 2115 and 2114 models. All of these models were replaced by the HP 2100 series in 1971, and then again as the 21MX series in 1974 when the magnetic-core memory was replaced with semiconductor memory. All of these models were also packaged as the HP 2000 series, combining a 2100-series machine with optional components in order to run the BASIC programming language in a multi-user time sharing fashion.

The first multi-chip 16-bit microprocessor was the National Semiconductor IMP-16, introduced in early 1973. An 8-bit version of the chipset was introduced in 1974 as the IMP-8. Other early multi-chip 16-bit microprocessors include one that Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) used in the LSI-11 OEM board set and the packaged PDP 11/03 minicomputer—and the Fairchild Semiconductor MicroFlame 9440, both introduced in 1975–76. In 1975, National introduced the first 16-bit single-chip microprocessor, the National Semiconductor PACE, which was later followed by an NMOS version, the INS8900.

As microprocessors continued to improve in the 1980s, it soon became clear that the next generation would offer performance and features equal to the best of DECs low-end minicomputer lineup. Worse, the Berkeley RISC and Stanford MIPS designs were aiming to introduce 32-bit designs that would outperform the fastest members of the VAX family, DEC's cash cow. Constrained by the huge success of their VAX/VMS products, which followed the proprietary model, the company was very late to respond to these threats. In the early 1990s, DEC found its sales faltering and its first layoffs followed.

On 22 March 1965, DEC introduced the PDP-8, which replaced the PDP-5's modules with the new R-series modules using Flip Chips. The machine was re-packaged into a small tabletop case, which remains distinctive for its use of smoked plastic over the CPU which allowed one to easily see the wire- wrapped internals of the CPU. Sold standard with 4 kWords of 12-bit core memory and a Teletype Model 33 ASR for basic input/output, the machine listed for only $18,000. The PDP-8 is referred to as the first real minicomputer because of its sub-$25,000 price.

On April 10, 1978, Shepardson Microsystems signed a contract with Apple. For $13,000 -- $5,200 up front, and $7,800 on delivery, and no additional royalties—Shepardson Microsystems would build Apple's first DOS—and hand it over just 35 days later. For its money, Apple would get a file manager, an interface for Integer BASIC and Applesoft BASIC, and utilities that would allow disk backup, disk recovery, and file copying. Apple provided detailed specifications, and early Apple employee Randy Wigginton worked closely with Shepardson's Paul Laughton as the latter wrote the operating system with punched cards and a minicomputer.

The ship is affected by the single strongest gravitational pull of the astronomical bodies. The game was developed at Bell Labs, and was ported during 1969 from the Multics operating system to the GECOS operating system on the GE 635 computer, and then to the PDP-7 minicomputer. While porting the game to the PDP-7, Thompson developed ideas for his own operating system, which later formed the core of the Unix operating system. Space Travel never spread beyond Bell Labs or had an effect on future games, leaving its primary legacy as part of the original push for the development of Unix.

In November 1966, Hewlett-Packard introduced the 2116A minicomputer, one of the first commercial 16-bit computers. It used CTµL (Complementary Transistor MicroLogic) in integrated circuits from Fairchild Semiconductor. Hewlett-Packard followed this with similar 16-bit computers, such as the 2115A in 1967, the 2114A in 1968, and others. In 1969, Data General introduced the Nova and shipped a total of 50,000 at $8,000 each. The popularity of 16-bit computers, such as the Hewlett-Packard 21xx series and the Data General Nova, led the way toward word lengths that were multiples of the 8-bit byte.

However, they were much smaller, less expensive, and generally simpler to operate than the mainframe computers of the time, and thus affordable by individual laboratories and research projects. Minicomputers largely freed these organizations from the batch processing and bureaucracy of a commercial or university computing center. In addition, minicomputers were more interactive than mainframes, and soon had their own operating systems. The minicomputer Xerox Alto (1973) was a landmark step in the development of personal computers, because of its graphical user interface, bit-mapped high resolution screen, large internal and external memory storage, mouse, and special software.

Though the book today serves partially as a historical document of the computing industry, some valuable business lessons can be learned from it. The most important lesson is that a company's culture must change as its operating environment changes. In many ways, Ken Olsen was responsible for much of the innovation that created the personal computer, even though DEC failed to produce any successful personal computer product itself before the book was published. The title of the book focuses on Ken Olsen's major career success, namely his successful introduction of the minicomputer for small to medium businesses.

The 200 used a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal to input EDL information. The editing console was interfaced to two equipment racks of support equipment (which were usually located remotely in another room from the console). The first rack contained the interface electronics for the system, monitoring equipment, and a Digital PDP-11 minicomputer with 32 kilobytes of RAM, which controlled the system. The second rack contained all the audio & video electronics, and the "Skip-Field Recorder", which took in video & audio for editing from a VTR, and then recorded such to one or several disk pack drives interfaced to the 600.

Ed Roberts received a letter from Traf-O-Data asking if he would be interested in buying its BASIC programming language for the machine. He called the company and reached a private home, where no one had heard of anything like BASIC. In fact the letter had been sent by Bill Gates and Paul Allen from the Boston area, and they had no BASIC yet to offer. When they called Roberts to follow up on the letter he expressed his interest, and the two started work on their BASIC interpreter using a self-made simulator for the 8080 on a PDP-10 minicomputer.

On its journey from calculators and word processing to serious data processing Wang developed and marketed several lines of small computer system, some of which were WordProcessing-based and some of which were DataProcessing-based. Instead of a clear, linear progression, the product lines overlapped and in some cases borrowed technology from each other. The most identifiable Wang minicomputer performing recognizable data processing was the Wang 2200 which appeared in May 1973. Unlike some other desktop computers such as the HP 9830, it had a CRT in a cabinet that also included an integrated computer controlled Compact Cassette storage unit and keyboard.

S/Compare was eventually developed into a comprehensive source compare and merge tool, known as Aldon Harmonizer. The product compared current releases with new releases and then merged the versions to create a whole new set of source and objects. It also supported parallel development by identifying and merging the work of two or more programmers who had modified the same program simultaneously. In the late 1980s, Harmonizer was converted to run on IBM's System/38 minicomputer platform, a precursor to the AS/400 (later known as iSeries, Application System/400, System i and now IBM i).

Many historical and extant processors use a big-endian memory representation, either exclusively or as a design option. Big-endian memory representation is commonly referred to as network order, as used in the Internet protocol suite. Other processor types use little-endian memory representation; others use yet another scheme called "middle-endian", "mixed-endian" or "PDP-11-endian". The IBM System/360 uses big-endian byte order, as do its successors System/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture. The PDP-10 also uses big-endian addressing for byte-oriented instructions. The IBM Series/1 minicomputer also use big-endian byte order.

New in CP-6 was the use of communications and terminal interfaces through minicomputer (Honeywell Level 6)-based front-end processors, connected locally, remotely, or in combination through IMP (input manipulation processor). CP-6 included an integrated software development system which supported and included a set of language processors: APL,Frost, Bruce, "APL and I-D-S/II APL access to large databases". in pages 103-107 BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG, IDP, IDS/II, SORT/MERGE, PL-6, GMAP, and a text formatting program, TEXT. Commonly needed software packages (Pascal, SNOBOL, LISP, SPSS, BMDP, IMSL, SPICEII, and SLAM) were developed by Carleton University.

The first Lunar Lander game was a text-based game named Lunar, or alternately the Lunar Landing Game, written in the FOCAL programming language for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8 minicomputer by Jim Storer while a high school student in the fall of 1969. Two other versions were written soon after by other programmers in BASIC. Lunar was converted to BASIC by David H. Ahl, who included all three versions in his 1973 book 101 BASIC Computer Games. By the end of the decade, the type of game was collectively known as a "lunar lander" game.

BYTE in 1983 speculated that "we may soon see a similar machine here in America". Describing the 5550 as "a true workstation", the magazine envisioned the computer as filling the "considerable gulf above the PC", and a rival to the IBM System/36 minicomputer. It praised the 5550's "unprecedented" combination of kanji support with high-end word-processing capability, and reported that in Japan an ecosystem of vendors providing products for the computer was forming. The magazine concluded that "if the American PC is any precedent, the market should soon be filled with 5550 software".

The buildings and design were part of a broader change in Canadian architecture, and remain an example of the brutalist style. When it first opened, the Science Centre was a pioneer for its hands-on approach to science, along with San Francisco's Exploratorium and Detroit's Museum of Science and Technology. Unlike a traditional museum, where exhibits are for viewing only, the majority of the exhibits at the Science Centre were interactive, while many others were live demonstrations (e.g. metalworking). The Communications room contained a number of computerized displays, including a very popular tic-tac-toe game, run on a PDP-11 minicomputer.

The key development that led to the tremendous success of the HP 3000 was the bundling of the HP-developed network database management system (DBMS) called IMAGE (now called TurboIMAGE/SQL) that was reputedly inspired by the TOTAL DBMS developed by Cincom Systems, Inc. IMAGE was an award-winning database anointed by Datamation within two years of the database's introduction. It was the first database management system included with a business-class minicomputer. By bundling IMAGE with the server, HP created an ecosystem of applications and development utilities that could rely upon IMAGE as a data repository in any HP 3000.

James G. Treybig Bloomberg Business Executive Profile Treybig's first job after graduating from Rice was as a salesman for Texas Instruments. After receiving his MBA, he went to work for Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 1968, serving as marketing section manager on the HP 3000 project, the first ever commercial minicomputer with a full featured operating system with time-sharing, released in 1973.HP3000 "HP's EARLY COMPUTERS, Part Three: THE STRONGEST CASTLE: The Rise, Fall and Rise of the HP 3000" In 1973, he joined Kleiner Perkins venture capital company. In 1974, he founded Tandem Computers, funded in part by Kleiner Perkins.

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.

A combination of these technologies, along with supercritical wings, composites and artificially stable control systems would improve fuel economy of future airliners by 60%. Major avionics firms also attended in force. Goodyear brought their STARAN computer, originally developed for missile interception and similar duties, but now being pitched as an air traffic control (ATC) system that would optionally use a computer-generated voice to automatically send traffic advisories to pilots. Plessey was showing their ACR 430 radar for smaller airfields, and with Lockheed they were demonstrating their then- incomplete automated ATC system based on a Lockheed MAC-16 minicomputer.

But other factors would weigh more heavily in the competition, including DEC's corporate culture and business model, which were ill-suited to the rapidly developing consumer market for computers. BYTE in 1984 reported that Venix on the PC outperformed the same operating system on the DEC Professional and PDP-11/23. Further, although the PDP-11 was a very successful minicomputer, it lacked a wide base of affordable small business software. By comparison, many existing CP/M applications (see the Rainbow 100) were easily ported to the similar 8086/8088 chips and MS-DOS operating system.

The GEC 2050 was an 8-bit minicomputer produced during the 1970s, initially by Marconi Elliott Computer Systems of the UK, before the company renamed itself GEC Computers Limited. The first models were labeled MECS 2050, before being renamed GEC 2050. The GEC 2050 was commonly used as a Remote Job Entry station, supporting a punched card reader, line printer, system console, and a data link to a remote mainframe computer system, and GEC Computers sold a complete RJE package including the system, peripherals, and RJE software. Another turnkey application was a ticketing system, whose customers included Arsenal Football Club.

Calma Company, based in Sunnyvale, California, was, between 1965 and 1988, a vendor of digitizers and minicomputer-based graphics systems targeted at the cartographic and electronic, mechanical and architectural design markets. In the electronic area, the company's best known products were GDS (an abbreviation for "Graphic Design System" [GDS78]), introduced in 1971, and GDS II, introduced in 1978. By the end of the 1970s, Calma systems were installed in virtually every major semiconductor manufacturing company. The external format of the GDS II database, known as GDS II Stream Format, became a de facto standard for the interchange of IC mask information.

Calma Company was incorporated in California on November 13, 1963. Its initial business was as a product distributor, continuing the business of a previously existing partnership of the same name. [UT78] The company took its name from its founders, Calvin and Irma Louise Hefte. In 1965 Calma introduced the Calma Digitizer, a device consisting of a table-like surface with constrained cursor, whereby an operator could enter coordinate data from a paper drawing and have it turned into computer readable form. In about 1969, the company undertook to develop a minicomputer-based graphics system built around a digitizer.

After acquiring drawings with a Nova 1200 purchase, Digital Computer Controls designed its own nearly identical minicomputer. Digital Computer Controls maintained that its use of the documentation was proper because Data General Corporation inadequately maintained the secrecy of the design drawings by distributing them to many customers. The court found that Data General Corporation had sufficiently protected the secrecy of the drawings and that Digital Computer Controls was thus in violation of trade secret law for improperly using confidential information. Such a view of disclosure had been held by previous courts in non-information technology contexts Tabor v.

The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, making it one of DEC's most successful product lines. The PDP-11 is considered by some experts to be the most popular minicomputer. The PDP-11 included a number of innovative features in its instruction set and additional general-purpose registers that made it much easier to program than earlier models in the PDP series.

In computer programming, Franz Lisp is a discontinued Lisp programming language system written at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, UCB) by Professor Richard Fateman and several students, based largely on Maclisp and distributed with the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) for the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX minicomputer. Piggybacking on the popularity of the BSD package, Franz Lisp was probably the most widely distributed and used Lisp system of the 1970s and 1980s. The name is a pun on the composer and pianist Franz Liszt. It was written specifically to be a host for running the Macsyma computer algebra system on VAX.

The AC power was converted on board to power two 60 horsepower DC electric motors. The system used regenerative braking, converting the energy back through the DC motors to AC into the lines. Another rail, above the power rails, carried multiplexed frequency 'tones' that were decoded by the vehicles on-board controller into a 3-of-5 command sequence that was used to control all vehicle movement and station cycle functions. The heart of the on-board controller was a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer which interfaced with various vehicle subsystems via dual-redundant fail-safe vital relay logic.

Shrinking demand and tough competition started a shakeout in the market in the early 1970s—RCA sold out to UNIVAC and GE sold its business to Honeywell; between 1986 and 1990 Honeywell was bought out by Bull; UNIVAC became a division of Sperry, which later merged with Burroughs to form Unisys Corporation in 1986. In 1984 estimated sales of desktop computers ($11.6 billion) exceeded mainframe computers ($11.4 billion) for the first time. IBM received the vast majority of mainframe revenue. During the 1980s, minicomputer-based systems grew more sophisticated and were able to displace the lower-end of the mainframes.

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.

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.

COMAL was originally developed in Denmark by mathematics teacher Børge R. Christensen. The school in which he taught had received a Data General NOVA 1200 minicomputer in 1972, with the expectation that the school would begin to teach computer science. Christensen, who had taken a short course on the subject at university, was expected to lead the program and to maintain the computer system. The NOVA 1200 was supplied with Data General Extended BASIC, and Christensen quickly became frustrated with the way in which the unstructured language led students to write low-quality code that was difficult to read and thus mark.

The fair rides and exhibits are similar to those at Disneyland and the 1964 New York World's Fair. Clem is one of the first "computer hackers" mentioned in pop culture, and his dialogue with the fair's computer includes messages found in the DEC PDP-10, a popular minicomputer at the time. (Some of the lines are error messages from MACLISP.) An identification followed by the word "hello" initiated an interactive session on contemporary Univac, General Electric, and university timesharing systems. Many of the things the computer said were based on ELIZA, a computer program which simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist.

In 1969, George Lucas and Walter Murch incorporated an Eliza-like dialogue interface in their screenplay for the feature film THX-1138. Inhabitants of the underground future world of THX, when stressed, would retreat to "confession booths" and initiate a one-sided Eliza-formula conversation with a Jesus-faced computer who claimed to be "Omm". ELIZA influenced a number of early computer games by demonstrating additional kinds of interface designs. Don Daglow wrote an enhanced version of the program called Ecala on a DEC PDP-10 minicomputer at Pomona College in 1973 before writing the computer role-playing game Dungeon (1975).

1948 First Charactron cathode ray tube built. 1949 Convair begins development project of Charactron program. 1954 Major contract for Charactron tubes received (SAGE). First Charactron microfilm printer (Model 100) built. 1955 Stromberg-Carlson merges with General Dynamics and Charactron Project transferred from Convair to Stromberg-Carlson. 1959 First graphic COM recorder introduced (Model 4020). 1961 General Dynamics Electronic Division acquires Charactron project. 1964 Reorganization moves Charactron group back to Stromberg-Carlson where it becomes the Data Products Division. 1965 Model 4400 business COM recorder introduced. 1966 Production begins on Model 4060 (first minicomputer-controlled COM recorder).

In 1968, however, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Doug Dyment gave a talk about computers in education at the University of Alberta, and after the talk a woman who had once seen The Sumerian Game described it to him. Dyment decided to recreate the game as an early program for the FOCAL programming language, recently developed at DEC, and programmed it for a DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. He named the result King of Sumeria. Needing the game to run in the smallest memory configuration available for the computer, he included only the first segment of the game.

The DVI format specified two video compression schemes, Presentation Level Video or Production Level Video and Real-Time Video and two audio compression schemes, ADPCM and PCM8. The original video compression scheme, called Presentation Level Video, was asymmetric in that a Digital VAX-11/750 minicomputer was used to compress the video in non-real time to 30 frames per second with a resolution of 320x240. Encoding was performed by Intel at its facilities or at licensed encoding facilities set up by Intel. Video compression involved coding both still frames and motion-compensated residuals using Vector Quantization in dimensions 1, 2, and 4.

The MV series came in various iterations, from the MV/2000 (later MV/2500), MV/4000, MV/10000, MV/15000, MV/20000, MV/30000, MV/40000 and ultimately concluded with the MV/60000HA minicomputer. The MV/60000HA was intended to be a High Availability system, with many components duplicated to eliminate the single point of failure. Yet, there were failures among the system's many daughter boards, back-plane, and mid-plane. DG technicians were kept quite busy replacing boards and many blamed poor quality control at the DG factory in Mexico where they were made and refurbished.

The RCA 1600 is a discontinued 16-bit minicomputer designed and built by RCA in West Palm Beach, Florida and Marlboro, Massachusetts. It was developed to meet the needs of several RCA divisions, including the Graphics Systems Division (GSD), Instructional Systems, and Global Communications. It was introduced in 1968, and at the time of UNIVAC's purchase of the RCA Computer Division in 1972 the 1600 was estimated to be in use by 40 customers. The 1600 was intended for use in embedded systems, and was retained by UNIVAC and used in products such as the Accuscan supermarket checkout system in the 1970s.

9830s were built with a processor similar in architecture to the HP 1000/2100 series minicomputer with 16-bit memory address, and an AX and BX general processor register. They ran at a speed comparable to the first IBM PCs. They could draw a mesh of a 3D SIN(X)/X function with no hidden lines over the course of several minutes, a technological breakthrough for the time. Because programs were designed to run from ROM (read only memory) the call subroutine instruction had to be changed because in the HP211x the return location was written in the first location of the subroutine.

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.

This research further demonstrated that computer-controlled audio with four-track tape was possible. In 1979, Williams used a digitally controlled cassette tape recorder that had been interfaced to a minicomputer (Williams, M.A. "A comparison of three approaches to the teaching of auditory-visual discrimination, sight singing and music dictation to college music students: A traditional approach, a Kodaly approach, and a Kodaly approach augmented by computer-assisted instruction," University of Illinois, unpublished). This device worked, yet was slow with variable access times. In 1981, Nan T. Watanabe researched the feasibility of computer- assisted music instruction using computer-controlled pre-recorded audio.

Prior to the 1980s, IBM had largely been known as a provider of business computer systems. As the 1980s opened, their market share in the growing minicomputer market failed to keep up with competitors, while other manufacturers were beginning to see impressive profits in the microcomputer space. The market for personal computers was dominated at the time by Tandy, Commodore and Apple, whose machines sold for several hundred dollars each and had become very popular. The microcomputer market was large enough for IBM's attention, with $150 million in sales by 1979 and projected annual growth of more than 40% during the early 1980s.

A notable example was the PDP-8 from Digital Equipment Corporation, regarded to be the first commercial minicomputer. The Lisp machines developed at MIT in the early 1970s pioneered some of the principles of the workstation computer, as they were high- performance, networked, single-user systems intended for heavily interactive use. Lisp Machines were commercialized beginning 1980 by companies like Symbolics, Lisp Machines, Texas Instruments (the TI Explorer) and Xerox (the Interlisp-D workstations). The first computer designed for a single-user, with high-resolution graphics facilities (and so a workstation in the modern sense of the term) was the Xerox Alto developed at Xerox PARC in 1973.

From 1968 through the mid-1970s Warren worked as a freelance minicomputer programmer and computer consultant, operating under the name, Frelan Associates (for "free land"), creating assembler-level real-time data-acquisition and process-control programs for biomedical research at Stanford Medical Center, and control programs for various high-tech companies around Silicon Valley. In those years, he also chaired the Association for Computing Machinery's regional chapters of SIGPLAN, SIGMICRO and the San Francisco Peninsula ACM. In 1977, Warren co- founded the West Coast Computer Faire which, for a half-dozen years, was the largest public microcomputer convention in the world. He was its self-titled "Faire Chaircreature," organizing eight conventions.

National Semiconductor PACE die (IPC-16A/500) National Semiconductor's IPC-16A/520 PACE, short for "Processing and Control Element", was the first commercial single-chip 16-bit microprocessor. PACE had four general-purpose accumulators, with an instruction set architecture loosely based on the earlier IMP-16 architecture, which in turn had been inspired by the Data General Nova minicomputer. PACE was slightly faster than the IMP-16, and offered a "byte mode" for more convenient processing of 8-bit data. Some PACE instructions were restricted to operation on only the first accumulator, AC0, rather than allowing use of any accumulator as on the IMP-16.

Unlike the other text-based games, however, it did not use written responses to player input, but instead had character-based graphics, with different characters used as graphical symbols to represent objects. It was initially developed by Mike Mayfield in 1971 on an SDS Sigma 7 mainframe. The game was also unlike many of the other mainframe games in the book in that it was originally written in BASIC; by the time the book was published, it had been widely copied among minicomputer and mainframe systems and modified into several versions. It was one of these, renamed by Ahl as Space War, that appeared in 101 BASIC Computer Games.

With the onset of the AI winter and the early beginnings of the microcomputer revolution, which would sweep away the minicomputer and workstation makers, cheaper desktop PCs soon could run Lisp programs even faster than Lisp machines, with no use of special purpose hardware. Their high profit margin hardware business eliminated, most Lisp machine makers had gone out of business by the early 90s, leaving only software based firms like Lucid Inc. or hardware makers who had switched to software and services to avoid the crash. , besides Xerox, Symbolics is the only Lisp machine firm still operating, selling the Open Genera Lisp machine software environment and the Macsyma computer algebra system.

By 1982 when the British, French, Italian and German versions were being developed, the original voices were recorded in the TI facility near Nice in France and these full bit rate digital recordings were sent to Dallas for processing using a minicomputer. Some weeks later the processed data was returned and required significant hand editing to fix the voicing errors which had occurred during the process. The data rate was so radically cut that all of the words needed some editing. In some cases this was fairly simple, but some words were unintelligible and required days of work and others had to be completely scrapped.

In 1971, Don Rawitsch, a senior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, taught an 8th grade history class as a student teacher. He used HP Time-Shared BASIC running on a HP 2100 minicomputer to write a computer program to help teach the subject. Rawitsch recruited two friends and fellow student teachers, Paul Dillenberger and Bill Heinemann, to help. These are the original core gameplay concepts which have endured in every subsequent version: initial supply purchase; occasional food hunting; occasional supply purchase at forts; inventory management of supplies; variable travel speed depending upon conditions; frequent misfortunes; and game over upon death or successfully reaching Oregon.

HP 3000 Series III Early 3000 models had large cabinets with front panels, while later models were made that fit into desks using only terminal consoles for diagnostics, with bootstrap routines in ROM. By 1984 HP introduced the HP3000 Series 37, the first model that ran in offices without special cooling or flooring requirements. Models ranged from a system sometimes used by a single user, to models that supported over 2,000 users. The HP 3000 was one of the last proprietary minicomputer systems whose manufacture was curtailed by its vendor, outlasting the PDP-11-descended Digital Equipment Corporation VAX, which was acquired by Compaq and then ultimately by Hewlett-Packard.

Spacewar! running on the Computer History Museum's PDP-1 By 1961, MIT had acquired the DEC PDP-1 minicomputer, the successor to the TX-0, which also used a vector display system. The system's comparatively small size and processing speed meant that, like with the TX-0, the university allowed its undergraduate students and employees to write programs for the computer which were not directly academically related whenever it was not in use. In 1961–62, Harvard and MIT employees Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen created the game Spacewar! on the PDP-1, inspired by science fiction books such as the Lensman series.

LANStar (Lanstar) was a 2.56 Mbit/s twisted-pair local area network created by Northern Telecom ("NT", now Nortel) in the mid '80s. Because NT's PBX systems already owned a building's twisted pair plant (for voice), it made sense to use the same wiring for data as well. LANStar was originally to be a component of NT's PTE (Packet Transport Equipment) product, which was a sort of minicomputer arrangement with dumb (VT220) terminals on the desktop and the CPUs in an intelligent rack (the PTE) in the PBX room (alongside the PBX). The PTE was to have several basic office automation apps: word processing, database, etc.

Freedom from vendor-specific databases and data communications were desirable qualities in application generators,Cardenas and Grafton, "Challenges and requirements for new application generators", p. 346. and Informatics continued to stress the portability of TAPS across different hardware, operating systems, and terminal models. Prime Computer became an important minicomputer platform for the product; also supported was the NCR 9300 under ITX. Advertisement. Projects were undertaken to expand the number of IBM platforms that could host TAPS, to include not just System 370 OS-based ones such as OS/VS1 but also the DOS-based SSX/VSE for the IBM 4300, and even the relatively obscure IBM 8100 distributed processing engine.

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.

Up until the late 1970s, the management of laboratory samples and the associated analysis and reporting were time-consuming manual processes often riddled with transcription errors. This gave some organizations impetus to streamline the collection of data and how it was reported. Custom in-house solutions were developed by a few individual laboratories, while some enterprising entities at the same time sought to develop a more commercial reporting solution in the form of special instrument-based systems. In 1982 the first generation of LIMS was introduced in the form of a single centralized minicomputer, which offered laboratories the first opportunity to utilize automated reporting tools.

It would require fewer checkers to replace the last board with a positive checker in the 8 and a negative checker in the 1, but this is not taught as the standard. Arithmetic can be performed on the Minicomputer by combining two numbers' representations into a single board and performing simplification techniques. One such technique is to replace checkers from the 8 and 2 squares of one board with a checker on the 1 square of the adjacent board to the left. Another technique is to replace a pair of checkers in the same square with one checker in the next higher square, such as two 4s with an 8.

By the mid-1990s the price of low-end PCs was rapidly falling to under $1000. When equipped with a terminal emulator, these machines could perform all the functions of a DEC terminal, as well as running software locally. The terminal market began to crash, but remained important to DEC's core minicomputer business. DEC responded by introducing the VT500 series as simplified and lower-cost options to the existing VT420 and VT340. The new 500s were text- only but they added an RS-232C serial port and a Centronics port as well as a PS/2 keyboard connector which made them easier to integrate into a mixed computing environment.

User instigated low-level formatting (LLF) of hard disk drives was common for minicomputer and personal computer systems until the 1990s. IBM and other mainframe system vendors typically supplied their hard disk drives (or media in the case of removable media HDDs) with a low-level format. Typically this involved subdividing each track on the disk into one or more blocks which would contain the user data and associated control information. Different computers used different block sizes and IBM notably used variable block sizes but the popularity of the IBM PC caused the industry to adopt a standard of 512 user data bytes per block by the middle 1980s.

They quickly arranged to repay the Atari loan, ending that threat. The two companies were initially arranging a $4 million license agreement before Commodore offered $24 million to purchase Amiga outright. By late 1984 the prototype breadboard chipset had successfully been turned into integrated circuits, and the system hardware was being readied for production. At this time the operating system (OS) was not as ready, and led to a deal to port an OS known as TRIPOS to the platform. TRIPOS was a multitasking system that had been written in BCPL during the 1970s for minicomputer systems like the PDP-11, but later experimentally ported to the 68000.

Looking to simplify and update their line, DEC replaced most of their smaller machines with the PDP-11 in 1970, eventually selling over 600,000 units and cementing DEC's position in the industry. Originally designed as a follow-on to the PDP-11, DEC's VAX-11 series was the first widely used 32-bit minicomputer, sometimes referred to as "superminis". These systems were able to compete in many roles with larger mainframe computers, such as the IBM System/370. The VAX was a best-seller, with over 400,000 sold, and its sales through the 1980s propelled DEC to become the second largest computer company in the industry.

Engelbart's house in Atherton, California burned down during this period, causing him and his family further problems. Tymshare took over NLS and the lab that Engelbart had founded, hired most of the lab's staff (including its creator as a Senior Scientist), renamed the software Augment, and offered it as a commercial service via its new Office Automation Division. Tymshare was already somewhat familiar with NLS; when ARC was still operational, it had experimented with its own local copy of the NLS software on a minicomputer called OFFICE-1, as part of a joint project with ARC. At Tymshare, Engelbart soon found himself further marginalized.

"[KCID] had some sort of process worked out, an oracle or something. It had to do with randomly generated numbers — he had a little box, a minicomputer that lit up with seven- or eight-digit figures, I think. He told me when he had enough data worked into the system he could predict any series of events connected to Adder, a few minutes before each event actually occurred..." (Jeter, 131). This is a hint at I Ching, the Chinese oracular book Dick used to compose his 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle, but also a popular reading in the counter-cultural 1960s.

In retrospect, the nicely performing MV series was too little, too late. At a time when DG invested its last dollar into the dying minicomputer segment, the microcomputer was rapidly making inroads to the lower-end market segment, and the introduction of the first workstations wiped out all 16-bit machines, once DG's best customer segment. While the MV series did stop the erosion of DG's customer base, this now smaller base was no longer large enough to allow DG to develop their next generation. DG had also changed their marketing to focus on direct sales to Fortune 100 companies and thus alienated many resellers.

Data General's introduction of the Data General-One (DG-1) in 1984 is one of the few cases of a minicomputer company introducing a truly breakthrough PC product. Considered genuinely "portable", rather than "luggable", as alternatives often were called, it was a nine-pound battery- powered MS-DOS machine equipped with dual 3½-inch diskettes, a 79-key full- stroke keyboard, 128K to 512K of RAM, and a monochrome liquid-crystal display (LCD) screen capable of either the full-sized standard 80×25 characters or full CGA graphics (640×200). The DG-1 was considered a modest advance over similar Osborne-Kaypro systems overall.

Edson de Castro was the Product Manager of the pioneering Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-8, a 12-bit computer generally considered by most to be the first true minicomputer. He also led the design of the upgraded PDP-8/I, which used early integrated circuits in place of individual transistors. During the PDP-8/I process, de Castro had been visiting circuit board manufacturers who were making rapid strides in the complexity of the boards they could assemble. de Castro concluded that the 8/I could be produced using fully automated assembly on large boards, which would have been impossible only a year earlier.

These elements, along with a number of slide projectors and lighting systems, were all controlled by a PDP-15 minicomputer. Unlike conventional planetariums, which are limited to showing the night sky as it appears from various points on the surface of the Earth at various dates, the STS could show the sky as it would appear from anywhere within about 100 astronomical units of Earth (about three times the radius of Pluto's orbit). A joystick even allowed the operator to "fly" the theater through space, showing the resulting apparent movement of planets through the sky, though in practice the planetarium presentations were always pre-programmed.

Bravo was released commercially, and the software eventually included in the Xerox Star can be seen as a direct descendant of it.Brad A. Myers. A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology. ACM interactions. Vol. 5, no. 2, March, 1998. pp. 44–54. In late 1978, in parallel with but independent of the work at Xerox PARC, Hewlett Packard developed and released the first commercial WYSIWYG software application for producing overhead slides (or what today are referred to as presentation graphics). The first release, named BRUNO (after an HP sales training puppet), ran on the HP 1000 minicomputer, taking advantage of HP 2640—HP's first bitmapped computer terminal.

TELON was originally conceived and designed by Chris McNeil and Don Christensen in the late 1970s when McNeil was a software engineer at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and Christensen was an IBM Systems Engineer contracting with Liberty Mutual. During their tenure, Liberty Mutual installed an IBM 3790 minicomputer along with a claims processing system (CAPS) created by Insurance Systems of America. Christensen worked with McNeil on a project that customized the package for use at Liberty Mutual. This customization, which involved IBM's cumbersome Macro language, required an engineer to create multiple forms for each IBM 3270 screen and then to convert the screens for executing on the 3790.

Improving semiconductor fabrication processes, especially through the 1970s, put increasing pressure on the individual-IC CPU designs. Initially only 4-bit and then 8-bit CPUs could easily be manufactured on a single chip, but by the mid-1970s, 16-bit designs were appearing. In 1973, National Semiconductor introduced the IMP-16, which implemented a NOVA- like system in a set of only five IC's. The next year their PACE reduced that to a single IC. Several similar designs appeared during this period, including the Texas Instruments TMS 9900, which implemented their TI-990 minicomputer, and the Intersil 6100, a single-chip version of the PDP-8.

The name Inter-Act was again used for this venture. The contract represented up to a quarter of ACT's business for a while, but then ended without ACT being fully paid, and following the Iranian Revolution, ACT became party to the Iran–United States Claims Tribunal. In 1983 it received an award of some $300,000 from the tribunal. An ACT promotional item: a room thermometer paperweight ACT was also an earlier entrant in the word processing field in the mid-late-1970s, acquiring Base Information Systems and its Ultratext System technology and partnering with Honeywell to put the system on the Honeywell Level 6 minicomputer.

While early IBM PCs had single color green screens, these screens were not terminals. The screen of a PC did not contain any character generation hardware; all video signals and video formatting were generated by the video display card in the PC, or (in most graphics modes) by the CPU and software. An IBM PC monitor, whether it was the green monochrome display or the 16-color display, was technically much more similar to an analog TV set (without a tuner) than to a terminal. With suitable software a PC could, however, emulate a terminal, and in that capacity it could be connected to a mainframe or minicomputer.

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".

Among them were "pedit5", "oubliette", "moria", "avathar", "krozair", "dungeon", "dnd", "crypt", and "drygulch". By 1978–79, these games were heavily in use on various PLATO systems, and exhibited a marked increase in sophistication in terms of 3D graphics, storytelling, user involvement, team play, and depth of objects and monsters in the dungeons.Brian Dear, Chapter 16: "Into the Dungeon", The Friendly Orange Glow, Pantheon Books, New York, 2017; see pages 292–294 for "pedit5", pages 294–297 for "dnd", pages 297–298 for "dungeon". Inspired by Adventure, a group of students at MIT in the summer of 1977 wrote a game for the PDP-10 minicomputer; called Zork, it became quite popular on the ARPANET.

DEC VAX 11/780-5 at Living Computers: Museum + Labs In 1976, DEC decided to extend the PDP-11 architecture to 32 bits while adding a complete virtual memory system to the simple paging and memory protection of the PDP-11. The result was the VAX architecture, where VAX stands for Virtual Address eXtension (from 16 to 32 bits). The first computer to use a VAX CPU was the VAX-11/780, which DEC referred to as a superminicomputer. Although it was not the first 32-bit minicomputer, the VAX-11/780's combination of features, price, and marketing almost immediately propelled it to a leadership position in the market after it was released in 1978.

System Simulation had been applying computer graphics techniques in TV and film applications following collaborative research work at the Royal College of Art.Charlie Gere, 'Minicomputer Experimentalism in the United Kingdom from the 1950s to 1980' in Hannah Higgins, & Douglas Kahn (Eds.), Mainframe experimentalism: Early digital computing in the experimental arts. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (2012), pp. 114–116 At System Simulation Lansdown then played a leading role in several pioneering animation projects, contributing to the flight deck instrumentation readouts on the Nostromo space ship for Ridley Scott's Alien, many advertising sequences and latterly, working with Tony Pritchett, producing the 3D wireframe drawings from which Martin Lambie- Nairn's original Channel 4 logo was rendered.

Despite advances in the Fortran language, preprocessors continue to be used for conditional compilation and macro substitution. One of the earliest versions of FORTRAN, introduced in the '60s, was popularly used in colleges and universities. Developed, supported, and distributed by the University of Waterloo, WATFOR was based largely on FORTRAN IV. A student using WATFOR could submit their batch FORTRAN job and, if there were no syntax errors, the program would move straight to execution. This simplification allowed students to concentrate on their program's syntax and semantics, or execution logic flow, rather than dealing with submission Job Control Language (JCL), the compile/link- edit/execution successive process(es), or other complexities of the mainframe/minicomputer environment.

New ventures included marketing a range of powerful IBM clones made by Fujitsu, various minicomputer and personal computer ranges and (more successfully) a range of retail point-of-sale equipment and back-office software. Although it had significant sales overseas, ICL's mainframe business was dominated by large contracts from the UK public sector, including Post Office Ltd, the Inland Revenue, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Ministry of Defence. It also had a strong market share with UK local authorities and (at that time) nationalized utilities including the water, electricity, and gas boards. The company had an increasingly close relationship with Fujitsu from the early 1980s, culminating in Fujitsu becoming sole shareholder in 1998.

It was at this point that Ahl decided to move ahead with the educational-focused magazine. Reasoning that the educational market would be of interest to public foundations and many companies, Ahl sent funding proposals to over a hundred companies and received nothing. Instead, he used his own funds to print 11,000 copies of a flier that he sent to Hewlett-Packard and other minicomputer vendors, which resulted in 850 subscriptions to a magazine that did not even exist yet. Instead of printing 850 copies, Ahl split the subscription money in two; he kept one half for future operations, and used the other half to print as many copies of the new magazine as he could.

Apple provided detailed specifications, and early Apple employee Randy Wigginton worked closely with Shepardson's Paul Laughton as the latter wrote the operating system with punched cards and a minicomputer. There was no Apple DOS 1 or 2. Versions 0.1 through 2.8 were serially enumerated revisions during development, which might as well have been called builds 1 through 28. Apple DOS 3.0, a renamed issue of version 2.8, was never publicly released due to bugs. Apple published no official documentation until release 3.2. Apple DOS 3.1 was publicly released in June 1978, slightly more than one year after the Apple II was introduced, becoming the first disk-based operating system for any Apple computer.

In the mid-1960s, RC began the design of a small integrated circuit-based computer system for industrial control and automation needs, initially to fill a request by a Danish company to automate a chemical factory they were building in Poland. The RC 4000 design emerged in 1966 and was completed for the factory the next year. When combined with appropriate peripherals, almost always including an RC 2000 along with several rebranded devices from other companies, the RC 4000 was a highly reliable minicomputer, and went on to be sold across Europe. The RC 8000 from the mid-1970s used newer-generation integrated circuits (ICs) to shrink the RC 4000 into a single rack-mount system.

A later version of runoff for Multics was written in PL/I by Dennis Capps, in 1974. This runoff code was the ancestor of the machine language roff that was written for the fledgling Unix. Other versions of Runoff were developed for various computer systems including Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-11 minicomputer systems running RT-11, RSTS/E, RSX on Digital's PDP-10 and for OpenVMS on VAX minicomputers, as well as UNIVAC Series 90 mainframes using the EDT text editor under the VS/9 operating system. These different releases of Runoff typically had little in common except the convention of indicating a command to Runoff by beginning the line with a period.

A 1974 advertisement for the Wang 2200 ComputerThe Wang 2200 appeared in May 1973, and was Wang Laboratories' first minicomputer that could perform data processing in a common computer language. Unlike some other desktop computers, such as the HP 9830, it had a cathode ray tube (CRT) in a cabinet that also included an integrated computer-controlled cassette tape storage unit and keyboard. Microcoded to run interpretive BASIC, about 65,000 systems were shipped in its lifetime and it found wide use in small and medium-size businesses worldwide. The 2200 evolved into a desktop computer and larger system to support up to 16 workstations and utilized commercial disk technologies that appeared in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

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.

In computer science, an interpreter is a computer program that directly executes instructions written in a programming or scripting language, without requiring them previously to have been compiled into a machine language program. An interpreter generally uses one of the following strategies for program execution: # Parse the source code and perform its behavior directly; # Translate source code into some efficient intermediate representation and immediately execute this; # Explicitly execute stored precompiled codeIn this sense, the CPU is also an interpreter, of machine instructions. made by a compiler which is part of the interpreter system. Early versions of Lisp programming language and minicomputer and microcomputer BASIC dialects would be examples of the first type.

Synchronous communication links were more often seen with mainframes, where they were typically run over corporate leased lines to connect a mainframe to another mainframe or perhaps a minicomputer.) Code 0 (ASCII code name NUL) is a special case. In paper tape, it is the case when there are no holes. It is convenient to treat this as a fill character with no meaning otherwise. Since the position of a NUL character has no holes punched, it can be replaced with any other character at a later time, so it was typically used to reserve space, either for correcting errors or for inserting information that would be available at a later time or in another place.

Cybernetic Serendipity was an exhibition of cybernetic art curated by Jasia Reichardt, shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England, in 1968,Charlie Gere, ‘Minicomputer Experimentalism in the United Kingdom from the 1950s to 1980’ in Hannah Higgins, & Douglas Kahn (Eds.), Mainframe experimentalism: Early digital computing in the experimental arts. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (2012), p. 119 and then toured across the United States. Two stops in the United States were the Corcoran Annex (Corcoran Gallery of Art), Washington, D.C., and the newly opened ExploratoriumAcceptance speech for the AAM Distinguished Service Award - June 21, 1982, transcript, Frank Oppenheimer, Exploration and Discovery magazine, p9, San Francisco, CA. in San Francisco.

However, numerous Vaxxian space stations, all blindly controlled and defended by robots, still remain in the galaxy, mindlessly pursuing their original orders. The small band of scientists who initially escaped managed to clone the great human hero Major Havoc, in order to fly his Catastrofighter through a wormhole in space, so that he may lead a clone army against the dreaded Vaxxian robots, and to liberate the remnants of humanity by destroying the enemy reactors. The player controls Major Havoc, the leader of this very band of clones. Some games identified the Vaxxian homeworld as Maynard, referring to the town of Maynard, Massachusetts, home of Digital Equipment Corporation, manufacturer of the VAX minicomputer.

Rocket added a simple text-based graphical display of the distance from the ground in each round, while LEM added horizontal velocity and the ability to apply thrust at an angle. In 1970 and 1971, DEC employee and editor of the newsletter David H. Ahl converted two early mainframe games, Lunar and Hamurabi, from the FOCAL language to BASIC, partially as a demonstration of the language on the DEC PDP-8 minicomputer. Their popularity led him to start printing BASIC games in the DEC newsletter, both his own and reader submissions. In 1973, Ahl released the book 101 BASIC Computer Games, which contained the source code of computer games written in BASIC.

In the IBM System/360Including the successors S/370 through z/Architecture storage architecture, the Volume Table of Contents, or VTOC, is a data structure that provides a way of locating the data sets that reside on a particular DASD volume. It is the functional equivalent of either the MS/PC DOS File Allocation Table (FAT) or GUID Partition Table (GPT) on a desktop PC, and the root directory of a mass storage device (floppy, jump drive, hard disk, etc.) on a PC or minicomputer, e.g. / on Unix or Linux, C:\ on DOS or Windows. The VTOC is not used to contain any IPLTEXTHowever, the IPL text on cylinder 0 track 0 does read and use the VTOC.

In 1962, Westchester County, New York and IBM began studying the use of computers in education, using a grant from the U.S. Office of Education to produce "economic games" for sixth-grade students. One, The Sumerian Game (1964), was a model of ancient Sumerian civilization, written and designed by elementary- school teacher Mabel Addis and programmed by William McKay of IBM. The early mainframe game, set in 3500 B.C., has players act as rulers of the city of Lagash. In 1966 Addis revised the game and interspersed it with cutscenes of taped audio lectures and slide projector images. DEC PDP-8 minicomputer In 1968, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) employee Richard Merrill invented the FOCAL programming language.

In the 1970s and 1980s, dot matrix impact printers were generally considered the best combination of cost and versatility, and until the 1990s were by far the most common form of printer used with personal and home computers. The first impact dot matrix printer was the Centronics 101.The first non-impact dot matrix printer was marketed by IBM in 1957: Introduced in 1970, it led to the design of the parallel electrical interface that was to become standard on most printers until it was displaced well over a decade later by the Universal Serial Bus (USB). Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was another major vendor, albeit with a focus on use with their PDP minicomputer line.

Wesley Allison Clark (April 10, 1927 – February 22, 2016) was an American physicist who is credited for designing the first modern personal computer. He was also a computer designer and the main participant, along with Charles Molnar, in the creation of the LINC computer, which was the first minicomputer and shares with a number of other computers (such as the PDP-1) the claim to be the inspiration for the personal computer. Clark was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and grew up in Kinderhook, New York, and in northern California. His parents, Wesley Sr. and Eleanor Kittell, moved to California, and he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with a degree in physics in 1947.

Hosted on a fault-tolerant Tandem/16 minicomputer, Viewtron used the NAPLPS graphics language to provide a user interface that was graphically sophisticated by the standards of the time. According to Chip Bok, screens were crafted so as they loaded, elements would be drawn in sequence, "the way you would tell a story." Unlike HTML, NAPLPS allowed screen elements that remained unchanged through different pages of a story to remain static, an important concern with the low bandwidth 300-2400 baud modems then in use. Despite being initially restricted to the chiclet keyboard-equipped AT&T; Sceptre terminal, Viewtron's developers foresaw that general purpose personal computers would soon become the preferred way to consume online content.

STET was founded by IRI on October 21 of 1933 as the "STET - Società Torinese per l'Esercizio Telefonico" and was based in Turin with headquarters in Rome. The aim of the company was to address technical, administrative and accounting of all state's company for telephone services and for public telecommunications services in Italy. In 1964 fostered the born of the research center CSELT to modernize the Italian phone service, and in 1976 the campus of Scuola Superiore Guglielmo Reiss Romoli was built in L'Aquila to support training activities for managers and executives of the group. In the late 60s the group company Selenia produced the first European minicomputer: the Selenia Gp-16.

STOIC started out at the MIT and Harvard Biomedical Engineering Centre in Boston, (part of the Health, Science and Technology Division) and was written in the mid 1970s by Jonathan Sachs.Oral History Interview of Johnathan Sachs archived at the Charles Babbage Institute Jonathan Sachs went on to be the principal programmer of Lotus Development and wrote the first version of Lotus 1-2-3. The original version of STOIC was written on a Data General Nova minicomputer and cross-assembled for the 8080. STOIC came with its own primitive but effective file system, and could be booted up with little preliminary work on any 8080-based microprocessor with 24K of memory and a Teletype machine.

Lenger began her work on developing a modern school mathematics curriculum in 1958, working with Willy Servais and in consultation with Georges Papy, whom she married in 1960. With Madeleine Lepropre, Lenger ran an experimental training program for kindergarten teachers based on the new curriculum in 1958–1959, and was encouraged by the enthusiasm the kindergarten students showed for the material. With Papy, in the mid-1960s, she developed a six- volume high-school mathematics program based on the principles of set theory and abstract algebra. She was an invited plenary speaker at the first International Congress on Mathematical Education, speaking there on the "minicomputer" method for teaching binary number arithmetic to schoolchildren.

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".

Prestel computers were based on GEC 4000 series minicomputer with small differences in the accumulation according to the function of the machine. IRC main machines were originally GEC 4082 equipped with 384 Kbytes memory core store machines, six 70 Mbyte HDD and 100 ports for 1500 initial users. The network grew to the point that in June 1980 there were four stand-alone retrieval computers in the London area with six other computers installed in pairs in Birmingham, Edinburgh and Manchester. The ten computers could output to approximately 1000 user ports, expandable to 2000. The GEC 4082 computer with 512 megabyte capacity will interconnect to the 10 and later to 20 retrieval computers to handle the data files.

The PDP-11 family of computers was used for many purposes. It was used as a standard minicomputer for general-purpose computing, such as timesharing, scientific, educational, medical, or business computing. Another common application was real-time process control and factory automation. Some OEM models were also frequently used as embedded systems to control complex systems like traffic-light systems, medical systems, numerical controlled machining, or for network-management. An example of such use of PDP-11s was the management of the packet switched network Datanet 1. In the 1980s, the UK's air traffic control radar processing was conducted on a PDP 11/34 system known as PRDS – Processed Radar Display System at RAF West Drayton.

Through a complete package of device drivers that fully implemented the Macintosh Toolbox Application Programming Interface (APIs), MacWorks Plus essentially tricked the 128K ROM code into thinking it was running on an actual Macintosh. It was also necessary to completely simulate the memory address space of a Macintosh Plus, including the behavior of certain illegal addresses that were deliberately exploited by certain applications (primarily games). Fortunately, while the Macintosh memory manager circuitry was not programmable, the Lisa featured a fully programmable hardware MMU which was a legacy of the minicomputer roots of its designers. Finally, bootloaders were written for all available floppy disk and hard disk models that were compatible with the Lisa.

PERPOS was developed for a line of Motorola 68000-based computers called the Power 5 series, which CCI developed. They were a line of multi-processor, fault-tolerant computers, code-named after the Great Lakes. The Power 5 line also included single- processor 68000-based computers, code-named after the Finger Lakes, running a regular Unix port called PERPOS-S, which was originally a Version 7-derived kernel with a System III-derived userland; the kernel was later modified to provide System III compatibility. Later, Computer Consoles opened a development center in Irvine, California, United States, which developed a proprietary minicomputer, competitive with the Digital Equipment Corporation VAX, called the Power 6/32, code-named "Tahoe" after Lake Tahoe.

The MACSS aimed to develop an entirely new architecture without backward compatibility with the 6800. It ultimately does retain a bus protocol compatibility mode for existing 6800 peripheral devices, and a version with an 8-bit data bus was produced. However, the designers mainly focused on the future, or forward compatibility, which gives the 68000 design a head start against later 32-bit instruction set architectures (ISAs). For instance, the CPU registers are 32 bits wide, though few self-contained structures in the processor itself operate on 32 bits at a time. The MACSS team drew heavily on the influence of minicomputer processor design, such as the PDP-11 and VAX systems, which are similarly microcode-based.

Sources differ in regard to the first NCR data entry terminal integrating support for the FAT file system. According to Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews, "Gates", development was for a NCR 8200 in late 1977, incorrectly classified as a floppy-based upgrade to the NCR 7200, which had been released in 1975-11 (model I and IV) and was built around an Intel 8080 8-bit processor, but was cassette-based only. However, the NCR Century 8200 was a 16-bit minicomputer, onto which several data entry terminals could be hooked up. Marc McDonald even remembered a NCR 8500, a mainframe of the Criterion series, which can be ruled out as well.

The on-screen instructions from Will Crowther's 1976 game Colossal Cave Adventure. In the 1960s, a number of computer games were created for mainframe and minicomputer systems, but these failed to achieve wide distribution due to the continuing scarcity of computer resources, a lack of sufficiently trained programmers interested in crafting entertainment products, and the difficulty in transferring programs between computers in different geographic areas. By the end of the 1970s, however, the situation had changed drastically. The BASIC and C high-level programming languages were widely adopted during the decade, which were more accessible than earlier more technical languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL, opening up computer game creation to a larger base of users.

There were worries that new system-wide algorithms utilizing secondary storage would be less effective than previously used application- specific algorithms. By 1969, the debate over virtual memory for commercial computers was over; an IBM research team led by David Sayre showed that their virtual memory overlay system consistently worked better than the best manually controlled systems. Throughout the 1970s, the IBM 370 series running their virtual-storage based operating systems provided a means for business users to migrate multiple older systems into fewer, more powerful, mainframes that had improved price/performance. The first minicomputer to introduce virtual memory was the Norwegian NORD-1; during the 1970s, other minicomputers implemented virtual memory, notably VAX models running VMS.

A Model 20 Teletype machine with a paper tape punch ("reperforator") was installed at subscriber newspaper sites. Originally these machines would simply punch paper tapes and these tapes could be read by a tape reader attached to a "Teletypesetter operating unit" installed on a Linotype machine. The "operating unit" was essentially a box full of solenoids that sat on top of the Linotype's keyboard and pressed the appropriate keys in response to the codes read from the tape, thus creating type for printing in newspapers and magazines. In later years the incoming 6-bit current loop signal carrying the TTS code was connected to a minicomputer or mainframe for storage, editing, and eventual feed to a phototypesetting machine.

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.

Major components on a PICMG 1.3 active backplane Wire-wrapped backplane from a 1960s PDP-8 minicomputer A backplane (or "backplane system") is a group of electrical connectors in parallel with each other, so that each pin of each connector is linked to the same relative pin of all the other connectors, forming a computer bus. It is used as a backbone to connect several printed circuit boards together to make up a complete computer system. Backplanes commonly use a printed circuit board, but wire-wrapped backplanes have also been used in minicomputers and high-reliability applications. A backplane is generally differentiated from a motherboard by the lack of on-board processing and storage elements.

Known as WINDCO, the system consisted of a video disk for storing imagery and a Raytheon 440 minicomputer controlling it. The computer was used to record the imagery from the satellites, buffering a single frame from the strips and then storing it out along with timing information. The user interacted with the resulting video to select points on the frames that represented the same point as it moved over time, the output of their selections being punched to paper tape. The paper tape was then read by the 440 and copied onto punched cards containing instructions for the UNIVAC 1108 mainframe, which converted them into a vector map overlaid on top of a map of the Earth.

The DataVault cabinet contains 42 disk drives (or 84 for double capacity) plus a minicomputer as the controller The controller accepts I/O commands over an Ethernet connection and transfers data over a high-speed I/O bus The DataVault was Thinking Machines' mass storage system, storing five gigabytes of data, expandable to ten gigabytes with transfer rates of 40 megabytes per second. Eight DataVaults could be operated in parallel for a combined data transfer rate of 320 megabytes per second for up to 80 gigabytes of data. Each DataVault unit stored its data in an array of 39 individual disk drives with data was spread across the drives. Each 64-bit data chunk received from the I/O bus was split into two 32-bit words.

The Falcon won the highly touted US Air Force Office Automation contract, initially estimated at $1.7 billion, and the largest single computer contract the Federal government had awarded at that time. It was also the first supermicrocomputer to use a first- level cache memory based on virtual addresses instead of physical addresses, which made it 80% faster than the original requirements called for. Because the 3B5/3B15 was a large minicomputer with only 1 CPU, it was sometimes referred to as "the body without a brain". Also the small 3B2 had a desktop design with (supposedly) less expansion capability, but had capacity available for up to 4 CPUs, it was thus also at times referred to as "the brain without a body".

DEC PDP-1 minicomputer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The over the shoulder camera angle is also simulated in third-person shooter video gaming. Within this category of 3D gaming the player’s avatar is visible on screen, as opposed to a first-person shooter game that centres the weapon in the frame and adopts a Point-of-view immersive angle. The OTS angle is utilised in third-person shooter games as a way to allow both game designers and players to further customise the avatar characters and to display a greater range of vision of the surrounding area. This increase in a player’s field of vision allows for clearer close combat and interaction with physical objects in the game space.

RDOS was capable of multitasking, with the ability to run up to 32 what were called "tasks" (similar to the current term threads) simultaneously on each of two grounds (foreground and background) within a 64 KB memory space. Later versions of RDOS were compatible with Data General's 16-bit Eclipse minicomputer line. A cut-down version of RDOS, without real-time background and foreground capability but still capable of running multiple threads and multi-user Data General Business Basic, was called Data General Diskette Operating System (DG-DOS or, now somewhat confusingly, simply DOS); another related operating system was RTOS, a Real-Time Operating System for diskless environments. RDOS on microNOVA-based "Micro Products" micro-minicomputers was sometimes called DG/RDOS.

The first production X-ray CT machine (in fact called the "EMI-Scanner") was limited to making tomographic sections of the brain, but acquired the image data in about 4 minutes (scanning two adjacent slices), and the computation time (using a Data General Nova minicomputer) was about 7 minutes per picture. This scanner required the use of a water-filled Perspex tank with a pre-shaped rubber "head-cap" at the front, which enclosed the patient's head. The water-tank was used to reduce the dynamic range of the radiation reaching the detectors (between scanning outside the head compared with scanning through the bone of the skull). The images were relatively low resolution, being composed of a matrix of only 80 × 80 pixels.

The SM-1420 (CM-1420) was a 16 bit DEC PDP-11/45 minicomputer clone, and the successor to SM-4 in Soviet Bloc countries. Under the direction of Minpribor it was produced in the Soviet Union and Bulgaria from 1983 onwards, and was more than twice as fast as its predecessor. Its closest western counterpart was the DEC PDP-11/45, which meant the Soviet technology lagged 11 years behind compared to the Digital Equipment Corporation equivalent machine. The standard package included 256KB MOS memory, two RK-06 disks, two TU-10 decks, CM-6315 barrel or DZM-180 dot-matrix printer from Mera Blonie (Poland), VT52 compatible or VTA-2000-15 (BTA 2000-15) VT100 compatible terminals from Mera Elzab.

In addition to the names and entry points of the code located within, they also require a list of the objects they depend on. This is a side-effect of one of OOP's main advantages, inheritance, which means that parts of the complete definition of any method may be in different places. This is more than simply listing that one library requires the services of another: in a true OOP system, the libraries themselves may not be known at compile time, and vary from system to system. At the same time many developers worked on the idea of multi-tier programs, in which a "display" running on a desktop computer would use the services of a mainframe or minicomputer for data storage or processing.

Inside of laptop, with CPU removed from socket Advances in MOS IC technology led to the invention of the microprocessor in the early 1970s. Since the introduction of the first commercially available microprocessor, the Intel 4004 in 1971, and the first widely used microprocessor, the Intel 8080 in 1974, this class of CPUs has almost completely overtaken all other central processing unit implementation methods. Mainframe and minicomputer manufacturers of the time launched proprietary IC development programs to upgrade their older computer architectures, and eventually produced instruction set compatible microprocessors that were backward-compatible with their older hardware and software. Combined with the advent and eventual success of the ubiquitous personal computer, the term CPU is now applied almost exclusively to microprocessors.

Colour television arrived in Australia in March 1975, around ten years after the UK. and Redihire had been preparing for the event for over a year with six shops opening in and around the Sydney area with the company's HQ in Roseville, New South Wales. Television rental accounted for around twenty percent of the initial market and Redihire adopted a 'rent or buy' marketing approach from the onset majoring on existing models that were being made for AWA-Thorn by Mitsubishi Electric of Japan. In 1975, AWA brought the first Pick minicomputer system to Australia, and set up a computer services arm. 1979 saw the closure of the Marconi School of Wireless when it moved to Launceston, Tasmania to become part of the Australian Maritime College.

Technically, the Alto was a small minicomputer, but it could be considered a personal computer in the sense that it was used by one person sitting at a desk, in contrast with the mainframe computers and other minicomputers of the era. It was arguably "the first personal computer", although this title is disputed by others. More significantly (and perhaps less controversially), it may be considered to be one of the first workstation systems in the style of single-user machines such as the Apollo, based on the Unix operating system, and systems by Symbolics, designed to natively run Lisp as a development environment. In 1976 to 1977 the Swiss computer pioneer Niklaus Wirth spent a sabbatical at PARC and was excited by the Alto.

1982 Videotex Communications, Collected Papers Aldrich Archive, University of Brighton December 1982 His definition of the new mass communications medium as 'participative' [interactive, many-to-many] was fundamentally different from the traditional definitions of mass communication and mass media and a precursor to the social networking on the Internet 25 years later. In March 1980 he launched Redifon's Office Revolution, which allowed consumers, customers, agents, distributors, suppliers and service companies to be connected on-line to the corporate systems and allow business transactions to be completed electronically in real-time.1980 TV paves the way for Information Brokerage, Minicomputer News p. 12 London May 1980, the most comprehensive report of the March 1980 Press Conference launching the Redifon R 1800/50 computer system.

Trip Hawkins created a clone of the Strat-o-Matic paper and dice-based football simulation game as a teenager. The game was unsuccessful due to its complexity, and he hoped to one day delegate its rules to a computer. At Harvard College, where Hawkins played football for the Crimson, he wrote a football simulation for the PDP-11 minicomputer which, he later said, predicted that the Miami Dolphins would defeat the Minnesota Vikings 23–6 (actually 24–7) in the 1974 Super Bowl. After founding Electronic Arts in 1982—"The real reason that I founded [it] was because I wanted to make computerized versions of games like Strat-O- Matic", Hawkins later said—the company began designing a microcomputer football game.

Wanting to find a better solution, Thompson initially petitioned for Bell to purchase a PDP-10 computer, then US$120,000, for the purposes of writing a new operating system; he was turned down, as Bell Labs was uninterested in spending money on an operating system project after just cancelling the previous one. Thompson, however, learned that a neighboring department had an older, little-used PDP-7 minicomputer which he could re-purpose. As Thompson began porting the game to the new system, he decided not to base the code on any of the existing software for the computer, and instead write his own. As a result, he implemented his own base code libraries for programs to use, including arithmetic packages and graphics subsystems.

This led to the term "Meaningless Indices of Performance" being popular amongst technical people by the mid-1980s. For this reason, MIPS has become not a measure of instruction execution speed, but task performance speed compared to a reference. In the late 1970s, minicomputer performance was compared using VAX MIPS, where computers were measured on a task and their performance rated against the VAX 11/780 that was marketed as a 1 MIPS machine. (The measure was also known as the VAX Unit of Performance or VUP.) This was chosen because the 11/780 was roughly equivalent in performance to an IBM System/370 model 158–3, which was commonly accepted in the computing industry as running at 1 MIPS.

Many minicomputer performance claims were based on the Fortran version of the Whetstone benchmark, giving Millions of Whetstone Instructions Per Second (MWIPS). The VAX 11/780 with FPA (1977) runs at 1.02 MWIPS. Effective MIPS speeds are highly dependent on the programming language used. The Whetstone Report has a table showing MWIPS speeds of PCs via early interpreters and compilers up to modern languages. The first PC compiler was for BASIC (1982) when a 4.8 MHz 8088/87 CPU obtained 0.01 MWIPS. Results on a 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (1 CPU 2007) vary from 9.7 MWIPS using BASIC Interpreter, 59 MWIPS via BASIC Compiler, 347 MWIPS using 1987 Fortran, 1,534 MWIPS through HTML/Java to 2,403 MWIPS using a modern C/C++ compiler.

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.

In early 1974, Bob Leedom saw Ahl's version of the game in 101 BASIC Computer Games while working with a Data General Nova 800 minicomputer at Westinghouse Electric Corporation and, having never seen a Star Trek game before, started porting it to the system. After he got the game running, he began to expand it with suggestions from his friends. He changed the user interface, replacing the original game's numeric codes with three-letter commands and adding status reports from show characters and names for the galaxy quadrants, and overhauled the gameplay, adding moving Klingon ships, navigation and fire control options, and an expanded library computer. Once it was completed, he wrote a letter to the People's Computer Company newsletter describing the game.

NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the IPX network protocol. The original NetWare product in 1983 supported clients running both CP/M and MS-DOS, ran over a proprietary star network topology and was based on a Novell-built file server using the Motorola 68000 processor, but the company soon moved away from building its own hardware, and NetWare became hardware-independent, running on any suitable Intel-based IBM PC compatible system, and a wide range of network cards. From the beginning NetWare implemented a number of features inspired by mainframe and minicomputer systems that were not available in its competitors.

The central node communications processor was an HP 2100 minicomputer called the Menehune, which is the Hawaiian language word for "imp", or dwarf people, and was named for its similar role to the original ARPANET Interface Message Processor (IMP) which was being deployed at about the same time. In the original system, the Menehune forwarded correctly received user data to the UH central computer, an IBM System 360/65 time-sharing system. Outgoing messages from the 360 were converted into packets by the Menehune, which were queued and broadcast to the remote users at a data rate of 9600 bit/s. Unlike the half-duplex radios at the user TCUs, the Menehune was interfaced to the radio channels with full- duplex radio equipment.

On June 20, 1988 Microsoft Corporation and Hewlett-Packard issued a press release announcing the inclusion of NewWave support in an up-coming release Microsoft Excel. NewWave featured icons, scheduled scripts in the form of "agents", and "hot connects." HP incorporated NewWave into their multi-platform office automation offerings running under their proprietary MPE and HP-UX (UNIX) minicomputer operating systems. They developed NewWave versions of key email, database, document management, personal productivity, communications and network management tools and branded all related solutions under the “HP NewWave Office” banner. Prior to the integration of HP NewWave this solution set had been known as “Business System Plus”. The “NewWave Office” term had been used previously to describe the main NewWave user desktop.

Improvements in software and hardware, and rapidly lowering costs, popularized desktop publishing and enabled very fine control of typeset results much less expensively than the minicomputer dedicated systems. At the same time, word processing systems, such as Wang and WordPerfect and Microsoft Word, revolutionized office documents. They did not, however, have the typographic ability or flexibility required for complicated book layout, graphics, mathematics, or advanced hyphenation and justification rules (H and J). By the year 2000, this industry segment had shrunk because publishers were now capable of integrating typesetting and graphic design on their own in-house computers. Many found the cost of maintaining high standards of typographic design and technical skill made it more economical to outsource to freelancers and graphic design specialists.

The first Pyramid Technology series of minicomputers was released in August 1983Supports Up to 128 Users Pyramid 32-Bit Mini Designed for Unix, Page 73, Computerworld, 15 Aug 1983, ...has unwrapped a 32-bit, ...minicomputer...Pyramid 90x...Position advert: Pyramid Systems Support Specialist, Page 184, Computerworld, 12 Sep 1983, Pyramid Technology Corporation, a new Mountain View, California company focused on ... has recently announced its first product: the Pyramid 90x computer. as the 90x superminicomputer, which used their custom 32-bit scalar processor running at 8 MHz. Although the architecture was marketed as a RISC machine, it was actually microprogrammed. It used a "sliding window" register model based on the Berkeley RISC processor, but memory access instructions had complex operation modes that could require many cycles to run.

The post-World War II decades have seen New Hampshire increase its economic and cultural links with the greater Boston, Massachusetts, region. This reflects a national trend, in which improved highway networks have helped metropolitan areas expand into formerly rural areas or small nearby cities. The replacement of the Nashua textile mill with defense electronics contractor Sanders Associates in 1952 and the arrival of minicomputer giant Digital Equipment Corporation in the early 1970s helped lead the way toward southern New Hampshire's role as a high-tech adjunct of the Route 128 corridor. The postwar years saw the rise of New Hampshire's political primary for President of the United States, which as the first primary in the quadrennial campaign season draws enormous attention.

The predecessor to AS/400, IBM System/38, was first made available in August 1979 and was marketed as a minicomputer for general business and departmental use. It was sold alongside other product lines, each with a different architecture (System/3, System/32, System/34, System/36). Realizing the importance of compatibility with the thousands of programs written in legacy code, IBM launched the AS/400 midrange computer line in 1988. AS stands for "Application System." Great effort was made during development of the AS/400 to enable programs written for the System/34 and System/36 to be moved to the AS/400. Programs on the System/38 were directly compatible with the new AS/400 (after they were 're-encapsulated' by the operating system).

Another early single-chip 16-bit microprocessor was TI's TMS 9900, which was also compatible with their TI-990 line of minicomputers. The 9900 was used in the TI 990/4 minicomputer, the Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computer, and the TM990 line of OEM microcomputer boards. The chip was packaged in a large ceramic 64-pin DIP package, while most 8-bit microprocessors such as the Intel 8080 used the more common, smaller, and less expensive plastic 40-pin DIP. A follow-on chip, the TMS 9980, was designed to compete with the Intel 8080, had the full TI 990 16-bit instruction set, used a plastic 40-pin package, moved data 8 bits at a time, but could only address 16 KB. A third chip, the TMS 9995, was a new design.

Video editing reached its full potential in the late 1970s when computer-controlled minicomputer edit controllers along with communications protocols were developed, which could orchestrate an edit based on an EDL, using timecode to synchronize multiple tape machines and auxiliary devices using a 9-Pin Protocol. The most popular and widely used computer edit systems came from Sony, Ampex and the venerable CMX. Systems such as these were expensive, especially when considering auxiliary equipment like VTR, video switchers and character generators (CG) and were usually limited to high-end post-production facilities. Strassner Editing Systems Jack Calaway of Calaway Engineering was the first to produce a lower-cost, PC-based, "CMX- style" linear editing system which greatly expanded the use of linear editing systems throughout the post-production industry.

IPM makes "minicomputer mongrels" to eat flaming death CPU Wars is an underground comic strip by Charles Andres that circulated around Digital Equipment Corporation and other computer manufacturers starting in 1977. It described a hypothetical invasion of Digital's slightly disguised Maynard, Massachusetts ex-woolen mill headquarters (now located in Barnyard, Mass) by troops from IPM, the Impossible to Purchase Machine Corporation in a rather- blunt-edged parody of IBM."CPU Wars"; in: The humor hinged on the differences in style and culture between the invading forces of IPM and the laid-back employees of the Human Equipment Corporation. For example, even at gunpoint, the employees were unable to lead the invading forces to their leaders because they had no specific leaders as a result their corporation's use of matrix management.

Early in 1976, ICL acquired the international (that is, non-US) part of Singer Business Machines. The Singer group, a holding company which had diversified by adding many divisions, the most well-known of which was its early roots in sewing machines, and others such as the Business Machine division which was acquired by purchasing Friden, a San Leandro computer company, whose flagship product was the System Ten, a small business minicomputer. SBM had also acquired Cogar Corporation, a manufacturer of desktop intelligent terminals in Utica, New York, which after the ICL acquisition became the development and manufacturing plant for both minicomputers and terminals. The acquisition shifted the geographical balance of ICL's sales away from the UK, and also gave a presence in industry markets such as retail and manufacturing.

Later, software was sold to multiple customers by being bundled with the hardware by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) such as Data General, Digital Equipment and IBM. When a customer bought a minicomputer, at that time the smallest computer on the market, the computer did not come with pre-installed software, but needed to be installed by engineers employed by the OEM. This bundling attracted the attention of US antitrust regulators, who sued IBM for improper "tying" in 1969, alleging that it was an antitrust violation that customers who wanted to obtain its software had to also buy or lease its hardware in order to do so. However, the case was dropped by the US Justice Department, after many years of attrition, as it concluded it was "without merit".

The 5100 was based on IBM's innovative concept that, using an emulator written in microcode, a small and relatively cheap computer could run programs already written for much larger, and much more expensive, existing computers, without the time and expense of writing and debugging new programs. Two such programs were included: a slightly modified version of APLSV, IBM's APL interpreter for its System/370 mainframes, and the BASIC interpreter used on IBM's System/3 minicomputer. Consequently, the 5100's microcode was written to emulate most of the functionality of both a System/370 and a System/3. IBM later used the same approach for its 1983 introduction of the XT/370 model of the IBM PC, which was a standard IBM PC XT with the addition of a System/370 emulator card.

WordMARC ComposerThe name on the software distribution media, (C) 1983, 1986 by MARC Software International, Inc was a scientifically oriented word processor developed by MARC Software, an offshoot of MARC Analysis Research Corporation (which specialized in high end Finite Element Analysis software for mechanical engineering). It ran originally on minicomputers such as Prime and Digital Equipment Corporation VAX. When the IBM PC emerged as the platform of choice for word processing, WordMARC allowed users to easily move documents from a minicomputer (where they could be easily shared) to PCs. WordMARC was the creation of Pedro Marcal, who pioneered work in finite element analysis and needed a technical word processor that both supported complex notations and was capable of running on minicomputers and other high-end machines such an Alliant and AT&T.

Software Cartridge with Box and Manual The code was written in F-8 Assembly language, and then run through a translator/assembler on a Hewlett-Packard minicomputer to produce binary machine code. The resident 1K ROM contained basic start-up and operating code, images of letters and numbers, and four user-accessible programs – text, clock, alarm, and color.Shapero Umtech developed and marketed fourteen software programs, six in the Education Series, six in the Entertainment Series, and two in the Money Management Category. The company developed but never offered for sale a cartridge with 1k of onboard RAM that made the computer programmable in a variation of the APL language, and an educational program called Old Regime that allowed users to simulate being a wealthy landowner in seventeenth century France.

Jobs, however, replied that "we can afford you" and Holt joined the Apple II team in part responding to Alcorn's request to "help the kids out." Holt thus began to work "after hours at Atari on Apple's television interface and power supply." According to Apple's first CEO, Michael ("Scotty") Scott, "One thing Holt has to his credit is that he created the switching power supply that allowed us to do a very lightweight computer compared to everybody else's that used transformers." However, one history reports over a dozen computer systems and terminals with a switching power supply came out in years prior to the Apple II, including PDP-11/20 minicomputer in 1969, Datapoint 2200 in 1970Datapoint 2200 is a "smart terminal", whose designers supposedly claimed to be "the first personal computer" (.

Ian Stocks was one of the graduate students who worked on this fast-turnaround in-memory 2-pass compiler, and the compiler (for the Digital Equipment PDP-11 minicomputer) was completed in the early 1970s. This work was part of the "PDP-11 Playpen" project which focused on getting graduate students direct access to low-cost computer hardware, such as the PDP-11/23, where the Pascal compiler ran. Two years later at the urging of his new graduate student, Greg Chesson, Gillies became in 1974 the first licensee for the UNIX operating system from Bell Labs.Greg Chesson, Personal communication to Donald W. Gillies, Spring 1995, 115 Waverley Street, Palo Alto, CA Chesson went on to be the third person to edit the Unix kernel and was the eighth hire at Silicon Graphics Inc.

The IBM Series/1 is a 16-bit minicomputer, introduced in 1976, that in many respects competed with other minicomputers of the time, such as the PDP-11 from Digital Equipment Corporation and similar offerings from Data General and HP. The Series/1 was typically used to control and operate external electro- mechanical components while also allowing for primitive data storage and handling. Although the Series/1 uses EBCDIC character encoding internally and locally attached EBCDIC terminals, ASCII-based remote terminals and devices could be attached via an I/O card with a RS-232 interface to be more compatible with competing minicomputers. IBM's own 3101 and 3151 ASCII display terminals are examples of this. This was a departure from IBM mainframes that used 3270 terminals and coaxial attachment.

In 1975, KDUN's owners were frustrated by the volume of paperwork then required for scheduling advertising, billing advertisers, and producing each day's commercial lineup, they purchased a Wang Laboratories minicomputer and, along with engineer Wes Lockard, invented software to handle these traffic and billing tasks. As the brothers took on these tasks for other stations in the area, they realized that a market for computerized traffic and billing existed and, in 1978, they founded Custom Business Systems, Inc. At its peak in the mid-1990s, CBSI software was in use by roughly one-third of the commercial radio stations in the United States and by broadcasters in 24 other countries. In 1999, it was described as the "world's largest supplier of business software for the radio broadcast industry".

The predecessor of all Chinese CDS/CMS is the first CDS in China designated as Type 670-1, which was developed by the 706th Institute under the request of 701st and 713th Institutes, when the latter two were assigned to develop Type 051 destroyer in 1966. Mr. Qin Xue-Chang (秦学昌, born in 1940 in Chongming County) as the general designer, with the CDS designated as Type 670-I shipborne combat information center, and given the name Poseidon-1 (Hai-shen Yi-Hao, 海神1号), with development begun in 1966 and concluded seven years later. Type 670-I CDS is a centralized system based on specially developed 22-bit, 8K-RAM, MLB minicomputers, which is built on DTL small-scale integrated circuits (IC). The minicomputer is capable of performing two hundred thousand operations per second (ops/sec).

The safety of TMS in rats with a maximal field strength of 3.4 Tesla at 8 Herz for 20 minutes or 10uC/cm2/phase was demonstrated in Sgro While working as a neurology researcher Sgro began work in biomedical engineering and machine vision, specifically the use of imaging and machine vision technologies, to assess the function and integrity of the nervous system in various states of consciousness, during medical procedures, and disease. The research was performed initially using computer programs written in Fortran running on a DEC PDP minicomputer. In the mid 1980s the widespread adoption of IBM PC compatible computers with the ISA bus enabled the development of PC based expansion cards to increase the functionality of the PC. To facilitate lower cost advanced hardware development, Sgro co-founded Alacron, Inc. to develop advanced medical research equipment and commercial PC based products.

Chapter 1 - The Wave: The Shape of the Wave lays the foundation for some of the themes that occur throughout the book. These include the universal nature of mobile devices, and how mobile and cloud computing technologies will continue to disrupt established industries and the old ways of doing business. This chapter also introduces the ongoing Information Revolution as the third great revolution to transform society, after the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. Chapter 2 - Computers: The Evolution to Mobile Computing discusses the four great waves of computing described by technologists as leading to the fifth mobile wave: the mainframe, the minicomputer, the personal computer and the Internet PC. Saylor writes that a critical turning point unleashing the mobile wave was triggered by Apple, with the introduction of the affordable iPhone and its App Store, multi-touch capabilities and built-in GPS.

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.

The General Electric M236 computer was developed to support MISTRAM and other large military radar projects in the 1960s. (According to Dr. Neelands, certain military people involved in the project were adamant about not relying on "computers", therefore this "information processor" was developed.) This high speed 36-bit minicomputer was developed by the GE Heavy Military Electronics Department (HMED) in Syracuse, New York, eventually leading to the GE-600 series of mainframe computers. The M236 was designed for real-time processing in a radar-based missile flight measurement system and lacked some general purpose features, such as overlapped instruction processing, the floating point operations needed for Fortran, and operating system support features, such as base and bounds registers. The M-236 computer was developed for the US Air Force Cape Canaveral Missile Range, and installed it at Eleuthera (Bahamas).

TAPS was not only a development tool for making online applications but also a production environment to run them within, and as such provided essential capabilities including network security and control, screen mapping and data editing, menu processing, database maintenance and inquiry, concurrency protection, and network and database recovery. During the late 1970s TAPS was ported to a number of minicomputer platforms, including the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11, the Hewlett-Packard HP 3000, Perkin Elmer's Interdata minicomputers, and the IBM Series/1, along with systems from Harris Corporation and Tandem Computers. At this time some 70 percent of TAPS sales were to other companies doing software development, such as McCormack & Dodge and On-Line Systems, Inc., in what the firm said was a deliberate strategy to first market the product to customers who would be "the toughest test of all".

Hack (1982) was developed by Jay Fenlason with help from Kenny Woodland, Mike Thome, and Jonathan Payne, students at Lincoln- Sudbury Regional High School at the time, while participating in the school's computer lab overseen by Brian Harvey. Harvey had been able to acquire a PDP-11/7 minicomputer for the school and instituted a course curriculum that allowed students to do whatever they wanted on the computers, including playing games, as long as they had completed assignments by the end of each semester. Fenlason, Woodland, Thome, and Payne met through these courses and became a close group of friends and competent programmers. Harvey had invited the group to the computer labs at UC Berkeley where they had the opportunity to use the mainframe systems there, and were introduced to Rogue, inspiring them to create their own version as their class project.

The CSMP project employs four non-verbal languages for the purpose of posing problems and representing mathematical concepts: the Papy Minicomputer (mental computation), Arrows (relations), Strings (classification) and Calculators (patterns). It was designed to teach mathematics as a problem solving activity rather than simply teaching arithmetic skills, and uses the Socratic method, guiding students to figure out concepts on their own rather than directly lecturing or demonstrating the material. The curriculum uses a spiral structure and philosophy, providing students chances to learn materials at different times and rates. By giving students repeated exposure to a variety of content – even if all students may not initially fully understand – students may experience, assimilate, apply, and react to a variety of mathematical experiences, learning to master different concepts over time, at their own paces, rather than being presented with a single topic to study until mastered.

Prior to January 1991, pointing, data taking, and calibration of the radio telescope were controlled by a Data General Nova minicomputer ( picture ) running a custom telescope-control system. The control computer was fairly limited in speed and memory (having only 32 K byte of random access memory and 5 M byte of fixed disk storage), but it was fast enough to allow limited data reduction on-line. For further processing, all scans were transferred via 1600 bpi 9-track magnetic tape to a Digital Equipment VAXstation II/GPX workstation. In January 1991, the telescope-control functions were transferred to a Macintosh IIfx computer, running a translated and improved version of the telescope-control system written in C. Individual scans or more commonly concatenated files containing large numbers of scans can be obtained from the control computer directly over the Internet.

Later that summer, Mayfield purchased an HP-35 calculator and often visited the local Hewlett- Packard sales office. The staff there offered to let him use the HP 2000C minicomputer at the office if he would create a version of his Star Trek game for it; as the version of the BASIC programming language on the computer was different from the Sigma 7, he elected to abandon the Sigma 7 version and rewrite the program from scratch. He completed it on October 20, 1972, and the game was added to the HP public domain Contributed Program library of software as STTR1 in February 1973, with Mayfield attributing the game to Centerline Engineering, a company he was considering starting. It was also published in the People's Computer Company newsletter, and republished in their collection book, What to Do After You Hit Return (1975).

It was not until the 1970s when fully programmable computers appeared that could fit entirely on top of a desk. 1970 saw the introduction of the Datapoint 2200, a "smart" computer terminal complete with keyboard and monitor, was designed to connect with a mainframe computer but that didn't stop owners from using its built-in computational abilities as a stand-alone desktop computer.Lamont Wood, "Forgotten PC history: The true origins of the personal computer" , Computerworld, 8 August 2008 The HP 9800 series, which started out as programmable calculators in 1971 but was programmable in BASIC by 1972, used a smaller version of a minicomputer design based on ROM memory and had small one-line LED alphanumeric displays and displayed graphics with a plotter. The Wang 2200 of 1973 had a full-size cathode ray tube (CRT) and cassette tape storage.

The 'Class I' systems were classified as mainframe systems – and the Series/1 systems that provided field input to them – that were maintained at and distributed from the three CDPAs. The chief among these were JUMPS/MMS (Joint Uniform Military Pay System/Manpower Management System), SASSY (Supported Activities Supply SYstem), and MIMMS (Marine Corps Integrated Maintenance Management System). Designed primarily as a Source Data Automation (SDA) device for the enhancement of input into 'Class I' logistics and personnel computer systems, the ADPE-FMF Series/1 provided the power of a minicomputer to the battalion/squadron commander. However, left in the hands of young Marine Corps programmers eager to explore the capabilities of their new equipment, the Series/1 soon proved to be a valuable and flexible workhorse for all manner of tasks at all organizational levels.

The main objective of the project was to build a computer, which would be small, affordable (around 6.5 thousand dollars apiece), easy to produce and failproof.Lipiński 2014, p. 102 Great emphasis was also put on its modularity Karpiński was determined to build an entire system, with flexible complexity and arrangement in line with user's needs. Production of 1300 units was planned in two initial series. The primary objective was commercial, but Karpiński intended for K-202 to be used in a vast variety of applications in industry, administration, science and military (land and navy). The team worked for three years and in 1973 first prototypes were completed. The result was a minicomputer highly innovative in many aspects. K-202 was constructed entirely with microchips, using breakthrough 1971 Intel 4004 chips. It was also asynchronic and used floating point representation, as KAR-65.

The Data General NOVA was introduced in 1969, implemented using individual integrated circuits (ICs) mounted on a 15x15-inch printed circuit board. In order to lower design complexity, and thus board size and cost, the arithmetic logic unit (ALU) was only 4-bits wide, implemented using a single 74181 IC. This meant it required four machine cycles to complete a 16-bit instruction, but it also allowed the system to be much less expensive than competing minicomputers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) or Hewlett- Packard. The NOVA was very successful, propelling DG into the second-place position behind DEC in the minicomputer market during the 1970s. In 1970, DG introduced the SuperNOVA, which featured a full 16-bit wide ALU using four 74181's in bit-slice fashion, and thus ran about four times as fast as the original NOVA.

The original 1969 dial-up technology was fairly simple—the local phone number in Cleveland, for example, was a line connected to a time-division multiplexer that connected via a leased line to a matched multiplexer in Columbus that was connected to a time-sharing host system. In the earliest buildups, each line terminated on a single machine at CompuServe's host, so different numbers had to be used to reach different computers. Later, the central multiplexers in Columbus were replaced with PDP-8 minicomputers, and the PDP-8s were connected to a DEC PDP-15 minicomputer that acted as switches so a phone number was not tied to a particular destination host. Finally, CompuServe developed its own packet switching network, implemented on DEC PDP-11 minicomputers acting as network nodes that were installed throughout the US (and later, in other countries) and interconnected.

As the publishing expanded, in the early 80s the BBT programmer, Prsni, suggested the creation of an internal conferencing system and a PDP-11 minicomputer system was purchased and a limited internal conferencing system, based on the popular KOM (BBS) system was installed. Soon it became apparent that the capacity to discuss the publishing affairs in conference format greatly increased the capacity of the BBT. Considering that Harikesa Swami was now travelling almost non-stop throughout an expanding area and engaging in publishing in dozens of languages, the system was enhanced to allow users to dial into the network from anywhere in the world. This system, renamed COM, connected all parts of ISKCON and the BBT in real-time, and was soon carrying hundreds of communications a day long before the creation of the www or the on-line usage of the internet.

On 15 August 1978, the DoC (whose technical side is now part of the Industry Canada) held a press conference and formally announced the Telidon project to the public, demonstrating a large video display sending information to the minicomputer controlling it over an acoustic coupler modem. They outlined a four-year development plan that included funding for further technical development at the CRC, the production of several hundred terminals that would be lent out to industry for development studies, as well as funds for marketing and lobbying in videotex standards negotiations. In 1979 the DoC formed the Canadian Videotex Consultative Committee to advise the Minister on ways to commercialize the CRC's work, and develop videotext services within Canada. The committee held four meetings during the initial four-year development plan, and coordinated a number of field trials with broadcasters, telephone companies, cable television firms, manufacturers and various information providers.

In September 1961, a Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-1 minicomputer was installed in the "kludge room" on the 2nd floor of Building 26, the location of the MIT Electrical Engineering Department. The PDP-1 was to complement the older TX-0, and like it had a punched tape reader and writer, and additionally accepted input from a panel of switches and could output to a cathode-ray tube display. Over the summer before its arrival a group of students and university employees had been pondering ideas for programs that would demonstrate the new computer's capabilities in a compelling way. Three of them—Steve Russell, then an employee at Harvard University and a former research assistant at MIT; Martin Graetz, a research assistant and former student at MIT; and Wayne Wiitanen, a research assistant at Harvard and former employee and student at MIT—came up with the idea for Spacewar!.

VT55 Programmer's Manual, DEC, 1977 The VT125 added an implementation of the byte-efficient Remote Graphic Instruction Set, ReGIS, which used custom ANSI codes to send the graphics commands to the terminal, rather than requiring the terminal to be set to a separate graphics mode like the VT105. The VT100 form factor left significant room in the case for expansion, and DEC used this to produce several all-in-one stand-alone minicomputer systems. The VT103 included a cardcage and 4×4 (8-slot) Q-Bus backplane, sufficient to configure a small LSI-11 system within the case,VT103 LSI-11 Video Terminal User's Guide (Digital Equipment Corporation, 1979) and supported an optional dual TU58 DECtape II block addressable cartridge tape drive which behaves like a very slow disk drive. The VT180 (codenamed "Robin") added a single-board microcomputer using a Zilog Z80 to run CP/M.

MITS Altair 8800 Computer with floppy disk system, of which the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, the Altair BASIC Gates read the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics which demonstrated the Altair 8800, and he contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform. In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demonstration, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration was held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, New Mexico; it was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC.

The decline of the minis happened due to the lower cost of microprocessor-based hardware, the emergence of inexpensive and easily deployable local area network systems, the emergence of the 68020, 80286 and the 80386 microprocessors, and the desire of end-users to be less reliant on inflexible minicomputer manufacturers and IT departments or "data centers". The result was that minicomputers and computer terminals were replaced by networked workstations, file servers and PCs in some installations, beginning in the latter half of the 1980s. During the 1990s, the change from minicomputers to inexpensive PC networks was cemented by the development of several versions of Unix and Unix-like systems that ran on the Intel x86 microprocessor architecture, including Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. Also, the Microsoft Windows series of operating systems, beginning with Windows NT, now included server versions that supported preemptive multitasking and other features required for servers.

The university authorities supported this, as they wanted to forcibly remove the "nasty habit of harassing computers for logic games", which they believed should be used only for serious military purposes. Players took to holding secret meetings in front of the massive computer in the late evenings when the operators were gone. Podgórski recalled that despite knowing that the game was designed to always beat the player, many people spent many hours trying to decipher the algorithm or win. In later years, variants of nim and Marienbad were the second most popular type of computer game present on Polish computers after noughts and crosses, since it was a relatively simple game to program. , who would later become the two-decade long host of Wheel of Fortune from the 1970s, proposed to Polish television a game show where players compete against a computer in nim on a Momik 8b minicomputer.

DEC VT100 terminal, widely used for Unix timesharing VAX-11/780, a typical minicomputer used for early BSD timesharing systems VAX-11/780 internals A VAX computer was installed at Berkeley in 1978, but the port of Unix to the VAX architecture, UNIX/32V, did not take advantage of the VAX's virtual memory capabilities. The kernel of 32V was largely rewritten by Berkeley students to include a virtual memory implementation, and a complete operating system including the new kernel, ports of the 2BSD utilities to the VAX, and the utilities from 32V was released as 3BSD at the end of 1979. 3BSD was also alternatively called Virtual VAX/UNIX or VMUNIX (for Virtual Memory Unix), and BSD kernel images were normally called `/vmunix` until 4.4BSD. The success of 3BSD was a major factor in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) decision to fund Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), which would develop a standard Unix platform for future DARPA research in the VLSI Project.

Per Bugge- Asperheim, Svein Strøm, Per Klevan, Lars Monrad-Krohn, Per Bjørge, Asbjørn Horn, Olav Landsverk and Yngvar Lundh which made up the NDRE's digital division in 1962 Norsk Data grew out of the development Simulation for Automatic Machinery 2 (SAM 2), a minicomputer developed at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (NDRE). The computer was ordered in 1966 for analysis of satellite data at Tromsø Satellite Station (TSS) and was the third computer built by NDRE.Heradstveit: 33 The main developers of the system were Rolf Skår, Per Bjørge, Lars Monrad-Krohn and Yngvar Lundh. SAM 2 was the first in Europe and among the first three in the world which used integrated circuits.Heradstveit: 29 The project was risky, as TSS originally had proposed buying an American computer and NDRE would have to buy such a computer if SAM 2 failed. As there was time between SAM 2 was completed and it had to be in Tromsø, the designers took it on a tour to Bergen and Trondheim.

Like all of the original newsreaders and the Usenet software itself, rn was designed for the environment of a large time-shared minicomputer, which users connected to using terminals wired directly to the machine, and where the only networks available were accessed by slow and expensive dial-up modem connections. All of the articles in all of the newsgroups were stored in files on the local disk (known as the "news spool"), and rn could simply read those files directly when presenting them to the user. When local area networks became widespread, it was natural that administrators and users would desire remote access to the news spool, and NNTP, the Network News Transfer Protocol, was developed to serve that need. While working at Baylor College of Medicine, Stan O. Barber developed remote rn (rrn), a set of patches to rn which allowed it to communicate with an NNTP server over a local-area (or even wide-area) network.

HP 2100 minicomputer In 1971, Don Rawitsch, a history major and senior at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, taught an 8th grade history class at a junior high school in Minneapolis as a student teacher. His supervising teacher assigned him to prepare a unit on "The Western Expansion of the Mid-19th Century", and Rawitch decided to create a board game activity about the Oregon Trail for the students. After one week of planning the lessons, he was in the process of drawing out the trail on sheets of paper on the floor of his apartment when his roommates, fellow Carleton students Bill Heinemann and Paul Dillenberger, came in. Heinemann, who along with Dillenberger was a math student and student teacher with experience programming, discussed the project with Rawitsch, and told him that it would be well-suited to a computer program, as it could keep track of the player's progress and calculate their chances of success based on their supplies instead of a dice roll.

Storage (left), MAC-16 (center), paper tape reader (center top) and Plessy display (right) as part of an ARTS II set-up displayed in Rome. The MAC-16 (or LEC-16) was a 16-bit minicomputer introduced in 1969 by Lockheed Electronics. One main selling point of the MAC-16 was a dedicated context switching system that completed operations in two machine cycles. Several improved versions were introduced, including the MAC Jr., Sue, and System III, but the company dropped support for all of these in the late 1970s. The MAC-16 was designed to support various high-performance military and civilian roles, and thus spent a considerable amount of time on guaranteeing high speed context switching to support real-time computing. A switch to and from an interrupt handler took only 2 cycles. The original MAC-16 operated with a 1 μS cycle time using core memory and TTL integrated circuits. Lockheed advertised the machine with the slogan "In by 12:34:45.000000, out by 12:34:45.000002".

In 1976, with three colleagues: Richard (Dick) Evans, Robin Lodge and James Miller, Brown founded Metier Management Systems in London, the first company to develop and market mini-computer-based systems for the management of large scale projects. Their first product, Apollo, launched in 1977, was the first Project Management System to run on a minicomputer but was limited to network planning and scheduling. It was joined in 1978 by a sister product, Artemis which incorporated cost and resource management, and became the world's first commercially successful relational database system. By the early 1980s, Artemis systems were in use in over 30 countries providing management information for some of the world's largest civil, aerospace, nuclear and military projects, including the construction of off-shore oil platforms, aircraft development, the construction of five military cities in the Middle East, the maintenance of the US navy fleets at Long Beach and Norfolk Naval Yard, aerospace projects, nuclear power plant maintenance, and production scheduling in the UK and US automobile industries.

The entire exhibition is also available online. The museum features a Liquid Galaxy in the “Going Places: A History of Silicon Valley” exhibit. The exhibit features 20 preselected locations that visitors can fly to on the Liquid Galaxy. The museum has several additional exhibits, including a restoration of an historic PDP-1 minicomputer, two restored IBM 1401 computers, and an exhibit on the history of autonomous vehicles, from torpedoes to self-driving cars. An operating Difference Engine designed by Charles Babbage in the 1840s and constructed by the Science Museum of London was on display until January 31, 2016. It had been on loan since 2008 from its owner, Nathan Myhrvold, a former Microsoft executive.Difference Engine Leaves Computer History Museum , Mark Moack, Mountain View Voice, January 28, 2016 Former media executive John Hollar was appointed CEO of The Computer History Museum in July 2008. In 2010 the museum began with the collection of source code of important software, beginning with Apple's MacPaint 1.3, written in a combination of Assembly and Pascal and available as download for the public.

Performance could be especially problematic because early expert systems were built using tools (such as earlier Lisp versions) that interpreted code expressions without first compiling them. This provided a powerful development environment, but with the drawback that it was virtually impossible to match the efficiency of the fastest compiled languages (such as C). System and database integration were difficult for early expert systems because the tools were mostly in languages and platforms that were neither familiar to nor welcome in most corporate IT environments – programming languages such as Lisp and Prolog, and hardware platforms such as Lisp machines and personal computers. As a result, much effort in the later stages of expert system tool development was focused on integrating with legacy environments such as COBOL and large database systems, and on porting to more standard platforms. These issues were resolved mainly by the client-server paradigm shift, as PCs were gradually accepted in the IT environment as a legitimate platform for serious business system development and as affordable minicomputer servers provided the processing power needed for AI applications.

He was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, US. He attended Duke University, where he received his Bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1946 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1956. Cocke spent his entire career as an industrial researcher for IBM, from 1956 to 1992. Perhaps the project where his innovations were most noted was in the IBM 801 minicomputer, where his realization that matching the design of the architecture's instruction set to the relatively simple instructions actually emitted by compilers could allow high performance at a low cost. He is one of the inventors of the CYK algorithm (C for Cocke). He was also involved in the pioneering speech recognition and machine translation work at IBM in the 1970s and 1980s, and is credited by Frederick Jelinek with originating the idea of using a trigram language model for speech recognition.Jelinek, Frederick, "The Dawn of Statistical ASR and MT", Computational Linguistics, 35(4), 2009, pp. 483-494, doi: 10.1162/coli.2009.35.4.35401 Cocke was appointed IBM Fellow in 1972.

The history of this CPU stems from the early 1970s, when the group of engineers in Zelenograd's Special Computing Center, led by D.I. Yuditsky, developed their first 16-bit minicomputer, called Elektronika NC-1. This machine, intended to directly compete with SM EVM series, was first released in 1973 and used the bit slice 4-bit 587 CPU, sometimes called the first Soviet microprocessor ever. Its descendants proved popular and were widely used in various control systems and telecom equipment. However, the bit-slice nature of their CPUs made these machines somewhat unwieldy, especially in military applications, and the need for a single-chip microprocessor was identified. In 1980 the first 1801 CPU intended to fill this niche, K1801VE1, entered production. It was essentially a microcontroller with 256 bytes of on-chip RAM, 2K ROM and other peripheral circuitry, still based on Elektronika NC instruction set, but compatible with a Soviet clone of DEC's Q-Bus that was already adopted as an industry standard — a first sign of things to come.

To this base of equipment, Systime added peripherals and software from other vendors and then added some of its own application software. This allowed Systime to provide full solutions to growing customers, such as Gordon Spice Cash and Carry, that were first embracing computerised line-of-business systems during the 1970s. Accordingly, the Systime product lines were based around the minicomputers they produced, the most popular of which were the Systime 1000, Systime 3000, and Systime 5000, all based on different models of the DEC 16-bit PDP-11 minicomputer (roughly, the PDP-11/04, /60, and /34 respectively). The PDP-11-based Systime systems would typically run the DEC's RSTS/E operating system. These systems had many kinds of users; for instance, a botany group at the University of Reading used a Systime 5000. Systime's use of the PDP-11 coincided with an upsurge in the popularity of that model within the computer- using community, one that DEC had not fully antipated, leading to wait times up to three years for systems or components.

Geac designed additional hardware to support multiple simultaneous terminal connections, and with Dr Michael R Sweet developed its own operating system (named Geac) and own programming language (OPL) resulting in a multi-user real-time solution called the Geac 500.500/800 The initial implementation of this system at Donlands Dairybought, later sold, by Neilson in Toronto1972: the first Geac 500 was installed at Donlands Dairy, running an order entry systemA year later the first Geac 800 was installed at Donlands led to a contract at Vancouver City Savings Credit Union ("Vancity") in Vancouver, British Columbia, to create a real-time multi- branch online banking system. Geac developed hardware and operating system software to link minicomputers together, and integrated multiple-access disk drives, thereby creating a multi-processor minicomputer with a level of protection from data loss. Subsequently, Geac replaced the minicomputers with a proprietary microcoded processor of its own design, resulting in vastly improved software flexibility, reliability, performance, and fault tolerance. This system, called the Geac 8000 was introduced in 1978.

A PDP-8 on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.. This example is from the first generation of PDP-8s, built with discrete transistors and later known as the Straight 8. In 1962, Lincoln Laboratory used a selection of System Building Blocks to implement a small 12-bit machine, and attached it to a variety of analog-to-digital (A to D) input/output (I/O) devices that made it easy to interface with various analog lab equipment. The LINC proved to attract intense interest in the scientific community, and has since been referred to as the first real minicomputer,Wesley Clark, "The Linc, Perhaps the First Mini-Computer", From Cave Paintings to the Internet a machine that was small and inexpensive enough to be dedicated to a single task even in a small lab. Seeing the success of the LINC, in 1963 DEC took the basic logic design but stripped away the extensive A to D systems to produce the PDP-5. The new machine, the first outside the PDP-1 mould, was introduced at WESTCON on 11 August 1963.

The SuperPaint software contained all the essential elements of later paint packages, allowing the user to paint and modify pixels, using a palette of tools and effects, and thereby making it the first complete computer hardware and software solution for painting and editing images. Shoup also experimented with modifying the output signal using color tables, to allow the system to produce a wider variety of colors than the limited 8-bit range it contained. This scheme would later become commonplace in computer framebuffers. The SuperPaint framebuffer could also be used to capture input images from video.Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, 1999, Michael A. Hiltzik, HarperBusiness, Richard Shoup personal website - The SuperPaint System (1973–1979) (retrieved 20 August 2012). The first commercial framebuffer was produced in 1974 by Evans & Sutherland. It cost about $15,000, with a resolution of 512 by 512 pixels in 8-bit grayscale color, and sold well to graphics researchers without the resources to build their own framebuffer."Company: Evans and Sutherland Computer Corporation", at Computer History Museum, California (retrieved 20 August 2012). A little later, NYIT created the first full-color 24-bit RGB framebuffer by using three of the Evans & Sutherland framebuffers linked together as one device by a minicomputer.