1.
IBM PC compatible
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IBM PC compatible computers are those similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, able to run the same software and support the same expansion cards as those. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones, Columbia Data Products built the first clone of the IBM personal computer by a clean room implementation of its BIOS. Early IBM PC compatibles used the computer bus as the original PC. The IBM AT compatible bus was named the Industry Standard Architecture bus by manufacturers of compatible computers. The term IBM PC compatible is now a historical description only, only the Apple Macintosh classic Mac OS and macOS kept significant market share without compatibility with the IBM personal computer, so consumers are typically identified as being a PC or Mac user. IBM decided in 1980 to market a low-cost single-user computer as quickly as possible in response to Apple Computers success in the microcomputer market. On 12 August 1981, the first IBM PC went on sale, there were three operating systems available for it. The least expensive and most popular was PC DOS made by Microsoft, in a crucial concession, IBMs agreement allowed Microsoft to sell its own version, MS-DOS, for non-IBM computers. The only component of the original PC architecture exclusive to IBM was the BIOS and this software would run on any machine using MS-DOS or PC-DOS. Software that directly addressed the hardware instead of making standard calls was faster, however, software addressing IBM PC hardware in this way would not run on MS-DOS machines with different hardware. The 808x computer marketplace rapidly excluded all machines which were not hardware-, the 640 KB barrier on conventional system memory available to MS-DOS is a legacy of that period, other non-clone machines, while subject to a limit, could exceed 640 kB. Rumors of lookalike, compatible computers, created without IBMs approval, by June 1983 PC Magazine defined PC clone as a computer accommodate the user who takes a disk home from an IBM PC, walks across the room, and plugs it into the foreign machine. Because of a shortage of IBM PCs that year, many customers purchased clones instead, Columbia Data Products produced the first computer more or less compatible to the IBM PC standard during June 1982, soon followed by Eagle Computer. Compaq announced its first IBM PC compatible in November 1982, the Compaq Portable, the Compaq was the first sewing machine-sized portable computer that was essentially 100% PC-compatible. The company could not copy the BIOS directly as a result of the decision in Apple v. Franklin. Each computer would have its own Original Equipment Manufacturer version of MS-DOS, any software written for MS-DOS would operate on any MS-DOS computer, despite variations in hardware design. This expectation seemed reasonable in the marketplace of the time. Until then Microsoft was based primarily on computer languages such as BASIC, the established small system operating software was CP/M from Digital Research which was in use both at the hobbyist level and by the more professional of those using microcomputers
2.
IBM
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International Business Machines Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States, with operations in over 170 countries. The company originated in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and was renamed International Business Machines in 1924, IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware, middleware and software, and offers hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a research organization, holding the record for most patents generated by a business for 24 consecutive years. IBM has continually shifted its business mix by exiting commoditizing markets and focusing on higher-value, also in 2014, IBM announced that it would go fabless, continuing to design semiconductors, but offloading manufacturing to GlobalFoundries. Nicknamed Big Blue, IBM is one of 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the worlds largest employers, with nearly 380,000 employees. Known as IBMers, IBM employees have been awarded five Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards, ten National Medals of Technology, in the 1880s, technologies emerged that would ultimately form the core of what would become International Business Machines. On June 16,1911, their four companies were amalgamated in New York State by Charles Ranlett Flint forming a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company based in Endicott, New York. The five companies had 1,300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, New York, Dayton, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, Washington, D. C. and Toronto. They manufactured machinery for sale and lease, ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorders, meat and cheese slicers, to tabulators and punched cards. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. fired from the National Cash Register Company by John Henry Patterson, called on Flint and, Watson joined CTR as General Manager then,11 months later, was made President when court cases relating to his time at NCR were resolved. Having learned Pattersons pioneering business practices, Watson proceeded to put the stamp of NCR onto CTRs companies and his favorite slogan, THINK, became a mantra for each companys employees. During Watsons first four years, revenues more than doubled to $9 million, Watson had never liked the clumsy hyphenated title of the CTR and in 1924 chose to replace it with the more expansive title International Business Machines. By 1933 most of the subsidiaries had been merged into one company, in 1937, IBMs tabulating equipment enabled organizations to process unprecedented amounts of data, its clients including the U. S. During the Second World War the company produced small arms for the American war effort, in 1949, Thomas Watson, Sr. created IBM World Trade Corporation, a subsidiary of IBM focused on foreign operations. In 1952, he stepped down after almost 40 years at the company helm, in 1957, the FORTRAN scientific programming language was developed. In 1961, IBM developed the SABRE reservation system for American Airlines, in 1963, IBM employees and computers helped NASA track the orbital flight of the Mercury astronauts. A year later it moved its headquarters from New York City to Armonk. The latter half of the 1960s saw IBM continue its support of space exploration, on April 7,1964, IBM announced the first computer system family, the IBM System/360
3.
IBM Personal System/2
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The Personal System/2 or PS/2 was IBMs third generation of personal computers. Released in 1987, it replaced the IBM PC, XT, AT. The PS/2 line was created by IBM in an attempt to control of the PC market by introducing an advanced yet proprietary architecture. IBMs considerable market presence plus the reliability of the PS/2 ensured that the systems would sell in large numbers. Also the evolving Wintel architecture was seeing a period of dramatic reductions in price, the OS/2 operating system was announced at the same time as the PS/2 line and was intended to be the primary operating system for models with Intel 286 or later processors. However, at the time of the first shipments, only PC DOS was available, OS/21.0 and Microsofts Windows 2.0 became available several months later. IBM also released AIX PS/2, a UNIX operating system for PS/2 models with Intel 386 or later processors, for years before IBM released the PS/2, rumors spread about IBMs plans for successors to its IBM PC, XT, and AT personal computers. Among the rumors that did not come true, The company would use proprietary, the company would release a version of its VM mainframe operating system for them. The company would design the new computers to make third-party communications products more difficult to design, IBMs PS/2 was designed to remain software compatible with their PC/AT/XT line of computers upon which the large PC clone market was built, but the hardware was quite different. CBIOS was so compatible that it even included Cassette BASIC, while IBM did not publish the BIOS source code, it did promise to publish BIOS entry points. With the IBM PS/2 line, Micro Channel Architecture was also introduced, MCA was conceptually similar to the channel architecture of the IBM System/360 mainframes. MCA was technically superior to ISA and allowed for higher speed communications within the system, MCA featured many advances not seen in other standards until several years later. Transfer speeds were on par with the much later PCI standard, MCA allowed one-to-one, card to card, and multi-card to processor simultaneous transaction management which is a feature of the PCI-X bus format. Bus mastering capability, bus arbitration, and a form of plug-and-play BIOS management of hardware were all benefits of MCA. (One book from the year 2000 writes, MCA used a version of what we know now as “Plug-N′-Play”, requiring a special setup disk for each machine. MCA never gained wide acceptance outside of the PS/2 line due to IBMs anti-clone practices and incompatibilities with ISA, IBM offered to sell an MCA license to anyone who could afford the royalty. However, royalties were required for every MCA-compatible machine sold and a payment for every IBM-compatible machine the particular maker had made in the past, there was nothing unique in IBM insisting on payment of royalties on the use of its patents applied to Micro Channel based machines. However, up until that time, some companies had failed to pay IBM for the use of its patents on the generation of Personal Computer
4.
Kanji
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Kanji, or kanji, are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana and katakana. The Japanese term kanji for the Chinese characters literally means Han characters and is using the same characters as the Chinese word hànzì. Chinese characters first came to Japan on official seals, letters, swords, coins, mirrors, the earliest known instance of such an import was the King of Na gold seal given by Emperor Guangwu of Han to a Yamato emissary in 57 AD. Chinese coins from the first century AD have been found in Yayoi-period archaeological sites, however, the Japanese of that era probably had no comprehension of the script, and would remain illiterate until the fifth century AD. The earliest Japanese documents were written by bilingual Chinese or Korean officials employed at the Yamato court. For example, the correspondence from King Bu of Wa to Emperor Shun of Liu Song in 478 has been praised for its skillful use of allusion. Later, groups of people called fuhito were organized under the monarch to read, during the reign of Empress Suiko, the Yamato court began sending full-scale diplomatic missions to China, which resulted in a large increase in Chinese literacy at the Japanese court. The Japanese language had no form at the time Chinese characters were introduced. Chinese characters also came to be used to write Japanese words, around 650 CE, a writing system called manyōgana evolved that used a number of Chinese characters for their sound, rather than for their meaning. Manyōgana written in cursive style evolved into hiragana, or onna-de, that is, ladies hand, major works of Heian-era literature by women were written in hiragana. Katakana emerged via a path, monastery students simplified manyōgana to a single constituent element. Thus the two writing systems, hiragana and katakana, referred to collectively as kana, are descended from kanji. Katakana are mostly used for representing onomatopoeia, non-Japanese loanwords, the names of plants and animals, and for emphasis on certain words. In 1946, following World War II and under the Allied Occupation of Japan and this was done with the goal of facilitating learning for children and simplifying kanji use in literature and periodicals. The number of characters in circulation was reduced, and formal lists of characters to be learned during each grade of school were established, some characters were given simplified glyphs, called shinjitai. Many variant forms of characters and obscure alternatives for common characters were officially discouraged and these are simply guidelines, so many characters outside these standards are still widely known and commonly used, these are known as hyōgaiji. The kyōiku kanji are 1,006 characters that Japanese children learn in elementary school, originally the list only contained 881 characters. This was expanded to 996 characters in 1977 and it was not until 1982 the list was expanded to its current size
5.
NEC
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NEC Corporation is a Japanese multinational provider of information technology services and products, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. NEC provides IT and network solutions to enterprises, communications services providers and to government agencies. The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited and its NEC Semiconductors business unit was one of the worldwide top 20 semiconductor sales leaders before merging with Renesas Electronics. NEC is a member of the Sumitomo Group, kunihiko Iwadare and Takeshiro Maeda established Nippon Electric Limited Partnership on August 31,1898 by using facilities that they had bought from Miyoshi Electrical Manufacturing Company. Iwadare acted as the partner, Maeda handled company sales. Western Electric, which had an interest in the Japanese phone market, was represented by Walter Tenney Carleton, Carleton was also responsible for the renovation of the Miyoshi facilities. It was agreed that the partnership would be reorganized as a company when treaty would allow it. On July 17,1899, the treaty between Japan and the United States went into effect. Nippon Electric Company, Limited was organized the day with Western Electric Company to become the first Japanese joint-venture with foreign capital. Ernest Clement and Carleton were named as directors, Maeda and Mototeru Fujii were assigned to be auditors. Iwadare, Maeda and Carleton handled the overall management, the company started with the production, sales and maintenance of telephones and switches. NEC modernized the facilities with the construction of the Mita Plant in 1901 at Mita Shikokumachi. It was completed in December 1902, the Japanese Ministry of Communications adopted a new technology in 1903, the common battery switchboard supplied by NEC. The common battery switchboards powered the subscriber phone, eliminating the need for a permanent magnet generator in each subscribers phone, the switchboards were initially imported, but were manufactured locally by 1909. NEC started exporting telephone sets to China in 1904, in 1905, Iwadare visited Western Electric in the U. S. to see their management and production control. On his return to Japan he discontinued the system of sub-contracting and replaced it with a new system where managers. Inefficiency was also removed from the production process, the company paid higher salaries with incentives for efficiency. New accounting and cost controls were put in place, and time clocks installed, between 1899 and 1907 the number of telephone subscribers in Japan rose from 35,000 to 95,000
6.
IBM Personal Computer
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The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12,1981 and it was created by a team of engineers and designers under the direction of Don Estridge of the IBM Entry Systems Division in Boca Raton, Florida. IBM compatible became an important criterion for sales growth, only the Apple Macintosh family kept significant market share without compatibility with the IBM personal computer, International Business Machines, one of the worlds largest companies, had a 62% share of the mainframe computer market in 1981. Its share of the computer market, however, had declined from 60% in 1970 to 32% in 1980. In 1979 BusinessWeek asked, Is IBM just another stodgy, mature company, by 1981 its stock price had declined by 22%. IBMs earnings for the first half the year grew by 5. 3%—one third of the inflation rate—while those of minicomputer maker Digital Equipment Corporation grew by more than 35%. B. M, No longer dominates the computer business. IBM wished to avoid the outcome with the new personal computer industry, dominated by the Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, Tandy Corporations TRS-80. With $150 million in sales by 1979 and projected growth of more than 40% in the early 1980s. The Japanese project, codenamed Go, ended before the 1981 release of the American-designed IBM PC codenamed Chess, whether IBM had waited too long to enter an industry in which Apple and others were already successful was unclear. An observer stated that IBM bringing out a computer would be like teaching an elephant to tap dance. Successful microcomputer company Vector Graphics fiscal 1980 revenue was $12 million, the company only sold through its internal sales force, had no experience with resellers or retail stores, and did not introduce the first product designed to work with non-IBM equipment until 1980. Another observer claimed that IBM made decisions so slowly that, when tested, as with other large computer companies, its new products typically required about four to five years for development. IBM had to learn how to develop, mass-produce. The potential importance to microcomputers of a company so prestigious, that a saying in American companies stated No one ever got fired for buying IBM, was nonetheless clear. InfoWorld, which described itself as The Newsweekly for Microcomputer Users, stated that for my grandmother, is far and away the media star, not because of its features, but because it exists at all. When the number eight company in the Fortune 500 enters the field, the influence of a personal computer made by a company whose name has literally come to mean computer to most of the world is hard to contemplate. The editorial acknowledged that some factions in our industry have looked upon IBM as the enemy, desktop sized programmable calculators by Hewlett Packard had evolved into the HP9830 BASIC language computer by 1972. In 1972–1973 a team led by Dr. SCAMP emulated an IBM1130 minicomputer to run APL\1130, in 1973 APL was generally available only on mainframe computers, and most desktop sized microcomputers such as the Wang 2200 or HP9800 offered only BASIC
7.
Intel 8088
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The Intel 8088 microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on July 1,1979, the 8088 had an 8-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086, the 16-bit registers and the one megabyte address range were unchanged, however. In fact, according to the Intel documentation, the 8086 and 8088 have the execution unit —only the bus interface unit is different. The original IBM PC was based on the 8088, the 8088 was designed in Israel, at Intels Haifa laboratory, as were a large number of Intels processors. The prefetch queue of the 8088 was shortened to four bytes, from the 8086s six bytes, and these modifications of the basic 8086 design were one of the first jobs assigned to Intels then new design office and laboratory in Haifa, Israel. Later followed the 80C88, a fully static CHMOS design, which could operate with clock speeds from 0 to 8 MHz, there were also several other, more or less similar, variants from other manufacturers. For instance, the NEC V20 was a pin compatible and slightly faster variant of the 8088, successive NEC8088 compatible processors would run at up to 16 MHz. In 1984, Commodore International signed a deal to manufacture the 8088 for use in a licensed Dynalogic Hyperion clone, when announced, the list price of the 8088 was US $124.80. The 8088 is architecturally similar to the 8086. The main difference is there are only 8 data lines instead of the 8086s 16 lines. All of the pins of the device perform the same function as they do with the 8086 with two exceptions. First, pin 34 is no longer BHE, instead it outputs a maximum mode status, SSO. Combined with the IO/M and DT/R signals, the bus cycles can be decoded, the second change is the pin that signals if a memory access or input/output access is being made has had it sense reversed. The pin on the 8088 is IO/M, on the 8086 part it is IO/M. The reason for the reversal is that it makes the 8088 compatible with the 8085. 33–1 million instructions per second. The speed of the unit and the bus of the 8086 CPU was well balanced, with a typical instruction mix. Cutting down the bus to 8 bits made it a bottleneck in the 8088. With the speed of instruction fetch reduced by 50% in the 8088 as compared to the 8086, when the queue is empty, instructions take as long to complete as they take to fetch
8.
Intel 8086
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The 8086 is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and mid-1978, when it was released. The 8086 gave rise to the x86 architecture which eventually became Intels most successful line of processors, in 1972, Intel launched the 8008, the first 8-bit microprocessor. It implemented a set designed by Datapoint corporation with programmable CRT terminals in mind. The device needed several additional ICs to produce a computer, in part due to it being packaged in a small 18-pin memory package. Two years later, Intel launched the 8080, employing the new 40-pin DIL packages originally developed for calculator ICs to enable a separate address bus and it had an extended instruction set that was source compatible with the 8008 and also included some 16-bit instructions to make programming easier. Other well known 8-bit microprocessors that emerged during these years were Motorola 6800, General Instrument PIC16X, MOS Technology 6502, Zilog Z80, the 8086 project started in May 1976 and was originally intended as a temporary substitute for the ambitious and delayed iAPX432 project. It was an attempt to draw attention from the less-delayed 16- and 32-bit processors of other manufacturers and at the time to counter the threat from the Zilog Z80. The programming model and instruction set was based on the 8080 in order to make this possible, however, the 8086 design was expanded to support full 16-bit processing, instead of the fairly basic 16-bit capabilities of the 8080/8085. Instructions directly supporting nested ALGOL-family languages such as Pascal and PL/M were also added, according to principal architect Stephen P. Morse, this was a result of a more software centric approach than in the design of earlier Intel processors. Other enhancements included microcoded multiply and divide instructions and a bus structure better adapted to future coprocessors, the 8086 took a little more than two years from idea to working product, which was considered rather fast for a complex design in 1976–1978. The 8086 was sequenced using a mixture of random logic and microcode and was implemented using depletion-load nMOS circuitry with approximately 20,000 active transistors and it was soon moved to a new refined nMOS manufacturing process called HMOS that Intel originally developed for manufacturing of fast static RAM products. This was followed by HMOS-II, HMOS-III versions, and, eventually, the original chip measured 33 mm² and minimum feature size was 3.2 μm. The architecture was defined by Stephen P. Morse with some help, logic designer Jim McKevitt and John Bayliss were the lead engineers of the hardware-level development team and Bill Pohlman the manager for the project. All internal registers, as well as internal and external buses, are 16 bits wide. A 20-bit external address bus provides a 1 MB physical address space and this address space is addressed by means of internal memory segmentation. The data bus is multiplexed with the bus in order to fit all of the control lines into a standard 40-pin dual in-line package. It provides a 16-bit I/O address bus, supporting 64 KB of separate I/O space, the maximum linear address space is limited to 64 KB, simply because internal address/index registers are only 16 bits wide. Programming over 64 KB memory boundaries involves adjusting the segment registers, some of the control pins, which carry essential signals for all external operations, have more than one function depending upon whether the device is operated in min or max mode
9.
Toshiba
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Toshiba Corporation, commonly known as Toshiba and stylized as TOSHIBA, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Toshiba was founded in 1938 as Tokyo Shibaura Electric K. K. through the merger of Shibaura Seisaku-sho, the company name was officially changed to Toshiba Corporation in 1978. Toshiba is organized into four groupings, the Digital Products Group, the Electronic Devices Group, the Home Appliances Group and the Social Infrastructure Group. It is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, where it is a constituent of the Nikkei 225 and TOPIX indices, the Osaka Securities Exchange, Toshiba is the seventh largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world. Toshiba was founded in 1939 by the merger of Shibaura Seisakusho, Shibaura Seisakusho had been founded as Tanaka Seisakusho by Tanaka Hisashige in July 1875 as Japans first manufacturer of telegraph equipment. In 1904, it was renamed Shibaura Seisakusho, Tokyo Denki was founded as Hakunetsusha in 1890 and had been Japans first producer of incandescent electric lamps. It later diversified into the manufacture of consumer products and in 1899 had been renamed Tokyo Denki. The merger of Shibaura and Tokyo Denki created a new company called Tokyo Shibaura Denki and it was soon nicknamed Toshiba, but it was not until 1978 that the company was officially renamed Toshiba Corporation. The group expanded rapidly, driven by a combination of growth and by acquisitions, buying heavy engineering. In 1977, Toshiba acquired the Brazilian company Semp, subsequently forming Semp Toshiba through the combination of the two companies South American operations, the Toshiba-Kongsberg scandal involved a subsidiary of Toshiba and the Norwegian company Kongsberg Vaapenfabrikk. Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania said What Toshiba and Kongsberg did was ransom the security of the United States for $517 million, the contract ended in 2008, ending seven years of OEM production with Orion. In December 2004, Toshiba quietly announced it would discontinue manufacturing traditional in-house cathode ray tube televisions, in 2006, Toshiba terminated production of in-house plasma TVs. To ensure its competitiveness in the flat-panel digital television and display market. Before World War II, Toshiba was a member of the Mitsui Group zaibatsu, today Toshiba is a member of the Mitsui keiretsu, and still has preferential arrangements with Mitsui Bank and the other members of the keiretsu. Membership in a keiretsu has traditionally meant loyalty, both corporate and private, to members of the keiretsu or allied keiretsu. This loyalty can extend as far as the beer the employees consume, in July 2005, BNFL confirmed it planned to sell Westinghouse Electric Company, then estimated to be worth $1.8 billion. In late 2007, Toshiba took over from Discover Card as the sponsor of the top-most screen of One Times Square in New York City and it displays the iconic 60-second New Years countdown on its screen, as well as messages, greetings, and advertisements for the company. In January 2009, Toshiba acquired the HDD business of Fujitsu, Toshiba announced on 16 May 2011, that it had agreed to acquire all of the shares of the Swiss-based advanced-power-meter maker Landis+Gyr for $2.3 billion
10.
Microsoft
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Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office office suite, and Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface tablet lineup, as of 2016, it was the worlds largest software maker by revenue, and one of the worlds most valuable companies. Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4,1975, to develop and it rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The companys 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion, in June 2012, Microsoft entered the personal computer production market for the first time, with the launch of the Microsoft Surface, a line of tablet computers. The word Microsoft is a portmanteau of microcomputer and software, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, childhood friends with a passion for computer programming, sought to make a successful business utilizing their shared skills. In 1972 they founded their first company, named Traf-O-Data, which offered a computer that tracked and analyzed automobile traffic data. Allen went on to pursue a degree in science at Washington State University. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systemss Altair 8800 microcomputer, Allen suggested that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device, after a call from Gates claiming to have a working interpreter, MITS requested a demonstration. Since they didnt actually have one, Allen worked on a simulator for the Altair while Gates developed the interpreter and they officially established Microsoft on April 4,1975, with Gates as the CEO. Allen came up with the name of Micro-Soft, as recounted in a 1995 Fortune magazine article. In August 1977 the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office, the company moved to a new home in Bellevue, Washington in January 1979. Microsoft entered the OS business in 1980 with its own version of Unix, however, it was MS-DOS that solidified the companys dominance. For this deal, Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone called 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, branding it as MS-DOS, following the release of the IBM PC in August 1981, Microsoft retained ownership of MS-DOS. Since IBM copyrighted the IBM PC BIOS, other companies had to engineer it in order for non-IBM hardware to run as IBM PC compatibles. Due to various factors, such as MS-DOSs available software selection, the company expanded into new markets with the release of the Microsoft Mouse in 1983, as well as with a publishing division named Microsoft Press. Paul Allen resigned from Microsoft in 1983 after developing Hodgkins disease, while jointly developing a new OS with IBM in 1984, OS/2, Microsoft released Microsoft Windows, a graphical extension for MS-DOS, on November 20,1985. Once Microsoft informed IBM of NT, the OS/2 partnership deteriorated, in 1990, Microsoft introduced its office suite, Microsoft Office
11.
Bulletin board system
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A bulletin board system, or BBS, is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Many BBSes also offer on-line games, in users can compete with each other. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the form of the World Wide Web, social networks. Low-cost, high-performance modems drove the use of services and BBSes through the early 1990s. Infoworld estimated there were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994, over the next year, many of the leading BBS software providers went bankrupt and tens of thousands of BBSes disappeared. Today, BBSing survives largely as a hobby in most parts of the world. Most BBSes are now accessible over Telnet and typically offer free email accounts, FTP services, IRC, some offer access through packet switched networks, or packet radio connections. A precursor to the bulletin board system was Community Memory, started in August 1973 in Berkeley. Useful microcomputers did not exist at that time, and modems were both expensive and slow, Community Memory therefore ran on a mainframe computer and was accessed through terminals located in several San Francisco Bay Area neighborhoods. The poor quality of the original modem connecting the terminals to the mainframe prompted a user to invent the Pennywhistle modem, Community Memory allowed the user to type messages into a computer terminal after inserting a coin, and offered a pure bulletin board experience with public messages only. It did offer the ability to tag messages with keywords, which the user could use in searches, the system acted primarily in the form of a buy and sell system with the tags taking the place of the more traditional classifications. But users found ways to express themselves outside these bounds, unfortunately, the system was expensive to operate, and when their host machine became unavailable and a new one could not be found, the system closed in January 1975. Similar functionality was available to most mainframe users, which might be considered a sort of ultra-local BBS when used in this fashion. Commercial systems, expressly intended to offer features to the public, became available in the late 1970s. Early modems were very simple devices using acoustic couplers to handle telephone operation. The user would first pick up the phone, dial a number, disconnecting at the end of a call required the user to pick up the handset and return it to the phone. With the introduction of microcomputers with expansion slots, like the S-100 bus machines and Apple II, it possible for the modem to communicate instructions. A number of modems of this sort were available by the late 1970s
12.
Dell
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Dell Inc. is a multinational computer technology company based in Round Rock, Texas, United States, that develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. The company is a subsidiary of Dell Technologies, which was formed by the 2016 merger of Dell Inc. eponymously named after its founder, Michael Dell, the company is one of the largest technological corporations in the world, employing more than 103,300 people worldwide. Dell sells personal computers, servers, data storage devices, network switches, software, computer peripherals, HDTVs, cameras, printers, MP3 players, and electronics built by other manufacturers. Dell was a pure hardware vendor for much of its existence, Dell was listed at number 51 in the Fortune 500 list, until 2014. After going private in 2013, the confidential nature of its financial information prevents the company from being ranked by Fortune. In 2015, it was the third largest PC vendor in the world after Lenovo, Dell is currently the #1 shipper of PC monitors in the world. Dell is the sixth largest company in Texas by total revenue and it is the second largest non-oil company in Texas – behind AT&T – and the largest company in the Greater Austin area. It was a traded company, as well as a component of the NASDAQ-100 and S&P500. On September 7,2016, Dell Inc. acquired EMC Corporation to form Dell Technologies, Michael Dell founded PCs Limited while a student of the University of Texas at Austin. The dorm-room headquartered company sold IBM PC-compatible computers built from stock components, Dell dropped out of school to focus full-time on his fledgling business, after getting $1,000 in expansion-capital from his family. In 1985, the company produced the first computer of its own design, the Turbo PC, Dell appeared in PCs Limited advertisements in national magazines, asking readers to give us a chance to show you what can do. Selling directly to consumers custom-assembled computers according to a selection of options, in 1986, Michael Dell brought in Lee Walker, a 51-year-old venture capitalist, as president and chief operating officer, to serve as mentor and to implement Dells ideas for growing the company. Walker was also instrumental in recruiting members to the board of directors when the company went public in 1988, the company dropped the PC’s Limited name in 1987 to become Dell Computer Corporation and began expanding globally. In June 1988, Dells market capitalization grew by $30 million to $80 million from its June 22 initial public offering of 3.5 million shares at $8.50 a share. In 1992, Fortune magazine included Dell Computer Corporation in its list of the worlds 500 largest companies, making Michael Dell the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company ever. In 1993, to complement its own direct sales channel, Dell planned to sell PCs at big-box retail outlets such as Wal-Mart, bain consultant Kevin Rollins persuaded Michael Dell to pull out of these deals, believing they would be money losers in the long run. Margins at retail were thin at best and Dell left the channel in 1994. Rollins would soon join Dell full-time and eventually become the company President, Dell found an opportunity among PC-savvy individuals who liked the convenience of buying direct, customizing their PC to their means, and having it delivered in days
