Digital Equipment Corporation - Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. They are generally referred to within the computing industry as DEC. (This initialism was once officially used by DEC itself, but discarded in favor of "Digital" in order to avoid a trademark dispute with the Dairy Equipment Company of Madison, Wisconsin). They were later acquired by Compaq, who subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard. As of 2003 their product lines are still produced under the HP name. Though DEC does not exist anymore, its logo is very much alive. It is now the logo of Digital GlobalSoft, a well-respected IT services company in India. Earlier this company was a 51 % subsidiary of DEC. Now it is a part of HP. In 1990,.
Digital - Digital Digital refers to the property of dealing with the discrete values rather than a continuous spectrum of values: compare analog or analogue. The word comes from the same source as the word digit: the Latin word for finger (counting on the fingers) as these are used for discrete counting. The distinction digital versus analogue can refer to data storage and transfer, the internal working of an instrument, and the kind of display. The word "digital" is commonly used in computing. Digital vs Analogue Digital noise When data is transmitted using analogue methods, a certain amount of noise enters into the signal. This can have a myriad of different causes: data transmitted via radio may get a poor reception, have interference from other radio sources, or.
Digital UNIX - Digital UNIX Digital Unix (DUNIX) was the final name of the Unix variant developed to run on computers produced by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The initial development of Unix occurred on DEC equipment, notably their PDP-7 and 11 (Programmable Data Processor). Later DEC computers, such as their VAX systems were also popular platforms to run Unix on, the first port to VAX was in 1978 (the VAX was only released in October 1977). However DEC pushed their own proprietary VMS operating system for a long time before they acknowledged Unix. DEC released Ultrix in 1982 for their VAX and DEC Station machines, it was based on the BSD 4.2 release. It was an attempt to bridge the void between Unix and VMS, providing support for DECnet.
British Broadcasting Corporation - British Broadcasting Corporation The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a national publicly-funded broadcaster based in the United Kingdom. It is frequently heralded as the most widely respected broadcaster in the world. Affectionately known to local consumers as the "Beeb" or "Auntie", it was for many years the only television and radio provider in the United Kingdom. Before the introduction of Independent Television in 1955 and subsequently Independent Radio in 1973, it held a monopoly on broadcasting. More recent de-regulation of the British television broadcasting market produced analogue cable television and satellite broadcasting and later digital satellite, digital cable and digital terrestrial television (DTT) . Today the BBC broadcasts in almost every medium including these and the Internet. The BBC's technical lead is assisted by its Research & Development.
Sperry Corporation - Sperry Corporation Sperry Corporation began in 1910 as the Sperry Gyroscope Company, founded by Elmer Ambrose Sperry to manufacture navigation equipment, chiefly his own inventions - the marine gyrostabilizer and the gyrocompass. During WW I the company diversified into aircraft components including bomb sights and fire control systems. In 1918 Lawrence Sperry split from his father to compete over aero-instruments with the Lawrence Sperry Aircraft Company, including the new automatic pilot. In 1924 following the death of Lawrence (December 13, 1923) the two firms were brought together. The company became Sperry Corporation in 1933. The new corporation was a holding company for a number of smaller entities such as the original Sperry Gyroscope, but also Ford Instrument Company, Intercontinental Aviation, Inc. and others. The company did very.
Roland Corporation - Roland Corporation Roland Corporation is a manufacturer of electronic musical instruments, electronic equipment and software. It was founded by Ikutaro Kakehashi in Osaka on April 18, 1972, and was named after the French epic poem, Le Chanson de Roland. Roland use a number of additional brand names for their products: BOSS (guitar effects pedals, effects units, rhythm machines) Edirol (Desktop Media Production or 'DTMP') Rodgers Instruments (electronic and combination pipe organs) Roland Digital Group (Roland DG). Roland company slogans: Inspire the enjoyment of creativity Be the best rather than the biggest The Roland Family - Cooperative Enthusiasm A few noteworthy products: Roland Jupiter-6: First Roland synthesizer to support MIDI MC-303 The first non-keyboard drum machine, sample based synthesizer and sequencer combination bearing the now generic term "Groovebox.".
NEC Corporation - NEC Corporation NEC Corporation (NEC) is a multi-national information technologies company headquated in Japan. They are an internet solutions business involved in the manufacture and sales of computers, communications equipment, electron devices and software, including the Versa notebooks for the international market and the Lavie series for Japanese market. NEC is also the creator of a supercomputer known as the Earth Simulator. In 1980 NEC created the first digital signal processor, the NEC µPD7710. NEC was founded as a subsidiary of Western Electric in 1899. The company was formerly known as Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before it was renamed in 1983..
January 26 - physician. This is the first time a woman holds this appointment. 1962 - Ranger 3 is launched to study the moon. The space probe later missed the moon by 22,000 miles. 1965 - Hindi becomes the official language of India. 1980 - Israel and Egypt establish diplomatic relations. 1983 - Lotus 1-2-3 is released. 1992 - Boris Yeltsin announces that Russia is going to stop targeting United States cities with nuclear weapons. 1993 - Vaclav Havel elected President of the Czech Republic. 1994 - A man fires two blank shots at Charles, Prince of Wales in Sydney, Australia. 1996 - Whitewater scandal: Hillary Rodham Clinton testifies before a grand jury. 1998 - Lewinsky scandal: On American television, Bill Clinton denies he had "sexual relations" with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky..
Jargon File - due to a desire to freeze the file temporarily to facilitate the production of Steele-1983, but external conditions caused the `temporary' freeze to become permanent. The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by funding cuts and the resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and software instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated LISP Machines. At the same time, the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out West in Silicon Valley. The startups built LISP machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI hackers' beloved ITS. The Stanford AI Lab had.
Yamaha DSP-1 - a revolutionary piece of early home theater surround sound equipment, produced in 1985 by the Yamaha Corporation. The DSP-1 (referred to by Yamaha as a Digital Sound field Processor) allowed owners to synthesize up to 6-channels of surround sound from 2 channel stereo sound via a complex digital signal processor (DSP). Much like today's home theater receivers the DSP-1 offered sixteen "sound fields" created through the DSP including a jazz club, a cathedral, a concert hall, and a stadium. However, unlike today's receivers, these sound field modes were highly editible, allowing the owner to customize the effect to his or her own personal taste. The DSP-1 also included an analog Dolby Surround decoder as well as other effects such as real-time echo and pitch change. Oddly, most of the DSP-1's controls.
June 12 - 1985 - The United States House of Representatives approves $27 million in aid to the Nicaraguan Contras 1986 - South Africa declares a national state of emergency. Virtually unlimited power is given to security forces and restrictions are put on news coverage of the unrest. 1987 - The Central African Republic's former Emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa is sentenced to death for crimes he had committed during his 13-year rule 1987 - President Ronald Reagan publicly challenges Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall 1990 - The parliament of the Russian Federation formally declares its sovereignty (see Russia Day below) 1991 - Russianss elect Boris Yeltsin as the president of their republic 1991 - NAFTA talks open in Toronto, Ontario. 1991 - The Chicago Bulls win their first National Basketball Association championship..
Intel - Intel Intel is a US based multinational corporation that is best known for designing and manufacturing microprocessors and specialized integrated circuits. Intel also makes networking cards, components, and other devices. It was founded in 1968 by Gordon E. Moore and Robert Noyce. Its employee number 4 was Andrew Grove, who ran the company more or less from his arrival in the 1960s through his retirement in the 1990s, building it into one of the largest and most successful businesses in the world. Moore and Noyce wanted to name their new company 'Moore Noyce' but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics. The company started as a memory manufacturer before making the switch to processors. Andrew Grove described this transition.
Incompatible Timesharing System - was a debugger (DDT) whose commands looked like line noise, and its main editor, TECO, was programmable in a similar-looking gibberish. ITS was developed on the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-6 and PDP-10 mainframe computers. ITS was produced by people who disagreed with the direction taken by Multics; the name was a hack on CTSS. Further Reading Donald E. Eastlake, ITS Reference Manual, Version 1.5, (MIT AI Laboratory, 1969) documents a very early version of the system (Warning, very large file, scanned page images) Donald E. Eastlake, ITS Status Report (MIT AI Laboratory, 1972) External Links http://www.cosmic.com/u/mirian/its/ if you're crazy enough to want to run it on a PDP-10 simulator http://www.its.os.org/ contains file system images of various ITS machines, including documentation of the final system.
Hacker - solution. The term hack came to refer to any clever prank perpetrated by MIT students; the perpetrator is a hacker. To this day the terms hack and hacker are used in that way at MIT, without necessarily referring to computers. When MIT students surreptiously put a police car atop the dome on MIT's Building 10, that was a hack, and the students involved were therefore hackers. Computer culture at MIT developed when members of the Tech Model Railroad Club started working with a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 computer and applied local model railroad slang to computers. In modern computer culture, the label "hacker" is a compliment, indicating a skilled and clever programmer. In the media, however, it has negative connotations and has become synonymous with "software cracker". The term hacker has.
Henry Kucera - and variegated opus, combining elements of linguistics, psychology, statistics, and sociology. Shortly thereafter, Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin approached Kucera to supply a million word, three-line citation base for its new American Heritage Dictionary. This ground-breaking new dictionary, which first appeared in 1969, was the first dictionary to be compiled using corpus linguistics for word frequency and other information. Kucera wrote one of the first spellcheckers over Christmas, 1981, in PL/I for VAX machines, at the behest of Digital Equipment Corporation. It was a simple, rapid spelling verifier. Kucera later oversaw the development of Houghton-Mifflin’s Correct Text grammar checker, which also drew heavily on statistical techniques for analysis..
History of the Internet - initial problem. (One popular saying has it that TCP/IP, the eventual product of Cerf and Kahn's work, will run over "two tin cans and a string".) A computer called a gateway (a name later changed to router to avoid confusion with a number of other kinds of devices, also called gateways) is provided with an interface to each network, and fowards packets back and forth between them. Happily, this new concept was a perfect fit with the newly emerging local area networks, which were revolutionizing communication between computers within a site. Growth The early Internet, based around the ARPANET, was government-funded and therefore restricted to research use only. Commercial use was strictly forbidden. This initially restricted connections to military sites and universities. During the 1980s, as the TCP/IP protocols (developed by.
History of Microsoft Windows - continued to develop OS/2, while Microsoft changed the name of its (as yet unreleased) OS/2 3.0 to Windows NT. Both retained the rights to use OS/2 and Windows technology developed up to the termination of the agreement; Windows NT, however, was to be written anew, mostly independently (see below). After an interim 1.3 version to fix up many remaining problems with the 1.x series, IBM released OS/2 version 2.0 in 1992. This was a major improvement: it featured a new, object-oriented GUI, the Workplace Shell (WPS), that included a desktop and was considered by many to be OS/2's best feature. Microsoft would later imitate much of it in Windows 95. Version 2.0 also provided a full 32-bit API, offered smooth multitasking and could take advantage of the 4 gigabytes of virtual.
History of radio - Station, Massachusetts. Ships at sea heard a broadcast that included Fessenden playing the song O Holy Night on the violin and reading a passage from the Bible. The first benefit seen to radio telegraphy was the ability to communicate with ships at sea. A company called British Marconi was established to make use of Marconi's and others' patents. This company along with its subsidiary American Marconi, had a stranglehold on ship to shore communication. It operated much the way American Telephone and Telegraph operated until 1983, owning all of its own equipment and refusing to communicate with non-Marconi equipped ships. Many inventions improved the quality of radio, and amateurs experimented with uses of radio, thus the first seeds of broadcasting were planted. Spark Gap Wireless Telegraphy (1896--1920) Quickly becomes popular on.
VT100 - VT100 The VT100 is a video terminal made by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which became the de facto standard used by terminal emulators. It was introduced in August 1978, following its predecessor, the VT52, and communicated with its host system over serial lines using the ASCII character set and control sequences (aka escape sequences) standardized by ANSI. In 1983, the VT100 was replaced by the more powerful VT200 series terminals such as the VT220. See also: VT100.net.
VT220 - VT220 VT220 was a terminal produced by Digital Equipment Corporation in the years 1983 to 1987. It was similar to the earlier VT100 series of terminals, but added support for the Multinational Character Set and came with a redesigned keyboard. Variants of the VT220 were the VT240 and VT241, both capable of displaying vector graphics. The VT241 was equipped with a color screen. The successor of the VT220 was the VT320..
