1.
Apple II
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The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak. It was introduced in 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire by Jobs and was the first consumer product sold by Apple Computer and it is the first model in a series of computers which were produced until Apple IIe production ceased in November 1993. The Apple II marks Apples first launch of a computer aimed at a consumer market – branded towards American households rather than businessmen or computer hobbyists. Along with the PET2001 and the TRS-80, Byte magazine referred to these as the 1977 Trinity of personal computing. The Apple II had the feature of being able to display color graphics. By 1976, Steve Jobs had convinced the product designer Jerry Manock to create the shell for the Apple II – a smooth case inspired by kitchen appliances that would conceal the internal mechanics. The earliest Apple IIs were assembled in Silicon Valley, and later in Texas, printed circuit boards were manufactured in Ireland, the original retail price of the computer was $1,298 and $2,638. To reflect the color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing has rainbow stripes. Perhaps most significantly, the Apple II was a catalyst for personal computers across many industries, the Apple II used a multiplicity of idiosyncratic engineering shortcuts to save hardware and reduce costs. This arrangement simultaneously eliminated the need for a separate circuit for the DRAM chips. Similarly, in the graphics mode, color is determined by pixel position and can thus be implemented in software. This also allows for subpixel font rendering since orange and blue pixels appear half a pixel-width farther to the right on the screen than green, the Apple II at first used data cassette storage like most other microcomputers of the time. In 1978 the company introduced an external 5 1⁄4-inch floppy disk drive, the Disk II interface, created by Wozniak, is regarded as an engineering masterpiece for its economy of electronic components. The approach taken in the Disk II controller is typical of Wozniaks designs, with a few small-scale logic chips and a cheap PROM, he created a functional floppy-disk interface at a fraction of the component cost of standard circuit configurations. The cost of such terminals could easily exceed the price of the computer itself, the Apple IIs PCB underwent several revisions as Steve Wozniak made modifications to it. The earliest version was known as Revision 0, and the first 6000 units shipped used it, later revisions added a color killer circuit to prevent color fringing when the computer was in text mode, as well as modifications to improve the reliability of cassette I/O. Revision 0 Apple IIs powered up in a mode and had garbage on screen. This was eliminated on the later board revisions, Revision 0 Apple IIs could display only four colors, but Wozniak was later able to generate 16 in low-res mode
2.
Home computer
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Home computers were a class of microcomputers entering the market in 1977, and becoming common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, however, a home computer often had better graphics and sound than contemporaneous business computers. Their most common uses were playing games, but they were also regularly used for word processing, doing homework. Home computers were usually not electronic kits, home computers were already manufactured in stylish metal or plastic enclosures. There were, however, commercial kits like the Sinclair ZX80 which were home and home-built computers since the purchaser could assemble the unit from a kit. For example, using a typical 1980s home computer as a home automation appliance would require the computer to be powered on at all times. Personal finance and database use required tedious data entry, by contrast, advertisements in the specialty computer press often simply listed specifications. Since most systems shipped with the BASIC programming language included on the system ROM, many users found programming to be a fun and rewarding experience, and an excellent introduction to the world of digital technology. Often the only difference may be the outlet through which they are purchased. Another change from the computer era is that the once-common endeavour of writing ones own software programs has almost vanished from home computer use. As early as 1965, some projects such as Jim Sutherlands ECHO IV explored the possible utility of a computer in the home. In 1969, the Honeywell Kitchen Computer was marketed as a gift item, and would have inaugurated the era of home computing. Computers became affordable for the public in the 1970s due to the mass production of the microprocessor starting in 1971. Early microcomputers such as the Altair 8800 had front-mounted switches and diagnostic lights to control and indicate internal system status, while two early home computers could be bought either in kit form or assembled, most home computers were only sold pre-assembled. The keyboard - a feature lacking on the Altair - was usually built into the case as the motherboard. Ports for plug-in peripheral devices such as a display, cassette tape recorders, joysticks. Usually the manufacturer would sell peripheral devices designed to be compatible with their computers as extra cost accessories, peripherals were not often interchangeable between different brands of home computer, or even between successive models of the same brand. To save the cost of a monitor, the home computer would often connect through an RF modulator to the family TV set
3.
Microcomputer
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A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit. It includes a microprocessor, memory, and minimal input/output circuitry mounted on a printed circuit board. Microcomputers became popular in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of increasingly powerful microprocessors, the predecessors to these computers, mainframes and minicomputers, were comparatively much larger and more expensive. Many microcomputers are also personal computers, the abbreviation micro was common during the 1970s and 1980s, but has now fallen out of common usage. The term microcomputer came into use after the introduction of the minicomputer. Most notably, the replaced the many separate components that made up the minicomputers CPU with one integrated microprocessor chip. The first microcomputer was the Japanese Sord Computer Corporations SMP80/08, which was followed by the SMP80/x, the French developers of the Micral N filed their patents with the term Micro-ordinateur, a literal equivalent of Microcomputer, to designate a solid state machine designed with a microprocessor. Use of audio cassettes for data storage replaced manual re-entry of a program every time the device was powered on. Large cheap arrays of silicon logic gates in the form of memory and EPROMs allowed utility programs. This replaced the slow, complex, and expensive teletypewriter that was common as an interface to minicomputers. All these improvements in cost and usability resulted in an explosion in their popularity during the late 1970s, a large number of computer makers packaged microcomputers for use in small business applications. This allowed businesses unable to afford leasing of a minicomputer or time-sharing service the opportunity to automate business functions, without hiring a full-time staff to operate the computers. A representative system of this era would have used an S100 bus, an 8-bit processor such as an Intel 8080 or Zilog Z80, the increasing availability and power of desktop computers for personal use attracted the attention of more software developers. In time, and as the industry matured, the market for personal computers standardized around IBM PC compatibles running DOS, everyday use of the expression microcomputer has declined significantly from the mid-1980s and has declined in commonplace usage since 2000. The term is most commonly associated with the first wave of all-in-one 8-bit home computers, although, or perhaps because, an increasingly diverse range of modern microprocessor-based devices fit the definition of microcomputer, they are no longer referred to as such in everyday speech. IBM first promoted the personal computer to differentiate themselves from other microcomputers, often called home computers. However, following its release, the IBM PC itself was widely imitated, the component parts were commonly available to producers and the BIOS was reverse engineered through cleanroom design techniques. IBM PC compatible clones became commonplace, and the personal computer
4.
Steve Wozniak
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Stephen Gary Steve Wozniak, nicknamed Woz, is an American inventor, electronics engineer, programmer, and technology entrepreneur who co-founded Apple Inc. He is known as a pioneer of the computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Wozniak single-handedly developed the 1976 Apple I, which was the computer that launched Apple and he primarily designed the 1977 Apple II, while Jobs oversaw the development of its unusual case and Rod Holt developed the unique power supply. Steve Wozniak was born in San Jose, California, the son of Margaret Elaine and he is of Polish and Swiss-German ancestry. His father was from Bukovyna, Ukraine and his mother from German-Swiss background, the name on Wozniaks birth certificate is Stephan Gary Wozniak, but Steves mother said that she intended it to be spelled Stephen, and Steve is what he uses. Wozniak has been referred to frequently by the nickname Woz, The Wonderful Wizard of Woz, The Second Steve, or The Woz, the city of San Jose named a street Woz Way in his honour. In the early 1970s, Wozniak was also known as Berkeley Blue in the phone phreak community, in 1969, Wozniak returned to the Bay Area after being expelled from University of Colorado Boulder in his first year for hacking into the institutions computer system. During this time, Wozniak designed and built his Cream Soda computer with his friend Bill Fernandez and he later re-enrolled at De Anza College and transferred to University of California, Berkeley in 1971. Before focusing his attention on Apple, he was employed at Hewlett-Packard where he designed calculators and it was during this time that he befriended Steve Jobs. Steve Wozniak was introduced to Jobs by friend Bill Fernandez, who attended Homestead High School with Jobs in 1971, Jobs and Wozniak became friends when Jobs worked for the summer at Hewlett-Packard, where Wozniak too was employed, working on a mainframe computer. This was recounted by Wozniak in a 2007 interview with ABC News, of how, a friend said, you should meet Steve Jobs, because he likes electronics and he also plays pranks. In 1973, Jobs was working for arcade game company Atari, Inc. in Los Gatos and he was assigned to create a circuit board for the arcade video game Breakout. According to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari offered $100 for each chip that was eliminated in the machine, Jobs had little knowledge of circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the fee evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, by using RAM for the brick representation, too complex to be fully comprehended at the time, the fact that this prototype also had no scoring or coin mechanisms meant Wozs prototype could not be used. Jobs was paid the full bonus regardless, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari gave them only $700 and that Wozniaks share was thus $350. Wozniak did not learn about the actual $5,000 bonus until ten years later, on June 29,1975 Wozniak tested his first working prototype, displaying a few letters and running sample programs. It was the first time in history that a character displayed on a TV screen was generated by a home computer. With the Apple I design, he and Jobs were largely working to impress members of the Palo Alto-based Homebrew Computer Club
5.
Apple Inc.
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Apple is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. Apples consumer software includes the macOS and iOS operating systems, the media player, the Safari web browser. Its online services include the iTunes Store, the iOS App Store and Mac App Store, Apple Music, Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne in April 1976 to develop and sell personal computers. It was incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc. in January 1977, Apple joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average in March 2015. In November 2014, Apple became the first U. S. company to be valued at over US$700 billion in addition to being the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization. The company employs 115,000 full-time employees as of July 2015 and it operates the online Apple Store and iTunes Store, the latter of which is the worlds largest music retailer. Consumers use more than one billion Apple products worldwide as of March 2016, Apples worldwide annual revenue totaled $233 billion for the fiscal year ending in September 2015. This revenue accounts for approximately 1. 25% of the total United States GDP.1 billion, the corporation receives significant criticism regarding the labor practices of its contractors and its environmental and business practices, including the origins of source materials. Apple was founded on April 1,1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the Apple I kits were computers single-handedly designed and hand-built by Wozniak and first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. The Apple I was sold as a motherboard, which was less than what is now considered a personal computer. The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 and was market-priced at $666.66, Apple was incorporated January 3,1977, without Wayne, who sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800. Multimillionaire Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of $250,000 during the incorporation of Apple, during the first five years of operations revenues grew exponentially, doubling about every four months. Between September 1977 and September 1980 yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118m, the Apple II, also invented by Wozniak, was introduced on April 16,1977, at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It differed from its rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because of its character cell-based color graphics. While early Apple II models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, they were superseded by the introduction of a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive and interface called the Disk II. The Apple II was chosen to be the platform for the first killer app of the business world, VisiCalc. VisiCalc created a market for the Apple II and gave home users an additional reason to buy an Apple II. Before VisiCalc, Apple had been a distant third place competitor to Commodore, by the end of the 1970s, Apple had a staff of computer designers and a production line
6.
Apple I
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Apple Computer 1, also known later as the Apple I, or Apple-1, is a desktop computer released by the Apple Computer Company in 1976. It was designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak, Wozniaks friend Steve Jobs had the idea of selling the computer. It was demonstrated in July 1976 at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, on March 5,1975, Steve Wozniak attended the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in Gordon Frenchs garage. He was so inspired that he set to work on what would become the Apple I computer. After building it for himself and showing it at the Club, he and Steve Jobs gave out schematics for the computer to interested members and even helped some of them build. Then, Steve Jobs suggested that design and sell a single etched and silkscreened circuit board—just the bare board. To fund this venture, their first company, Jobs sold his van. Very soon after, Steve Jobs arranged to sell something like 100 completely built computers to the The Byte Shop at $500 each, to fulfill the $50,000 order, they obtained $20,000 in parts at 30 days net and delivered the finished product in 10 days. The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 at a price of US$666.66, because Wozniak liked repeating digits, the first unit produced was used in a high school math class, and donated to Liza Loops public access computer center. About 200 units were produced and all but 25 were sold during nine or ten months, the Apple Is built-in computer terminal circuitry was distinctive. All one needed was a keyboard and a television set. This made the Apple I an innovative machine for its day, in April 1977, the price was dropped to $475. It continued to be sold through August 1977, despite the introduction of the Apple II in April 1977, in October 1977, the Apple I was officially discontinued and removed from Apples price list. These recovered boards were destroyed by Apple, contributing to their rarity today. As of 2013, at least 63 Apple I computers have been confirmed to exist, only six have been verified to be in working condition. An Apple I reportedly sold for $50,000 USD at auction in 1999, in 2008, the website Vintage Computing and Gaming reported that Apple I owner Rick Conte was looking to sell his unit and was expecting a price in excess of $15,000 US. The site later reported Conte had donated the unit to the Maine Personal Computer Museum in 2009, a unit was sold in September 2009 for $17,480 on eBay. A unit belonging to early Apple Computer engineers Dick and Cliff Huston was sold on March 23,2010, in November 2010, an Apple I sold for £133,250 at Christies auction house in London
7.
Printed circuit board
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Components are generally soldered on the PCB. Advanced PCBs may contain components embedded in the substrate, PCBs can be single sided, double sided or multi-layer. Conductors on different layers are connected with vias, multi-layer PCBs allow for much higher component density. FR-4 glass epoxy is the primary insulating substrate, a basic building block of the PCB is an FR-4 panel with a thin layer of copper foil laminated to one or both sides. In multi-layer boards multiple layers of material are laminated together, printed circuit boards are used in all but the simplest electronic products. Alternatives to PCBs include wire wrap and point-to-point construction, PCBs require the additional design effort to lay out the circuit, but manufacturing and assembly can be automated. Manufacturing circuits with PCBs is cheaper and faster than other wiring methods as components are mounted and wired with one single part. A minimal PCB with a component used for easier prototyping is called a breakout board. When the board has no embedded components it is correctly called a printed wiring board or etched wiring board. However, the printed wiring board has fallen into disuse. A PCB populated with electronic components is called a printed circuit assembly, the IPC preferred term for assembled boards is circuit card assembly, and for assembled backplanes it is backplane assemblies. The term PCB is used both for bare and assembled boards. The world market for bare PCBs exceeded $60.2 billion in 2014, initially PCBs were designed manually by creating a photomask on a clear mylar sheet, usually at two or four times the true size. Starting from the diagram the component pin pads were laid out on the mylar. Rub-on dry transfers of common component footprints increased efficiency, traces were made with self-adhesive tape. Pre-printed non-reproducing grids on the mylar assisted in layout, to fabricate the board, the finished photomask was photolithographically reproduced onto a photoresist coating on the blank copper-clad boards. Modern PCBs are designed with dedicated software, generally in the following steps. Card dimensions and template are decided based on required circuitry and case of the PCB, the positions of the components and heat sinks are determined
8.
Apple IIe
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The Apple IIe is the third model in the Apple II series of personal computers produced by Apple Computer. The e in the stands for enhanced, referring to the fact that several popular features were now built-in that were available only as upgrades or add-ons in earlier models. It also improved upon expandability and added a few new features, the Apple IIe has the distinction of being the longest-lived computer in Apples history, having been manufactured and sold for nearly 11 years with relatively few changes. Management believed that once the Apple III was out, the Apple II would stop selling in six months, by the time IBM released the rival IBM PC in 1981, the Apple IIs technology was already four years old. After the Apple III initially struggled, management decided in 1981 that the continuation of the Apple II was in the companys best interest. After 3 1⁄2 years of the Apple II Plus, essentially at a standstill, the Apple IIe was released in January 1983, the successor to the Apple II Plus. The Apple IIe was the first Apple computer with a custom ASIC chip, which reduced much of the old discrete IC-based circuitry to a chip, reducing cost. Some of the features of the Apple III were borrowed in the design of the Apple IIe. The culmination of these led to increased sales and greater market share of home, education. One of the most notable improvements of the Apple IIe is the addition of a full ASCII character set, the most important addition is the ability to input and display lower-case letters. Other keyboard improvements include four-way cursor control and standard editing keys, the auto-repeat function is now automatic, no longer requiring the REPT key found on the previous models keyboard. As time progressed, even more memory could be added through third-party cards using the same bank-switching slot or, alternatively, a new ROM diagnostic routine could be invoked to test the motherboard for faults and also test its main bank of memory. The Apple IIe lowered production costs and improved reliability by merging the function of several off-the-shelf ICs into single custom chips, the IIe also switched to using newer single-voltage 4164 DRAM chips instead of the unreliable triple-voltage 4116 DRAM in the II/II+. For this reason the design is much cleaner and runs cooler as well. Also added was a backport-accessible DE-9 joystick connector, making it far easier for users to add and remove game, also improved were port openings for expansion cards. Later-production IIe models had the RAM soldered to the board rather than socketed. Despite the changes the IIe maintains a degree of backwards compatibility with the previous models. Apple provided technical information on the IIe to hundreds of developers before its release, and claimed that, as a result,85 to 90% of Apple II software worked with it
9.
Apple IIGS
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The GS in the name stands for Graphics and Sound, referring to its enhanced multimedia hardware, especially its state of the art sound and music synthesis. The machine is a departure from any previous Apple II, with its 65C816 16-bit microprocessor, direct access to megabytes of RAM. It was the first computer produced by Apple to use a graphical user interface and Apple Desktop Bus interface for keyboards, mice. It is the first personal computer to come with a built-in wavetable synthesis chip, the machine outsold all other Apple products, including the Macintosh, during its first year in production. Apple ceased IIGS production in December 1992, the Apple IIGS made significant improvements over previous machines from the line such as the Apple IIe and Apple IIc. Use of the 65C816 allows the IIGS to address considerably more RAM, the IIGS also includes enhanced graphics and sound, which led to its GS name. Its graphics are the best of the Apple II series, with new higher resolution video modes. These include a 640×200-pixel mode with 2-bit color and a 320×200-pixel mode with 4-bit color, through some clever programming, it is possible to make the IIGS display as many as 3,200 colors at once. When first introduced, Apples user interface known as MouseDesk and the IIGS System Demo were both in black and white only, users did not see color until an application which took advantage of the new features was launched. Audio is generated by a built-in sound-and-music synthesizer in the form of the Ensoniq 5503 digital oscillator chip and these channels are paired to produce 15 voices in stereo audio. Although Apple had hoped that the IIc would outsell the IIe, the IIGS supports both 5. 25-inch and 3. 5-inch floppy disks and, like the IIe before it, has several expansion slots. These include seven general-purpose expansion slots compatible with those on the Apple II, II+, the IIGS, like the IIc, also has dedicated ports for external devices. These ports are associated with the slots, so for example using a card in slot 1 means that the port is disabled. The machine also features a control panel and real-time clock. The IIGS also supports booting from an AppleShare server, via the AppleTalk protocol, when the Apple IIe Workstation Card was introduced, this capability was given to the IIe. This was over a decade before NetBoot offered the capability to computers running Mac OS8. 320×200 pixels with a palette of 16 colors. 320×200 pixels with up to 16 palettes of 16 colors, in this mode, the VGC holds 16 separate palettes of 16 colors in its own memory
10.
Atari ST
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The Atari ST is a line of home computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family. The initial ST model, the 520ST, saw limited release in April-June 1985 and was available in July. The Atari ST is the first personal computer to come with a bitmapped color GUI, the 1040ST, released in 1986, is the first personal computer to ship with a megabyte of RAM in the base configuration and also the first with a cost-per-kilobyte of less than US$1. The Atari ST is part of a generation of home computers that have 16 or 32-bit processors,256 KiB or more of RAM. It includes the Macintosh, Commodore Amiga, Apple IIGS, and, in certain markets, ST officially stands for Sixteen/Thirty-two, which refers to the Motorola 68000s 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals. The ST was sold with either Ataris color or monochrome monitor, the systems color graphics modes were only available on the color monitor, while the highest resolution mode needed the monochrome monitor. In some markets, particularly Germany, the machine gained a foothold as a small business machine for CAD. Thanks to its built-in MIDI ports, the ST enjoyed success for running music-sequencer software, the ST was superseded by the Atari STE, Atari TT, Atari MEGA STE, and Falcon computers. The Atari ST was born from the rivalry between home-computer makers Atari, Inc. and Commodore International, when his idea was rejected, Miner left Atari to form a small think tank called Hi-Toro in 1982 and began designing the new Lorraine chipset. The company, which was later renamed Amiga Corporation, was pretending to sell video game controllers to deceive competition while it developed a Lorraine-based computer, Amiga ran out of capital to complete Lorraines development, and Atari, owned by Warner Communications, paid Amiga to continue development work. In return Atari received exclusive use of the Lorraine design for one year as a game console. After one year Atari would have the right to add a keyboard and market the complete computer, as Atari was heavily involved with Disney at the time, it was later code-named Mickey, and the 256K memory expansion board was codenamed Minnie. After leaving Commodore International in January 1984, Jack Tramiel formed Tramel Technology with his sons and other employees and, in April. The company initially considered the National Semiconductor NS320xx microprocessor but was disappointed with its performance and this started the move to the 68000. Tramiel learned that Warner wanted to sell Atari which, in mid-1984, was losing about a million dollars per day, interested in Ataris overseas manufacturing and worldwide distribution network for his new computer, Tramiel negotiated with Warner in May and June 1984. He secured funding and bought Ataris Consumer Division in July, as executives and engineers left Commodore to join Tramiels new Atari Corporation, Commodore responded by filing lawsuits against four former engineers for theft of trade secrets. This company was originally called TTL, later renamed to Atari Corp, at the time of the purchase of Atari Incs assets, there were roughly 900 employees remaining from a high point of 10,000. After the interviews, approximately 100 employees were hired to work at Atari Corp, Amiga Corp. had sought more monetary support from investors in spring 1984
11.
Amiga
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The Amiga is a family of personal computers sold by Commodore in the 1980s and 1990s. The Amiga provided a significant upgrade from earlier 8-bit home computers, the Amiga 1000 was officially released in July 1985, but a series of production problems meant it did not become widely available until early 1986. The best selling model, the Amiga 500, was introduced in 1987 and became one of the home computers of the late 1980s. The A3000, introduced in 1990, started the second generation of Amiga systems, followed by the A500+, finally, as the third generation, the A1200 and the A4000 were released in late 1992. The platform became particularly popular for gaming and programming demos and it also found a prominent role in the desktop video, video production, and show control business, leading to video editing systems such as the Video Toaster. The Amigas native ability to play back multiple digital sound samples made it a popular platform for early tracker music software. It was also an expensive alternative to the Apple Macintosh. Initially, the Amiga was developed alongside various Commodore PC clones, Commodore ultimately went bankrupt in April 1994 after the Amiga CD32 model failed in the marketplace. Since the demise of Commodore, various groups have marketed successors to the original Amiga line, including Genesi, Eyetech, ACube Systems Srl, likewise, AmigaOS has influenced replacements, clones and compatible systems such as MorphOS, AmigaOS4 and AROS. The Amiga was so far ahead of its time that almost nobody—including Commodores marketing department—could fully articulate what it was all about. Today, its obvious the Amiga was the first multimedia computer, but in those days it was derided as a machine because few people grasped the importance of advanced graphics, sound. Nine years later, vendors are still struggling to make systems that work like 1985 Amigas, Jay Miner joined Atari in the 1970s to develop custom integrated circuits, and led development of the Atari 2600s TIA. Almost as soon as its development was complete, the team developing a much more sophisticated set of chips, CTIA, ANTIC and POKEY. With the 8-bit lines launch in 1979, Miner again started looking at a next generation chipset, Miner wanted to start work with the new Motorola 68000, but management was only interested in another MOS6502 based system. Miner left the company, and the industry, shortly thereafter, in 1982, Larry Kaplan was approached by a number of investors who wanted to develop a new game platform. Kaplan hired Miner to run the side of the newly formed company. The system was code-named Lorraine in keeping with Miners policy of giving systems female names, in case the company presidents wife. When Kaplan left the late in 1982 to rejoin Atari, Miner was promoted to head engineer
12.
Commodore PET
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The Commodore PET is a line of home/personal computers produced starting in 1977 by Commodore International. The first model, which was named the PET2001, was the personal computer ever made available to retail consumers, after the Apple II. In the 1970s Commodore was one of many companies selling calculators designed around Dallas-based Texas Instruments chips. Commodore responded to this by searching for a set they could purchase outright. At Commodore, Peddle convinced Jack Tramiel that calculators were a dead-end, in September 1976 Peddle got a demonstration of Jobs and Wozniaks Apple II prototype, when Jobs was offering to sell it to Commodore, but Commodore considered Jobs offer too expensive. Tramiel demanded that Peddle, Bill Seiler, and John Feagans create a computer in time for the June 1977 Consumer Electronics Show, tramiels son, Leonard, helped design the PETSCII graphic characters and acted as quality control. The result was the first all-in-one home computer, the PET and its 6502 processor controlled the screen, keyboard, cassette tape recorders and any peripherals connected to one of the computers several expansion ports. The machine also included a built-in Datasette for data storage located on the front of the case, the data transfer rate to cassette tape was 1500 baud, but the data was recorded to tape twice for safety, giving an effective rate of 750 baud. The PET2001 was announced at the Winter CES in January 1977, however, the PET was back-ordered for months and to ease deliveries, early in 1978 Commodore decided to cancel the 4 kB version. However, this took six months to finally happen, during which time Microsoft lost money. At the end of the year, the company was saved by Apples decision to license Microsoft BASIC for the Apple II line. The key tops also tended to rub off easily, reliability was fairly poor, although that was not atypical of many early microcomputers. Because of the keyboard on the PET, external replacement ones quickly appeared. On the other hand, Commodore was a year behind Apple, in 1979, Commodore replaced the original PET2001 with an improved model known as the 2001-N. The new machine used a standard green-phosphor monitor in place of the blue in the original 2001. It now had a conventional, full-sized keyboard and no longer sported the built-in cassette recorder, the kernel ROM was upgraded to add support for Commodores newly introduced disk drive line. It was offered in 8kB, 16kB, or 32kB models as the 2001-N8, 2001-N16, the 2001-N switched to using conventional DRAM instead of the 6550 SRAM in the original model. PET 2001-8Ns had eight 2108 DRAMs and 2001-16Ns used sixteen 2108s, the PET4016 used eight 4116 chips
13.
VisiCalc
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VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for the Apple II by VisiCorp. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a business tool. VisiCalc is considered the Apple IIs killer app and it sold over 700,000 copies in six years, and as many as 1 million copies over its history. Initially developed in a 6502 assembler running on the Multics time sharing system, VisiCalc was ported to numerous platforms, in order to do this, the company developed porting platforms that produced bug compatible versions. The company took the approach when the IBM PC was launched. Sales were initially brisk, with about 300,000 copies sold, VisiCalc used the A1 notation in formulas. When Lotus 1-2-3 was launched in 1983, taking advantage of the expanded memory and screen of the PC. Sales imploded so rapidly that the company was soon insolvent, Lotus Development purchased the company in 1985, and immediately ended sales of VisiCalc and the companys other products. VISICALC represented a new idea of a way to use a computer, — Ted Nelson VisiCalc traces its history to a presentation that Dan Bricklin was watching while attending Harvard Business School. The professor was creating a model on a blackboard that was ruled with lines to create a table. When the professor found an error or wanted to change a parameter, he had to erase, Bricklin realized that he could replicate the process on a computer using an electronic spreadsheet to view results of underlying formulae. Bricklin was joined by Bob Frankston, and the pair worked on VisiCalc for two months during the winter of 1978–79, forming Software Arts, Bricklin wrote that with the years of experience we had at the time we created VisiCalc, we were familiar with many row/column financial programs. However, these earlier timesharing programs were not completely interactive, nor did they run on personal computers, Frankston described VisiCalc as a magic sheet of paper that can perform calculations and recalculations, which allows the user to just solve the problem using familiar tools and concepts. Personal Software began selling it in mid-1979 for under $100, after a demonstration at the fourth West Coast Computer Faire and it required an Apple II with 32K of random-access memory, and supported saving files to magnetic tape cassette or Apples Disk II floppy disk system. VisiCalc was unusually easy to use and came with excellent documentation, ben Rosen speculated in July 1979 that VisiCalc could someday become the software tail that wags the personal computer dog. For the first 12 months it was available for the Apple II. Many bought $2000 Apples to run the software, even if they already owned computers. Apples rival Tandy Corporation used VisiCalc on its own Apple IIs, other software supported its Data Interchange Format to share data
14.
Spreadsheet
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A spreadsheet is an interactive computer application for organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets are developed as computerized simulations of paper accounting worksheets, the program operates on data entered in cells of a table. Each cell may contain either numeric or text data, or the results of formulas that automatically calculate, a spreadsheet may also refer to one such electronic document. Spreadsheet users can adjust any stored value and observe the effects on calculated values and this makes the spreadsheet useful for what-if analysis since many cases can be rapidly investigated without manual recalculation. Modern spreadsheet software can have multiple interacting sheets, and can display either as text and numerals. Besides performing basic arithmetic and mathematical functions, modern spreadsheets provide built-in functions for financial and statistical operations. Such calculations as net present value or standard deviation can be applied to data with a pre-programmed function in a formula. Spreadsheet programs also provide conditional expressions, functions to convert between text and numbers, and functions operate on strings of text. Spreadsheets have replaced paper-based systems throughout the business world, although they were first developed for accounting or bookkeeping tasks, they now are used extensively in any context where tabular lists are built, sorted, and shared. LANPAR, available in 1969, was the first electronic spreadsheet on mainframe and time sharing computers, LANPAR was an acronym, LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random. VisiCalc was the first electronic spreadsheet on a microcomputer, and it helped turn the Apple II computer into a popular, Lotus 1-2-3 was the leading spreadsheet when DOS was the dominant operating system. Excel now has the largest market share on the Windows and Macintosh platforms, a spreadsheet program is a standard feature of an office productivity suite, since the advent of web apps, office suites now also exist in web app form. A spreadsheet consists of a table of cells arranged into rows and columns, X locations, the columns, are normally represented by letters, A, B, C, etc. while rows are normally represented by numbers,1,2,3, etc. A single cell can be referred to by addressing its row and column and this electronic concept of cell references was first introduced in LANPAR and a variant used in VisiCalc, and known as A1 notation. Additionally, spreadsheets have the concept of a range, a group of cells, for instance, one can refer to the first ten cells in the first column with the range A1, A10. LANPAR innovated forward referencing/natural order calculation which didnt re-appear until Lotus 123, in modern spreadsheet applications, several spreadsheets, often known as worksheets or simply sheets, are gathered together to form a workbook. A workbook is physically represented by a file, containing all the data for the book, the sheets, worksheets are normally represented by tabs that flip between pages, each one containing one of the sheets, although Numbers changes this model significantly. Cells in a multi-sheet book add the name to their reference, for instance
15.
Operating system
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An operating system is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs. All computer programs, excluding firmware, require a system to function. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer – from cellular phones, the dominant desktop operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 83. 3%. MacOS by Apple Inc. is in place, and the varieties of Linux is in third position. Linux distributions are dominant in the server and supercomputing sectors, other specialized classes of operating systems, such as embedded and real-time systems, exist for many applications. A single-tasking system can run one program at a time. Multi-tasking may be characterized in preemptive and co-operative types, in preemptive multitasking, the operating system slices the CPU time and dedicates a slot to each of the programs. Unix-like operating systems, e. g. Solaris, Linux, cooperative multitasking is achieved by relying on each process to provide time to the other processes in a defined manner. 16-bit versions of Microsoft Windows used cooperative multi-tasking, 32-bit versions of both Windows NT and Win9x, used preemptive multi-tasking. Single-user operating systems have no facilities to distinguish users, but may allow multiple programs to run in tandem, a distributed operating system manages a group of distinct computers and makes them appear to be a single computer. The development of networked computers that could be linked and communicate with each other gave rise to distributed computing, distributed computations are carried out on more than one machine. When computers in a work in cooperation, they form a distributed system. The technique is used both in virtualization and cloud computing management, and is common in large server warehouses, embedded operating systems are designed to be used in embedded computer systems. They are designed to operate on small machines like PDAs with less autonomy and they are able to operate with a limited number of resources. They are very compact and extremely efficient by design, Windows CE and Minix 3 are some examples of embedded operating systems. A real-time operating system is a system that guarantees to process events or data by a specific moment in time. A real-time operating system may be single- or multi-tasking, but when multitasking, early computers were built to perform a series of single tasks, like a calculator. Basic operating system features were developed in the 1950s, such as resident monitor functions that could run different programs in succession to speed up processing
16.
Read-only memory
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Read-only memory is a type of non-volatile memory used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM can only be modified slowly, with difficulty, or not at all, strictly, read-only memory refers to memory that is hard-wired, such as diode matrix and the later mask ROM, which cannot be changed after manufacture. Although discrete circuits can be altered in principle, integrated circuits cannot and that such memory can never be changed is a disadvantage in many applications, as bugs and security issues cannot be fixed, and new features cannot be added. More recently, ROM has come to include memory that is read-only in normal operation, the simplest type of solid-state ROM is as old as the semiconductor technology itself. Combinational logic gates can be joined manually to map n-bit address input onto arbitrary values of m-bit data output, with the invention of the integrated circuit came mask ROM. In mask ROM, the data is encoded in the circuit. This leads to a number of disadvantages, It is only economical to buy mask ROM in large quantities. The turnaround time between completing the design for a mask ROM and receiving the finished product is long, for the same reason, mask ROM is impractical for R&D work since designers frequently need to modify the contents of memory as they refine a design. If a product is shipped with faulty mask ROM, the way to fix it is to recall the product. Subsequent developments have addressed these shortcomings, PROM, invented in 1956, allowed users to program its contents exactly once by physically altering its structure with the application of high-voltage pulses. This addressed problems 1 and 2 above, since a company can order a large batch of fresh PROM chips. The 1971 invention of EPROM essentially solved problem 3, since EPROM can be reset to its unprogrammed state by exposure to strong ultraviolet light. All of these technologies improved the flexibility of ROM, but at a significant cost-per-chip, rewriteable technologies were envisioned as replacements for mask ROM. The most recent development is NAND flash, also invented at Toshiba, as of 2007, NAND has partially achieved this goal by offering throughput comparable to hard disks, higher tolerance of physical shock, extreme miniaturization, and much lower power consumption. Every stored-program computer may use a form of storage to store the initial program that runs when the computer is powered on or otherwise begins execution. Likewise, every non-trivial computer needs some form of memory to record changes in its state as it executes. Forms of read-only memory were employed as non-volatile storage for programs in most early stored-program computers, consequently, ROM could be implemented at a lower cost-per-bit than RAM for many years. Most home computers of the 1980s stored a BASIC interpreter or operating system in ROM as other forms of storage such as magnetic disk drives were too costly
17.
Compact Cassette
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The Compact Cassette or Musicassette, also commonly called cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog magnetic tape recording format for audio recording and playback. It was released by Philips in 1962, having developed in Hasselt. Compact cassettes come in two forms, either already containing content as a cassette, or as a fully recordable blank cassette. Its uses ranged from portable audio to home recording to data storage for early microcomputers, the first cassette player designed for use in car dashes was introduced in 1968. Between the early 1970s and the early 2000s, the cassette was one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music, first alongside the LP record and later the compact disc. Compact Cassettes contain two miniature spools, between which a magnetically coated, polyester-type plastic film is passed and wound and these spools and their attendant parts are held inside a protective plastic shell. This reversal is achieved either by flipping the cassette, or by having the machine itself change the direction of tape movement. In 1935, decades before the introduction of the Compact Cassette, AEG released the first reel-to-reel tape recorder and it was based on the invention of the magnetic tape by Fritz Pfleumer, which used similar technology but with open reels. These instruments were expensive and relatively difficult to use and were therefore used mostly by professionals in radio stations. In 1958, following four years of development, RCA Victor introduced the stereo, quarter-inch, reversible, however, it was a large cassette, and offered few pre-recorded tapes. Despite the multiple versions, it failed, consumer use of tape only took off in the early 1960s, after playback machines reached a comfortable, user-friendly design. This was achieved primarily by the introduction of transistors which replaced the bulky, fragile, reel-to-reel tape then became more suitable to household use, but still remained an esoteric product. The team at Philips was led by Lou Ottens in Hasselt, Philips was competing with Telefunken and Grundig in a race to establish its cassette tape as the worldwide standard, and it wanted support from Japanese electronics manufacturers. However, the Philips Compact Cassette became dominant as a result of Philips decision to license the format free of charge, Philips also released the Norelco Carry-Corder 150 recorder/player in the US in November 1964. By 1966 over 250,000 recorders had been sold in the US alone, by 1968,85 manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million players. By the end of the 1960s, the business was worth an estimated 150 million dollars. In the early years sound quality was mediocre, but it improved dramatically by the early 1970s when it caught up with the quality of 8-track tape, the Compact Cassette went on to become a popular alternative to the 12-inch vinyl LP during the late 1970s. The mass production of blank Compact Cassettes began in 1964 in Hanover, prerecorded music cassettes were launched in Europe in late 1965
18.
Disk II
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The Disk II Floppy Disk Subsystem, often rendered as Disk ][, is a 5¼-inch floppy disk drive designed by Steve Wozniak and manufactured by Apple Computer. It went on sale in June 1978 at a price of US$495 for pre-order, it was later sold for $595 including the controller card. The Disk II was designed specifically for use with the Apple II personal computer family to replace the slower cassette tape storage and these floppy drives cannot be used with any Macintosh computer without an Apple IIe Card as doing so will damage the drive or the controller. Most DuoDisk drives, the Disk IIc, the UniDisk 5.25, the only 5.25 drive Apple sold aside from the Disk II family was a 360k MFM unit made to allow Mac IIs and SEs to read PC floppy disks. Apple did not originally offer a drive for the Apple II. Wozniak knew nothing about disk controllers, but while at Hewlett-Packard had designed a simple, Wozniak began studying existing floppy controllers, including North Star and IBM models. Standard floppy controller boards were large devices that used dozens of TTL chips, in addition to being expensive, they were also much too big to fit into the Apple IIs small case. Initially, Wozniak attempted to develop an FM-type controller with a chip count and by making improvements to the FM encoding scheme. This allowed still more storage, up to 13 sectors per track, Wozniak called the resultant Disk II system my most incredible experience at Apple and the finest job I did, and credited it and VisiCalc with the Apple IIs success. For a while, the direct competitor in the microcomputer industry was the TRS-80 Model I. Both the Atari 8-bit and Commodore 64s disk drives throughputs were much slower than the Disk IIs 15K bytes per second, however, the advantage of Wozniaks design was somewhat nullified when the cost of double-density MFM controllers dropped only a year after the Disk IIs introduction. The Apple IIs lack of a drive was a glaring weakness in what was otherwise intended to be a polished. Speaking later, Osborne I designer Lee Felsenstein stated, The difference between cassette and disk systems was the difference between hobbyist devices and a computer and you couldnt have expected, say, VisiCalc, to run on a cassette system. Recognizing that the II needed a drive to be taken seriously, Apple set out to develop a disk drive. Wozniak spent the 1977 Christmas holidays adapting his controller design, which reduced the number of chips used by a factor of 10 compared to existing controllers, still lacking a DOS, and with Wozniak inexperienced in operating system design, Jobs approached Shepardson Microsystems with the project. On April 10,1978 Apple signed a contract for $13,000 with Sheperdson to develop the DOS, the initial Disk II drives were modifications of the Shugart SA-400, which was the first commercially available 5.25 diskette drive. Apple purchased only the drive mechanisms without the standard SA-400 controller board, replaced it with Wozniaks board design. Early production at Apple was handled by two people, and they assembled 30 drives a day, by 1982, Apple switched to Alps drives for cost reasons
19.
Apple DOS
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Apple DOS is the family of disk operating systems for the Apple II series of microcomputers from late 1978 through early 1983. The best-known and most-used version is Apple DOS3.3 in the 1980 and 1983 releases. Prior to the release of Apple DOS3.1, Apple users had to rely on audio cassette tapes for storage and retrieval, but that method was notoriously slow, inconvenient. When Apple Computer introduced the Apple II in April 1977, the new computer had no drive or disk operating system. Although Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak designed the Disk II controller late that year, the company considered using Digital Researchs CP/M, but Wozniak sought an operating system that was easier to use. On 10 April 1978 Apple signed a $13,000 contract with Shepardson Microsystems to write a DOS, there was no Apple DOS1 or 2, per se. Versions 0.1 through 2.8 were serially enumerated revisions during development, Apple DOS3.0, a renamed issue of version 2.8, was never publicly released due to bugs. To the dismay of many programmers, Apple published no official documentation until release 3.2. Apple DOS3.1 was publicly released in June 1978, slightly less than one year after the Apple II was introduced, MASTER CREATE includes a self-relocating version of DOS that boots on Apples with any memory configuration. Apple DOS3.2 was released in 1979 to reflect changes in computer booting methods that were built into the successor of the Apple II. Instead of the original Integer BASIC, the Apple II Plus firmware includes the newer Applesoft II floating point BASIC. The new firmware also has a feature which automatically finds a disk controller. Apple DOS3.3 was released in 1980, DOS3.3 is, however, not backward compatible, it cannot read or write DOS3.2 disks. To address this problem, Apple Computer released a utility called MUFFIN to migrate Apple DOS3.2 files, Apple never offered a utility to copy the other way. To migrate Apple DOS3.3 files back to version 3.2 disks, there are also commercial utilities that can copy files from and to either format. Release 3.3 also improves the ability to switch between Integer BASIC and Applesoft BASIC, if the computer has a card or firmware card. Apple DOS3.1 disks use 13 sectors of data per track and it uses 35 tracks per disk side, and can access only one side of the floppy disk, unless the user flipped the disk over. This gives the user a total capacity of 113.75 KB per side, of which about 10 KB are used to store DOS itself
20.
PC booter
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Video games were the type of application most commonly distributed as booters. Some booters include a subset or variant of a standard operating system for the platform. Amiga games and those for other computers were distributed as bootable floppies using a custom boot block which would consist of a custom loader. These disks contained no filesystem, instead, the loader would read the tracks directly. Many Amiga games were released as such in order to thwart piracy, in early to mid-1990s, disks with a custom boot block became very popular for making so-called trackmos by demo groups. While booters provided a form of copy protection, programs such as Locksmith and Copy II PC existed that provided a method for copying of these disks. Today, IBM PC compatible computers can boot from floppies, CD-ROMs/DVDs. However, it may require to change boot device priority in the BIOS setup utility, in a way, the booter acted as a sandbox, even though the concept didnt exist yet. The last benefit was critical for games, as it allowed to use specialized replacements such as lightweight filesystems and this allowed performance boosts, especially for graphical applications. The application cannot co-exist with other installed applications, bypassing the normal operating system forced the developers to anticipate every hardware-related or driver-related issue. They would have to write drivers themselves and this could cause compatibility issues on unusual equipment. List of PC booter games Live CD
21.
Apple ProDOS
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ProDOS is the name of two similar operating systems for the Apple II series of personal computers. The original ProDOS, renamed ProDOS8 in version 1.2, is the last official operating system usable by all 8-bit Apple II series computers, the other, ProDOS16, was a stop-gap solution for the 16-bit Apple IIGS that was replaced by GS/OS within two years. ProDOS was released to address shortcomings in the earlier Apple operating system, Apple DOS only has built-in support for 5.25 floppy disks and requires patches to use peripheral devices such as hard disk drives and non-Disk-II floppy disk drives, including 3.5 floppy drives. ProDOS addresses problems with handling hardware interrupts, and includes a well-defined and documented programming and expansion interface, which Apple DOS had always lacked. Although ProDOS also includes support for a clock, this support went largely unused until the release of the Apple IIGS. Third-party clocks were available for the II Plus, IIe, and IIc, ProDOS, unlike earlier Apple DOS versions, has its developmental roots in SOS, the operating system for the ill-fated Apple III computer released in 1980. Pre-release documentation for ProDOS documented SOS error codes, notably one for switched disks, for this reason, most machine-language programs that run under Apple DOS will not work under ProDOS. However, most BASIC programs work, though they sometimes require minor changes, a third-party program called DOS. MASTER enables users to have multiple virtual DOS3.3 partitions on a larger ProDOS volume. With the release of ProDOS came the end of support for Integer BASIC and the original Apple II model, which had long since been supplanted by Applesoft BASIC. BASIC. SYSTEM alone requires about as much memory as the whole of DOS3.3. Since the ProDOS kernel itself is stowed away in the Language Card RAM, a contributing reason was that ProDOS allows only 15 characters in a filename compared to Apple DOSs 30. Apple IIs continued to be able to boot the older DOS but as 3.5 floppies and hard disks became more prevalent, the Apple IIe, also released in 1983, was the first Apple II computer to have 64kB of memory built in. For a while, Apple shipped both DOS3.3 and ProDOS with new computers, the original ProDOS was renamed ProDOS8 when ProDOS16 was released to support the 16-bit Apple IIGS computer, although ProDOS16 was soon replaced by GS/OS. All editions of ProDOS require an Apple II series computer or licensed compatible, ProDOS8 requires 64kB of memory to run. ProDOS8 version 2. x requires a 65C02 or later CPU, ProDOS82. x runs in 64kB, but the utility programs on the system disk require 128kB. Systems with a 6502 CPU instead of a 65C02 must use ProDOS8 versions prior to version 2.0, ProDOS16 requires an Apple IIGS. With the release of ProDOS version 1.01 and higher, if the word Apple is found in the computers ROM firmware, ProDOS will load up as normal. If anything else is found ProDOS refuses to run, locking up at the boot splash screen and this measure was taken by Apple Computer to discourage use of unlicensed Apple II clones
22.
Zilog Z80
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The Z80 CPU is an 8-bit based microprocessor. It was introduced by Zilog in 1976 as the companys first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his employees at Zilog from early 1975 until March 1976. With the revenue from the Z80, the company built its own chip factories, the Zilog Z80 was a software compatible extension and enhancement of the Intel 8080 and, like it, was mainly aimed at embedded systems. In the early 1980s, the Z80 was the most commonly used CPU of all time, Zilog licensed the Z80 to the US-based Synertek and Mostek, that had helped them with initial production, as well as to a European second source manufacturer, SGS. The design was copied also by several Japanese, East European and Russian manufacturers and this enabled the Z80 to gain acceptance in the world market since large companies like NEC, Toshiba, Sharp, and Hitachi, started to manufacture the device. The Z80 came about when physicist Federico Faggin left Intel at the end of 1974 to found Zilog with Ralph Ungermann, at Fairchild Semiconductor, and later at Intel, Faggin had been working on fundamental transistor and semiconductor manufacturing technology. He also developed the design methodology used for memories and microprocessors at Intel and led the work on the Intel 4004. Masatoshi Shima, the logic and transistor level-designer of the 4004. By March 1976, Zilog had developed the Z80 as well as an accompanying assembler based development system for its customers, and by July 1976, early Z80s were manufactured by Synertek and Mostek, before Zilog had its own manufacturing factory ready, in late 1976. Masatoshi Shima designed most of the microarchitecture as well as the gate and transistor levels of the Z80 CPU, assisted by a number of engineers. CEO Federico Faggin was actually involved in the chip layout work. Faggin worked 80 hours a week in order to meet the tight schedule given by the financial investors, a non maskable interrupt which can be used to respond to power down situations and/or other high priority events. Two separate register files, which could be switched, to speed up response to interrupts such as fast asynchronous event handlers or a multitasking dispatcher. Although they were not intended as extra registers for general code, less hardware required for power supply, clock generation and interface to memory and I/O Single 5-volt power supply. A built-in DRAM refresh mechanism that would otherwise have to be provided by external circuitry, a special reset function which clears only the program counter so that a single Z80 CPU could be used in a development system such as an in-circuit emulator. The Z80 took over from the 8080 and its offspring, the 8085, in the processor market, perhaps a key to the initial success of the Z80 was the built-in DRAM refresh, and other features which allowed systems to be built with fewer support chips. For the original NMOS design, the specified upper frequency limit increased successively from the introductory 2.5 MHz, via the well known 4 MHz
23.
Expansion card
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An expansion bus is a computer bus which moves information between the internal hardware of a computer system and peripheral devices. It is a collection of wires and protocols that allows for the expansion of a computer, 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, minicomputers, starting with the PDP-8, were made of multiple cards, all powered by and communicating through a passive backplane. The first commercial microcomputer to feature expansion slots was the Micral N, proprietary bus implementations for systems such as the Apple II co-existed with multi-manufacturer standards. IBM introduced what would retroactively be called the Industry Standard Architecture bus with the IBM PC in 1981, the IBM XT, introduced in 1983, used the same bus. The 8-bit PC and XT bus was extended with the introduction of the IBM AT and this used a second connector for extending the address and data bus over the XT, but was backward compatible, 8-bit cards were still usable in the AT 16-bit slots. Industry Standard Architecture became the designation for the IBM AT bus after other types were developed. IBMs MCA bus, developed for the PS/2 in 1987, was a competitor to ISA, also their design, but fell out of favor due to the ISAs industry-wide acceptance and IBMs licensing of MCA. EISA, the 32-bit extended version of ISA championed by Compaq, was used on some PC motherboards until 1997, proprietary local buses and then the VESA Local Bus Standard, were late 1980s expansion buses that were tied but not exclusive to the 80386 and 80486 CPU bus. The PC/104 bus is a bus that copies the ISA bus. Intel launched their PCI bus chipsets along with the P5-based Pentium CPUs in 1993, the PCI bus was introduced in 1991 as replacement for ISA. The standard is found on PC motherboards to this day, the PCI standard supports bus bridging, as many as ten daisy chained PCI buses have been tested. Cardbus, using the PCMCIA connector, is a PCI format that attaches peripherals to the Host PCI Bus via PCI to PCI Bridge, cardbus is being supplanted by ExpressCard format. Intel introduced the AGP bus in 1997 as a video acceleration solution. AGP devices are attached to the PCI bus over a PCI-to-PCI bridge. Though termed a bus, AGP usually supports only a card at a time. From 2005 PCI-Express has been replacing both PCI and AGP and this standard, approved in 2004, implements the logical PCI protocol over a serial communication interface. PC/104 or Mini PCI are often added for expansion on small form factor boards such as Mini-ITX, for their 1000 EX and 1000 HX models, Tandy Computer designed the PLUS expansion interface, an adaptation of the XT-bus supporting cards of a smaller form factor
24.
CP/M
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Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors. The combination of CP/M and S-100 bus computers was loosely patterned on the MITS Altair and this computer platform was widely used in business through the late 1970s and into the mid-1980s. CP/M increased the size for both hardware and software by greatly reducing the amount of programming required to install an application on a new manufacturers computer. An important driver of innovation was the advent of low-cost microcomputers running CP/M, as independent programmers and hackers bought them. CP/M was displaced by MS-DOS soon after the 1981 introduction of the IBM PC, manufacturers of CP/M-compatible systems customized portions of the operating system for their own combination of installed memory, disk drives, and console devices. CP/M would also run on based on the Zilog Z80 processor since the Z80 was compatible with 8080 code. CP/M used the 7-bit ASCII set, the other 128 characters made possible by the 8-bit byte were not standardized. For example, one Kaypro used them for Greek characters, WordStar used the 8th bit as an end-of-word marker. The BIOS and BDOS were memory-resident, while the CCP was memory-resident unless overwritten by an application, a number of transient commands for standard utilities were also provided. The transient commands resided in files with the extension. COM on disk, the BIOS directly controlled hardware components other than the CPU and main memory. It contained functions such as input and output and the reading and writing of disk sectors. The BDOS implemented the CP/M file system and some input/output abstractions on top of the BIOS, the CCP took user commands and either executed them directly or loaded and started an executable file of the given name. Third-party applications for CP/M were also essentially transient commands, the BDOS, CCP and standard transient commands were the same in all installations of a particular revision of CP/M, but the BIOS portion was always adapted to the particular hardware. Adding memory to a computer, for example, meant that the CP/M system had to be reinstalled with an updated BIOS capable of addressing the additional memory, a utility was provided to patch the supplied BIOS, BDOS and CCP to allow them to be run from higher memory. Once installed, the system was stored in reserved areas at the beginning of any disk which would be used to boot the system. On start-up, the bootloader would load the system from the disk in drive A. By modern standards CP/M was primitive, owing to the constraints on program size. With version 1.0 there was no provision for detecting a changed disk, if a user changed disks without manually rereading the disk directory the system would write on the new disk using the old disks directory information, ruining the data stored on the disk
25.
WordStar
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WordStar is a word processor application that had a dominant market share during the early- to mid-1980s. It was published by MicroPro International, and written for the CP/M operating system, Rubinstein was the principal owner of the company, Rob Barnaby was the sole author of the early versions of the program. Starting with WordStar 4.0, the program was built on new code written principally by Peter Mierau. WordStar was deliberately written to make as few assumptions about the system as possible. As all of these versions had relatively similar commands and controls, already popular, its inclusion with the Osborne 1 computer made the program become the de facto standard for much of the word-processing market. As the computer market became dominated by the IBM PC. In spite of its popularity in the early 1980s, these problems allowed WordPerfect to take WordStars place as the most widely used word processor from 1985 onwards. Rubinstein was an employee of early microcomputer company IMSAI, where he negotiated contracts with Digital Research. After leaving IMSAI, Rubinstein planned to start his own company that would sell through the new network of retail computer stores. MicroPro began selling the product, now renamed WordStar, in June 1979, by early 1980, MicroPro claimed in advertisements that 5,000 people had purchased WordStar in eight months. Wordstar was the first microcomputer word processor to offer mail merge, by May 1983 BYTE magazine called WordStar without a doubt the best-known and probably the most widely used personal computer word-processing program. By 1984, the year it held a public offering. A manual that PC Magazine described as incredibly inadequate led many authors to publish replacements, WordStar 3.0, the first version for MS-DOS, appeared in April 1982. WordStars ability to use a non-document mode to create text files without formatting made it popular among programmers for writing code, like the CP/M versions, the DOS WordStar was not explicitly designed for IBM PCs, but rather for any x86 machine. As such, it used only DOSs OS calls and avoided any BIOS usage or direct hardware access, the first DOS version was a port of the CP/M-86 version, and therefore could only address 64k of RAM even though DOS supported up to 640k. Users quickly learned they could make WordStar run dramatically faster by installing a RAM disk board, WordStar would still access the disk repeatedly, but the far faster access of the RAM drive compared to a floppy disk yielded a substantial speed improvement. However, edited versions of a document were saved only to this RAM disk, infoWorld described WordStar as notorious for its complexity, but by 1983 it was the leading word processing system. Although competition appeared early, WordStar was the dominant word processor on x86 machines until 1985 and it was part of the software bundle that accompanied Kaypro computers
26.
DBase
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DBase was one of the first database management systems for microcomputers, and the most successful in its day. The dBase system includes the core engine, a query system, a forms engine. DBases underlying file format, the. dbf file, is used in applications needing a simple format to store structured data. DBase was originally published by Ashton-Tate for microcomputer operating system CP/M in 1980, on the PC platform, in particular, dBase became one of the best-selling software titles for a number of years. A major upgrade was released as dBase III, and ported to a variety of platforms, adding UNIX. By the mid-1980s, Ashton-Tate was one of the big three software publishers in the business software market, the others being Lotus Development and WordPerfect. Starting in the mid-1980s, several companies produced their own variations on the dBase product and these included FoxBASE+, Clipper, and other so-called xBase products. Many of these were technically stronger than dBase, but could not push it aside in the market and this changed with the disastrous introduction of dBase IV, whose design and stability were so poor that many users switched to other products. At the same time, there was growing use of IBM-invented SQL in database products, another factor was user adoption of Microsoft Windows on desktop computers. The shift toward SQL and Windows put pressure on the makers of xBase products to invest in major redesign to provide new capabilities, in spite of growing pressure to evolve, in the early 1990s xBase products constituted the leading database platform for implementing business applications. The size and impact of the market did not go unnoticed, and within one year. Borland purchased Ashton-Tate, Microsoft bought Fox Software, and Computer Associates acquired Nantucket, however, by the following decade most of the original xBase products had faded from prominence and several disappeared. Products known as dBase still exist, owned by dBase LLC, in 1971 Thompson collaborated with Jack Hatfield, a programmer at JPL, to write an enhanced version of RETRIEVE which became the JPLDIS project. JPLDIS was written in FORTRAN on the UNIVAC1108 mainframe, and was presented publicly in 1973, when Hatfield left JPL in 1974, Jeb Long took over his role. While working at JPL as a contractor, C. Wayne Ratliff entered the football pool. He had no interest in the game, but felt he could win the pool by processing the post-game statistics found in newspapers, in order to do this, he turned his attention to a database system and, by chance, came across the documentation for JPLDIS. He used this as the basis for a port to PTDOS on his kit-built IMSAI8080 microcomputer and they entered into an agreement with Ratliff to market Vulcan, and formed Ashton-Tate to do so. Ratliff ported Vulcan from PTDOS to CP/M, hal Pawluk, who handled marketing for the nascent company, decided to change the name to the more business-like dBase
27.
Macintosh
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The Macintosh (/ˈmækᵻntɒʃ/ MAK-in-tosh, is a series of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. Steve Jobs introduced the original Macintosh computer on January 24,1984 and this was the companys first mass-market personal computer featuring an integral graphical user interface and mouse. This first model was renamed to Macintosh 128k for uniqueness amongst a populous family of subsequently updated models which are also based on Apples same proprietary architecture. Since 1998, Apple has largely phased out the Macintosh name in favor of Mac, Macintosh systems still found success in education and desktop publishing and kept Apple as the second-largest PC manufacturer for the next decade. In the 1990s, improvements in the rival Wintel platform, notably with the introduction of Windows 3.0, then Windows 95, gradually took market share from the more expensive Macintosh systems. The performance advantage of 68000-based Macintosh systems was eroded by Intels Pentium, even after a transition to the superior PowerPC-based Power Macintosh line in 1994, the falling prices of commodity PC components and the release of Windows 95 saw the Macintosh user base decline. In 1998, after the return of Steve Jobs, Apple consolidated its multiple consumer-level desktop models into the all-in-one iMac G3, since their transition to Intel processors in 2006, the complete lineup is entirely based on said processors and associated systems. Its current lineup comprises three desktops, and three laptops and its Xserve server was discontinued in 2011 in favor of the Mac Mini and Mac Pro. Apple also develops the operating system for the Mac, currently macOS version 10.12 Sierra, Macs are currently capable of running non-Apple operating systems such as Linux, OpenBSD, and Microsoft Windows with the aid of Boot Camp or third-party software. Apple does not license macOS for use on computers, though it did license previous versions of the classic Mac OS through their Macintosh clone program from 1995 to 1997. The Macintosh project was begun in 1979 by Jef Raskin, an Apple employee who envisioned an easy-to-use, in 1978 Apple began to organize the Apple Lisa project, aiming to build a next-generation machine similar to an advanced Apple III or the yet-to-be-introduced IBM PC. In 1979, Steve Jobs learned of the work on graphical user interfaces taking place at Xerox PARC. He arranged a deal in which Xerox received Apple stock options in return for which Apple would license their designs, the basic layout of the Lisa was largely complete by 1982, at which point Jobs continual suggestions for improvements led to him being kicked off the project. At the same time that the Lisa was becoming a GUI machine in 1979, the design at that time was for a low-cost, easy-to-use machine for the average consumer. Raskin was authorized to start hiring for the project in September 1979 and his initial team would eventually consist of himself, Howard, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, and Bud Tribble. Smiths design used fewer RAM chips than the Lisa, which production of the board significantly more cost-efficient. Though there were no memory slots, its RAM was expandable to 512 kB by means of soldering sixteen IC sockets to accept 256 kb RAM chips in place of the factory-installed chips. The final products screen was a 9-inch, 512x342 pixel monochrome display, burrels innovative design, combining the low production cost of an Apple II with the computing power of Lisas Motorola 68000 CPU, began to receive Jobs attentions
28.
Motorola 68000
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The Motorola 68000 is a 32-bit CISC microprocessor with a 16-bit external data bus, designed and marketed by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector. After 38 years in production, the 68000 architecture is still in use, the 68000 grew out of the MACSS project, begun in 1976 to develop an entirely new architecture without backward compatibility. It would be a higher-power sibling complementing the existing 8-bit 6800 line rather than a compatible successor, in the end, the 68000 did retain a bus protocol compatibility mode for existing 6800 peripheral devices, and a version with an 8-bit data bus was produced. However, the designers focused on the future, or forward compatibility. For instance, the CPU registers are 32 bits wide, though few self-contained structures in the processor itself operate on 32 bits at a time. The MACSS team drew heavily on the influence of minicomputer processor design, such as the PDP-11 and VAX systems, in the mid 1970s, the 8-bit microprocessor manufacturers raced to introduce the 16-bit generation. National Semiconductor had been first with its IMP-16 and PACE processors in 1973–1975, Intel had worked on their advanced 16/32-bit Intel iAPX432 since 1975 and their Intel 8086 since 1976. Arriving late to the 16-bit arena afforded the new processor more transistors, 32-bit macroinstructions, the original MC68000 was fabricated using an HMOS process with a 3.5 µm feature size. Formally introduced in September 1979, Initial samples were released in February 1980, Initial speed grades were 4,6, and 8 MHz.10 MHz chips became available during 1981, and 12.5 MHz chips by June 1982. The 16.67 MHz 12F version of the MC68000, the fastest version of the original HMOS chip, was not produced until the late 1980s, tom Gunter, retired Corporate Vice President at Motorola, is known as the Father of the 68000. The 68000 was used in Microsoft Xenix systems as well as an early NetWare Unix-based Server, the 68000 was used in the first generation of desktop laser printers including the original Apple Inc. In 1982, the 68000 received an update to its ISA allowing it to virtual memory and to conform to the Popek. The updated chip was called the 68010, a further extended version which exposed 31 bits of the address bus was also produced, in small quantities, as the 68012. To support lower-cost systems and control applications with smaller sizes, Motorola introduced the 8-bit compatible MC68008. This was a 68000 with an 8-bit data bus and an address bus. After 1982, Motorola devoted more attention to the 68020 and 88000 projects, several other companies were second-source manufacturers of the HMOS68000. These included Hitachi, who shrank the size to 2.7 µm for their 12.5 MHz version, Mostek, Rockwell, Signetics, Thomson/SGS-Thomson. Toshiba was also a maker of the CMOS 68HC000
29.
Small appliance
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A small appliance or small domestic appliance is a portable or semi-portable machines, generally used on table-tops, counter-tops, or other platforms, to accomplish a household task. Examples include microwave ovens, toasters, humidifiers, and coffee makers and they contrast with major appliances, such as the refrigerator and washing machine, which cannot be easily moved and are generally placed on the floor. Small appliances also contrast with consumer electronics which are for leisure, some small appliances perform the same or similar function as their larger counterparts. For example, an oven is a small appliance that performs a similar function as an oven. Small appliances often have a version and a commercial version, for example waffle irons, food processors. The commercial, or industrial, version is designed to be used continuously in a restaurant or other similar setting. Commercial appliances are connected to a more powerful electrical outlet, are larger and stronger, have more user-serviceable parts. Dollars, or very expensive, such as an espresso maker. Most homes in developed economies contain several cheaper home appliances, with perhaps a few more expensive appliances, many small appliances are powered by electricity. The appliance may use a permanently attached cord which is plugged into an outlet or a detachable cord. The appliance may have a cord storage feature, a few hand-held appliances use batteries, which may be disposable or rechargeable. Some appliances consist of an electrical motor upon which is mounted various attachments so as to constitute several individual appliances, such as a blender, many stand mixers, while functioning primarily as a mixer, have attachments which can perform additional functions. A few gasoline and gas-powered appliances exist for use in situations where electricity is not expected to be available, small appliances which are defective or improperly used or maintained may cause house fires and other property damage, or may harbor bacteria if not properly cleaned. It is important that users read the instructions carefully and that appliances that use a grounded cord be attached to a grounded outlet, because of the risk of fire, some appliances have a short detachable cord that is connected to the appliance magnetically. If the appliance is moved further than the length from the wall. Designations and regulations of small appliances vary by country and are not simply determined by physical sizes
30.
Motherboard
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A motherboard is the main printed circuit board found in general purpose microcomputers and other expandable systems. It holds and allows communication between many of the electronic components of a system, such as the central processing unit and memory. In very old designs, copper wires were the discrete connections between card connector pins, but printed circuit boards soon became the standard practice, the Central Processing Unit, memory, and peripherals were housed on individual printed circuit boards, which were plugged into the backplate. The ubiquitous S-100 bus of the 1970s is an example of type of backplane system. During the late 1980s and 1990s, it became economical to move a number of peripheral functions onto the motherboard. Business PCs, workstations, and servers were more likely to need expansion cards, either for more robust functions, or for higher speeds, laptop and notebook computers that were developed in the 1990s integrated the most common peripherals. This even included motherboards with no upgradeable components, a trend that would continue as smaller systems were introduced after the turn of the century, memory, processors, network controllers, power source, and storage would be integrated into some systems. A motherboard provides the connections by which the other components of the system communicate. Unlike a backplane, it contains the central processing unit and hosts other subsystems. A typical desktop computer has its microprocessor, main memory, an important component of a motherboard is the microprocessors supporting chipset, which provides the supporting interfaces between the CPU and the various buses and external components. This chipset determines, to an extent, the features and capabilities of the motherboard, modern motherboards include, Sockets in which one or more microprocessors may be installed. In the case of CPUs in ball grid array packages, such as the VIA C3, as of 2007, some graphics cards require more power than the motherboard can provide, and thus dedicated connectors have been introduced to attach them directly to the power supply. Connectors for hard drives, typically SATA only, disk drives also connect to the power supply. Additionally, nearly all motherboards include logic and connectors to support commonly used devices, such as USB for mouse devices. Early personal computers such as the Apple II or IBM PC included only this minimal peripheral support on the motherboard, occasionally video interface hardware was also integrated into the motherboard, for example, on the Apple II and rarely on IBM-compatible computers such as the IBM PC Jr. Additional peripherals such as disk controllers and serial ports were provided as expansion cards, given the high thermal design power of high-speed computer CPUs and components, modern motherboards nearly always include heat sinks and mounting points for fans to dissipate excess heat. Motherboards are produced in a variety of sizes and shapes called computer form factor, however, the motherboards used in IBM-compatible systems are designed to fit various case sizes. As of 2007, most desktop computer motherboards use the ATX standard form factor — even those found in Macintosh and Sun computers, a cases motherboard and PSU form factor must all match, though some smaller form factor motherboards of the same family will fit larger cases
31.
Apple II graphics
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The Apple II graphics were composed of idiosyncratic modes and settings that could be exploited. This graphics system debuted on the original Apple II, continued with the Apple II Plus and was carried forward and expanded with the Apple IIe, Enhanced IIe, IIc, IIc Plus and IIGS. The graphic modes of the Apple II series were peculiar even by the standards of the late 1970s, one notable peculiarity of these modes is a direct result of Apple founder Steve Wozniaks chip-saving design. Many home computer systems of the time had architecture which assigned consecutive blocks of memory to non-consecutive rows on the screen in graphic modes, apples text and graphics modes are based on two different interleave factors of 8,1 and 64,1. A second peculiarity of Apple II graphics—the so-called color fringes—is yet another by-product of Wozniaks design, while these occur in all graphics modes, they play a crucial role in Hi-Resolution or Hi-Res mode. Reading a value from, or writing any value to, certain memory addresses controlled so called soft switches, the value read or written does not matter, what counts is the access itself. For example, one could switch from mixed graphics and text to a display by accessing location 0xC052. Then, to go back to mixed graphics and text, one would access 0xC053, all Apple II machines featured an RCA jack providing a rough NTSC, PAL, or SECAM composite video output. This enabled the computer to be connected to any composite video monitor conforming to the standard for which the machine was configured. In addition to the video output jack, the IIc, IIc Plus. In the IIc and IIc Plus, this connector was a video connector for adapters to digital RGB monitors. In the IIGS it was an output for an analog RGB monitor specially designed for the IIGS, numerous add-on video display cards were available for the Apple II series, such as the Apple 80-Column Text Card. There were PAL color cards which enabled color output on early PAL machines, some other cards simply added 80-column and lowercase display capabilities, while others allowed output to an IBM CGA monitor through a DE9 output jack. The Apple II video output is really a monochrome display based upon the bit patterns in the video memory and these pixels are combined in quadrature with the colorburst signal to be interpreted as color by a composite video display. High resolution provides two pixels per colorburst cycle, allowing for two colors if one pixel is on, black if no pixels are on, or white if both pixels are on. By shifting the alignment of the pixels to the colorburst signal by 90°, low resolution allows for four bits per cycle, but repeats the bit pattern several times per low resolution pixel. Double high resolution also displays four pixels per cycle, see the sections below for more details. The blocky, but fast and colorful Lo-Res graphics mode was 40 pixels wide and this mode could display either 40 rows of pixels with four lines of text at the bottom of the screen, or 48 rows of pixels with no text
32.
BASIC
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BASIC is a family of general-purpose, high-level programming languages whose design philosophy emphasizes ease of use. In 1964, John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz designed the original BASIC language at Dartmouth College in the U. S. state of New Hampshire and they wanted to enable students in fields other than science and mathematics to use computers. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, versions of BASIC became widespread on microcomputers in the mid-1970s and 1980s. Microcomputers usually shipped with BASIC, often in the machines firmware, having an easy-to-learn language on these early personal computers allowed small business owners, professionals, hobbyists, and consultants to develop custom software on computers they could afford. In the 2010s, BASIC remains popular in many computing dialects and in new languages influenced by BASIC, before the mid-1960s, the only computers were huge mainframe computers. Users submitted jobs on punched cards or similar media to specialist computer operators, the computer stored these, then used a batch processing system to run this queue of jobs one after another, allowing very high levels of utilization of these expensive machines. As the performance of computing hardware rose through the 1960s, multi-processing was developed and this allowed a mix of batch jobs to be run together, but the real revolution was the development of time-sharing. The original BASIC language was released on May 1,1964 by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz, the acronym BASIC comes from the name of an unpublished paper by Thomas Kurtz. BASIC was designed to allow students to write computer programs for the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. It was intended specifically for technical users who did not have or want the mathematical background previously expected. Being able to use a computer to support teaching and research was quite novel at the time, the language was based on FORTRAN II, with some influences from ALGOL60 and with additions to make it suitable for timesharing. Wanting use of the language to become widespread, its designers made the available free of charge. They also made it available to schools in the Hanover area. In the following years, as dialects of BASIC appeared, Kemeny. A version was a part of the Pick operating system from 1973 onward. During this period a number of computer games were written in BASIC. A number of these were collected by DEC employee David H. Ahl and he later collected a number of these into book form,101 BASIC Computer Games, published in 1973. During the same period, Ahl was involved in the creation of a computer for education use
33.
Applesoft BASIC
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Applesoft BASIC is a dialect of Microsoft BASIC, developed by Marc McDonald and Ric Weiland, supplied with the Apple II series of computers. It supersedes Integer BASIC and is the BASIC in ROM in all Apple II series computers after the original Apple II model and it is also referred to as FP BASIC because of the Disk Operating System command used to invoke it, instead of INT for Integer BASIC. Applesoft BASIC was supplied by Microsoft and its name is derived from the names of both Apple and Microsoft, Apple employees, including Randy Wigginton, adapted Microsofts interpreter for the Apple II and added several features. The first version of Applesoft was released in 1977 only on cassette tape, Applesoft II, which was made available on cassette and disk and in the ROM of the Apple II Plus and subsequent models, was released in 1978. It is this version, which has some syntax differences from the first as well as support for the Apple II high-resolution graphics modes. In 1976, Microsoft had developed Microsoft BASIC, a BASIC interpreter for the MOS Technology 6502, upon learning that Apple had a 6502 machine, Microsoft asked if the company were interested in licensing BASIC, but Steve Jobs replied that Apple already had one. The Apple II was unveiled to the public at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977, one of the most common customer complaints about the computer was BASICs lack of floating-point capability. Integer BASIC is limited to numbers between −32768 and 32767 and caused problems for users attempting to write business applications with it. As Wozniak—the only person who understood Integer BASIC well enough to add floating point features—was busy with the Disk II drive and controller and with Apple DOS, making things more problematic was that the rival TRS-80 and Commodore PET both had floating point-capable BASICs from the beginning. The Applesoft license also saved Microsoft from near-bankruptcy when they licensed BASIC to Commodore for the PET in an agreement that proved costly for them. This allows for string arrays, DIM A$ resulted in a vector of eleven string variables numbered 0–10. Since Apple had no 6502 assembler on hand, the dev team were forced to send the code over the phone lines to Call Computer. Applesoft is very similar to Commodores BASIC2.0 aside from features inherited from Integer BASIC, there are a few minor differences such as Applesofts lack of bitwise operators, otherwise most BASIC programs that do not utilize hardware-dependent features will run on both BASICs. Coleco claimed that its Adam home computers SmartBASIC was source-code compatible with Applesoft, Microsoft licensed a BASIC compatible with Applesoft to VTech for its Laser 128 clone. Whereas Wozniak originally referred to his Integer BASIC as Game BASIC, in that era of carefully counting clock cycles and limited memory, it was inefficient to write speed-dependent programs that ran on a runtime interpreter. The use of numbers for all math operations created unnecessary overhead. A common feature of all Microsoft 6502 BASICs is the lack of double-precision variables or true integer math, the integer variable type on Microsoft 6502 BASIC was really only designed for arrays because each element would take two bytes. Additionally, shape tables were an alternative to bitmaps
34.
Cat
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The domestic cat is a small, typically furry, carnivorous mammal. They are often called house cats when kept as pets or simply cats when there is no need to distinguish them from other felids. Cats are often valued by humans for companionship and for their ability to hunt vermin, there are more than 70 cat breeds, though different associations proclaim different numbers according to their standards. Cats are similar in anatomy to the felids, with a strong flexible body, quick reflexes, sharp retractable claws. Cat senses fit a crepuscular and predatory ecological niche, cats can hear sounds too faint or too high in frequency for human ears, such as those made by mice and other small animals. They can see in near darkness, like most other mammals, cats have poorer color vision and a better sense of smell than humans. Cats, despite being solitary hunters, are a species and cat communication includes the use of a variety of vocalizations. Cats have a high breeding rate, under controlled breeding, they can be bred and shown as registered pedigree pets, a hobby known as cat fancy. Failure to control the breeding of pet cats by neutering, as well as the abandonment of former household pets, has resulted in numbers of feral cats worldwide. In certain areas outside cats native range, this has contributed, along with destruction and other factors. Cats have been known to extirpate a bird species within specific regions, a genetic study in 2007 concluded that domestic cats are descended from Near Eastern wildcats, having diverged around 8,000 BC in the Middle East. As of a 2007 study, cats are the second most popular pet in the US by number of pets owned, in a 2010 study they were ranked the third most popular pet in the UK, after fish and dogs, with around 8 million being owned. The domestic cat is believed to have evolved from the Near Eastern wildcat, the felids are a rapidly evolving family of mammals that share a common ancestor only 10–15 million years ago and include lions, tigers, cougars and many others. Within this family, domestic cats are part of the genus Felis, members of the genus are found worldwide and include the jungle cat of southeast Asia, European wildcat, African wildcat, the Chinese mountain cat, and the Arabian sand cat, among others. The domestic cat was first classified as Felis catus by Carl Linnaeus in the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae published in 1758, because of modern phylogenetics, domestic cats are usually regarded as another subspecies of the wildcat, F. silvestris. This has resulted in mixed usage of the terms, as the cat can be called by its subspecies name. Wildcats have also referred to as various subspecies of F. catus, but in 2003. The most common name in use for the cat remains F. catus
35.
Modem
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A modem is a network hardware device that modulates one or more carrier wave signals to encode digital information for transmission and demodulates signals to decode the transmitted information. The goal is attempting to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily, modems can be used with any means of transmitting analog signals, from light emitting diodes to radio. Modems are generally classified by the amount of data they can send in a given unit of time, usually expressed in bits per second. Modems can also be classified by their rate, measured in baud. The baud unit denotes symbols per second, or the number of times per second the modem sends a new signal. For example, the ITU V.21 standard used audio frequency shift keying with two frequencies, corresponding to two distinct symbols, to carry 300 bits per second using 300 baud. By contrast, the original ITU V.22 standard, which could transmit and receive four distinct symbols, news wire services in the 1920s used multiplex devices that satisfied the definition of a modem. However, the function was incidental to the multiplexing function, so they are not commonly included in the history of modems. S. SAGE modems were described by AT&Ts Bell Labs as conforming to their newly published Bell 101 dataset standard, while they ran on dedicated telephone lines, the devices at each end were no different from commercial acoustically coupled Bell 101,110 baud modems. The 201A and 201B Data-Phones were synchronous modems using two-bit-per-baud phase-shift keying, the famous Bell 103A dataset standard was also introduced by AT&T in 1962. It provided full-duplex service at 300 bit/s over normal phone lines, frequency-shift keying was used, with the call originator transmitting at 1,070 or 1,270 Hz and the answering modem transmitting at 2,025 or 2,225 Hz. The readily available 103A2 gave an important boost to the use of remote low-speed terminals such as the Teletype Model 33 ASR and KSR, AT&T reduced modem costs by introducing the originate-only 113D and the answer-only 113B/C modems. For many years, the Bell System maintained a monopoly on the use of its phone lines, however, the seminal Hush-a-Phone v. FCC case of 1956 concluded it was within the FCCs jurisdiction to regulate the operation of the Bell System. The FCC found that as long as a device was not electronically attached to the system and this led to a number of devices that mechanically connected to the phone through a standard handset. Since most handsets were supplied by Western Electric and thus of a standard design and this type of connection was used for many devices, such as answering machines. Acoustically coupled Bell 103A-compatible 300 bit/s modems were common during the 1970s, well-known models included the Novation CAT and the Anderson-Jacobson, the latter spun off from an in-house project at Stanford Research Institute. An even lower-cost option was the Pennywhistle modem, designed to be built using parts from electronics scrap, in December 1972, Vadic introduced the VA3400, notable for full-duplex operation at 1,200 bit/s over the phone network. Like the 103A, it used different frequency bands for transmit, in November 1976, AT&T introduced the 212A modem to compete with Vadic
36.
MOS Technology 6502
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The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor that was designed by a small team led by Chuck Peddle for MOS Technology. When it was introduced in 1975, the 6502 was, by a considerable margin and it initially sold for less than one-sixth the cost of competing designs from larger companies, such as Motorola and Intel, and caused rapid decreases in pricing across the entire processor market. Along with the Zilog Z80, it sparked a series of projects that resulted in the computer revolution of the early 1980s. Popular home video consoles and computers, such as Atari, Apple II, Nintendo Entertainment System, Commodore PET and others. Soon after the 6502s introduction, MOS Technology was purchased outright by Commodore International, in the early days of the 6502, it was second-sourced by Rockwell and Synertek, and later licensed to other companies. The 6502 was designed by many of the engineers that had designed the Motorola 6800 microprocessor family. Motorola started the 6800 microprocessor project in 1971 with Tom Bennett as the main architect, the chip layout began in late 1972, the first 6800 chips were fabricated in February 1974 and the full family was officially released in November 1974. John Buchanan was the designer of the 6800 chip and Rod Orgill, Bill Mensch joined Motorola in June 1971 after graduating from the University of Arizona. His first assignment was helping define the peripheral ICs for the 6800 family, Motorolas engineers could run analog and digital simulations on an IBM 370-165 mainframe computer. Bennett hired Chuck Peddle in 1973 to do architectural work on the 6800 family products already in progress. He contributed in areas, including the design of the 6850 ACIA. Motorolas target customers were established electronics companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix, TRW, in May 1972, Motorolas engineers began visiting select customers and sharing the details of their proposed 8-bit microprocessor system with ROM, RAM, parallel and serial interfaces. In early 1974, they provided engineering samples of the chips so that customers could prototype their designs, Motorolas total product family strategy did not focus on the price of the microprocessor, but on reducing the customers total design cost. They offered development software on a computer, the EXORciser system debugging system, onsite training. Both Intel and Motorola had initially announced a price for a single microprocessor. The actual price for production quantities was much less, Motorola offered a design kit containing the 6800 with six support chips for $300. Peddle, who would accompany the people on customer visits. To lower the price, the IC chip size would have to shrink so that more chips could be produced on each silicon wafer and this could be done by removing inessential features in the 6800 and using a newer fabrication technology, depletion-mode MOS transistors
37.
Hertz
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The hertz is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units and is defined as one cycle per second. It is named for Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, the first person to provide proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves. Hertz are commonly expressed in SI multiples kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, kilo means thousand, mega meaning million, giga meaning billion and tera for trillion. Some of the units most common uses are in the description of waves and musical tones, particularly those used in radio-. It is also used to describe the speeds at which computers, the hertz is equivalent to cycles per second, i. e. 1/second or s −1. In English, hertz is also used as the plural form, as an SI unit, Hz can be prefixed, commonly used multiples are kHz, MHz, GHz and THz. One hertz simply means one cycle per second,100 Hz means one hundred cycles per second, and so on. The unit may be applied to any periodic event—for example, a clock might be said to tick at 1 Hz, the rate of aperiodic or stochastic events occur is expressed in reciprocal second or inverse second in general or, the specific case of radioactive decay, becquerels. Whereas 1 Hz is 1 cycle per second,1 Bq is 1 aperiodic radionuclide event per second, the conversion between a frequency f measured in hertz and an angular velocity ω measured in radians per second is ω =2 π f and f = ω2 π. This SI unit is named after Heinrich Hertz, as with every International System of Units unit named for a person, the first letter of its symbol is upper case. Note that degree Celsius conforms to this rule because the d is lowercase. — Based on The International System of Units, the hertz is named after the German physicist Heinrich Hertz, who made important scientific contributions to the study of electromagnetism. The name was established by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 1930, the term cycles per second was largely replaced by hertz by the 1970s. One hobby magazine, Electronics Illustrated, declared their intention to stick with the traditional kc. Mc. etc. units, sound is a traveling longitudinal wave which is an oscillation of pressure. Humans perceive frequency of waves as pitch. Each musical note corresponds to a frequency which can be measured in hertz. An infants ear is able to perceive frequencies ranging from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, the range of ultrasound, infrasound and other physical vibrations such as molecular and atomic vibrations extends from a few femtoHz into the terahertz range and beyond. Electromagnetic radiation is described by its frequency—the number of oscillations of the perpendicular electric and magnetic fields per second—expressed in hertz. Radio frequency radiation is measured in kilohertz, megahertz, or gigahertz
38.
Random-access memory
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Random-access memory is a form of computer data storage which stores frequently used program instructions to increase the general speed of a system. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the location of data inside the memory. RAM contains multiplexing and demultiplexing circuitry, to connect the lines to the addressed storage for reading or writing the entry. Usually more than one bit of storage is accessed by the same address, in todays technology, random-access memory takes the form of integrated circuits. RAM is normally associated with types of memory, where stored information is lost if power is removed. Other types of non-volatile memories exist that allow access for read operations. These include most types of ROM and a type of memory called NOR-Flash. Integrated-circuit RAM chips came into the market in the early 1970s, with the first commercially available DRAM chip, early computers used relays, mechanical counters or delay lines for main memory functions. Ultrasonic delay lines could only reproduce data in the order it was written, drum memory could be expanded at relatively low cost but efficient retrieval of memory items required knowledge of the physical layout of the drum to optimize speed. Latches built out of vacuum tube triodes, and later, out of transistors, were used for smaller and faster memories such as registers. Such registers were relatively large and too costly to use for large amounts of data, the first practical form of random-access memory was the Williams tube starting in 1947. It stored data as electrically charged spots on the face of a cathode ray tube, since the electron beam of the CRT could read and write the spots on the tube in any order, memory was random access. The capacity of the Williams tube was a few hundred to around a thousand bits, but it was smaller, faster. In fact, rather than the Williams tube memory being designed for the SSEM, magnetic-core memory was invented in 1947 and developed up until the mid-1970s. It became a form of random-access memory, relying on an array of magnetized rings. By changing the sense of each rings magnetization, data could be stored with one bit stored per ring, since every ring had a combination of address wires to select and read or write it, access to any memory location in any sequence was possible. Magnetic core memory was the form of memory system until displaced by solid-state memory in integrated circuits. Data was stored in the capacitance of each transistor, and had to be periodically refreshed every few milliseconds before the charge could leak away
39.
ASCII
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ASCII, abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices, most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters. ASCII was developed from telegraph code and its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on the ASCII standard began on October 6,1960, the first edition of the standard was published in 1963, underwent a major revision during 1967, and experienced its most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting of lists, and added features for other than teleprinters. Originally based on the English alphabet, ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers as shown by the ASCII chart above. The characters encoded are numbers 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, basic punctuation symbols, control codes that originated with Teletype machines, for example, lowercase j would become binary 1101010 and decimal 106. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters,33 are non-printing control characters that affect how text and space are processed and 95 printable characters, of these, the IANA encourages use of the name US-ASCII for Internet uses of ASCII. The ASA became the United States of America Standards Institute and ultimately the American National Standards Institute, there was some debate at the time whether there should be more control characters rather than the lowercase alphabet. The X3.2.4 task group voted its approval for the change to ASCII at its May 1963 meeting, the X3 committee made other changes, including other new characters, renaming some control characters and moving or removing others. ASCII was subsequently updated as USAS X3. 4-1967, then USAS X3. 4-1968, ANSI X3. 4-1977 and they proposed a 9-track standard for magnetic tape, and attempted to deal with some punched card formats. The X3.2 subcommittee designed ASCII based on the earlier teleprinter encoding systems, like other character encodings, ASCII specifies a correspondence between digital bit patterns and character symbols. This allows digital devices to communicate each other and to process, store. Before ASCII was developed, the encodings in use included 26 alphabetic characters,10 numerical digits, ITA2 were in turn based on the 5-bit telegraph code Émile Baudot invented in 1870 and patented in 1874. The committee debated the possibility of a function, which would allow more than 64 codes to be represented by a six-bit code. In a shifted code, some character codes determine choices between options for the character codes. It allows compact encoding, but is reliable for data transmission. The standards committee decided against shifting, and so ASCII required at least a seven-bit code, the committee considered an eight-bit code, since eight bits would allow two four-bit patterns to efficiently encode two digits with binary-coded decimal
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NTSC
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The first NTSC standard was developed in 1941 and had no provision for color. In 1953 a second NTSC standard was adopted, which allowed for television broadcasting which was compatible with the existing stock of black-and-white receivers. NTSC was the first widely adopted broadcast color system and remained dominant until 1997, North America, parts of Central America, and South Korea are adopting or have adopted the ATSC standards, while other countries are adopting or have adopted other standards instead of ATSC. After nearly 70 years, the majority of over-the-air NTSC transmissions in the United States ceased on January 1,2010, the majority of NTSC transmissions ended in Japan on July 24,2011, with the Japanese prefectures of Iwate, Miyagi, and Fukushima ending the next year. In March 1941, the committee issued a standard for black-and-white television that built upon a 1936 recommendation made by the Radio Manufacturers Association. Technical advancements of the side band technique allowed for the opportunity to increase the image resolution. The NTSC selected 525 scan lines as a compromise between RCAs 441-scan line standard and Philcos and DuMonts desire to increase the number of lines to between 605 and 800. The standard recommended a frame rate of 30 frames per second, other standards in the final recommendation were an aspect ratio of 4,3, and frequency modulation for the sound signal. In January 1950, the committee was reconstituted to standardize color television, in December 1953, it unanimously approved what is now called the NTSC color television standard. The compatible color standard retained full backward compatibility with existing black-and-white television sets, Color information was added to the black-and-white image by introducing a color subcarrier of precisely 315/88 MHz. These changes amounted to 0.1 percent and were tolerated by existing television receivers. The FCC had briefly approved a different color standard, starting in October 1950. However, this standard was incompatible with black-and-white broadcasts and it used a rotating color wheel, reduced the number of scan lines from 525 to 405, and increased the field rate from 60 to 144, but had an effective frame rate of only 24 frames per second. CBS rescinded its system in March 1953, and the FCC replaced it on December 17,1953, with the NTSC color standard, later that year, the improved TK-41 became the standard camera used throughout much of the 1960s. The NTSC standard has been adopted by countries, including most of the Americas. With the advent of television, analog broadcasts are being phased out. Most US NTSC broadcasters were required by the FCC to shut down their analog transmitters in 2009, low-power stations, Class A stations and translators were required to shut down by 2015. NTSC color encoding is used with the System M television signal, each frame is composed of two fields, each consisting of 262.5 scan lines, for a total of 525 scan lines
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Composite video
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Composite video is an analog video transmission that carries standard definition video typically at 480i or 576i resolution. Video information is encoded on one channel, unlike the higher-quality S-video, Composite video is usually in standard formats such as NTSC, PAL, and SECAM and is often designated by the CVBS initialism, for color, video, blanking and sync, or simply as video. A composite video signal combines on one wire the video information required to recreate a picture, as well as line. The color video signal is a combination of the luminance of the picture, and a modulated subcarrier carries the chrominance or color information. Details of the process vary between the NTSC, PAL and SECAM systems. The burst signal is inverted in phase from the reference subcarrier, Composite video can easily be directed to any broadcast channel simply by modulating the proper RF carrier wave with it. On playback, these devices often give the user the option to output the signal or to modulate it onto a VHF or UHF frequency compatible with a TV tuner. In home applications, the video signal is typically connected using an RCA connector. It is often accompanied with red and white connectors for right, BNC connectors and higher quality coaxial cable are often used in professional television studios and post-production applications. BNC connectors were used for composite video connections on early home VCRs. The BNC connector, in turn post dated the PL-259 connector which featured on first generation VCRs. In Europe, SCART connections are used instead of RCA jacks, so where available, RGB is used instead of composite video with computers, video game consoles. Video cables are 75 ohm impedance, low in capacitance, typical values run from 52 pF/m for an HDPE-foamed dielectric precision video cable to 69 pF/m for a solid PE dielectric cable. Some devices that connect to a TV, such as VCRs, older video game consoles and home computers of the 1980s and this may then be converted to RF with an external box known as an RF modulator that generates the proper carrier. Sometimes this modulator was built into the product and sometimes it was a unit powered by the computer or with an independent power supply. In the United States, using an external RF modulator frees the manufacturer from obtaining FCC approval for each variation of a device, Video game consoles on the other hand were less of an issue with FCC approval because the circuitry was inexpensive enough to allow for channel 3/4 outputs. Modern day devices with analog outputs have typically omitted channel 3 and 4 outputs in favor of composite and S-video outputs as composite, in addition, many TV sets sold these days no longer have analog television tuners and cannot accept channel 3/4. The process of modulating RF with the video signal, and then demodulating the original signal again in the TV
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RF modulator
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An RF modulator is an electronic device whose input is a baseband signal which is used to modulate a radio frequency source. The aerial connector is standard on all TV sets, even very old ones, technically, RF modulation usually means combining the data with a carrier signal at a standardized frequency. Either amplitude or frequency modulation may be used, as required by the receiving equipment, in North America, RF modulators generally output on channel 3 or 4, which may be selectable, although the Atari consoles offer channels 2 and 3. In Europe standard modulators usually used channel 36 by default, but are usually tunable over part or all of the UHF band, modulating a TV signal with stereo sound is relatively complex, most low-cost home TV modulators produce a signal with monaural audio. Even some units that have two or more audio inputs simply combine the left and right audio channels into one mono audio signal, some used on very early home computers had no sound capability at all. Most cheaper modulators lack vestigial sideband filtering, RF modulators produce a relatively poor picture, as image quality is lost during both the modulation from the source device, and the demodulation in the television. RF modulators are commonly integrated into VCRs, in game consoles up to and including the fourth generation. Some systems were supplied with an external modulator unit that connected to both the system and to the jacks of a television. Multi-channel RF modulators are used in home audio/video distribution. These devices have multiple audio and video inputs and one RF output, audio/video outputs from source devices such as a DVD player, VCR, or DSS receiver are connected to the audio/video inputs on the modulator. The modulator is then programmed to broadcast the signals on a certain frequency and that RF broadcast is then received by the connected TV. When the TV is tuned to the channel, the video. RF modulation can become difficult in a CATV system, high pass, low pass, and notch filters must be used to block certain frequencies, or channels, so that the modulator can broadcast the audio/video signal of the source device on that channel. Professional modulators such as used in the CATV industry generally include vestigial sideband filtering which is generally absent on consumer grade modulators. Audio RF modulators are used in car audio to add devices like CD changers without requiring dashboard hardware upgrades. For example, a portable CD players headphone jack is connected to the modulator, car FM modulators suffer from loss of quality and interference issues. Later devices which would use these types of modulators would be iPods and similar portable media players
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Silicon Valley
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Silicon Valley is a nickname for the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area, in the northern part of the U. S. state of California. The valley in its name refers to the Santa Clara Valley in Santa Clara County, which includes the city of San Jose and surrounding cities and towns, where the region has been traditionally centered. The region has expanded to include the half of the San Francisco Peninsula in San Mateo County. It was in the Valley that the integrated circuit, the microprocessor. As of 2013, the region employed about a quarter of an information technology workers. The term is now used as a synecdoche for the American high-technology economic sector. The first published use of Silicon Valley is credited to Don Hoefler, hostler used the phrase as the title of a series of articles in the weekly trade newspaper Electronic News. The series, entitled Silicon Valley in the USA, began in the papers January 11,1971, the term gained widespread use in the early 1980s, at the time of the introduction of the IBM PC and numerous related hardware and software products to the consumer market. The silicon part of the name refers to the concentration of companies involved in the making of semiconductors. These firms slowly replaced the orchards and the fruits which gave the area its initial nickname — the Valley of Hearts Delight, Stanford University leadership was especially important in the valleys early development. Together these elements formed the basis of its growth and success, the ship had been outfitted with a wireless telegraph transmitter by a local newspaper, so that they could prepare a celebration on the return of the American sailors. Local historian Clyde Arbuckle states in Clyde Arbuckles History of San Jose that California first heard the click of a key on September 11,1853. It marked completion of an enterprise begun by a couple of San Francisco Merchants Exchange members named George Sweeney and it was known as the Inner Station, the second, as the Outer Station. Both used their primitive mode of communication until Messrs, Sweeney and Baugh connected the Outer Station directly with the Merchantss Exchange by electric telegraph Wire. According to Arbuckle Sweeney and Baughs line was strictly an intra-city, San Francisco-based service, allen and C. Burnham led the way to build a line from San Francisco to Marysville via San Jose, Stockton, and Sacramento. Delays to construction occurred until September 1853, but, …San Jose became the first station on the line when the wire arrived here on October 15, the line was completed when Gambles northbound crew met a similar crew working southward from Marysville on October 24. The Bay Area had long been a site of United States Navy research. In 1909, Charles Herrold started the first radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming in San Jose
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Singapore
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Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, sometimes referred to as the Lion City or the Little Red Dot, is a sovereign city-state in Southeast Asia. It lies one degree north of the equator, at the tip of peninsular Malaysia. Singapores territory consists of one island along with 62 other islets. Since independence, extensive land reclamation has increased its size by 23%. During the Second World War, Singapore was occupied by Japan, after early years of turbulence, and despite lacking natural resources and a hinterland, the nation developed rapidly as an Asian Tiger economy, based on external trade and its workforce. Singapore is a global commerce, finance and transport hub, the country has also been identified as a tax haven. Singapore ranks 5th internationally and first in Asia on the UN Human Development Index and it is ranked highly in education, healthcare, life expectancy, quality of life, personal safety, and housing, but does not fare well on the Democracy index. Although income inequality is high, 90% of homes are owner-occupied, 38% of Singapores 5.6 million residents are permanent residents and other foreign nationals. There are four languages on the island, Malay, Mandarin, Tamil. English is its language, most Singaporeans are bilingual. Singapore is a multiparty parliamentary republic, with a Westminster system of unicameral parliamentary government. The Peoples Action Party has won every election since self-government in 1959, however, it is unlikely that lions ever lived on the island, Sang Nila Utama, the Srivijayan prince said to have founded and named the island Singapura, perhaps saw a Malayan tiger. There are however other suggestions for the origin of the name, the central island has also been called Pulau Ujong as far back as the third century CE, literally island at the end in Malay. In 1299, according to the Malay Annals, the Kingdom of Singapura was founded on the island by Sang Nila Utama and these Indianized Kingdoms, a term coined by George Cœdès were characterized by surprising resilience, political integrity and administrative stability. In 1613, Portuguese raiders burned down the settlement, which by then was part of the Johor Sultanate. The wider maritime region and much trade was under Dutch control for the following period, in 1824 the entire island, as well as the Temenggong, became a British possession after a further treaty with the Sultan. In 1826, Singapore became part of the Straits Settlements, under the jurisdiction of British India, prior to Raffles arrival, there were only about a thousand people living on the island, mostly indigenous Malays along with a handful of Chinese. By 1860 the population had swelled to over 80,000, many of these early immigrants came to work on the pepper and gambier plantations
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