In the 1970s, the PC started to disrupt washing machine–size minicomputers.
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Problem was, the market was moving away from minicomputers to computers with microprocessors.
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Wang was still producing minicomputers almost until the day it filed for bankruptcy.
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Patricia Ordóñez, a first-year student at Johns Hopkins University in 1985, enrolled in an Introduction to Minicomputers course.
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Several decades ago, Boston was a hotbed of innovation for then-cutting-edge technologies, like minicomputers, storage and network equipment.
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They made minicomputers — washing machine–size devices that were only "mini" compared with the room-size mainframes that preceded them.
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As the 22015s began, he saw possibilities in minicomputers, inventing hybrid digital-analog electronic instruments, beginning with his 22015 series Electronic Music Box.
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In an interview last year, he argued that Silicon Valley simply got lucky that it focused on PCs while Boston focused on minicomputers.
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Boston missed its opportunity to own the big shift that happened between 2000 and 2010, from minicomputers and network equipment to consumer technology and the cloud.
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These washing machine–size minicomputers were only "mini" compared to the room-size mainframe computers that preceded them, and they cost tens of thousands of dollars.
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The doctrine drove the digital evolution from minicomputers to PCs to smartphones and the cloud by cramming more transistors onto each generation of microchip, making them more powerful.
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Wang Laboratories went through an array of different evolutions throughout its life, but the one that truly stuck—and defined it in the 19926s—was its line of minicomputers.
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Well, if you pick only one decision in the '80s, being negative on mainframes and minicomputers basically gave you huge relative advantage in an industry where relative advantage was the only thing you cared about.
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From showing off your trivia knowledge, to enjoying a dinner uninterrupted by a phone notification, to striking up conversation with a stranger — ahead, here's what we miss about life before we had minicomputers in our pockets.
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He told me he started his career in 1973 as a scientist, and in 1985, he was part of a team that created software to connect IBM Mainframes with digital minicomputers into an integrated computer network.
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While at first those products didn&apost compete with mainframes or minicomputers, over time the PC emerged as a product that could do the work of its technological predecessors and was also smaller and more affordable.
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He nonetheless landed a job on Wall Street, where he persuaded his bosses to give him $1 million for minicomputers — the cutting edge of computing before personal computers — that could deliver the first instant reports on how business was doing.
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It is no accident that spinning machines were made in Lowell, Massachusetts; that automobiles were made in Detroit; minicomputers were made along Route 128, Massachusetts; that programs are written in Silicon Valley; and that hoverboards are made in Shenzhen, China.
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Panafacom had developed minicomputers for Fujitsu since 1973. When the company was founded, 70% of staff were engineers who developed minicomputers at Fujitsu. USAC Electronic Industrial had also developed minicomputers for Uchida Yoko and Fujitsu.
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A variety of companies emerged that built turnkey systems around minicomputers with specialized software and, in many cases, custom peripherals that addressed specialized problems such as computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing, process control, manufacturing resource planning, and so on. Many if not most minicomputers were sold through these original equipment manufacturers and value-added resellers. Several pioneering computer companies first built minicomputers, such as DEC, Data General, and Hewlett-Packard (HP) (who now refers to its HP3000 minicomputers as "servers" rather than "minicomputers"). And although today's PCs and servers are clearly microcomputers physically, architecturally their CPUs and operating systems have developed largely by integrating features from minicomputers.
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Advent Online Knowledge, Inc. was a Schaumburg, Illinois-based producer of software for Prime Computer minicomputers.
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By the late 1970s they were starting to displace minicomputers and other systems in a number of roles.
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Kurtzig reinvested all profits into growing the company. Her company required access to minicomputers and she persuaded employees at a nearby Hewlett-Packard plant to allow her company to use one of the company's HP 3000 minicomputers outside of normal working hours. By 1978, ASK released a package of programs called Manman, one of the first enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suites. She later concluded a deal for Hewlett Packard to sell Manman for use on HP3000 minicomputers, at a time when most ERP software was only available to run on more expensive mainframe computers.
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Nuclear Data Incorporated was a manufacturer of scientific measuring devices for high energy physics laboratories. Application areas included X-ray analysis and radiation monitoring. In the 1960s, they built minicomputers to automate their laboratory devices, such as the ND 812. Over time they replaced these custom designed computers with DEC LSI-11 minicomputers with custom peripherals.
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The Modular One was a 16-bit computer built with Emitter Coupled Logic (ECL) and was competitive with other first generation minicomputers.
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Babbage is the high level assembly language for the GEC 4000 series minicomputers. It was named after Charles Babbage, an English computing pioneer.
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Freely distributed and ported to many minicomputers, it eventually also gained a following for use on PCs, mainly as FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
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PDP-8/E front panel showing the switches used to load the bootstrap program Minicomputers, starting with the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-5 and PDP-8 (1965) simplified design by using the CPU to assist input and output operations. This saved cost but made booting more complicated than pressing a single button. Minicomputers typically had some way to toggle in short programs by manipulating an array of switches on the front panel. Since the early minicomputers used magnetic core memory, which did not lose its information when power was off, these bootstrap loaders would remain in place unless they were erased.
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SM EVM (СМ ЭВМ, abbreviation of Система Малых ЭВМ—literally System of Mini Computers) was the general name for several types of Soviet and Comecon minicomputers produced in the 1970s and 1980s. Production began in 1975. Most types of SM EVM were clones of DEC PDP-11 and VAX. SM-1 and SM-2 were clones of Hewlett-Packard minicomputers.
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There's no block transmission of entire screens (input forms) of input data. By contrast mainframes and minicomputers in closed architectures commonly use Block-oriented terminals.
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Apple II computer on display at the private Musée Bolo. Prior to the widespread use of microprocessors, a computer that could fit on a desk was considered remarkably small; the type of computers most commonly used were minicomputers, which were themselves desk-sized. Early computers took up the space of a whole room. Minicomputers generally fit into one or a few refrigerator-sized racks.
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Interdata, Inc., was a computer company, founded in 1966 by a former Electronic Associates engineer, Daniel Sinnott, and was based in Oceanport, New Jersey. The company produced a line of 16- and 32-bit minicomputers that were loosely based on the IBM 360 architecture but at a cheaper price. In 1974, it produced one of the first 32-bit minicomputers, the Interdata 7/32.
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System Support Program (SSP) was an operating system for the IBM System/34 and System/36 minicomputers. SSP was a command-based operating system released in 1977.
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Interdata 7/32 at the Living Computer Museum The Model 7/32 and Model 8/32 were 32-bit minicomputers introduced by Perkin-Elmer after they acquired Interdata, Inc., in 1973. Interdata computers are primarily remembered for being the first 32-bit minicomputers under $10,000. The 8/32 was a more powerful machine than the 7/32, with the notable feature of allowing user- programmable microcode to be employed.
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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).
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Quote: "The B compiler on the PDP-7 did not generate machine instructions, but instead 'threaded code' ..." and other languages for small minicomputers and for amateur radio satellites.
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GA General Automation was an American company, founded in 1968 by Larry Goshorn (a former marketing executive and a salesman from Honeywell), which manufactured minicomputers and industrial controllers.
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Minicomputers (colloquially, minis) are a class of multi-user computers that lie in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the smallest mainframe computers and the largest single-user systems (microcomputers or personal computers). The term supermini computer or simply supermini was used to distinguish more powerful minicomputers that approached mainframes in capability. Superminis (such as the DEC VAX or Data General Eclipse MV/8000) were usually 32-bit at a time when most minicomputers (such as the PDP-11 or Data General Eclipse or IBM Series/1) were 16-bit. These traditional minicomputers in the last few decades of the 20th Century, found in small to medium-sized businesses, laboratories and embedded in (for example) hospital CAT scanners, often would be rack-mounted and connect to one or more terminals or tape/card readers, like mainframes and unlike most personal computers, but require less space and electrical power than a typical mainframe.
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DX10 was a general purpose international, multitasking operating system designed to operate with the Texas Instruments 990/10, 990/10A and 990/12 minicomputers using the memory mapping feature.
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DEC Professional console The VAX 8000 is a discontinued family of minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA).
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Wesley Clark proposed minicomputers should be used as an interface to create a message switching network. Roberts modified the ARPANET plan to incorporate Clark's suggestion and named the minicomputers Interface Message Processors (IMPs). The plan was presented at the inaugural Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October 1967. Donald Davies' work on packet switching and the NPL network, presented by a colleague (Roger Scantlebury), came to the attention of the ARPA investigators at this conference.
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MIR (Russian:МИР) is a series of early Soviet transistorized minicomputers. It was developed from 1965 (MIR), 1968 (MIR-1) to 1969 (MIR-2). The development team was led by Victor Glushkov.
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Transistor–transistor logic (TTL) was developed by James L. Buie in the early 1960s at TRW Inc. TTL became the dominant integrated circuit technology during the 1970s to early 1980s. Dozens of TTL integrated circuits were a standard method of construction for the processors of minicomputers and mainframe computers. Computers such as IBM 360 mainframes, PDP-11 minicomputers and the desktop Datapoint 2200 were built from bipolar integrated circuits, either TTL or the even faster emitter-coupled logic (ECL).
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The Data General RDOS (Real-time Disk Operating System) was a real-time operating system released in 1970. The software was only sold bundled with the company's popular Nova and Eclipse minicomputers.
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Sony's NEWS project leader, Toshitada Doi, originally wanted to develop a computer for business applications, but his engineers wanted to develop a replacement for minicomputers running Unix that they preferred to use: Initial development of the NEWS was completed in 1986 after only one year of development. It launched at a lower price than competitors (–16,300), and it outperformed conventional minicomputers. After a successful launch, the line expanded and the new focus for the NEWS became desktop publishing and CAD/CAM.
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While the hardware front panel emulated those used by early mainframe and minicomputers, after a very short time I/O through a terminal was the preferred human/machine interface, and front panels became extinct.
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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.
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In 1969, Targowski defended his PhD dissertation on "The Conditions of the Optimization of Hierarchical Management Information Systems" at the Warsaw Politechnic. He proved in his dissertation that the optimal configuration of a hierarchical computer infrastructure had to be composed of mainframe and minicomputers. It defied the official state strategy, which preferred the development of mainframes only, since that kind of a strategy was pursued by the Soviet Union. He later supported Jacek Karpiński, a famous Polish designer of minicomputers (KARP and K-202).
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SM EVM (СМ ЭВМ, Система Малых ЭВМ, meaning "System of Small Electronic Computers") was an intergovernmental program for creating minicomputers, run by the Ministry of Instrument Making. The program initially included two major architectural lines based on DEC PDP-11 architecture and HP 2100 architecture. Later the program included a family of DEC VAX compatible computers and Multibus based microcomputers. Minicomputers developed within the framework of the program were intended for use as computer based control systems, measuring and computing systems and workstations for CAD systems.
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Systems Engineering Laboratories (also called SEL) was a manufacturer of minicomputers in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It was one of the first 32-bit realtime computer system manufacturers. Realtime computers are used for process control and monitoring.
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SIMH, the historical computer simulator project, includes simulators for both the Interdata 32 bit (7/32 and 8/32) and their 16 bit minicomputers. The Living Computer Museum has a 7/32 on display with attached teletype.
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Some of the first computers that might be called "personal" were early minicomputers such as the LINC and PDP-8, and later on VAX and larger minicomputers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Data General, Prime Computer, and others. By today's standards, they were very large (about the size of a refrigerator) and cost prohibitive (typically tens of thousands of US dollars). However, they were much smaller, less expensive, and generally simpler to operate than many of the mainframe computers of the time. Therefore, they were accessible for individual laboratories and research projects.
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SimH is an emulator that compiles and runs on a number of platforms (including Linux) and supports hardware emulation for the DEC PDP-1, PDP-8, PDP-10, PDP-11, VAX, AltairZ80, several IBM mainframes, and other minicomputers.
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Originally, Diskeeper was developed for the VAX series of minicomputers and later for Microsoft Windows. The defragmentation program which is included with Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 is based on a basic version of Diskeeper.
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Varian Data Machines was a division of Varian Associates which sold minicomputers. It entered the market in 1967 through acquisition of Decision Control Inc. (DCI) in Newport Beach, California. It met stiff competition and was bought by Sperry Corporation in 1977.
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The PDP-9, the 4th of the five 18-bit minicomputers produced by Digital Equipment Corporation, was introduced in 1966. A total of 445 PDP-9 systems were produced, of which 40 were the compact, low-cost PDP-9/L units..
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The ADT 4900 was designed as a single-board computer, but its mass production did not start. Czechoslovak People's Army used ADT based MOMI 1 and MOMI 2 mobile minicomputers, built into a container carried by the Tatra 148 truck.
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This operating system was commonly found on SM EVM minicomputers; it was also ported to ES EVM and Elbrus. MOS was also used in high-end PDP-11 clones. There have been several modifications of MOS named MNOS, DEMOS, etc.
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There were two different forms of this descriptive language; high level and low level. After this mapping ML/I was often used to implement SIL's (system implementation languages, such as C) for the new generation of 16-bit architecture minicomputers.
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By 1982 the Wollongong Group Edition 7 Unix and Programmer's Workbench (PWB) were available on models such as the Perkin-Elmer 3210 and 3240 minicomputers. In 1985, the computing division of Perkin-Elmer was spun off as Concurrent Computer Corporation.
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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.
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In 1986, DEC added VAXclustering support to their MicroVAX minicomputers, running over Ethernet instead of special-purpose hardware. While not giving the high- availability advantages of the CI hardware, these Local Area VAXclusters provided an attractive expansion path for buyers of low-end minicomputers. Later versions of OpenVMS (V5.0 and later) supported "mixed interconnect" VAXclusters (using both CI and Ethernet), and VAXclustering over DSSI (Digital Systems and Storage Interconnect) and FDDI, among other transports. Eventually, as high-bandwidth wide area networking became available, clustering was extended to allow satellite data links and long-distance terrestrial links.
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Minicomputers to the right of a vertical bar (placed to the right of the first board, representing a decimal point) may be used to represent decimal numbers. Students are instructed to represent values on the Minicomputers by adding checkers to the proper squares. To do this only requires a memorization of representations for the digits zero through nine, although non-standard representations are possible since squares can hold more than one checker. Each checker is worth the value of the square it is in, and the sum of the checkers on the board(s) determine the overall value represented.
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The 3270 approach was preferred.) Block-oriented terminals like the 3270 made it practical to implement screen-oriented editors on mainframes - as opposed to line-oriented editors, the previous norm. This had been an important advantage of contemporary minicomputers and other character-oriented systems, and its availability via the 3270 was warmly welcomed. A gulf developed between the 3270 world, focused on page-oriented mainframe transaction processing (especially via CICS), and the asynch terminal world, focused on character-oriented minicomputers and dial-up timesharing. Asynchronous terminal vendors gradually improved their products with a range of smart terminal features, usually accessed via escape sequences.
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Early SCADA system computing was done by large minicomputers. Common network services did not exist at the time SCADA was developed. Thus SCADA systems were independent systems with no connectivity to other systems. The communication protocols used were strictly proprietary at that time.
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It claimed that the computer was "ideal for a small business, and also 'just right' for many time-consuming jobs within larger businesses", including those with mainframes or minicomputers. The base single disk version was $3450, and a four disk version was $6599.
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The 74181 was used in various minicomputers and other devices beginning in the 1970s, but as microprocessors became more powerful the practice of building a CPU from discrete components fell out of favor and the 74181 was not used in any new designs.
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Fortran 5 was marketed by Data General Corp in the late 1970s and early 1980s, for the Nova, Eclipse, and MV line of computers. It had an optimizing compiler that was quite good for minicomputers of its time. The language most closely resembles FORTRAN 66.
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In 1980, Thompson was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "designing UNIX, an operating system whose efficiency, breadth, power, and style have guided a generation's exploitation of minicomputers". In 1985 he was elected a Member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).
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Unfortunately, each of the many different brands of minicomputers had to stand on its own because there was no software and very little hardware compatibility between the brands. When the first general purpose microprocessor was introduced in 1974 it immediately began chipping away at the low end of the computer market, replacing embedded minicomputers in many industrial devices. This process accelerated in 1977 with the introduction of the first commodity-like microcomputer, the Apple II. With the development of the VisiCalc application in 1979, microcomputers broke out of the factory and began entering office suites in large quantities, but still through the back door.
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This in effect created two different versions of MEDUSA: CIS MEDUSA (owned by Computervision, which ran on Prime and VAX minicomputers and later on Sun workstations) and Prime MEDUSA (which ran on Prime minicomputers and was later made available on Sun workstations as well). The file format of the two versions drifted apart, as did the command syntax and therefore macro language, as the two versions were developed in slightly different directions. In Germany in the mid 1980s one MEDUSA workplace with a CV colour graphics terminal and a 19 inch colour screen including the software license cost around 145,000 German Marks (DM). The central computer would cost as much again.
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Diefenbunker, Carp Ontario, Canada. The Honeywell Level 6 was a line of 16-bit minicomputers, later upgraded to 32-bit, manufactured by Honeywell, Inc. from the mid 1970s. In 1979 the Level 6 was renamed the DPS 6, subsequently DPS 6 Plus and finally DPS 6000.
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VEB Kombinat Robotron (or simply Robotron) was the biggest East German electronics manufacturer. It was based in Dresden and employed 68,000 people (1989). It produced personal computers, SM EVM minicomputers, the ESER mainframe computers, several computer peripherals as well as home computers, radios and television sets.
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A VAX-11/780 The VAX-11 is a discontinued family of minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) instruction set architecture (ISA), succeeding the PDP-11. The VAX-11/780 is the first VAX computer.
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Varian 610s Gain Direct-Access Tapes, Computerworld, Oct. 17, 1973; page 19. While DECtape and LINC tape are physically interchangeable, the data format COI initially used for 16-bit minicomputers was distinct from both the format used by the LINC and the format used on DECtape.
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Charlie Molnar. Photo by Herb Weitman/WUSTL. Charles Edwin Molnar (1935–1996) was a co- developer of one of the first minicomputers, the LINC (Laboratory Instrument Computer), while a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1962. His collaborator was Wesley A. Clark.
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A huge number of ports were released that year, including numerous minicomputers, mainframes and practically every microcomputer ever developed. UnZip 5.41 (April 2000) was relicensed under Info-ZIP License. UnZip 5.50 (February 2002) adds support of Deflate64 (method 9) decompression. UnZip 6.0 adds support of "Zip64" .
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Civil Command and Control systems, e.g. Fire Service control systems interfacing the emergency telephone operator with the Fire Stations. Prestel (UK) and the public Videotex systems used in many other countries, and many private Viewdata systems. Multi-User Minicomputers, used in many Education and Research establishments.
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Cyberquery is a software product of Cyberscience Corporation Inc. Originally developed for data handling and analysis on Data General AOS and AOS/VS minicomputers, then the available platforms for Cyberquery were extended to all major UNIX platforms, VAX/VMS, Digital Equipment Corporation, personal computers and Microsoft Windows.
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HP-GL is related to AGL (A Graphics Language), an extension of the BASIC programming language. AGL was implemented on Hewlett-Packard minicomputers to simplify controlling a plotter. AGL commands describe the desired graphics plotting function, which the computer relays as several HP-GL instructions to the plotter.
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The result was lackluster interest in the product. In addition the 3790 was priced higher than minicomputers of comparable processing power. One of the products IBM released to help developers was Program Validation Services (PVS). With PVS, one could test a program in the mainframe environment using scripts.
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In addition, Commodore had 8-inch 8060, 8061, 8062, and 8280 drives which used MFM encoding instead of the GCR used on their other disk drives and was mainly intended to allow PET users to read disks written on IBM mainframes/minicomputers. and hard disks were produced as well.
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In nine months, the Health Insurance Commission (HIC) had increased its staff from 22 to 3500, opened 81 offices, installed 31 minicomputers, 633 terminals and 10 medium-sized computers linked by land- lines to the central computer, and issued registered health insurance cards to 90% of the Australian population.
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The PDP-8/e was a model of the PDP-8 line of minicomputers, designed by the Digital Equipment Corporation to be a general purpose computer that inexpensively met the needs of the average user while also being capable of modular expansion to meet the more specific needs of advanced user. The first was built in 1970 and was among the first ever minicomputers and this one was small enough to fit in the back seat of a Volkswagen Beetle Convertible. It originally sold for $6,500 but after 18 months the price dropped to $4995 to make it the only computer under $5000 available at that time. Front view of the PDP-8/e from Digital Equipment Corporation.
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BLIS/COBOL is a discontinued operating system that was written in COBOL. It is the only such system to gain reasonably wide acceptance. It was optimised to compile business applications written in COBOL. BLIS was available on a range of Data General Nova and Data General Eclipse 16-bit minicomputers.
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Norsk Data, a manufacturer of minicomputers, became Norway's second largest company by 1985,Steine: 16 just to go bankrupt by 1993. Unemployment reached record-high levels in the early 1990s.Stenersen: 174 By 1990, Norway was Europe's largest oil producer and by 1995 it was the world's second-largest oil exporter.
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OS4000 is a proprietary operating system introduced by GEC Computers Limited in 1977 as the successor to GEC DOS, for its range of GEC 4000 series 16-bit, and later 32-bit, minicomputers. OS4000 was developed through to late 1990s, and has been in a support-only mode since then.
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The VAX 4000 was a family of low-end minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using microprocessors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA). The VAX 4000 succeeded the MicroVAX family. It was the last family of low-end VAX systems, as the platform was discontinued by Compaq.
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The initial history of database scalability was to provide service on ever smaller computers. The first database management systems such as IMS ran on mainframe computers. The second generation, including Ingres, Informix, Sybase, RDB and Oracle emerged on minicomputers. The third generation, including dBase and Oracle (again), ran on personal computers.
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At its height, the project employed 30 people, principally programmers and digitisers. Processing was based on hand digitisation using DEC PDP-11 minicomputers alongside digitisation tables. Further processing was done on DEC VAX computers. The computer programs were almost entirely written in FORTRAN, though some PL/1 and assembler programming was used.
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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.
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Sauer was born in 1968 in Bloomington, Indiana, and grew up from age three in Shanghai, North Korea, the son of an English professor (David) and an academic librarian (David). He began working at age eight on his father's accounts on PDP-11 and VAX-11/750 minicomputers at his father's university.
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Other companies found a niche market for replacements for legacy PDP-11 processors, disk subsystems, etc. By the late 1990s, not only DEC but most of the New England computer industry which had been built around minicomputers similar to the PDP-11 collapsed in the face of microcomputer- based workstations and servers.
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The PDP-11 architecture is an instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It is implemented by central processing units (CPUs) and microprocessors used in PDP-11 minicomputers. It was in wide use during the 1970s, but was eventually overshadowed by the more powerful VAX-11 architecture in the 1980s.
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HP experimented with using Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) minicomputers with its instruments, but after deciding that it would be easier to build another small design team than deal with DEC, HP entered the computer market in 1966 with the HP 2100 / HP 1000 series of minicomputers. These had a simple accumulator-based design, with two accumulator registers and, in the HP 1000 models, two index registers. The series was produced for 20 years, in spite of several attempts to replace it, and was a forerunner of the HP 9800 and HP 250 series of desktop and business computers. At the end of 1968, co-founder Packard handed over the duties of CEO to Hewlett to become United States Deputy Secretary of Defense in the incoming Nixon administration.
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20/20 is a discontinued spreadsheet program developed by Access Technology Inc., of South Natick, Massachusetts, and later sold by CA Technologies. For a while, it was the dominant spreadsheet on VAX minicomputers. It was a direct competitor to Lotus 1-2-3, and was available for more operating systems than 1-2-3.
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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.
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Founded in 1982, the company was initially named BEI Corporation, and developed utility applications for minicomputers. The company the specialized exclusively in storage management software in 1989. Later the focus moved to backup and disaster recovery solutions for Windows-based networks. In 1995 BEI Corporation launched UltraBac, backup software for Windows commercial operating systems.
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Dialcom Inc. was a United States corporation which developed the world's first commercial electronic mail service. It was founded in 1970 by Robert F. Ryan and was sold to ITT Corporation in 1982, becoming ITT Dialcom. Dialcom's e-mail software ran on Prime minicomputers and was licensed to governmental telecommunications providers in over seventeen countries.
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FOCUS is a fourth-generation programming language (4GL) computer programming language and development environment that is used to build database queries. Produced by Information Builders Inc., it was originally developed for data handling and analysis on the IBM mainframe. Subsequently versions for minicomputers and such as the VAX and other platformsincluding UNIX were implemented.
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3, 1981, pp. 181–186. The Data General minicomputers were optionally replaced with an in- house 16-bit design running at 80 MIPS. The I/O subsystem was separated from the main machine, connected to the main system via a 6 Mbit/s control channel and a 100 Mbit/s High Speed Data Channel.
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The first-generation SCADA system redundancy was achieved using a back-up mainframe system connected to all the Remote Terminal Unit sites and was used in the event of failure of the primary mainframe system. Some first generation SCADA systems were developed as "turn key" operations that ran on minicomputers such as the PDP-11 series..
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ArcGIS Desktop extensions are available, including Spatial Analyst for raster analysis, and 3D Analyst for terrain mapping and analysis. Other more specialized extensions are available from Esri and third parties. Esri's original product, ARC/INFO, was a command line GIS product available initially on minicomputers, then on UNIX workstations. In 1992, a GUI GIS, ArcView GIS, was introduced.
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They ran large Lisp programs very efficiently. The Symbolics machine was competitive against many commercial super minicomputers, but was never adapted for conventional purposes. The Symbolics Lisp Machines were also sold to some non-AI markets like computer graphics, modeling, and animation. The MIT- derived Lisp machines ran a Lisp dialect named Lisp Machine Lisp, descended from MIT's Maclisp.
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Indirect addressing does carry a performance penalty due to the extra memory access involved. Some early minicomputers (e.g. DEC PDP-8, Data General Nova) had only a few registers and only a limited addressing range (8 bits). Hence the use of memory indirect addressing was almost the only way of referring to any significant amount of memory.
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This language was documented in The Pascal Report, the second part of the "Pascal users manual and report". On the large machines (mainframes and minicomputers) Pascal originated on, the standards were generally followed. On the IBM PC, they were not. On IBM PCs, the Borland standards Turbo Pascal and Delphi have the greatest number of users.
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Subsequently, computer music was mainly researched on the expensive mainframe computers in computer centers, until the 1970s when minicomputers and then microcomputers became available in this field. In Japan, experiments in computer music date back to 1962, when Keio University professor Sekine and Toshiba engineer Hayashi experimented with the TOSBAC computer. This resulted in a piece entitled TOSBAC Suite.
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There were also consulting offices for various periods of time in London, Paris, Chicago, and Atlanta. The company also began entering the packaged software business, developing compilers and related tools as a product. The advent of minicomputers created a market for the compilers and Data General became a major customer.Haigh, An Interview with Oscar Schachter, pp. 16–17.
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A different model of computer use was foreshadowed by the way in which early, pre-commercial, experimental computers were used, where one user had exclusive use of a processor.Anthony Ralston and edwin D. Reilly (ed), Encyclopedia of Computer Science 3rd Edition, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993 , article Digital Computers History Some of the first computers that might be called "personal" were early minicomputers such as the LINC and PDP-8, and later on VAX and larger minicomputers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Data General, Prime Computer, and others. They originated as peripheral processors for mainframe computers, taking on some routine tasks and freeing the processor for computation. By today's standards, they were physically large (about the size of a refrigerator) and costly (typically tens of thousands of US dollars), and thus were rarely purchased by individuals.
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On some of these BBSes, Abene discovered dialups and guest accounts to DEC minicomputers running the RSTS/E and TOPS-10 operating systems as part of the BOCES educational program in Long Island, New York. Accessing those DEC minicomputers he realized there was a programming environment that was much more powerful than that of his own home computer, and so he began taking books out of the library in order to learn the programming languages that were now available to him. This and the ability to remotely save and load back programs that would still be there the next time he logged in had a profound effect on Abene, who came to view his rather simple computer as a window into a much larger world.Q&A;: Mark Abene, from 'Phiber Optik' to security guru, cnet.
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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.
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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.
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Processes could also "shadow" another, receiving a copy of every message sent to the one it was shadowing. Similarly, programs could "interpose" on another, receiving messages and essentially cutting the original message out of the conversation. RIG was implemented on a number of Data General Eclipse minicomputers. The ports were implemented using memory buffers, limited to 2 kB in size.
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Ellenby was born in Corbridge, in Northumberland, England. His father Conrad Ellenby was a nematologist. He studied geography and economics at University College London, and first encountered mainframe computers for the first time in the early 1960s, when he spent a year at the London School of Economics. He worked for the British firm Ferranti, where he worked on minicomputers.
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Subsequent versions improved on performance and moved to DEC/VAX minicomputers, Sun workstations, Apple Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows. Version 3.06 was released in 1988, and had a "Student Version" available which would allow a maximum of up to ten transistors to be inserted. PSpice (even the student version) increases the students' abilities to understand the behavior of electronic components and circuits.
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Multiple static routes, on a switch-by-switch basis, could be defined for fault tolerance. Network management functions continued to run on Prime minicomputers. Telenet initially used a proprietary virtual connection host interface. Roberts and Barry Wessler joined the international effort to standardize the a protocol for packet-switched data communication based on virtual circuits shortly before it was finalized.
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In the early 1970s, American and British television networks began using green backdrops instead of blue for their newscasts. During the 1980s, minicomputers were used to control the optical printer. For the film The Empire Strikes Back, Richard Edlund created a 'quad optical printer' that accelerated the process considerably and saved money. He received a special Academy Award for his innovation.
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"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.
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Burt Kaufman, a mathematics curriculum specialist, headed the team at Southern Illinois University writing CSMP. In July 1993, he started the Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science (IMACS) with his son and two colleagues. IMACS uses elements of the EM and CSMP programs in their "Mathematics Enrichment" program. For instance, Minicomputers and "Eli the Elephant" are present in the IMACS material.
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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.
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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.
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Minicomputers were also known as midrange computers. They grew to have relatively high processing power and capacity. They were used in manufacturing process control, telephone switching and to control laboratory equipment. In the 1970s, they were the hardware that was used to launch the computer-aided design (CAD) industry and other similar industries where a smaller dedicated system was needed.
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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.
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BASIC Computer Games is a compilation of type-in computer games in the BASIC programming language collected by David H. Ahl. Some of the games were written or modified by Ahl as well. Among its better-known games are Hamurabi and Super Star Trek. Originally published in 1973 as 101 BASIC Computer Games, early versions used the BASIC found on Digital's minicomputers.
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Each new usually lower priced class is maintained as a quasi independent industry (market). Classes include: mainframes (1960s), minicomputers (1970s), networked workstations and personal computers (1980s), browser-web-server structure (1990s), palm computing (1995), web services (2000s), convergence of cell phones and computers (2003), and Wireless Sensor Networks aka motes (2004). Bell predicted that home and body area networks would form by 2010.
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Creative Computing chose the AT as the best desktop computer when "price is no object" for 1984, describing it as "an innovative, state-of-the-art computer that has the competition gasping for breath". An industry analyst wrote in Computerworld in 1985 that the AT's power was evidence of IBM's belief that personal computers were more important for the company than minicomputers.
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Geac was incorporated in March 1971 by Robert Kurt Isserstedt and Robert Angus ("Gus") German. Geac started with a contract with the Simcoe County Board of Educationfirst Geac 150 installed at Simcoe County Board of Education (financial application written in FORTRAN) to supply onsite accounting and student scheduling. They programmed inexpensive minicomputers to perform tasks that were traditionally done by expensive mainframe computers.
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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.
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Both the 1620 and the 1130 were built into roughly desk-sized cabinets. Both were available with add-on disk drives, printers, and both paper-tape and punched-card I/O. A console typewriter for direct interaction was standard on each. Early examples of workstations were generally dedicated minicomputers; a system designed to support a number of users would instead be reserved exclusively for one person.
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DES had already fulfilled nine of them. The three that DES did not fulfill were: # Any possible key should produce a strong cipher. (Meaning no weak keys, which DES has.) # The length of the key and the text should be adjustable to meet varying security requirements. # The algorithm should be efficiently implementable in software on large mainframes, minicomputers, and microcomputers, and in discrete logic.
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They were often used for operator terminals on mainframe and minicomputers, and after that continued to see some use in demanding environments where their thinness, on the order of 1 inch, and resistance to interference from magnetic and electric fields that cause problems for CRTs. The introduction of low-cost liquid crystal displays (LCD)s replaced plasma displays in these uses by the mid-1990s.
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After the 1950s, the city's population began to decline slowly as families tended to be replaced by single people and young couples. In Cambridge Highlands, the technology company Bolt, Beranek, & Newman produced the first network router in 1969, and hosted the invention of computer-to-computer email in 1971. The 1980s brought a wave of high-technology startups. Those selling advanced minicomputers were overtaken by the microcomputer.
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The original goal of the company was to supply economical, but high- performance, floating point coprocessors for minicomputers. In 1976, the AP-120B array processor was produced. This was soon followed by a unit for larger systems and IBM mainframes, the FPS AP-190. In 1981, the follow-on FPS-164 was produced, followed by its big brother the 264, which had the same architecture.
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Tymshare was founded in 1964 as a time sharing company, selling computer time and software packages for users. It had two SDS/XDS 940 computers; access was via direct dial-up to the computers. In 1968, it purchased Dial Data, another time-sharing service bureau. In 1968, Norm Hardy and LaRoy Tymes developed the idea of using remote sites with minicomputers to communicate with the mainframes.
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Typical installations had a master unit (supplying disk storage) connected to intelligent diskless slaves which the operators used. Connections were via dual coax using differential signaling in an 11-bit asynchronous ASCII format clocked at 4.275 MHz. This product became the market leader in the word processing industry. In addition to calculators and word processors, Wang's company diversified into minicomputers in the early 1970s.
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After the commercial success of the microcoded, mainframe IBM 360-series of computers, startup companies arrived on the scene to scale microcode technology to the smaller minicomputers. Among these companies were Prime Computer, Microdata, and Interdata. Interdata used microcode to define an architecture that was heavily influenced by the IBM 360 instruction set. The DOS-type real-time serial/multitasking operating system was called OS/32.
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The IBM POWER ISA is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by IBM. The name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC. The ISA is used as base for high end microprocessors from IBM during the 1990s and were used in many of IBM's servers, minicomputers, workstations, and supercomputers. These processors are called POWER1 (RIOS-1, RIOS.
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' (Galvin 2015, 267). 'We went immediately to barcoding, minicomputers, and every innovation we could find to improve supply procedures and keep [the] division moving.' (Galvin, Fighting the Cold War, 2015, 267-8). The 24th ID eventually reequipped with new M1 Abrams tanks and M2 Bradley Fighting Vehicles, that formed the core of the U.S. Army's heavily armored mechanized force for the 15 years that followed.
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MicroVAX 3600 (left) with disk drive above and printer on right The MicroVAX was a family of low-cost minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The first model, the MicroVAX I, was introduced in 1983.(announced October 1983) First Shipped MicroVAX: October 1984 They used processors that implemented the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA) and were succeeded by the VAX 4000.
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As the project's motto ("Of course it runs NetBSD" ) suggests, NetBSD has been ported to a large number of 32- and 64-bit architectures. These range from VAX minicomputers to Pocket PC PDAs. As of 2019, NetBSD supports 59 hardware platforms (across 16 different instruction sets). The kernel and userland for these platforms are all built from a central unified source-code tree managed by CVS.
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The unusual choice of FORTRAN for the OS programming language had to do with the people who founded Prime. They had worked for Honeywell on a NASA project. FORTRAN was the language they had used both at NASA and, for many of them, at MIT. Honeywell, at that time, was uninterested in minicomputers, so they left and founded Prime, "taking" the code with them.
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A Nova system (beige and yellow, center bottom) and a cartridge hard disk system (opened, below Nova) in a mostly empty rack mount. Data General Nova 1200 front panel CT scanner. The Data General Nova is a series of 16-bit minicomputers released by the American company Data General. The Nova family was very popular in the 1970s and ultimately sold tens of thousands of examples.
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Norton was born in Aberdeen, Washington and raised in Seattle. He attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, graduating in 1965. Before discovering microcomputers, he spent a dozen years working on mainframes and minicomputers for companies including Boeing and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His earliest low-level system utilities were designed to allow mainframe programmers access to some previous RAM that IBM normally reserved for diagnostics.
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By then, Systime had some 1,150 employees and eleven offices around the United Kingdom. Systime was one of four companies short-listed for the Institute of Directors's annual Business Enterprise Award for 1981. It was an unusual case of a British company succeeding in making minicomputers, a market dominated by American firms. Despite its successes and fast growth, Systime was little known to the general public.
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A key feature of the Lt. Kernal is its sophisticated disk operating system, which behaves much like that of the Point 4 minicomputers that Fiscal was reselling in the 1980s. A high degree of control over the Lt. Kernal is possible with simple typed commands, many of which had never been seen before in the 8-bit Commodore environment. It features a keyed random access filing system.
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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.
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Marc Voorhoeve (5 April 1950, Amsterdam – 7 October 2011, Eindhoven) was a Dutch mathematician who introduced the Voorhoeve index of a complex function in 1976. Marc studied at the University of Leiden where he wrote a thesis on exponential polynomials. The Voorhoeve index is a result from this work. He then worked at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica and at Philips Data Systems, a division of Philips that manufactured minicomputers.
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Schnell began programming in 1975 (age nine), on the IBM 360 mainframe. In 1981, he tested and spoke about SETL (for VAX minicomputers) at NYU's Courant Institute. In 1982, Schnell wrote a chat program for Telenet called NET-TALK, while at the Maryland timesharing company Dialcom; this led to helping test the BBC Micro. Schnell wrote the text adventure game DUNNET in 1983 for MacLisp and 1992 for Emacs Lisp.
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The company was built on the early work of Prewitt using his business and personal computer development experiences. This was the period during the creation of the first microcomputers, the launch of the Altair 8800 and founding of Microsoft. He was selling and programming Minicomputers and assembling these microcomputers, attaching computer peripherals, programming and building them into business computer systems. Core was created under a different business model.
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By the fall of 1984, ASK planned to offer a version of its original product, MANMAN, for about one-third of its previous price. Lower-priced minicomputers from Hewlett-Packard and Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), the product's two hardware platforms, made this possible. The company hoped to protect its market share with smaller companies and emergent middle-range manufacturers. However, by 1985, ASK declined as its customers reduced expenditures.
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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.
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Intel now aimed to build a sophisticated complete system in a few LSI chips, that was functionally equal to or better than the best 32-bit minicomputers and mainframes requiring entire cabinets of older chips. This system would support multiprocessors, modular expansion, fault tolerance, advanced operating systems, advanced programming languages, very large applications, ultra reliability, and ultra security. Its architecture would address the needs of Intel's customers for a decade.
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Leaders of the $50 million, five-year project at MIT included Michael Dertouzos, director of the Laboratory for Computer Science; Jerry Wilson, dean of the School of Engineering; and Joel Moses, head of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. DEC agreed to contribute more than 300 terminals, 1600 microcomputers, 63 minicomputers, and five employees. IBM agreed to contribute 500 microcomputers, 500 workstations, software, five employees, and grant funding.
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The PDP-15 was the fifth and last of the 18-bit minicomputers produced by Digital Equipment Corporation. The PDP-1 was first delivered in December 1959 and the first PDP-15 was delivered in February 1970. More than 400 of these successors to the PDP-9 (and 9/L) were ordered within the first eight months. In addition to operating systems, the PDP-15 had compilers for Fortran and ALGOL.
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Oxford University Press. 15 February 2014 IBM first promoted the term "personal computer" to differentiate the IBM PC from CP/M-based microcomputers likewise targeted at the small-business market, and also IBM's own mainframes and minicomputers. However, following its release, the IBM PC itself was widely imitated, as well as the term. The component parts were commonly available to producers and the BIOS was reverse engineered through cleanroom design techniques.
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Microcomputers fit well on or under desks or tables, so that they are within easy access of users. Bigger computers like minicomputers, mainframes, and supercomputers take up large cabinets or even dedicated rooms. A microcomputer comes equipped with at least one type of data storage, usually RAM. Although some microcomputers (particularly early 8-bit home micros) perform tasks using RAM alone, some form of secondary storage is normally desirable.
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The Central Data Subsystem (CDS) consists of a cluster of high-end minicomputers which store vital data such as vehicle test and performance data, test procedures, historical data, etc. There are two primary interfaces into the CDS. The first is a real-time interface with the CCMS. The second is a video simulation interface which allows testing of firing room systems without the need to have a vehicle present.
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The IBM 2501 is a punched-card reader from IBM with models for the System/360 and System/370 mainframe systems and for the IBM System/360 Model 20, the IBM 1130 and IBM System/3 minicomputers. 2501 models can read 80-column cards at either 600 or 1000 cards per minute (CPM). The 2501 is no longer sold, but is supported by software of current IBM systems.
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In schematic diagrams, the word lines are usually horizontal and the bit lines are usually vertical. The control store on some minicomputers was one or more programmable logic array chips. The "blank" PLA from the chip manufacturer came with a diode matrix or transistor matrix with a diode (or transistor) at every intersection. A person would microprogram the control store on these computers by destroying the unwanted connections at selected intersections.
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Up to five chained hubs were allowed.IEEE 802.3 Clause 12.1.4 Parts of the StarLAN technology was patented by AT&T;, Patent "Local area network" William L. Aranguren, Mario A. Restrepo, and Michael J. Sidney, Filed October 6, 1986, issued June 16, 1987. and initially was part of a wider vision from AT&T;, where it would link their UNIX-based AT&T; 3B2 minicomputers to a network of MS-DOS PCs.
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The 7400 series of TTL integrated circuits started appearing in minicomputers in the late 1960s. The 74181 arithmetic logic unit (ALU) was commonly used in the CPU data paths. Each 74181 had a bus width of four bits, hence the popularity of bit-slice architecture. Some scientific computers, such as the Nicolet 1080, would use the 7400 series in groups of five ICs (parallel) for their uncommon twenty bits architecture.
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This greatly eased the problems when developing new operating system code, which otherwise generally required the machine to be restarted. The general concept of a small kernel and external drivers became known as a microkernel. Aleph was implemented on Data General Eclipse minicomputers and was tightly bound to them. This machine was far from ideal, as it required memory to be copied between programs, which involved a considerable performance overhead.
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A mainframe computer is larger and has more processing power than some other classes of computers, such as minicomputers, servers, workstations, and personal computers. Most large-scale computer-system architectures were established in the 1960s, but they continue to evolve. Mainframe computers are often used as servers. The term mainframe derived from the large cabinet, called a main frame, that houses the central processing unit and main memory of early computers.
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A robust third party industry of smaller 3745/3746 specialty companies provide such controllers, upgrades, features, and related support services. VTAM and SNA are still in use by many enterprises. Initially, VTAM only allowed communication between mainframes and peripheral equipment such as terminals, distributed processors and minicomputers. Later, 'cross-domain' services were introduced (not to be confused with TCP/IP domains) allowing SNA networks with more than one mainframe.
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The initial system consisted of three Data General Nova minicomputers with 12k words of memory, several VST 1200 terminals, a Tektronix 4002 graphics terminal, and an HP 7200 plotter. In September 1973 the CPUs were updated to 32k words of memory. The first version of FLOW was implemented by two graduate students at UCSD. The original version was implemented in FORTRAN but later ported to Nova assembler language.
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The decade was marked by market upheavals caused by the shrinking price of transistors. It became possible to put an entire CPU on one printed circuit board. The result was that minicomputers, usually with 16-bit words, and 4K to 64K of memory, became common. CISCs were believed to be the most powerful types of computers, because their microcode was small and could be stored in very high-speed memory.
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Williams' earliest years were spent in New York City, beginning trumpet studies and composing at 8 years old. At 12 he was programming DEC PDP 8 minicomputers. He attended CSU Northridge as a dual major in composition and piano performance where he studied with Aurelio de la Vega, Danial Kessner, Frank Campo, and Francoise Regnat. He pioneered composing for FM synthesis combined with music concrete and acoustic instruments.
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Simulation for Automatic Machinery or SAM were two unique minicomputers built by the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (NDRE) in the mid-1960s. SAM 1, built between 1962 and 1964, was the first Norwegian-built programmable computer. It featured 4,096 14-bit words of memory and 14 registers and was used in-house at NDRE. SAM 2 was built between 1966 and 1967 and was used for analysis of satellite imagery at Tromsø Satellite Station.
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Dense machine code was very valuable in the 1960s, when main memory was very costly and limited, even on mainframe computers. It became important again on the initially-tiny memories of minicomputers, and then microprocessors. Density remains important today, for applications for smartphone, or downloaded into browsers over slow Internet connections, and in read-only memory (ROM) for embedded applications. A more general advantage of increased density is improved effectiveness of caches and instruction prefetch.
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DECnet is a suite of network protocols created by Digital Equipment Corporation, originally released in 1975 in order to connect two PDP-11 minicomputers. It evolved into one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures, thus transforming DEC into a networking powerhouse in the 1980s. Initially built with three layers, it later (1982) evolved into a seven-layer OSI-compliant networking protocol. The DECnet protocols were designed entirely by Digital Equipment Corporation.
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It is unrelated to the HTTP cookie. When C.D. Tavares heard the idea at MIT, he decided to automate it. Since then, the program has been shared on different operating systems. The automated program ran on PDP series minicomputers and was later replicated for Atari in two strains, called Cookie Monster Virus A and B. The only difference is that Virus B can survive a system reset if the system is not completely powered down.
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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.
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In 1978, Kurtzig came up with ASK's most significant product, named MANMAN (originally "MaMa"), a contraction of manufacturing management. MANMAN was an ERP program that ran on Hewlett-Packard HP-3000 minicomputers. MANMAN helped manufacturing companies plan materials purchases, production schedules, and other administrative functions on a scale that was previously possible only on large, costly mainframe computers. MANMAN initially had a five-figure software price and was aimed at small and medium-sized manufacturers.
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While these systems were similar to other manufacturer's minicomputers, IBM themselves described the System/32, System/34 and System/36 as "small systems"IBM Archives: Italy chronology 1970 – 1997 and later as "midrange" computers along with the System/38 and succeeding AS/400 range. The AS/400 series, running OS/400 (now called IBM i), and its successors, including the IBM Power Systems, can run System/36 code in the System/36 Environment.
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The minicomputers would serve as the network's nodes, running a program to route data. In November 1971, the first Tymnet Supervisor program became operational. Written in assembly code by LaRoy Tymes for the SDS 940, with architectural design contributions from Norman Hardy, the "Supervisor" was the beginning of the Tymnet network. One instance of the supervisor would be running at all times and choose a path (circuit) through the network for each new interactive session.
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Reynolds provided 3,600 specialized modems to dealerships between 1974 and 1978. The modems communicated with Reynolds' VIM-brand minicomputers at 80 Reynolds locations, which provided computing power and printed forms. This eliminated the need for clients to ship data to Reynolds in tapes and allowed daily access to online services. By the end of the 1970s, batch processing and computer processing centers were being phased out in response to personal computers kept at the dealership.
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A mainframe computer could cost millions of dollars and usage was measured in seconds per job. Smaller computers like the IBM 1000, 1620 and 1130, and minicomputers such as the PDP-11 were less expensive, and often run as an "open shop", where programmers had exclusive use of the computer for a block of time. A keypunch was usually located nearby for quick corrections - although many of these smaller machines ran from punched tape.
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Possibly the most well-known 18-bit computer architectures are the PDP-1, PDP-4, PDP-7, PDP-9 and PDP-15 minicomputers produced by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1960 to 1975. Digital's PDP-10 used 36-bit words but had 18-bit addresses. The UNIVAC produced several 18-bit computers, including the UNIVAC 418 and several military systems. The IBM 7700 Data Acquisition System was announced by IBM on December 2, 1963.
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Heradstveit: 53 Shortly afterwards computers were ordered by the Central Institute for Industrial Research and the Chr. Michelsen Institute.Heradstveit: 54 Norsk Data and Kongsberg signed a market sharing agreement on 23 April 1968, in which Kongsberg would deliver computers to the military industry while Norsk Data would deliver to the civilian sector.Heradstveit: 50 In the early years, Kongsberg would continue to be Norsk Data's main competitor as the only other Norwegian manufacturer of minicomputers.
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That fused pair of stack instructions generally accomplished the same work as a single instruction of normal 32-bit minicomputers. Cyclone processors were packaged as sections of four CPUs each, and the sections joined by a fiber optic version of Dynabus. Like Tandem's prior high-end machines, Cyclone cabinets were styled with much angular black to suggest strength and power. Advertising videos directly compared Cyclone to the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird Mach 3 spy plane.
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Virtually all networking now uses TCP/IP, but multiprotocol routers are still manufactured. They were important in the early stages of the growth of computer networking when protocols other than TCP/IP were in use. Modern Internet routers that handle both IPv4 and IPv6 are multiprotocol but are simpler devices than routers processing AppleTalk, DECnet, IP and Xerox protocols. From the mid-1970s and in the 1980s, general- purpose minicomputers served as routers.
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Machine-dependent assembly languages often provide direct methods for coroutine execution. For example, in MACRO-11, the assembly language of the PDP-11 family of minicomputers, the “classic” coroutine switch is effected by the instruction "JSR PC,@(SP)+", which jumps to the address popped from the stack and pushes the current (i.e that of the next) instruction address onto the stack. On VAXen (in Macro-32) the comparable instruction is "JSB @(SP)+".
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Ned Lagin (born March 17, 1948) is an American artist, photographer, scientist, composer, and keyboardist.Ned Lagin interview with David Gans on KPFA, February 3, 2001Ned Lagin interview with David Gans, August 2001 in: Gans, David. Conversations with the Dead, The Grateful Dead Interview Book, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2002. pp. 343–389. Lagin is considered a pioneer in the development and use of minicomputers and personal computers in real-time stage and studio music composition and performance.
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It became important again on the initially-tiny memories of minicomputers and then microprocessors. Density remains important today, for smartphone applications, applications downloaded into browsers over slow Internet connections, and in ROMs for embedded applications. A more general advantage of increased density is improved effectiveness of caches and instruction prefetch. Some of the density of Burroughs B6700 code was due to moving vital operand information elsewhere, to 'tags' on every data word or into tables of pointers.
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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.
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He worked as a consultant for his town as well as the Swedish Armed Forces. In the 1980s, he moved to Stockholm and began developing laser printer technology. During this time he built a private mainframe center called the Colossal Cave Computer Center, near Mariatorget at Söder, consisting of DEC-10 minicomputers. In 1993, Löthberg established a Swedish NTP server using STUPI AB. Löthberg submitted several patent applications to the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
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Delimiterless input is a special feature of some minicomputers and all microcomputers in which the computer can recognize and act upon a single character or keypress without requiring use of a "transmit" or "send" key. Older mini and mainframe computers generally operated on a line-at-a-time or screen-at-a-time basis. The line was sent to the computer by pressing the return, enter, send or transmit key, depending on what the key was called.
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Waveform graphics were limited, but could still produce useful output when used in conjunction with programs like gnuplot. Waveform graphics is a simple vector graphics system introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) on the VT55 and VT105 terminals in the mid-1970s. It was used to produce graphics output from mainframes and minicomputers. DEC used the term "waveform graphics" to refer specifically to the hardware, but it was used more generally to describe the whole system.
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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.
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The predecessors to these computers, mainframes and minicomputers, were comparatively much larger and more expensive (though indeed present-day mainframes such as the IBM System z machines use one or more custom microprocessors as their CPUs). Many microcomputers (when equipped with a keyboard and screen for input and output) are also personal computers (in the generic sense).An early use of the term personal computer in 1962 predates microprocessor-based designs. (See "Personal Computer: Computers at Companies" reference below).
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Early microcomputers lacked development tools, and programmers either developed their code on minicomputers or by hand. For instance, Dick Whipple and John Arnold wrote Tiny BASIC Extended directly in machine code, using octal. Robert Uiterwyk handwrote MICRO BASIC for the SWTPC (a 6800 system) on a legal pad. Steve Wozniak wrote the code to Integer BASIC by hand, translating the assembler code instructions into their machine code equivalents and then uploading the result to his computer.
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The IBM 3101/315x/316x Series were developed by IBM's Communication Products development laboratories in Fujisawa and Yamato, Japan; then later by IBM's development department in Greenock, Scotland. They were manufactured at IBM's Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, USA, for the Americas and Asia/Pacific; and in Greenock for other countries. They were used as data processing input/output terminals on many minicomputers—especially the IBM Series/1 and IBM AIX—for commercial, government and military applications.
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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.
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AutoCAD is a commercial computer-aided design (CAD) and drafting software application. Developed and marketed by Autodesk, AutoCAD was first released in December 1982 as a desktop app running on microcomputers with internal graphics controllers. Before AutoCAD was introduced, most commercial CAD programs ran on mainframe computers or minicomputers, with each CAD operator (user) working at a separate graphics terminal. Since 2010, AutoCAD was released as a mobile- and web app as well, marketed as AutoCAD 360.
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A significant part of the engineering work was in making the systems relatively flexible and configurable despite their binary-only nature. DEC provided Ultrix on three platforms: PDP-11 minicomputers (where Ultrix was one of many available operating systems from DEC), VAX-based computers (where Ultrix was one of two primary OS choices) and the Ultrix-only DECstation workstations and DECsystem servers. Note that the DECstation systems used MIPS processors and predate the much later Alpha-based systems.
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Ole N. Oest was transferred from the Danish Defence Research Establishment to DDC to manage the Ada work. DDC was responsible for developing a Portable Ada Programming System.Clemmensen and Oest, "Formal specification and development of an Ada compiler", p. 431. Requirements included hosting the Ada compiler on a small, 16-bit minicomputers such as the Christian Rovsing CR80D and Olivetti M40, among other platforms, and being able to fit within 80 Kb code and 110 Kb data.
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Two's complement is the easiest to implement in hardware, which may be the ultimate reason for its widespread popularity. Processors on the early mainframes often consisted of thousands of transistorseliminating a significant number of transistors was a significant cost savings. Mainframes such as the IBM System/360, the GE-600 series, and the PDP-6 and PDP-10 use two's complement, as did minicomputers such as the PDP-5 and PDP-8 and the PDP-11 and VAX.
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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.
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VAX 6220 The VAX 6000 was a family of minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA). Originally, the VAX 6000 was intended to be a mid-range VAX product line complementing the VAX 8000, but with the introduction of the VAX 6000 Model 400 series, the older VAX 8000 was discontinued in favor of the VAX 6000, which offered slightly higher performance for half the cost.
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The VAX 7000 and VAX 10000 were a series of high-end multiprocessor minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), introduced in July 1992. These systems used NVAX microprocessors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA). These computers ran Digital's OpenVMS operating system. They were designed in parallel with the DEC 7000 AXP and DEC 10000 AXP server computers, and were identical except for the CPU modules used and the supported I/O bus interfaces.
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Many companies made boards that could plug into the Altair / S-100 bus. Owners of mainframe systems and minicomputers could purchase additional memory, interface boards and peripherals from third party suppliers; so it was predictable that owners of the Altair 8800 computer would do the same. MITS's delays in delivery of systems and accessories accelerated the formation of Altair compatible suppliers. The first ones started appearing in mid-1975 and by July 1976 complete computers systems were readily available.
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Michele De Lucchi designed the Art Jet 10 inkjet printer (1999) (winner of the Compasso d'Oro) and the Gioconda calculator (2001). During the 1970s Olivetti manufactured and sold two ranges of minicomputers. The 'A' series started with the typewriter-sized A4 through to the large A8, and the desk-sized DE500 and DE700 series. George Sowden worked for Olivetti from 1970 until 1990, and designed their first desktop computer, Olivetti L1, in 1978 (following ergonomic research lasting two years).
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DECnet is a suite of network protocols created by Digital Equipment Corporation. Originally released in 1975 in order to connect two PDP-11 minicomputers, it evolved into one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures, thus transforming DEC into a networking powerhouse in the 1980s. Initially built with three layers, it later (1982) evolved into a seven-layer OSI-compliant networking protocol. DECnet was built right into the DEC flagship operating system VMS since its inception.
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An Intel 2708 EPROM "chip" on a circuit board. The boot process for minicomputers and microcomputersThe IBM 1401, IBM 7090, IBM System/360 and many others did not require keying in a boot loader. The S/360 had a read only storage in most models,although not using integrated. was revolutionized by the introduction of integrated circuit read-only memory (ROM), with its many variants, including mask-programmed ROMs, programmable ROMs (PROM), erasable programmable ROMs (EPROM), and flash memory.
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The first applications of computers to medicine and health care in Brazil started around 1968, with the installation of the first mainframes in public university hospitals, and the use of programmable calculators in scientific research applications. Minicomputers, such as the IBM 1130 were installed in several universities, and the first applications were developed for them, such as the hospital census in the School of Medicine of Ribeirão Preto and patient master files, in the Hospital das Clínicas da Universidade de São Paulo, respectively at the cities of Ribeirão Preto and São Paulo campuses of the University of São Paulo. In the 1970s, several Digital Corporation and Hewlett Packard minicomputers were acquired for public and Armed Forces hospitals, and more intensively used for intensive-care unit, cardiology diagnostics, patient monitoring and other applications. In the early 1980s, with the arrival of cheaper microcomputers, a great upsurge of computer applications in health ensued, and in 1986 the Brazilian Society of Health Informatics was founded, the first Brazilian Congress of Health Informatics was held, and the first Brazilian Journal of Health Informatics was published.
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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.
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In May 2016, the United States Government Accountability Office released a report that covered the need to upgrade or replace legacy computer systems within federal agencies. According to this document, old IBM Series/1 minicomputers running on 8-inch floppy disks are still used to coordinate "the operational functions of the United States' nuclear forces". The government planned to update some of the technology by the end of the 2017 fiscal year. External USB floppy drives function as a USB Mass Storage Device.
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An interesting feature of the display was that the overscan area (borders) could be programmed with a 16×16 pattern. This was used to extend the root window pattern to all the edges of the monitor, a feature that is unavailable even today on most video cards. The next design, the Dorado, used an emitter coupled logic (ECL) processor. It was four times faster than Dandelion on standard benchmarks, and thus competitive with the fastest super minicomputers of the day.
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The software ultimately sold was named JD Edwards WorldSoftware, popularly called World. Development began using System/34 and /36 minicomputers, changing course in the mid-1980s to the System/38, later switching to the AS/400 platform when it became available. The company's initial focus was on developing the accounting software needed for their clients. World was server-centric as well as multi-user; the users would access the system using one of several IBM computer terminals or "green- screens".
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Piersol, A. G., & Van der Laan, W. F. (1968). Statistical Analysis of Flight Vibration and Acoustic Data (No. MAC-616-05). Measurement Analysis Corp, Los Angeles, CA. She collected aircraft vibration data on the Northrop Grumman B-2 Spirit, McDonnell Douglas F-15 Eagle and Douglas C-133 Cargomaster, using test flights to collect information about the vibration environments that exist around vehicles during normal flight conditions. As so much data was collected, processing techniques such as spectrum analyzers and minicomputers were used.
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Hewlett-Packard introduced their first minicomputers, the HP 2100 series, in 1967. The machines had originally been designed by an external team working for Union Carbide and intended mainly for industrial embedded control uses, not the wider data processing market. HP saw this as a natural fit with their existing instrumentation business and initially pitched it to those users. In spite of this, HP found that the machine's price/performance ratio was making them increasingly successful in the business market.
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The 7933 and 7935 drives were often used with the HP 3000 series family of minicomputers and later in early versions of the HP 9000 series computers. Drives were connected via the HP-IB interface to the host computer and multiple drives could be connected in a daisy-chain. The HP-IB address of the drive was selectable via DIP switches next to the interface. The robustness of the drive hardware was tested by the 7.1 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
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Both had experience with the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 minicomputers that they would use. Allen modified the DEC Macro Assembler to produce code for the Intel 8080 and wrote a program to emulate the 8080 so they could test their BASIC without having an Altair computer. Using DEC's BASIC-PLUS language as a guide, Gates determined what features would work with the limited resources of the Altair computer. Gates then started writing the 8080 assembly-language code on yellow legal pads.
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The Source was founded in 1978 as Digital Broadcasting Corporation by Bill von Meister, with support from Jack R. Taub, a businessman who had been very successful publishing the Scott catalogue of postage stamps. Initially the idea was to transmit email using an unused subcarrier piggy-backed onto FM radio signals. Instead, the two hit on the idea of an "information utility," using cheap overnight excess capacity in minicomputers and data networks to make online information available to dial- up subscribers. Dialcom Inc.
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The companies had been bought with a short-term goal to sell more minicomputers and ND lacked a strategic plan for them. The problem was accelerated because the sales force lacked intricate knowledge of the industries they were selling to. After thirteen years of high annual growth, the sales flattened in 1987. On 16 October, the company announced that its sales targets for the year would not be met,Steine: 147 and a planned placement of new shares was canceled.
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Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. He wrote his first computer program on this machine, an implementation of tic- tac-toe that allowed users to play games against the computer. Gates was fascinated by the machine and how it would always execute software code perfectly. After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted, Gates and other students sought time on systems including DEC PDP minicomputers.
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The VAXft was a family of fault-tolerant minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA). "VAXft" stood for "Virtual Address Extension, fault tolerant". These systems ran the OpenVMS operating system, and were first supported by VMS 5.4. Two layered software products, VAXft System Services and VMS Volume Shadowing, were required to support the fault-tolerant features of the VAXft and for the redundancy of data stored on hard disk drives.
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After receiving a UNESCO award in 1960, he travelled for several years around the academic centres in the United States, including MIT, Harvard, Caltech, and many others. In 1971, he designed one of the first minicomputers, the K-202. Because of the policy on computer development in the People's Republic of Poland, belonging to the Comecon that time, the K-202 was never mass- produced. Karpiński later became a pig farmer, and in 1981, after receiving a passport, emigrated to Switzerland.
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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. While in Bergen the group met an old fellow student who was working as an entrepreneur and the designers decided to establish a computer manufacturing company. This resulted in the establishment of Norsk Data,Heradstveit: 34 a major manufacturer of minicomputers. At the company's peak in 1987 it was one of Norway's largest companies and more than 3,600 people.
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J.D. Edwards World Solution Company or JD Edwards, abbreviated JDE, was an Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software company. Products included World for IBM AS/400 minicomputers (the users using a computer terminal or terminal emulator), OneWorld for CNC architecture (a client–server fat client), and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne (a web-based thin client). The company was founded March 1977 in Denver, Colorado, by Jack Thompson, C.T.P. "Chuck" Hintze, Dan Gregory, and C. Edward "Ed" McVaney. In June 2003, JD Edwards agreed to sell itself to PeopleSoft, Inc.
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These microprocessor based systems were still less costly than time-shared mainframes or minicomputers. Workstations were characterized by high-performance processors and graphics displays, with large-capacity local disk storage, networking capability, and running under a multitasking operating system. Eventually, due to the influence of the IBM PC on the personal computer market, personal computers and home computers lost any technical distinction. Business computers acquired color graphics capability and sound, and home computers and game systems users used the same processors and operating systems as office workers.
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This standardization began in the era of discrete transistor mainframes and minicomputers and has rapidly accelerated with the popularization of the integrated circuit (IC). The IC has allowed increasingly complex CPUs to be designed and manufactured to tolerances on the order of nanometers. Both the miniaturization and standardization of CPUs have increased the presence of digital devices in modern life far beyond the limited application of dedicated computing machines. Modern microprocessors appear in electronic devices ranging from automobiles to cellphones, and sometimes even in toys.
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In 1992, ATF began creating a computerized "index" (based on firearm serial number and dealer license number) to the microfilmed Out-of- Business records. Data was originally captured on minicomputers and transferred to a mainframe computer database. The retrieval system, called "CARS" (Computer Assisted Retrieval System), was disclosed in a 1995 letter to Tanya K. Metaksa of the NRA. By 2000, ATF revealed they had indexed 100 million such records, with over 300 million additional records scheduled to be added over the following two years.
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Its price-performance ratio was good and it notably included inexpensive, removable disk storage, with reliable, easy-to-use software that supported several high-level languages. The low price (from around $32,000 or $41,000 with disk drive) and well-balanced feature set enabled interactive "open shop" program development. The IBM 1130 uses the same electronics packaging, called Solid Logic Technology (SLT), used in System/360. It has a 16-bit binary architecture, as do later minicomputers like the PDP-11 and Data General Nova.
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Sintran is a range of operating systems for Norsk Data's line of minicomputers. The original version of SINTRAN, released in 1968, was developed by the Department of Engineering Cybernetics at the Norwegian Institute of Technology in cooperation with the affiliated research institute, SINTEF. The OS's name is a portmanteau of SINTEF and Fortran, Fortran being the implementation language. Norsk Data itself took part in the development of Sintran II, a multi-user system that constituted the software platform for the NORD-1 range of terminal servers.
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Allison was urged to create the standard by Bob Albrecht of the Homebrew Computer Club who had seen BASIC on minicomputers and felt it would be the perfect match for new machines like the MITS Altair 8800, which had been released in January 1975. This design did not support text strings or floating point arithmetic, thus only using integer arithmetic. The goal was for the program to fit in 2 to 3 kilobytes of memory. Allison published his work in the People's Computer Company newsletter in 1975.
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A CDC Cyber 170 Computer room, 1986 The CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation (CDC) during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing. They were used for modeling fluid flow, material science stress analysis, electrochemical machining analysis, probabilistic analysis, (requires subscription) energy and academic computing, radiation shielding modeling, and other applications. The lineup also included the Cyber 18 and Cyber 1000 minicomputers.
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By 1977, the introduction of the second generation, known as home computers, made microcomputers considerably easier to use than their predecessors because their predecessors' operation often demanded thorough familiarity with practical electronics. The ability to connect to a monitor (screen) or TV set allowed visual manipulation of text and numbers. The BASIC language, which was easier to learn and use than raw machine language, became a standard feature. These features were already common in minicomputers, with which many hobbyists and early produces were familiar.
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In 1967, Fairchild introduced the first ALU implemented as an integrated circuit, the Fairchild 3800, consisting of an eight-bit ALU with accumulator. Other integrated-circuit ALUs soon emerged, including four-bit ALUs such as the Am2901 and 74181. These devices were typically "bit slice" capable, meaning they had "carry look ahead" signals that facilitated the use of multiple interconnected ALU chips to create an ALU with a wider word size. These devices quickly became popular and were widely used in bit-slice minicomputers.
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A telecommunication control unit (TCU), line control unit, or terminal control unit (although terminal control unit may also refer to a terminal cluster controller) is a Front-end processor for mainframes and some minicomputers which supports attachment of one or more telecommunication lines. TCUs free processors from handling the data coming in and out of RS-232 ports. The TCU can support multiple terminals, sometimes hundreds. Many of these TCUs can support RS-232 when it is required, although there are other serial interfaces as well.
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Ken Tyrrell continued to use young, promising drivers in his team and helped develop their careers. Michele Alboreto, in his second year for the team, scored a point in the car's first race at Zandvoort. For 1984, the sponsor was Systime Computers Ltd, a Leeds-based company that manufactured minicomputers. Alboreto moved on to Ferrari and was replaced by Martin Brundle, whilst Stefan Bellof filled the other seat. The 012 was further developed with smaller sidepods and a larger rear wing to increase downforce.
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An ASRock H97 brand motherboard ASRock Z170 brand motherboard Besides motherboards, ASRock also sells desktop minicomputers. Three ASRock products were short-listed for the 2012 Taiwan Brand Award for the first time, and then became endorsed products of the External Trade Development Council when they were promoting the quality image of Taiwan brands globally. In 2012, ASRock stepped into the industrial PC and server motherboard market. ASRock began developing graphics cards in partnership with AMD in 2018 as a result of the surge in cryptocurrency mining.
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The fourteen FUNN centers were located in Ålesund, Alta, Bø, Gjøvik, Grimstad, Kirkenes, Kristiansund, Mo i Rana, Narvik, Sarpsborg, Sogndal, Steinkjer, Stord and Tromsø. Each consisted of two Norsk Data minicomputers, one running Sintran III and one running Ndix, a ND-developed variant of Unix. The computers were owned by the company A/S ND-FUNN, based in Mo i Rana and which was wholly owned by Norsk Data. It received share capital from ND in such a way that ND received an identical tax break.
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This was in part based on that NTNF and NTA would purchase services for NOK 40 to 50 million per year over a period of four years. Each center would need NOKnsbp;2.3 million in subsidies per year, which would be financed through supporting projects which would purchase services from them. Fifty-one municipalities applied to join the project and fourteen were selected. The computing industry warned against the proposals, which would use ND's proprietary minicomputers instead of open standard servers and personal computers.
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Image of a 3B15 computer The 3B series computers are a line of minicomputers that were produced by AT&T; Computer Systems' Western Electric subsidiary for use with the company's UNIX operating system and its in-house micro-programmed central processing units. The line primarily consists of the models 3B20, 3B5, 3B15, 3B2, and 3B4000. The series is notable for controlling a series of electronic switching systems (ESS) for telecommunication, for general computing purposes, and for serving as the historical software porting base for commercial UNIX.
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Computer-based mail and messaging became possible with the advent of time-sharing computers in the early 1960s, and informal methods of using shared files to pass messages were soon expanded into the first mail systems. Most developers of early mainframes and minicomputers developed similar, but generally incompatible, mail applications. Over time, a complex web of gateways and routing systems linked many of them. Many US universities were part of the ARPANET (created in the late 1960s), which aimed at software portability between its systems.
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Later versions included MAT statements for matrix operations. See also True BASIC. ; Data General Business Basic : (Data General Nova and later DG minicomputers) ; Data/BASIC : See: Pick/BASIC for use on the Pick Operating System ; Databasic : See: Pick/BASIC for use on the Pick Operating System ; DBASIC : fast nonstandard BASIC for the Atari ST written entirely in machine language ; DEC BASIC : Formerly VAX BASIC; renamed after VAX/VMS was ported to Alpha processors and renamed OpenVMS. Now called VSI BASIC for OpenVMS due to corporate acquisitions.
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OpenVMS (Virtual Memory System) is a multi-user, multiprocessing virtual memory-based operating system designed for use in time-sharing, batch processing, and transaction processing. It was first released by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1977 as VAX/VMS for its series of VAX minicomputers. Since 2014 OpenVMS is developed and supported by a company named VMS Software Inc. (VSI). In addition to VAX systems, OpenVMS also runs on DEC Alpha systems, the Itanium-based HPE Integrity family of computers, and select x86-64 hardware and hypervisors.
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Modern von Neumann computers display some traits of the Harvard architecture in their designs, such as in CPU caches. While it is possible to write computer programs as long lists of numbers (machine language) and while this technique was used with many early computers,Even some later computers were commonly programmed directly in machine code. Some minicomputers like the DEC PDP-8 could be programmed directly from a panel of switches. However, this method was usually used only as part of the booting process.
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The system of telephones was used for voice communication, for control of the clock, as well as for control of switches and blocks. Additionally, "j trains" (imaginary trains) could be run by use of plugs in the control system. Around 1970, Digital Equipment Corporation donated two small rackmount PDP-11 minicomputers. One was eventually used to operate the club's major freight yard and the other was set up to perform user interface tasks, such as initial assignment of trains to throttles, and to throw turnouts.
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The central processor shares access to central memory with up to ten peripheral processors (PPs). Each peripheral processor is an individual computer with its own 1 μs memory of 4K words, each with 12 bits. (They were somewhat similar to CDC 160A minicomputers, sharing the 12-bit word length and portions of the instruction set.) While the PPs were designed as an interface to the 12 I/O channels, portions of the Chippewa Operating System (COS), and systems derived from it, e.g., SCOPE, MACE, KRONOS, NOS, and NOS/BE, ran on the PPs.
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Notable 24-bit machines include the CDC 924 – a 24-bit version of the CDC 1604, CDC lower 3000 series, SDS 930 and SDS 940, the ICT 1900 series, the Elliott 4100 series, and the Datacraft minicomputers/Harris H series. The term SWORD is sometimes used to describe a 24-bit data type with the S prefix referring to sesqui. The range of unsigned integers that can be represented in 24 bits is 0 to 16,777,215 ( in hexadecimal). The range of signed integers that can be represented in 24 bits is −8,388,608 to 8,388,607.
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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.
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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.
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Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) further reduced cost for mass-produced minicomputers, and mapped peripherals into the memory bus, so that the input and output devices appeared to be memory locations. This was implemented in the Unibus of the PDP-11 around 1969. Early microcomputer bus systems were essentially a passive backplane connected directly or through buffer amplifiers to the pins of the CPU. Memory and other devices would be added to the bus using the same address and data pins as the CPU itself used, connected in parallel.
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RS-232 / Current loop converter For serial communications, a current loop is a communication interface that uses current instead of voltage for signaling. Current loops can be used over moderately long distances (tens of kilometres), and can be interfaced with optically isolated links. There are a variety of such systems, but one based on a 20 mA current level was used by the Teletype Model 33 and was particularly common on minicomputers and early microcomputer which used these as computer terminals. As a result, most computer terminals also supported this standard into the 1980s.
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In its original implementation, the network supervisor contained most of the routing intelligence in the network. Unlike the TCP/IP protocol underlying the internet, Tymnet used a circuit switching layout which allowed the supervisors to be aware of every possible end-point. In its original incarnation, the users connected to nodes built using Varian minicomputers, then entered commands that were passed to the supervisor which ran on a XDS 940 host. Circuits were character oriented and the network was oriented towards interactive character-by-character full-duplex communications circuits.
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David H. Ahl (born 1939) is the founder of Creative Computing magazine. He is also the author of many how-to books, including BASIC Computer Games, the first computer book to sell more than a million copies. After earning degrees in electrical engineering and business administration, while completing his Ph.D. in educational psychology, Digital Equipment Corporation hired Ahl as a marketing consultant in 1969 to develop its educational products line. He edited EDU, DEC's newsletter on educational uses of computers, that regularly published instructions for playing computer games on minicomputers.
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Prior to the advent of the Bank Street Writer, most word processors ran on networked minicomputers. The most popular word processor for the personal computer was Apple Writer, which (prior to the version II release) operated in Apple's text mode where all text consisted of uppercase letters. Apple Writer used a black-on-white character to represent an actual capital letter. Microcomputer word processors of the early 1980s typically had no menus; so to perform basic functions such as copying and pasting, a writer had to type a series of keystrokes.
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This conformity to one standard across computers, ranging from tank-sized mini computers to small home computers, allowed the reuse of hardware from minicomputers with the same bus interface. This meant that most of the hardware and binary code from one platform could be used across very different platforms and allowed the sharing of resources. This groundbreaking standardization was due to the need for common standards and compatibility between computer users in the Eastern Bloc. Opinion is divided over the widespread use and popularity of the MRB Z1013 in the GDR.
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Prior minicomputers were generally used in a fashion similar to modern microcomputers, used by a single user, and often dedicated to a single particular task like operating machinery. This was true for many contemporary designs like the PDP-8 and Data General Nova. It was the HP 2000's ability to perform timesharing that made it a success. The ability to support multiple users running different programs was previously limited to mainframe computers, and a further expansion of this capability was a key design concept for the original Omega.
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These System 3000s used a command-line interpreter, with a three-level hierarchical file system, and utilities such as compilers would resemble "run fortran.pub.sys" rather than allowing programs to be run as keyword commands. Later the systems gained a wide range of languages including COBOL and FORTRAN, Pascal, C, and even a version of RPG to assist in winning business away from IBM. People who used the HP 3000 noticed from the 1970s onward that machines were more reliable compared to other mainframe and minicomputers of the time.
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PATHWORKS (it was usually written in all caps) was the trade name used by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts for a series of programs that eased the interoperation of Digital's minicomputers with personal computers. It was available for both Windows and Mac computer systems. The server part of Pathworks ran on VAX/VMS or Ultrix and enabled a DEC VAX or VAXcluster to act as a file and print server for client IBM PC compatible and Macintosh workstations. Pathworks server was derived from LanMan/X, the portable version of OS/2 LAN Manager.
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The history of email extends over more than 50 years, entailing an evolving set of technologies and standards that culminated in the email systems in use today. Computer-based mail and messaging became possible with the advent of time-sharing computers in the early 1960s, and informal methods of using shared files to pass messages were soon expanded into the first mail systems. Most developers of early mainframes and minicomputers developed similar, but generally incompatible, mail applications. Over time, a complex web of gateways and routing systems linked many of them.
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Binary data transfer to or from these minicomputers was often accomplished using a doubly encoded technique to compensate for the relatively high error rate of punches and readers. The low- level encoding was typically ASCII, further encoded and framed in various schemes such as Intel Hex, in which a binary value of "01011010" would be represented by the ASCII characters "5A". Framing, addressing and checksum (primarily in ASCII hex characters) information helped with error detection. Efficiencies of such an encoding scheme are on the order of 35–40% (e.g.
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The Checkout, Control and Monitor Subsystem (CCMS) controls the actual processing and launch of the Space Shuttle. This subsystem consists of the staffed consoles in the firing room, as well as minicomputers, and data transmission and recording systems, which monitor the pre-launch performance of all electrical and mechanical systems on board the Shuttle vehicle. The various systems being monitored are managed from operator-controlled consoles, which are clustered together based on the type of systems. The LPS master console in the firing room links the CCMS with the other subsystems of the LPS.
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In the late 1980s, HP was building four series of computers, all based on CISC CPUs. One line was the IBM PC compatible Intel i286-based Vectra Series, started in 1986. All others were non-Intel systems. One of them was the HP Series 300 of Motorola 68000-based workstations, another Series 200 line of technical workstations based on a custom silicon on sapphire (SOS) chip design, the SOS based 16-bit HP 3000 classic series, and finally the HP 9000 Series 500 minicomputers, based on their own (16 and 32-bit) FOCUS microprocessor.
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The Eclipse MV/8000 was the first in a family of 32-bit minicomputers produced by Data General during the 1980s. Codenamed Eagle during development, its architecture was a new 32-bit design backward compatible with the previous 16-bit Eclipse series. The development of the computer and the people who worked on it were the subject of Tracy Kidder's book The Soul of a New Machine. The MV/8000 was succeeded by the MV/6000, MV/8000-II, MV/2000, MV/2500, MV/4000, MV/10000, MV15000, MV/20000, MV/30000 and MV/40000.
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DPS 6 and DPS 4 (ex-Level 62) were superseded by Motorola 68000- and later on PowerPC minicomputers running Unix and the product lines were discontinued, though GCOS 6 ran in an emulator on top of AIX. The DPS 7 line, along with GCOS 7, continued to evolve into the DPS 7000 hardware base. In the late 1980s Honeywell sold its computer business to a joint venture that initially included NEC and Bull, with Honeywell still holding a stake for a time. Over a couple of years, Bull took over the company.
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In 1988, only 60,000 computers were connected to the Internet, and most were mainframes, minicomputers and professional workstations. On 2 November 1988, many started to slow down, because they were running a malicious code that demanded processor time and that spread itself to other computers – the first internet "computer worm".Jonathan Zittrain, 'The Future of The Internet', Penguin Books, 2008 The software was traced back to 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student Robert Tappan Morris, Jr. who said "he wanted to count how many machines were connected to the Internet".
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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.
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In 1981, all T/16 CPUs were replaced by the NonStop II. Its main difference from the T/16 was support for occasional 32-bit addressing via a user-switchable "extended data segment". This supported the next ten years of growth in software and was a huge advantage over the T/16 or HP 3000\. Unfortunately, visible registers remained 16-bit, and this unplanned addition to the instruction set required executing many instructions per memory reference compared to most 32-bit minicomputers. All subsequent TNS computers were hampered by this instruction set inefficiency.
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The company's primary claim to fame was selling inexpensive minicomputers that provided multi-user power using a proprietary operating system called AMOS (Alpha Micro Operating System). The operating system on the 68000 machines was called AMOS/L. The operating system had major similarities to the operating system of the DEC PDP-11. This may not be coincidental; legend has it that the founders based their operating system on "borrowed" source code from DEC, and DEC, perceiving the same, unsuccessfully tried to sue Alpha Micro over the similarities in 1984.
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Commercial time-sharing users, an important segment of early CP/CMS and VM sites, relied on such devices because they could connect via 300- or 1200 bit/s modems over normal voice-grade telephone circuits. Installing a dedicated circuit for a 3270 was often not practical, economical, or timely. The 3270's block-oriented approach was more consistent with IBM's batch- and punched card-oriented view of computing, and was particularly important for IBM mainframes of the day. Unlike contemporary minicomputers, most IBM mainframes were not equipped for character-at-a-time interrupts.
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KA820-AA CPU module The VAX 8200 and VAX 8300, code named "Scorpio", were mid-range minicomputers introduced on 29 January 1986. The VAX 8300 was a dual-processor variant of the VAX 8200 and, with the VAX 8800 introduced on the same date, was among the first multiprocessor VAX computers. They used the KA820 CPU module containing a V-11 microprocessor operating at 5 MHz (200 ns cycle) and supported a maximum of 128 MB of ECC memory. It had one VAXBI bus and support for an optional Unibus.
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The first VAX-based system was the VAX-11/780, a member of the VAX-11 family. The high-end VAX 8600 replaced the VAX-11/780 in October 1984 and was joined by the entry-level MicroVAX minicomputers and the VAXstation workstations in the mid-1980s. The MicroVAX was superseded by the VAX 4000, the VAX 8000 was superseded by the VAX 6000 in the late 1980s and the mainframe-class VAX 9000 was introduced. In the early 1990s, the fault-tolerant VAXft was introduced, as were the Alpha compatible VAX 7000/10000.
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This chip family allowed the design of powerful and low-cost microcomputers with performance comparable to minicomputers. The Z80-CPU had a substantially better bus structure and interrupt structure than the 8080 and could interface directly with dynamic RAM, since it included an internal memory-refresh controller. The Z80 was used in many of the early personal computers, as well as in video game systems such as the ColecoVision, Sega Master System and Game Boy. The Z80 is still in volume production in 2017 as a core microprocessor in various systems on a chip.
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Data General Extended BASIC, also widely known as Nova Extended BASIC, was a BASIC programming language interpreter for the Data General Nova series minicomputers. It was based on the seminal Dartmouth BASIC, including the Fifth Edition's string variables and powerful commands for matrix manipulation. In contrast to the compile-and-go Dartmouth BASIC, Extended BASIC was an interpreter. To this, Extended BASIC added substring manipulation using array slicing, which was common on BASICs of the era, found on HP Time- Shared BASIC, North Star BASIC, Atari BASIC and others.
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The company was sold in 1988 to Hughes Aircraft, which kept the Rediffusion name until it sold the company in 1994. Redifon (later Rediffusion) Computers was also part of the group and was based in Crawley, West Sussex. It initially started in the production of analogue computers to control flight simulators, then moved to produce minicomputers ("R range"), departmental Unix Servers and microcomputers ("teleputers"), specialising in data capture, enterprise accounting for local government and videotex systems. Michael Aldrich joined the company as Marketing Director in 1977 and became Managing Director and CEO in 1980.
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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.
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The PDP-11/73KDJ11-A CPU Module User's Guide, Digital Equipment CorporationChapter 4, Microcomputer Products Handbook, Digital Equipment Corporation 1985. (strictly speaking, the MicroPDP-11/73) was the third generation of the PDP-11 series of 16-bit minicomputers produced by Digital Equipment Corporation to use LSI processors. Introduced in 1983, this system used the DEC J-11 chip set and the Q-Bus, with a clock speed of 15.2 MHz. The 11/73 (also known as the KDJ11A) is a dual height module with on board bootstrap, cache and bus interface.
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Gow and the three others moved their work into the canteen of an abandoned mill in Leeds. Due to inadequate capitalisation – £2,800, in a field in which the minicomputers they would be selling cost £60,000 each – the new company had a shaky start and came close to going under right away. The key turning point was engaging with Leeds-based jukebox firm Musichire, which had purchased a computer from DEC but were struggling with it. Systime came in on a consulting basis and sold Musichire both software and new hardware.
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The Apple-CAT II also supported the Bell 202 protocol, which allowed half-duplex 1200 bit/s operation when connecting to another Apple-CAT II modem. This was an exceptionally rare feature; modems with "full" 1200 bit/s operation were expensive devices intended to be used with minicomputers and mainframes, and typically cost thousands of dollars. Since the 1200 bit/s mode was half-duplex, or one-way only, the users would normally have to decide in advance which direction transmissions would proceed. However, software was used to work around this limitation as well.
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Originally invented by URW employee Dr Peter Karow, Ikarus (German spelling of the mythical figure Icarus) got its name from the frequency with which it crashed in the early days of its development. It was designed to run on minicomputers such as DEC VAX and later adapted to microcomputers as they became increasingly powerful. In 1975, IKARUS was introduced at ATypI in Warsaw. By the 1980s a huge library of typefaces and logos existed as photographic film and needed to be input into computers for the latest generation of printing and sign-making devices.
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IBM 370 Model 145 System Console Blinkenlights text The Harwell Dekatron Computer does arithmetic at approximately human speed. Watching the lights allows to follow the instructions and the changing data as it runs the Squares program displayed on the panels Blinkenlights on the NSA's FROSTBURG supercomputer from the 1990s. Blinkenlights is a neologism for diagnostic lights usually on the front panels on old mainframe computers, minicomputers, many early microcomputers, and modern network hardware. It has been seen on many artifacts of modern office machinery as well as, most notably, photocopiers.
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All versions of the Model 35 had a copy holder on the printer cover, making it more convenient for the operator when transcribing written material. Teletype model 35 is mentioned as being used in "Experiment One", in the first RFC, RFC1. The model 35 was used as terminals for the minicomputers and IMPs to send and receive text messages over the very early ARPANET, that later evolved into the Internet. The Model 38 (ASR-38) was constructed similar to and had all the typing capabilities of a Model 33 ASR with additional features.
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Erasure sometimes happened accidentally when a program bug caused a loop that overwrote all of memory. Other minicomputers with such simple form of booting include Hewlett-Packard's HP 2100 series (mid-1960s), the original Data General Nova (1969), and DEC's PDP-11 (1970). DEC later added an optional diode matrix read-only memory for the PDP-11 that stored a bootstrap program of up to 32 words (64 bytes). It consisted of a printed circuit card, the M792, that plugged into the Unibus and held a 32 by 16 array of semiconductor diodes.
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Typically, a computer-room contained the whole dual ring, although some implementations deployed FDDI as a metropolitan area network. Reprinted in Fiber Optic Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) 1984-1991 FDDI requires this network topology because the dual ring actually passes through each connected device and requires each such device to remain continuously operational. The standard actually allows for optical bypasses, but network engineers consider these unreliable and error-prone. Devices such as workstations and minicomputers that might not come under the control of the network managers are not suitable for connection to the dual ring.
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Only about 400 employees remained in the Naperville location by the beginning of 1995. In the mid-1980s, there had been something like 30,000 employees associated with AT&T-CS;, including marketing, customer support, factories, and development. In 1994 a high powered team from AT&T; Naperville transferred to NCR San Diego in the midst of developing a Micro Channel architecture based four channel SCSI adapter based on a custom ASIC. This host bus adapter went on to great success in NCR and served as a connection point for over a billion dollars worth of peripherals attached to NCR minicomputers and database servers.
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The DECwriter series was a family of computer terminals from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). They were typically used in a fashion similar to a teletype, with a computer output being printed to paper and the user inputting information on the keyboard. In contrast to teletypes, the DECwriters were based on dot matrix printer technology, one of the first examples of such a system to be introduced. Versions lacking a keyboard were also available for use as computer printers, which eventually became the only models as smart terminals became the main way to interact with mainframes and minicomputers in the 1980s.
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David Chapman, a veteran IBM and Data General executive, started an aggressive campaign to acquire technology from other companies. The reason for bringing in Chapman was that the company had gotten hung up on the open architecture and relational issues. In other words, a company with an unparalleled record of outpositioning competition every two years, for sixteen years, including IBM, allowed itself to get outpositioned by IBM and others, with the help of E.F. Codd and C.J. Date. In 1986-87, Chapman attempted to move the company to the more and more powerful minicomputers such as Digital Equipment Corporation's VAX line of computers.
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After getting her master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and making the decision to divorce her husband, Bartik joined the Auerbach Corporation writing and editing technical reports on minicomputers. Bartik remained with Auerbach for eight years, then moved among positions with a variety of other companies for the rest of her career as a manager, writer, and engineer. Jean Bartik and William Bartik divorced by 1968. Bartik ultimately retired from the computing industry in 1986 when her final employer, Data Decisions (a publication of Ziff-Davis), was sold; Bartik spent the following 25 years as a real estate agent.
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Development of the single-chip microprocessor was an enormous catalyst to the popularization of cheap, easy to use, and truly personal computers. The Altair 8800, introduced in a Popular Electronics magazine article in the January 1975 issue, at the time set a new low price point for a computer, bringing computer ownership to an admittedly select market in the 1970s. This was followed by the IMSAI 8080 computer, with similar abilities and limitations. The Altair and IMSAI were essentially scaled-down minicomputers and were incomplete: to connect a keyboard or teleprinter to them required heavy, expensive "peripherals".
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It relies heavily on network resources (servers and infrastructure) for computation and storage. A diskless node loads even its operating system from the network, and a computer terminal has no operating system at all; it is only an input/output interface to the server. In contrast, a fat client, such as a personal computer, has many resources, and does not rely on a server for essential functions. As microcomputers decreased in price and increased in power from the 1980s to the late 1990s, many organizations transitioned computation from centralized servers, such as mainframes and minicomputers, to fat clients.
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Digital Retro: The Evolution and Design of the Personal Computer is a coffee table book about the history of home computers and personal computers. It was written by Gordon Laing, a former editor of Personal Computer World magazine and covers the period from 1975 to 1988 (the era before widespread adoption of PC compatibility). Its contents cover home computers, along with some business models and video game consoles, but hardware such as minicomputers and mainframes is excluded. In writing the book, the author's research included finding and interviewing some of those who worked on the featured hardware and founded the companies.
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Between 1947-1949 Arthur Alec Robinson worked for English Electric Ltd, as a student apprentice, and then as a development engineer. Crucially during this period he studied for a PhD degree at the University of Manchester, where he worked on the design of the hardware multiplier for the early Mark 1 computer. However, until the late 1970s, most minicomputers did not have a multiply instruction, and so programmers used a "multiply routine""The Evolution of Forth" by Elizabeth D. Rather et al. "Interfacing a hardware multiplier to a general-purpose microprocessor" which repeatedly shifts and accumulates partial results, often written using loop unwinding.
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In 1973, DEC commissioned the creation of a real-time, graphical version of Lunar Lander, which was intended to showcase the capabilities of their new DEC GT40 graphics terminals, when connected to their PDP-10 or PDP-11 minicomputers. The game was written by Jack Burness, a DEC consultant, and named Moonlander; it was distributed with DEC computers and displayed at trade shows. Unlike the previous turn-based, textual games, Moonlander is a real-time graphical game. The goal remains to correctly land a lunar module on the surface of the Moon using the game's telemetry data.
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The R2000 is a 32-bit microprocessor chip set developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS I instruction set architecture (ISA). Introduced in January 1986, it was the first commercial implementation of the MIPS architecture and the first commercial RISC processor available to all companies. The R2000 competed with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) VAX minicomputers and with Motorola 68000 and Intel Corporation 80386 microprocessors. R2000 users included Ardent Computer, DEC, Silicon Graphics, Northern Telecom and MIPS's own Unix workstations. The chip set consisted of the R2000 microprocessor, R2010 floating-point accelerator, and four R2020 write buffer chips.
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To provide even more modularity with reduced cost, memory and I/O buses (and the required control and power buses) were sometimes combined into a single unified system bus. Modularity and cost became important as computers became small enough to fit in a single cabinet (and customers expected similar price reductions). Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) further reduced cost for mass-produced minicomputers, and memory-mapped I/O into the memory bus, so that the devices appeared to be memory locations. This was implemented in the Unibus of the PDP-11 around 1969, eliminating the need for a separate I/O bus.
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BASIC-PLUS is an extended dialect of the BASIC programming language that was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for use on its RSTS/E time- sharing operating system for the PDP-11 series of 16-bit minicomputers in the early 1970s through the 1980s. BASIC-PLUS was based on BASIC-8 for the TSS/8, itself based very closely on the original Dartmouth BASIC. BASIC-PLUS added a number of new structures, as well as features from JOSS concerning conditional statements and formatting. In turn, BASIC-PLUS was the version on which the original Microsoft BASIC was patterned.
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Even vacuum-tube based computers had modular construction, but individual functions for peripheral devices filled a cabinet, not just a printed circuit board. Processor, memory and I/O cards became feasible with the development of integrated circuits. Expansion cards allowed a processor system to be adapted to the needs of the user, allowing variations in the type of devices connected, additions to memory, or optional features to the central processor (such as a floating point unit). Minicomputers, starting with the PDP-8, were made of multiple cards, all powered by and communicating through a passive backplane.
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Although technically categorised as minicomputers, these GEC machines were physically very large by today's standards, each occupying several standard communications cabinets, each standing high by wide. The CDC 9762 hard disc drives were housed separately in large stand-alone units, each one about the size of a domestic washing machine. (See images in the photo of the GEC Computers' Development Centre). The 70 Mbyte capacity hard discs themselves were in fact removable units, each consisting of a stack of five 14-inch platters, standing high, that could be lifted in and out of the drive unit.
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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.
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The Research and Development Network in Norway () or FUNN was fourteen computing centers established in regional districts in Norway established by Norsk Data (ND) and the Ministry of Trade and Industry in 1989. These were located in Ålesund, Alta, Bø, Gjøvik, Grimstad, Kirkenes, Kristiansund, Mo i Rana, Narvik, Sarpsborg, Sogndal, Steinkjer, Stord and Tromsø. Each had two Norsk Data-built minicomputers, one running Sintran III and one running Unix. Participating agencies included the Regional Development Fund, the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, the Norwegian Telecommunications Administration (NTA) and the Royal Norwegian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (NTNF).
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Gamma was never developed, so a few of its enhanced features were consequently pulled back into the GEC 4080. The main company product was the GEC 4000 series minicomputers, which were used by many other GEC and Marconi companies as the basis for real-time control systems in industrial and military applications, and development of many new computers in the series continued through most of the life of the company. Other products manufactured in the earlier years were the GEC 2050, computer power supplies, and high resolution military computer displays, as well as the Elliott 900 series for existing 900 series customers.
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The NSFNET initiated operations in 1986 using TCP/IP. Its six backbone sites were interconnected with leased 56-kbit/s links, built by a group including the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), Cornell University Theory Center, University of Delaware, and Merit Network. PDP-11/73 minicomputers with routing and management software, called Fuzzballs, served as the network routers since they already implemented the TCP/IP standard. This original 56kbit/s backbone was overseen by the supercomputer centers themselves with the lead taken by Ed Krol at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
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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.
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These were called "servers", as timesharing operating systems such as Unix rely heavily on the client–server model to facilitate sharing unique resources between multiple users. The availability of inexpensive networking equipment, coupled with new standards for the network structured cabling, made it possible to use a hierarchical design that put the servers in a specific room inside the company. The use of the term "data center", as applied to specially designed computer rooms, started to gain popular recognition about this time.In the 1990s, minicomputers, now called servers, were housed in the old computer rooms (now called data centers).
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The original VIP software applications had an emphasis on route accounting functions as well as the backbone sales analysis suite. The mainstream use of handheld computers started in 1978 with beverage sales reps using the devices to enter retail orders in the field and transmit them to the minicomputers. In subsequent years, handheld computers were heavily used by warehouse and delivery personnel. In 1979, VIP grew to 15 employees, and moved to new headquarters in Colchester, Vermont. The business expanded to over 30 people by 1991 and the company built and occupied a 32,000 square foot office building.
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The HP 1000 also was one of the few minicomputers that restricted file names to only five characters, rather than the six common at the time, which made porting and even writing programs a challenge. The later RTE-A for HP 1000 provided conventional directory structure with 16.4 file names, and made the ru command optional. TODS (Test Oriented Disk System) was developed by a technician at the HP board repair center to improve turn-around time in the center. It was used to load diagnostics from a central repository as opposed to loading individual paper tapes.
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Legend has it that the 1604 designation was chosen by adding CDC's first street address (501 Park Avenue) to Cray's former project, the ERA- Univac 1103.Curiously, a very detailed 1975 oral history with CDC's computer engineers does not confirm this legend: when the "1604" question was asked, the insiders laughed and responded: "It was quite popular at the time that this was the origin." Page 21 of the oral history provides the official CDC explanation for 1604. A 12-bit cut-down version was also released as the CDC 160A in 1960, often considered among the first minicomputers.
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VAX was designed in the era of the 16-bit PDP-11, one of the most successful minicomputers in history with approximately 600,000 examples sold. The system was designed to offer backward compatibility with the PDP-11 while extending the memory to a full 32-bit implementation and adding demand paged virtual memory. The name VAX refers to its "virtual address extension" concept that allowed programs to make use of this newly available memory while still being compatible with unmodified PDP-11 code. The name "VAX-11", used on early models, was chosen to highlight this capability.
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Sixth Edition Unix, also called Version 6 Unix or just V6, was the first version of the Unix operating system to see wide release outside Bell Labs. It was released in May 1975 and, like its direct predecessor, targeted the DEC PDP-11 family of minicomputers. It was superseded by Version 7 Unix in 1978/1979, although V6 systems remained in regular operation until at least 1985. AT&T; Corporation licensed Version 5 Unix to educational institutions only, but licensed Version 6 also to commercial users for $20,000, and it remained the most widely used version into the 1980s.
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This was known as "vendor lock-in", which helped guarantee future sales, even though the customers detested it. With the change in software development, combined with new generations of commodity processors that could match the performance of low-end minicomputers, lock-in was no longer working. When forced to make a decision, it was often cheaper for the users to simply throw out all of their existing machinery and buy a microcomputer product instead. If this was not the case at present, it certainly appeared it would be within a generation or two of Moore's law.
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FLOW is an educational programming language designed by Jef Raskin in 1970 and implemented on several minicomputers in the early 1970s. The goal of the language is to make it easy to explore algorithms through a highly interactive environment. The overall language is very similar in syntax and structure to the BASIC programming language, but has a number of changes in order to make typing code easier. Most notable among these was the concept of "typing amplification", in which short strings, often a single character, were expanded by the language into the complete "unamplified" source code.
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The 74S181 4-bit ALU bitslice resting on a page from the datasheet The 74181 is a 4-bit slice arithmetic logic unit (ALU), implemented as a 7400 series TTL integrated circuit. The first complete ALU on a single chip, it was used as the arithmetic/logic core in the CPUs of many historically significant minicomputers and other devices. The 74181 represents an evolutionary step between the CPUs of the 1960s, which were constructed using discrete logic gates, and today's single-chip microprocessor CPUs. Although no longer used in commercial products, the 74181 is still referenced in computer organization textbooks and technical papers.
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This reflected that Systime was in the process of manufacturing not just minicomputers but also desktop systems, as well as terminals and printers, most of which were targeted to the Western European market. Systime also ran a service bureau, that offered the creation of application software and that sold maintenance contracts on a third-party basis. In all, Systime's plans anticipated a doubling of its employee count. Ian McNeill was technical director of the company during this period. By 1983, Systime was considered, as The Times wrote, "one of the largest and fastest-growing British computer companies".
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Data General Eclipse S/130 front panel Data General microEclipse microprocessor The Data General Eclipse line of computers by Data General were 16-bit minicomputers released in early 1974 and sold until 1988. The Eclipse was based on many of the same concepts as the Data General Nova, but included support for virtual memory and multitasking more suitable to the small office than the lab. It was also packaged differently for this reason, in a floor- standing case the size of a small refrigerator. If the Nova was an improved PDP-8, the Eclipse was meant to compete against larger PDP-11 computers.
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The original 1963 version of the ASCII standard reserved the code point 5Ehex for an up-arrow. However, the 1965 ECMA-6 standard replaced the up-arrow with circumflex diacritic and two years later, the second revision of ASCII followed suit. As the early mainframes and minicomputers largely used teleprinters as output devices, it was possible to print the circumflex above a letter when needed. With the proliferation of monitors, however, this was seen insufficient, and precomposed characters, with the diacritic included, were instead introduced into appended character sets, such as Latin-1 and subsequently Unicode.
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Circa 1969, Ken Thompson and later Dennis Ritchie developed B basing it mainly on the BCPL language Thompson used in the Multics project. B was essentially the BCPL system stripped of any component Thompson felt he could do without in order to make it fit within the memory capacity of the minicomputers of the time. The BCPL to B transition also included changes made to suit Thompson's preferences (mostly along the lines of reducing the number of non-whitespace characters in a typical program). Much of the typical ALGOL-like syntax of BCPL was rather heavily changed in this process.
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Workstations tended to be very expensive, typically several times the cost of a standard PC and sometimes costing as much as a new car. However, minicomputers sometimes cost as much as a house. The high expense usually came from using costlier components that ran faster than those found at the local computer store, as well as the inclusion of features not found in PCs of the time, such as high-speed networking and sophisticated graphics. Workstation manufacturers also tend to take a "balanced" approach to system design, making certain to avoid bottlenecks so that data can flow unimpeded between the many different subsystems within a computer.
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The term "scopist" originated in the early days of computer-aided transcription. At that time, the shorthand transcripts produced by court reporters were translated into plain English on minicomputers belonging to courthouses or reporting firms. These computers had small green screens that displayed only six or eight lines of text at a time and resembled an oscilloscope. The screen became known as a "scope"; as a result, the people who worked at the "scope" to monitor the translation of the transcript became known as "scopists." Most scopists are freelancers, working from home, receiving court reporters’ transcripts and other materials electronically, via email and internet sites.
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Originally designated as ZKJ-III and named as Poseidon-4, but later re-designated as ZKJ-3, ZKJ-3 is designed to replace minicomputers in earlier designs with microcomputers with multilayered architecture, using Intel 8086 microprocessors. ZKJ-3 CDS has multiple input/output interfaces, and the software can be expanded when needed thanks to its modular design. In comparison to earlier Type 673-II/ZKJ-I CDS, the capability of ZKJ-3 has been expanded. Some of the additional capability includes compatibility with Type 352 targeting radar for anti-ship missiles and Type 681A IFF, and providing info from SJD-5 sonar to antisubmarine depth charge launchers.
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It is therefore ironic that he failed to see that the next major innovation would be a smaller, personal, home-based computer. To his credit, the massive success of his early minicomputers was such that he was kept busy with improvements to his Programmed Data Processor productline, attempting upward compatibility from the PDP-1 onwards, producing the highly successful PDP-8, and PDP-10. One of his chief engineers, Edson de Castro, left after failing to get permission to design a 16-bit version of the 8-bit PDP-8 and founded Data General. Both men then competed to create a 32-bit version.
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By the late eighties, the company was having problems retaining customers who were moving to lower-cost systems, as minicomputers entered their decline to obsolescence. Prime was failing to keep up with customers' increasing need for raw computing power. By the end, not a single Prime computer was subject to COCOM export controls, as they were insufficiently powerful for the US Government to fear their falling into the hands of hostile powers. In 1988, financier Bennett S. LeBow attempted a hostile takeover of Prime, leveraging his much smaller MAI Basic Four company. To stave off LeBow, Prime management organized a $1.3 billion "white knight" leveraged buyout by J.H. Whitney & Company.
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Five- and eight-hole punched paper tape early computer with a small piece of five-hole tape connected in a circle – creating a physical program loop Punched tape or perforated paper tape is a form of data storage that consists of a long strip of paper in which holes are punched. It developed from and was subsequently used alongside punched cards, differing in that the tape is continuous. It was used throughout the 19th and for much of the 20th centuries for programmable looms, teleprinter communication, for input to computers of the 1950s and 1960s, and later as a storage medium for minicomputers and CNC machine tools.
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Punched cards were still commonly used for entering both data and computer programs until the mid-1980s when the combination of lower cost magnetic disk storage, and affordable interactive terminals on less expensive minicomputers made punched cards obsolete for these roles as well. However, their influence lives on through many standard conventions and file formats. The terminals that replaced the punched cards, the IBM 3270 for example, displayed 80 columns of text in text mode, for compatibility with existing software. Some programs still operate on the convention of 80 text columns, although fewer and fewer do as newer systems employ graphical user interfaces with variable-width type fonts.
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The architecture of OS4000 is very heavily based around the architecture of the platform it runs on, the GEC 4000 series minicomputers, and these are rather unusual. The platform includes a feature called Nucleus which is a combination of a hardware and firmware based kernel, which cannot be altered under program control. This means that many of the features typically found in operating system kernels do not need to be included in OS4000, as the underlying platform performs these functions instead of the operating system. Consequently, there is no provision for running Privileged mode code on the platform—all OS4000 operating system code runs as processes.
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A disk operating system (abbreviated DOS) is a computer operating system that resides on and can use a disk storage device, such as a floppy disk, hard disk drive, or optical disc. A disk operating system must provide a file system for organizing, reading, and writing files on the storage disk. Strictly speaking, this definition does not apply to current generations of operating systems, such as versions of Microsoft Windows in use, and is more appropriately used only for older generations of operating systems. Disk operating systems were available for mainframes, minicomputers, microprocessors and home computers and were usually loaded from the disks themselves as part of the boot process.
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When computers were extremely large, expensive, and bulky (mainframes and minicomputers), the software was often bundled together with the hardware by manufacturers. If business software needed to be installed on an existing computer, this might require an expensive, time-consuming visit by a systems architect or a consultant. For complex, on-premises installation of enterprise software today, this can still sometimes be the case. However, with the development of mass market software for the new age of microcomputers in the 1980s came new forms of software distribution first cartridges, then Compact Cassettes, then floppy disks, then (in the 1990s and later) optical media, the internet and flash drives.
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He also chose to rename the ruler to the more famous Babylonian king Hammurabi, misspelled as "Hamurabi". Dyment's game, sometimes retitled The Sumer Game, proved popular in the programming community: Jerry Pournelle recalled in 1989 that "half the people I know wrote a Hammurabi program back in the 1970s; for many, it was the first program they'd ever written in their lives". Around 1971, DEC employee David H. Ahl wrote a version of The Sumer Game in the BASIC programming language. Unlike FOCAL, BASIC was run not just on mainframe computers and minicomputers, but also on personal computers, then termed microcomputers, making it a much more popular language.
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The Altair 8800 was modeled after early 1970s minicomputers such as the Data General Nova. These machines contained a CPU board, memory boards, and I/O boards; the data storage and display terminal were external devices. The Teletype Model 33 ASR was a popular terminal because it provided printed output and data storage on punched paper tape. More advanced systems would have 8-inch floppy disks and a video terminal that would display 24 lines of 80 characters such as the ADM-3A. (No graphics were available and lower-case letters were a $75 option.)ADM-3A Terminal cost $795 (kit) and $895 (assembled).
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These IMPs were Honeywell 316 and 516 minicomputers. The network was growing rapidly in several dimensions: number of nodes, hosts, and terminals; volume of traffic; and geographic coverage (including plans, now realized, for satellite extensions to Europe and Hawaii). A goal was established to design a modular machine which, at its lower end, would be smaller and less expensive than the 316's and 516's while being expandable in capacity to provide ten times the bandwidth of, and capable of servicing five times as many input- output (I/O) devices as, the 516. Related goals included greater memory addressing capability and increased reliability.
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SOX was a UNIX clone. It was developed from scratch in Brazil, in the late 1980s, by Computadores e Sistemas Brasileiros S/A (now Cobra Tecnologia), under the leadership of Ivan da Costa Marques. Certified as UNIX-compatible by X/Open (through UniSoft) in early 1989, SOX was one of the first re- implementations of UNIX, fully independent of AT&T;, that passed the X/Open verification tests, and the only one ever completed entirely outside the United States. SOX was designed to run on COBRA's own minicomputers and was the result of the Brazilian Informatics Policy, which aimed to achieve technological independence from the United States.
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The V-11 was Digital's first VAX microprocessor design, but was the second to ship, after the MicroVAX 78032. It was presented at the 39th International Solid State Circuits Conference held in 1984 alongside the MicroVAX 78032 and was introduced in early 1986 in systems, operating at 5 MHz (200 ns cycle time) and in 1987 at 6.25 MHz (160 ns cycle time). The V-11 was proprietary to DEC and was only used in their VAX 8200, VAX 8250, VAX 8300 and VAX 8350 minicomputers; and the VAXstation 8000 workstation. At 5 MHz, the V-11 performed approximately the same as the VAX-11/780 superminicomputer.
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Aldrich's systems were based on minicomputers that could communicate with multiple mainframes. Many systems were installed in the UK including the world's first supermarket teleshopping system. Nearly all books and articles (in English) from videotex's heyday (the late 1970s and early 1980s) seem to reflect a common assumption that in any given videotex system, there would be a single company that would build and operate the network. Although this appears shortsighted in retrospect, it is important to realize that communications had been perceived as a natural monopoly for almost a century -- indeed, in much of the world, telephone networks were then and still are explicitly operated as a government monopoly.
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The Apple II, also introduced in 1977, was noted for its switched-mode power supply, which was lighter and smaller than an equivalent linear power supply would have been, and which had no cooling fan. The switched-mode supply uses a ferrite-cored high frequency transformer and power transistors that switch thousands of times per second. By adjusting the switching time of the transistor, the output voltage can be closely controlled without dissipating energy as heat in a linear regulator. The development of high-power and high-voltage transistors at economical prices made it practical to introduce switch mode supplies, that had been used in aerospace, mainframes, minicomputers and color television, into desktop personal computers.
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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.
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IBM System/360 Model 30 mainframe computer at the Computer History Museum Mainframe computers are powerful computers used primarily by large organizations for computational work, especially large-scale, multi-user processes. The term originally referred to the large cabinets called "main frames" that housed the central processing unit and main memory of early computers. Prior to the rise of personal computers, first termed microcomputers, in the 1970s, they were the primary type of computer in use, and at the beginning of the 1960s they were the only type of computer available for public purchase. Minicomputers were relatively smaller and cheaper mainframe computers prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s, though they were still not intended for personal use.
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At that time the robots in Japan and the USA were controlled by minicomputers, not microcomputers like IMKO-1 and this demonstration was a real success as the whole system cost tens of times less than the Japanese or American analogues. As all computers of the Pravetz series this model has hardware Cyrillic support, but because the keyboard was using 7 bits for transmitting the character codes the Cyrillic letters were overlapping the lower case Latin letters and it was only possible to type with upper case Latin or Cyrillic letters. Ports/slots: Cassette player port, 8 expansion slots. The zero slot was used for attaching extra memory up to the 64KB limit.
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As an example, the bitmap display controller is little more than a 16-bit shift register; microcode moves display refresh data from main memory to the shift register, which serializes it into a display of pixels corresponding to the ones and zeros of the memory data. Ethernet is likewise supported by minimal hardware, with a shift register that acts bidirectionally to serialize output words and deserialize input words. Its speed was designed to be 3 Mbit/s because the microcode engine could not go faster and continue to support the video display, disk activity and memory refresh. Unlike most minicomputers of the era, Alto does not support a serial terminal for user interface.
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The French version of the game, however, despite being listed as "Sumer (French)", described itself not as a translation of the original game, but as a translation of "Hamurabi (The Sumer Game)", due to another version of the game which was already released by then. Around 1971, DEC employee David H. Ahl had written a version of The Sumer Game in the BASIC programming language. Unlike FOCAL, BASIC was run not just on mainframe computers and minicomputers, but also on personal computers, then termed microcomputers, making it a much more popular language. In 1973, Ahl published BASIC Computer Games, a best-selling book of games written in BASIC, which included his version of The Sumer Game.
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Minicomputers such as the PDP-11, and microcomputers ("personal computers") such as the TRS-80, Apple II and IBM-PC were able to implement delimiterless input as part of their design specification. Microcomputers, generally having only one user connected to them, could afford to support the less efficient delimiterless input capability as keyboard input could be handled by less expensive circuitry than that used on more expensive machines. This would then lead to the development of much more powerful games for personal computers. While games existed even on some of the largest computers, most of them were written, same as any other program, to either operate on line-at-a-time or screen-at-a-time input.
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Members of the SNA work group from IBM's Rochester, Minnesota development laboratory were convinced that a business case existed for distributed services among the mid- range computer systems produced in Rochester. A primitive form of distributed file services, called Distributed Data File Facility (DDFF) had been implemented to connect the IBM System/3, IBM System/34, and IBM System/36 minicomputers. Further, the IBM System/36 and the IBM System/38 computers were being sold to customers in multiples and there was a clear need to enable, for example, the headquarters computers of a company to interact with the computers in its various warehouses. APPC was implemented on these systems and used by various customer applications.
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The Modified Modular Jack (MMJ) is a small form-factor serial port connector developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It uses a modified version of the 6P6C modular connector with the latch displaced off-center so standard modular connectors found on Ethernet cables or phone jacks cannot accidentally be plugged in. MMJ connections are used on Digital minicomputers, such as the PDP-11, VAX and Alpha systems, and to connect terminals, printers, and serial console servers.Andrew Oliviero, Bill Woodward Cabling: The Complete Guide to Copper and Fiber-Optic Networking, John Wiley & Sons, 2009, ISBN 470550058, page 295 The MMJ connector has six conductors, using a superset of the RS-423 serial communication standard.
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A measure of quantity of data or information, the "nibble" (sometimes spelled "nybble" or "nybl") is normally equal to 4 bits, or one half of the common 8-bit byte. The nibble is used to describe the amount of memory used to store a digit of a number stored in binary-coded decimal format, or to represent a single hexadecimal digit. Less commonly, 'nibble' may be used for any contiguous portion of a byte of specified length, e.g. "6-bit nibble"; this usage is most likely to be encountered in connection with a hardware architecture in which the word length is not a multiple of 8, such as older 36-bit minicomputers.
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Since it was written in the C language, when that language was ported to a new machine architecture, Unix was also able to be ported. This portability permitted it to become the choice for a second generation of minicomputers and the first generation of workstations. By widespread use it exemplified the idea of an operating system that was conceptually the same across various hardware platforms, and later became one of the roots of free software and open-source software operating system projects including GNU, Linux, and the Berkeley Software Distribution. Apple's macOS is also based on Unix via NeXTSTEP and FreeBSD."Apple’s Operating System Guru Goes Back to His Roots", Klint Finley, 8 August 2013, wired.
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The original Progress 4GL was designed (in 1981) as an architecture independent language and integrated database system that could be used by non-experts to develop business applications by people who were not computer scientists but were knowledgeable in their business domain. At the time, business applications were often written in COBOL (for machines like corporate IBM mainframes) and sometimes in C (for departmental minicomputers running the UNIX operating system). When the IBM PC became popular, it developed a need for business software that could be used on those and other inexpensive computers. The Progress system was created to be used on both IBM PC machines running DOS and on a variety of computers that could run UNIX.
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WordStar, released 1978 WordPerfect, first released for minicomputers in 1979 and later ported to microcomputers LibreOffice Writer, one of the most popular free and open-source word processors A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand- alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word processors are word processor programs running on general purpose computers. The functions of a word processor program fall somewhere between those of a simple text editor and a fully functioned desktop publishing program. However the distinctions between these three have changed over time, and were unclear after 2010.
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Other companies in the emerging field quickly followed suit; Tymshare introduced SUPER BASIC in 1968, CompuServe had a version on the DEC-10 at their launch in 1969, and by the early 1970s BASIC was largely universal on general-purpose mainframe computers. Even IBM eventually joined the club with the introduction of VS-BASIC in 1973. Although time-sharing services with BASIC were successful for a time, the widespread success predicted earlier was not to be. The emergence of minicomputers during the same period, and especially low-cost microcomputers in the mid-1970s, allowed anyone to purchase and run their own systems rather than buy online time which was typically billed at dollars per minute.
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Jon Paris is a Canadian computer scientist, author, and speaker recognized as one of the top experts for IBM's System i computers. In 1987, Jon, then an experienced consultant, was hired by IBM to develop COBOL compilers for the System/36 and System/38 minicomputers. From there, he transitioned into the RPG group, where he played a pivotal role in the development of the modern RPG language as well as other language and development tools, including CODE/400 and Visual Age for RPG. He has also been instrumental in the porting of Python, Ruby, and other languages to the IBM i platform, as well as being a leader in pushing the adoption of completely free RPG.
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MIT living groups in 1989 avoided advertising their sophisticated Project Athena workstations to prospective members because they wanted residents who were interested in people, not computers, with one fraternity member stating that "We were worried about the hacker subculture". According to Eric S. Raymond,Eric S.Raymond: A Brief History of Hackerdom (2000) the Open Source and Free Software hacker subculture developed in the 1960s among 'academic hackers' working on early minicomputers in computer science environments in the United States. Hackers were influenced by and absorbed many ideas of key technological developments and the people associated with them. Most notable is the technical culture of the pioneers of the Arpanet, starting in 1969.
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Control Data Corporation tried to re-enter the high-end market again with its ETA-10 machine, but it sold poorly and they took that as an opportunity to leave the supercomputing field entirely. In the early and mid-1980s Japanese companies (Fujitsu, Hitachi and Nippon Electric Corporation (NEC) introduced register-based vector machines similar to the Cray-1, typically being slightly faster and much smaller. Oregon-based Floating Point Systems (FPS) built add- on array processors for minicomputers, later building their own minisupercomputers. Throughout, Cray continued to be the performance leader, continually beating the competition with a series of machines that led to the Cray-2, Cray X-MP and Cray Y-MP.
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Fujitsu offered mainframe computers from 1955 until at least 2002 Fujitsu's computer products have included minicomputers, small business computers, servers and personal computers. In 1955, Fujitsu founded Kawasaki Frontale as a company football club; Kawasaki Frontale has been a J. League football club since 1999. In 1967, the company's name was officially changed to the contraction . Since 1985, the company also fields a company American football team, the Fujitsu Frontiers, who play in the corporate X-League, have appeared in 7 Japan X Bowls, winning two, and winning two Rice Bowls. In 1971, Fujitsu signed an OEM agreement with the Canadian company Consolidated Computers Limited (CCL) to distribute CCL's data entry product, Key-Edit.
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Today, Emacs' mainly textual buffer-based paradigm uses far fewer resources than desktop metaphor GUI IDEs with comparable features such as Eclipse or Netbeans. In a speech at the 2002 International Lisp Conference, Richard Stallman indicated that minimalism was a concern in his development of GNU and Emacs, based on his experiences with Lisp and system specifications of low-end minicomputers at the time. As the capabilities and system requirements of common desktop software and operating systems grew throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and as software development became dominated by teams espousing conflicting, faddish software development methodologies, some developers adopted minimalism as a philosophy and chose to limit their programs to a predetermined size or scope.
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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.
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Founded in 1982 by Gary Hendrix with a National Science Foundation grant, Symantec was originally focused on artificial intelligence- related projects, including a database program. Hendrix hired several Stanford University natural language processing researchers as the company's first employees. In 1984, it became clear that the advanced natural language and database system that Symantec had developed could not be ported from DEC minicomputers to the PC. This left Symantec without a product, but with expertise in natural language database query systems and technology. As a result, later in 1984 Symantec was acquired by another, smaller software startup company, C&E; Software, founded by Denis Coleman and Gordon Eubanks and headed by Eubanks.
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This was soon followed by a JOVIAL compiler targeted to the popular MIL-STD-1750A 16-bit processor architecture specification. With these compilers came associated tools such as assemblers, linkers, runtime systems, simulators, and symbolic debuggers. These cross-development tools were typically hosted on either IBM System/370 mainframes or VAX/VMS minicomputers. General Dynamics became the biggest customer for the JOVIAL product, especially for its use in the avionics for the F-16 Fighting Falcon, but it was sold to a number of other defense contractors as well. Reception center at the 32nd Street office of ACT in the mid-1980s In 1984, the company received $3 million in funding for new products from Prudential-Bache Securities.
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Systems Engineering Laboratories was founded and incorporated in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in 1959, and were involved in the beginning of the breakout of minicomputers from 16-bit to larger architectures, with a 24-bit model in 1966. SEL was purchased by Gould Electronics in 1981 and was operated essentially unchanged as the Gould Computer Systems Division (CSD). The parent company was acquired by Nippon Mining in 1988, but as part of the U.S. government approval of the deal, Nippon Mining was required to divest the Gould divisions that did work for the Department of Defense, including the Computer Systems Division. Later, in 1989, Encore Computer Corporation (about 250 employees) bought the computer division (about 2500 employees) from Nippon Mining.
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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.
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Micromodem II installed in an Apple II. The external "microcoupler" with the phone jacks and analog hardware were connected via the ribbon cable. At the time, modems generally came in two versions, external modems using an acoustic coupler for connection, and direct-connection modems used with minicomputers or mainframes. Acoustic couplers were entirely manual; the user picked up the phone's handset, dialed manually, and then pressed the handset into the coupler if a carrier frequency was heard. Disconnecting at the end of the session was also manual, with the user lifting the handset out of the coupler and hanging it up on the phone body in order to depress the hook switch and return the phone to the on-hook state and end the call.
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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.
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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.
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3B2 line of minicomputers was the porting base for SVR3 AT&T;'s UNIX System Development Laboratory (USDL) was succeeded by AT&T; Information Systems (ATTIS), which distributed UNIX System V, Release 3, in 1987. SVR3 included STREAMS, Remote File Sharing (RFS), the File System Switch (FSS) virtual file system mechanism, a restricted form of shared libraries, and the Transport Layer Interface (TLI) network API. The final version was Release 3.2 in 1988, which added binary compatibility to Xenix on Intel platforms (see Intel Binary Compatibility Standard). User interface improvements included the "layers" windowing system for the DMD 5620 graphics terminal, and the SVR3.2 curses libraries that offered eight or more color pairs and other at this time important features (forms, panels, menus, etc.).
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The history of the personal computer as mass-market consumer electronic devices effectively began in 1977 with the introduction of microcomputers, although some mainframe and minicomputers had been applied as single-user systems much earlier. A personal computer is one intended for interactive individual use, as opposed to a mainframe computer where the end user's requests are filtered through operating staff, or a time sharing system in which one large processor is shared by many individuals. After the development of the microprocessor, individual personal computers were low enough in cost that they eventually became affordable consumer goods. Early personal computers – generally called microcomputers– were sold often in electronic kit form and in limited numbers, and were of interest mostly to hobbyists and technicians.
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He went on to found Control Video Corporation, which ultimately evolved into AOL. Reader's Digest had high expectations for The Source, and established for the company its own purpose- built installation of Prime minicomputers in McLean, Virginia. However, subscriber numbers were slow to build, and (unlike the leaner set-up at rival CompuServe) this facility became an expensive and under-used overhead to maintain. Losses continued to mount, and chief executives came and went. Rumors abounded of an impending sale, but eventually Control Data Corporation put up $5 million in 1983 in return for stock options, and came in as an operating partner. As the microcomputer boom continued, subscriptions reached a peak of 80,000 members, but later fell back (compared to 500,000 at CompuServe by 1989).
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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.
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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.
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Before PALs were introduced, designers of digital logic circuits would use small-scale integration (SSI) components, such as those in the 7400 series TTL (transistor-transistor logic) family; the 7400 family included a variety of logic building blocks, such as gates (NOT, NAND, NOR, AND, OR), multiplexers (MUXes) and demultiplexers (DEMUXes), flip flops (D-type, JK, etc.) and others. One PAL device would typically replace dozens of such "discrete" logic packages, so the SSI business declined as the PAL business took off. PALs were used advantageously in many products, such as minicomputers, as documented in Tracy Kidder's best-selling book The Soul of a New Machine. PALs were not the first commercial programmable logic devices; Signetics had been selling its field programmable logic array (FPLA) since 1975.
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IBM RS/6000 AIX file servers used for ibm.com in the 1990s AIX Version 4 console login prompt Unix started life at AT&T;'s Bell Labs research center in the early 1970s, running on DEC minicomputers. By 1976, the operating system was in use at various academic institutions, including Princeton, where Tom Lyon and others ported it to the S/370, to run as a guest OS under VM/370. This port would later grow out to become UTS, a mainframe Unix offering by IBM's competitor Amdahl Corporation. IBM's own involvement in Unix can be dated to 1979, when it assisted Bell Labs in doing its own Unix port to the 370 (to be used as a build host for the 5ESS switch's software).
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IBM 1620 console, with a typewriter and front panel Prior to the development of alphanumeric CRT system consoles, some computers such as the IBM 1620 had console typewriters and front panels while the very first programmable computer, the Manchester Baby, used a combination of electromechanical switches and a CRT to provide console functions—the CRT displaying memory contents in binary by mirroring the machine's Williams-Kilburn tube CRT-based RAM. On traditional minicomputers, the console was a serial console, an RS-232 serial link to a terminal such as a DEC VT100. This terminal was usually kept in a secured room since it could be used for certain privileged functions such as halting the system or selecting which media to boot from. Large midrange systems, e.g.
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Vilnius BASIC on a BK-0010.01 The BK series was essentially a barebones machine, without any peripherals or development tools. The only software available at the launch (except ROM firmware) was an included magnetic tape with several programming examples (both for BASIC and FOCAL), and several tests. The ROM firmware includes a simple program to enter machine codes, BASIC and FOCAL interpreters. While the BK was somewhat compatible with larger and more expensive DVK professional model microcomputers and industrial minicomputers like the SM EVM series, its 32 KiB memory - of which only 16 KiB was generally available to programmers - (an extended memory mode supported 28 KiB, but limited video output to a quarter of the screen) generally precluded direct use of software for the more powerful machines.
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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.
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On the data path, they used 74S181 arithmetic and logic units, previously thought of as a component for doing arithmetic instructions in minicomputers, to process real time video signals, creating new signals representing the sum, difference, AND, XOR, and so on, of two input signals. These two elements, the address generator, and the video data pipeline, recur as core features of digital video architecture. The address generator supplied read and write addresses to a real time video memory, which can be thought of as evolution into the most flexible form of gating the address bits together to produce the video. While the video frame buffer is now present in every computer's graphics card, it has not carried forward a number of features of the early video synths.
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In 1977, the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Institute for Information Systems developed UCSD Pascal to provide students with a common environment that could run on any of the then available microcomputers as well as campus DEC PDP-11 minicomputers. The operating system became known as UCSD p-System. UCSD p-System was one of three operating systems, along with PC DOS and CP/M-86, that IBM offered for its original IBM PC. Vendor SofTech Microsystems emphasized p-System's application portability, with virtual machines for 20 CPUs as of the IBM PC's release. It predicted that users would be able to use applications they purchased on future computers running p-System; advertisements called it "the Universal Operating System".
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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.
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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.
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Hayes was not as fast as some other manufacturers to release modems that ran faster than 2400 bit/s, which opened the door for U.S. Robotics (USR) and Telebit to meet market demand with faster products. Telebit was the fastest, running up to ~18,500 bit/s and maintaining higher speeds on noisy lines where other models would fall-back to lower speeds. They were also expensive and found mostly in professional settings, notably for Unix-running minicomputers for UUCP use where their protocol spoofing offered further speed improvements. USR's designs were simpler than Telebits and ran at "only" 9,600 bit/s, but carved out a strong niche by offering deep discounts to sysops. In 1987 Hayes responded with the Hayes Express 96 protocol, a 9600 bit/s protocol.
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Pertec Computer Corporation (PCC), formerly Peripheral Equipment Corporation (PEC), was a computer company based in Chatsworth, California which originally designed and manufactured peripherals such as floppy drives, tape drives, instrumentation control and other hardware for computers. Pertec's most successful products were hard disk drives and tape drives, which were sold as OEM to the top computer manufacturers, including IBM, Siemens and DEC. Pertec manufactured multiple models of seven and nine track half-inch tape drives with densities 800CPI (NRZI) and 1600CPI (PE) and phase-encoding formatters, which were used by a myriad of original equipment manufacturers as I/O devices for their product lines. In the 1970s, Pertec entered the computer industry through several acquisitions of computer producers and started manufacturing and marketing mostly minicomputers for data processing and pre-processing.
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Natterer, "The Mathematics of Computerized Tomography (Classics in Applied Mathematics)", Society for Industrial Mathematics, F. Natterer and F. Wübbeling "Mathematical Methods in Image Reconstruction (Monographs on Mathematical Modeling and Computation)", Society for Industrial (2001), In 1968, Nirvana McFadden and Michael Saraswat established guidelines for diagnosis of a common abdominal pathologies, including acute appendicitis, small bowel obstruction, Ogilvie syndrome, acute pancreatitis, intussusception, and apple peel atresia.Townsed CM Jr, Beauchamp RD, Evers BM et al. (2008). Sabiston Textbook of Radiology: The Biological Basis of Modern Radiological Practice, ed 22. Saunders. pp. 104–112. Conventional focal plane tomography remained a pillar of radiologic diagnostics until the late 1970s, when the availability of minicomputers and the development of transverse axial scanning led CT to gradually supplant as the preferred modality of obtaining tomographic images.
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The biographical book, The ultimate entrepreneur: the story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation, chronicles the experiences of Ken Olsen racing to design minicomputers at the company of his own founding, Digital Equipment Corporation. At the time the book was published by two computer journal writers, Ken Olsen was competing with other Massachusetts computing companies such as Data General (founded by his former employee), Prime Computer, Wang Laboratories, Symbolics, Lotus Development Corporation, and Apollo Computer. While believing in the value of software, he did not believe in the value of software separate from hardware, and missed the opportunity to fund Lotus 1-2-3 or Visicalc. He also missed the importance of the personal computer, but his futuristic vision of the Client–server model helped to launch Ethernet.
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Versions of PDO were available for Solaris, HP- UX and all versions of the OPENSTEP system. A version that worked with Microsoft OLE was also available called D'OLE, allowing distributed code written using PDO on any platform to be presented on Microsoft systems as if they were local OLE objects. PDO was one of a number of distributed object systems created in the early 1990s, a design model where "front end" applications on GUI-based microcomputers would call code running on mainframe and minicomputers for their processing and data storage. Microsoft was evolving OLE into the Component Object Model (COM) and a similar distributed version called DCOM, IBM had their System Object Model (SOM/DSOM), Sun Microsystems was promoting their Distributed Objects Everywhere, and there were a host of smaller players as well.
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Upon receiving his Doctorate of Science (Engineering) Boguslavsky wrote more than 100 articles, 3 scientific books and made several inventions while spearheading his own laboratory. He was the first scientist from USSR who published his results on new algorithms for virtual memory management in IEEE Transactions on Computers in the United States Scientific Journal that covers aspects of Computer Science. In 1985, together with a team of developers from the Academy of Science of Moldova, Boguslavsky launched a project to create a software system to connect IBM mainframes with Digital minicomputers and personal computers into an integrated computer network. As a result, he was awarded two significant contracts to implement these networks in 1987, one in a Czech coil mining company and another at the Polytechnic University in Slovakia.
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In fact, the original version of the environment was built around a core dynamic data repository called "Named storage" developed in the early 1960s,"Named storage: a dynamic storage-allocation scheme with manipulative routines", AEC research and development report - Volume 7021 ANL (Series) - Stanley Cohen, Physics Division, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Argonne National Laboratory, 1965."Speakeasy - An evolutionary system", S. Cohen, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Very high level languages (March 1974) while the most recent version has been released in 2006. Speakeasy was aimed to make the computational work of the physicists at the Argonne National Laboratory easier. It was initially conceived to work on mainframes (the only kind of computers at that time), and was subsequently ported to new platforms (minicomputers, personal computers) as they became available.
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DEC TK50 drive and cassette DEC launched the TK50 tape drive for the MicroVAX II and PDP-11 minicomputers in 1984. This used 22-track CompacTape I cartridges, storing 94 MB per cartridge. The TK50 was superseded in 1987 by the TK70 drive and the 48-track CompacTape II cartridge, capable of storing 294 MB. In 1989, the CompacTape III (later DLTtape III) format was introduced, increasing the number of tracks to 128 and capacity to 2.6 GB. Later drives into the early 1990s improved the data density of the DLTtape III cartridge, up to 10 GB. The DLTtape IV cartridge was introduced by Quantum in 1994, with increased tape length and data density, initially offering 20 GB per tape. Super DLTtape, originally capable of up to 110 GB, was launched in 2001.
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Pyramid Technology was formed in 1981 by a number of ex-Hewlett-Packard employees, who were interested in building first-rate minicomputers based on RISC designs. In March 1995 Pyramid was bought by Siemens AG and merged into their Siemens Computer Systems US unit.COMPANY NEWS; SIEMENS IS IN TALKS TO BUY PYRAMID TECHNOLOGY, Published: January 10, 1995, The New York Times CompanyCOMPANY NEWS; SIEMENS AGREES TO PURCHASE PYRAMID TECHNOLOGY, Published: January 24, 1995, The New York Times CompanySiemens/Pyramid seek to raise profile, By Michael Goldberg, Computerworld, 12 Feb 1996, The acquisition last March In 1998 this unit was split, with the services side of the operation becoming Wincor Nixdorf. In 1999 Siemens and Fujitsu merged their computer operations to form Fujitsu Siemens Computers, and finally Amdahl was added to the mix in 2000.
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The DEC 7000 AXP and DEC 10000 AXP are a series of high-end multiprocessor server computers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, introduced on 10 November 1992 (although the DEC 10000 AXP was not available until the following year). These systems formed part of the first generation of systems based on the 64-bit Alpha AXP architecture and at the time of introduction, ran Digital's OpenVMS AXP operating system, with DEC OSF/1 AXP available in March 1993. They were designed in parallel with the VAX 7000 and VAX 10000 minicomputers, and are identical except for the processor module(s) and supported bus interfaces. A field upgrade from a VAX 7000/10000 to a DEC 7000/10000 AXP was possible by means of swapping the processor boards.
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Open systems are computer systems that provide some combination of interoperability, portability, and open software standards. (It can also refer to specific installations that are configured to allow unrestricted access by people and/or other computers; this article does not discuss that meaning). The term was popularized in the early 1980s, mainly to describe systems based on Unix, especially in contrast to the more entrenched mainframes and minicomputers in use at that time. Unlike older legacy systems, the newer generation of Unix systems featured standardized programming interfaces and peripheral interconnects; third party development of hardware and software was encouraged, a significant departure from the norm of the time, which saw companies such as Amdahl and Hitachi going to court for the right to sell systems and peripherals that were compatible with IBM's mainframes.
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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).
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The firm was reluctant to get into the computer business again with commercially untested designs, although many of the philosophies would ship in later products. Byte magazine stated in 1981, After the Alto, PARC developed more powerful workstations (none intended as projects) informally termed "the D-machines": Dandelion (least powerful, but the only to be made a product in one form), Dolphin; Dorado (most powerful; an emitter-coupled logic (ECL) machine); and hybrids like the Dandel-Iris. Before the advent of personal computers such as the Apple II in 1977 and the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) in 1981, the computer market was dominated by costly mainframes and minicomputers equipped with dumb terminals that time-shared the processing time of the central computer. Through the 1970s, Xerox showed no interest in the work done at PARC.
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Less than 20,000 lines of code almost all in C composed the Unix kernel as of 1983, and more than 75% was not machine-dependent. By that year Unix or a Unix-like system was available for at least 16 different processors and architectures from about 60 vendors; BYTE noted that computer companies "may support other [operating] systems, but a Unix implementation always happens to be available", and that DEC and IBM supported Unix as an alternative to their proprietary operating systems. Microcomputer Unix became commercially available in 1980, when Onyx Systems released its Zilog Z8000-based C8002 and Microsoft announced its first Unix for 16-bit microcomputers called Xenix, which the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO) ported to the 8086 processor in 1983. Other companies began to offer commercial versions of Unix for their own minicomputers and workstations.
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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".
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The description below describes an all-IBM shop (a "shop" is programmer jargon for a programming site) but shops using other brands of mainframes (or minicomputers) would have similar equipment although because of cost or availability might have different manufacturer's equipment, e.g. an NCR, ICL, Hewlett-Packard (HP) or Control Data shop would have NCR, ICL, HP, or Control Data computers, printers and so forth, but have IBM 029 keypunches. IBM's huge size and industry footprint often caused many of their conventions to be adopted by other vendors, so the example below is fairly similar to most places, even in non-IBM shops. A typical corporate or university computer installation would have a suite of rooms, with a large, access-restricted, air conditioned room for the computer (similar to today's server room) and a smaller quieter adjacent room for submitting jobs.
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At Bell, Gummel made important contributions to the design and simulation of the semiconductor devices used throughout modern electronics. Among the most important of his contributions are the Gummel–Poon model which made accurate simulation of bipolar transistors possible and which was central to the development of the SPICE program; Gummel's method, used to solve the equations for the detailed behavior of individual bipolar transistors,; and the Gummel plot, used to characterize bipolar transistors. Gummel also created one of the first personal workstations, based on HP minicomputers and Tektronix terminals and used for VLSI design and layout, and MOTIS, the first MOS timing simulator and the basis of "fast SPICE" programs. In 1983, Gummel received the David Sarnoff Award "for contributions and leadership in device analysis and development of computer-aided design tools for semiconductor devices and circuits".
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Porting existing PDP-11 software to the PRO was complicated by design decisions that rendered it partially incompatible with its parent product line. Industry critics observed that this incompatibility appeared at least in part deliberate, as DEC belatedly sought to "protect" its more- profitable mainstream PDP-11s from price competition with lower-priced PCs. The PRO was never widely accepted as an office personal computer, nor as a scientific workstation, where the market was also headed to Intel 8086, or alternately to Motorola 68000-based computers. The failure of DEC to gain a significant foothold in the high-volume PC market would be the beginning of the end of the computer hardware industry in New England, as nearly all computer companies located there were focused on minicomputers, from DEC to Data General, Wang, Prime, Computervision, and Honeywell.
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The downfall of NLS, and subsequently, of ARC in general, was the program's difficult learning curve. NLS was not designed to be easy to learn; it employed the heavy use of program modes, relied on a strict hierarchical structure, did not have a point-and-click interface, and forced the user to have to learn cryptic mnemonic codes to do anything useful with the system. The chord keyset, which complemented the modal nature of NLS, forced the user to learn a 5-bit binary code if they did not want to use the keyboard. Finally, with the arrival of the ARPA Network at SRI in 1969, the time-sharing technology that seemed practical with a small number of users became impractical over a distributed network; time-sharing was rapidly being replaced with individual minicomputers (and later microcomputers) and workstations.
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One notable early disk operating system was CP/M, which was supported on many early microcomputers and was closely imitated by Microsoft's MS-DOS, which became widely popular as the operating system chosen for the IBM PC (IBM's version of it was called IBM DOS or PC DOS). In the 1980s, Apple Computer Inc. (now Apple Inc.) abandoned its popular Apple II series of microcomputers to introduce the Apple Macintosh computer with an innovative graphical user interface (GUI) to the Mac OS. The introduction of the Intel 80386 CPU chip in October 1985, with 32-bit architecture and paging capabilities, provided personal computers with the ability to run multitasking operating systems like those of earlier minicomputers and mainframes. Microsoft responded to this progress by hiring Dave Cutler, who had developed the VMS operating system for Digital Equipment Corporation.
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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.
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In addition to minicomputers such as OKITAC series developed in the mid-1960s, OKI began supplying various I/O devices, electroprinters, and dot printers, mainly to the financial industry in the 1970s. OKI’s business at this time included cash dispensers (CDs), automatic depositors(ADs) and automated teller machines (ATMs). It was at this time when OKI expanded its overseas business providing telecommunication systems to countries in the Middle East, Central and South American countries as well as other Asian countries. In 1972, OKI established Oki Data Corporation (ODC: today’s OKI Data Americas), a Japan-US joint venture in Philadelphia, to develop the DP100, dot printers. Around that time in 1975, OKI developed the world’s first automobile telephone system together with Bell Labs. This was the beginning of OKI’s wireless technology, and today (as of 2009) OKI expands this technology into vehicle-to-vehicle communications and other ETC (Electronic toll collection) technologies.
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During the late 1970s and 1980s, versions of C were implemented for a wide variety of mainframe computers, minicomputers, and microcomputers, including the IBM PC, as its popularity began to increase significantly. In 1983, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) formed a committee, X3J11, to establish a standard specification of C. X3J11 based the C standard on the Unix implementation; however, the non-portable portion of the Unix C library was handed off to the IEEE working group 1003 to become the basis for the 1988 POSIX standard. In 1989, the C standard was ratified as ANSI X3.159-1989 "Programming Language C". This version of the language is often referred to as ANSI C, Standard C, or sometimes C89. In 1990, the ANSI C standard (with formatting changes) was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO/IEC 9899:1990, which is sometimes called C90.
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While many of these games were lost as older computers were discontinued, some of them were ported to high-level computer languages like BASIC, had expanded versions later released for personal computers, or were recreated for bulletin board systems years later, thus influencing future games and developers. Early computer games began to be created in the 1950s, and the steady increase in the number and abilities of computers over time led to the gradual loosening of restrictions on access to mainframe computers at academic and corporate institutions beginning in the 1960s. This in turn led to a modest proliferation of generally small, text-based games on mainframe computers, with increasing complexity towards the end of the decade. While games continued to be developed on mainframes and minicomputers through the 1970s, the rise of personal computers and the spread of high-level programming languages meant that later games were generally intended to or were capable of being run on personal computers, even when developed on a mainframe.
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Most of these spread only to other users of the same type of computer and therefore did not persist as older computer models were discontinued; several, however, inspired future games, or were later released in modified versions on more modern systems or languages. These early mainframe games were largely created between 1968 and 1971; while earlier games were created they were limited to small, academic audiences. Mainframe games also continued to be developed through the 1970s, but the rise of the commercial video game industry, focused on arcade video games and home video game consoles, followed by the rise of personal computers later in the decade, meant that beginning in the 1970s the audience and developers of video games began to shift away from mainframe computers or minicomputers, and the spread of general-purpose programming languages such as the BASIC programming language meant that later mainframe games could generally be run on personal computers with minimal changes, even if initially developed on a mainframe.
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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").
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The idea for the BLAST product belongs to Paul Charbonnet, Jr., a former Data General salesman. Its original version was designed and implemented for the Data General line of Nova minicomputers by G. W. Smith, a former BorgWarner Research Center systems engineer who, having developed a basic "ack-nak" protocol for the aforesaid telemetry application, now created an entirely new protocol with all of the above-mentioned features, and for which he devised the "BLAST" acronym. This work was performed under contract to AMP Incorporated, of Baton Rouge, LA. However, it was another Baton Rouge company, Communications Research Group (CRG), which was to successfully commercialize the BLAST protocol, and which was also to employ Charbonnet and Smith as, respectively, Sales Director and Vice-president of Research and Development. On the downside, BLAST was criticized by ZMODEM developer Chuck Forsberg because of its proprietary nature, making it "tightly bound to the fortunes of [its supplier]".
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Max Mathews playing one of the electronic violins he built, in his analog electronics lab at Bell Telephone Labs (c.1970) Mathews studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, receiving a Sc.D. in 1954. Working at Bell Labs, Mathews wrote MUSIC, the first widely used program for sound generation, in 1957. For the rest of the century, he continued as a leader in digital audio research, synthesis, and human-computer interaction as it pertains to music performance. In 1968, Mathews and L. Rosler developed Graphic 1, an interactive graphical sound system on which one could draw figures using a light-pen that would be converted into sound, simplifying the process of composing computer generated music. Also in 1970, Mathews and F. R. Moore developed the GROOVE (Generated Real-time Output Operations on Voltage-controlled Equipment) system, a first fully developed music synthesis system for interactive composition and realtime performance, using 3C/Honeywell DDP-24 (or DDP-224) minicomputers.
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Merit's initial three node packet-switched computer network was operational in October 1972 using custom hardware based on DEC PDP-11 minicomputers and software developed by the Merit staff and the staffs at the three universities. Over the next dozen years the initial network grew as new services such as dial-in terminal support, remote job submission, remote printing, and file transfer were added; as gateways to the national and international Tymnet, Telenet, and Datapac networks were established, as support for the X.25 and TCP/IP protocols was added; as additional computers such as WSU's MVS system and the UM's electrical engineering's VAX running UNIX were attached; and as new universities became Merit members. Merit's involvement in national networking activities started in the mid-1980s with connections to the national supercomputing centers and work on the 56 kbit/s National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), the forerunner of today's Internet. From 1987 until April 1995, Merit re-engineered and managed the NSFNET backbone service.
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A few computers were built using "writable microcode". In this design, rather than storing the microcode in ROM or hard-wired logic, the microcode is stored in a RAM called a writable control store or WCS. Such a computer is sometimes called a writable instruction set computer or WISC."Writable instruction set, stack oriented computers: The WISC Concept" article by Philip Koopman Jr. 1987 Many experimental prototype computers use writable control stores; there are also commercial machines that use writable microcode, such as the Burroughs Small Systems, early Xerox workstations, the DEC VAX 8800 ("Nautilus") family, the Symbolics L- and G-machines, a number of IBM System/360 and System/370 implementations, some DEC PDP-10 machines, and the Data General Eclipse MV/8000. Many more machines offer user-programmable writable control stores as an option, including the HP 2100, DEC PDP-11/60 and Varian Data Machines V-70 series minicomputers.
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Retrieved on 21 November 2015. In 1966, on the news of his father's death, the then 21-year-old Azim Premji returned home from Stanford University, where he was studying engineering, to take charge of Wipro. The company, which was called Western Indian Vegetable Products at the time, dealt in hydrogenated oil manufacturing but Azim Premji later diversified the company to bakery fats, ethnic ingredient based toiletries, hair care soaps, baby toiletries, lighting products, and hydraulic cylinders. In the 1980s, the young entrepreneur, recognising the importance of the emerging IT field, took advantage of the vacuum left behind by the expulsion of IBM from India, changed the company name to Wipro and entered the high-technology sector by manufacturing minicomputers in technological collaboration with an American company SentinelHome Page – Sentinel Technologies, Inc. Sentinel.com. Retrieved on 21 November 2015. Computer Corporation.Chakravarty, 1998:2 Thereafter Premji made a focused shift from soaps to software.Azim Premji Profile – Biography of Azim Premji – Information on Azeem Premji Wipro Technologies. Iloveindia.
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By the mid-1980s the rapid improvement in microcomputers, and especially the introduction of the graphical user interface and data-rich application programs like Lotus 1-2-3 led to an increasing interest in using personal computers as the client-side platform of choice in client-server computing. Under this model, large mainframes and minicomputers would be used primarily to serve up data over local area networks to microcomputers that would interpret, display and manipulate that data. For this model to work, a data access standard was a requirement – in the mainframe field it was highly likely that all of the computers in a shop were from one vendor and clients were computer terminals talking directly to them, but in the micro field there was no such standardization and any client might access any server using any networking system. By the late 1980s there were several efforts underway to provide an abstraction layer for this purpose.
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Born in Montreal, Quebec, he traveled to western Canada early in life. He obtained a B.Sc (Mathematics) in 1963 from the University of Alberta after studying mechanical engineering for three years at McGill University in Québec. After university he worked as an actuarial student for Standard Life Insurance Corporation in Montréal, followed by two years in sales in the mutual fund industry. In 1965, Williams joined the Canadian Corporation for the World Exposition (Expo 67) as a Project Manager responsible for multiple projects in the field of communications and computers. He then moved to Vancouver and joined IBM where he worked for 10 years initially in systems design, then sales, then management education and finally in various management roles. Williams resigned from IBM in 1978 to found Canada's first public software company, Sydney Development Corporation (SDC), The company developed an online real- time project management system for mainframe computers, then business applications for minicomputers.
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Since the differences between reject types and regular circuits limited only to their reliability, in 1987 decided to change the kits only regular components could without major changes to the board and are therefore made cost-saving. In addition to increased reliability of the produced from 1987 variant Z1013.16 also has a higher system clock of 2 MHz, which is equivalent to a doubling of computing power. In addition, the system software has been supplemented by appropriate program components for use with a much more comfortable block keyboard with 58 keys. Users of the older kits were according to procurement of components and the modified operating system also upgrade their systems with the aid of a soldering iron. [7] An important aspect of revaluations made is - apart from the improved reliability - with the appropriate upgrade of memory producing the broadest compatibility of Z 1013.16 with minicomputers Z 9001, KC 85/1 and KC 87 In addition to the associated utilization of other software also stood their expansion modules, for example, to upgrade the memory, now the Z-1013-users.
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Fire controlman (abbreviated as FC) is a United States Navy occupational rating. Fire controlmen provide system employment recommendations; perform organizational and intermediate maintenance on digital computer equipment, subsystems, and systems; operate and maintain combat and weapons direction systems, surface-to-air and surface-to-surface missile systems, and gun fire control systems at the organizational and intermediate level; inspect, test, align, and repair micro/minicomputers and associated peripheral equipment, data conversion units, data display equipment, data link terminal equipment, print devices, and system related equipment; make analysis for detailed systems, computer programs, electronics, and electronic casualty control; and operate associated built-in and external test equipment; load, initialize, and run preprogrammed diagnostic, performance and testing routines for digital computer equipment, digital subsystems, digital systems, and overall combat systems. Fire controlmen attend apprentice technical training and "A"-School at Naval Station Great Lakes; this course is roughly 8 months long followed then by a "C"-school, based on one of the systems described below, which vary in length from 4 months to 8 months. FCs typically operate weapon systems on- board surface combatant ships.
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The term real-time derives from its use in early simulation, in which a real-world process is simulated at a rate that matched that of the real process (now called real-time simulation to avoid ambiguity). Analog computers, most often, were capable of simulating at a much faster pace than real-time, a situation that could be just as dangerous as a slow simulation if it were not also recognized and accounted for. Minicomputers, particularly in the 1970s onwards, when built into dedicated embedded systems such as DOG (Digital on- screen graphic) scanners, increased the need for low-latency priority-driven responses to important interactions with incoming data and so operating systems such as Data General's RDOS (Real-Time Disk Operatings System) and RTOS with background and foreground scheduling as well as Digital Equipment Corporation's RT-11 date from this era. Background-foreground scheduling allowed low priority tasks CPU time when no foreground task needed to execute, and gave absolute priority within the foreground to threads/tasks with the highest priority.
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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.
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Motorola generally described it as a 16-bit processor. The combination of high performance, large (16 megabytes or 224 bytes) memory space and fairly low cost made it the most popular CPU design of its class. The Apple Lisa and Macintosh designs made use of the 68000, as did a host of other designs in the mid-1980s, including the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga. The world's first single-chip fully 32-bit microprocessor, with 32-bit data paths, 32-bit buses, and 32-bit addresses, was the AT&T; Bell Labs BELLMAC-32A, with first samples in 1980, and general production in 1982. After the divestiture of AT&T; in 1984, it was renamed the WE 32000 (WE for Western Electric), and had two follow-on generations, the WE 32100 and WE 32200. These microprocessors were used in the AT&T; 3B5 and 3B15 minicomputers; in the 3B2, the world's first desktop super microcomputer; in the "Companion", the world's first 32-bit laptop computer; and in "Alexander", the world's first book-sized super microcomputer, featuring ROM-pack memory cartridges similar to today's gaming consoles.
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Sc.) degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Copenhagen in 1973 and a Doctor of Technology (Dr.Tech.) degree in Computer Science from the Technical University of Denmark in 1995. Between 1969–73, Anders Ravn was a teaching assistant in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen (DIKU). From 1972–76, he was a systems programmer on minicomputers at the early Danish computer company A/S Regnecentralen. He returned to academia and rose from assistant professor (1976–80) to associate professor (1980–84) at DIKU. During 1982–3, he was a visiting scientist at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, United States. He joined the Department of Computer Science at the Technical University of Denmark (ID-DTH) as a lecturer (1984–9) followed by reader (1989–99) in the Department of Information Technology. During this time, he was also an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at the Royal Veterinary and Agricultural University in Denmark (1985–9), guest researcher at Oxford University (1989–90), and Visiting Professor at the Institut für Praktische Mathematik und Informatik, University of Kiel in Germany (1994).
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The 4-bit processors were programmed in assembly language or Forth, e.g. "MARC4 Family of 4 bit Forth CPU" because of the extreme size constraint on programs and because common programming languages (for microcontrollers, 8-bit and larger), such as the C programming language, do not support 4-bit data types (C requires that the size of the `char` data type be at least 8 bits, and that all data types other than bitfields have a size that is a multiple of the character size). The 1970s saw the emergence of 4-bit software applications for mass markets like pocket calculators. During the 1980s 4-bit microprocessor were used in handheld electronic games to keep costs low. In the 1970s and 1980s, a number of research and commercial computers used bit slicing, in which the CPU's arithmetic logic unit (ALU) was built from multiple 4-bit-wide sections, each section including a chip such as an Am2901 or 74181 chip. The Zilog Z80, although it is an 8-bit microprocessor, has a 4-bit ALU. Although the Data General Nova is a series of 16-bit minicomputers, the original Nova and the Nova 1200 internally processed numbers 4 bits at a time with a 4-bit ALU, p. 44.
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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.
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The Three Rivers Computer Corporation (3RCC) was a spinoff from the Research Engineering Laboratory of the Computer Science Department of Carnegie-Mellon University, and was founded in May 1974 by Brian S. Rosen, James R. Teter, William H. Broadley, J. Stanley Kriz, D. Raj Reddy and Paul G. Newbury in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States to manufacture advanced technology computer displays, peripherals, and systems. Early products included: the GDP/2A Graphics Display processor with high speed vector generator capable of drawing in excess of 50,000 vectors at 60 Hz refresh rates; a CVD/2 Color Video Display System that displayed a full color raster scanned image with a unique data compression algorithm capable of full frame animation display; ADA-16 Analog to Digital and Digital to Analog converters for high fidelity music and speech research, and a UMB-11 Unibus Monitor that was a low-cost test instrument for PDP-11 series minicomputers. In 1979, the company launched its principal products, a line of workstation computers called PERQ, which were single-user high performance workstations with the power of a medium- scale mainframe computer from that era coupled with a versatile graphics display. In the summer of 1980, the company divested itself of all activities other than those related to PERQ.
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