1.
Western Digital
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Western Digital Corporation is an American computer data storage company and one of the largest computer hard disk drive manufacturers in the world, along with Seagate Technology. Western Digital Corporation has a history in the electronics industry as an integrated circuit maker. Western Digital was founded on April 23,1970, by Alvin B, phillips, a Motorola employee, as General Digital, initially a manufacturer of MOS test equipment. It rapidly became a speciality semiconductor maker, with capital provided by several individual investors. Around July 1971, it adopted its current name and soon introduced its first product, the oil crisis of the mid-1970s and the bankruptcy of its biggest calculator customer, Bowmar Instrument, changed its fortunes, however, and in 1976 Western Digital declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. After this, Emerson withdrew their support of the company, WDC introduced several landmark products during this time, including the MCP-1600 multi-chip, microcoded CPU. The MCP-1600 was used to implement DECs LSI-11 system and their own Pascal MicroEngine microcomputer which ran the UCSD p-System Version III, the processor was also used in several single-chip floppy disk drive controller chips, notably the FD1771. However, the WD integrated circuit that arguably drove Westerns forward integration was the 1771 chip, despite a price far higher than average CMOS chips of the time, it was very successful and extremely profitable. That controller, the WD1003, became the basis of the ATA interface, throughout most of the 1980s, the family of controllers based on the WD1003 provided the bulk of WDCs revenues and profits, and for a time generated enormous corporate growth. Much of the mid-to-late 1980s saw an effort by WDC to use the profits from their ATA storage controllers to become a general-purpose OEM hardware supplier for the PC industry, as a result, WDC purchased a number of hardware companies. These included graphics cards, core logic chipsets, SCSI controller chips for disk and tape devices and they did well, but storage-related chips and disk controllers were their biggest money makers. 1988 also brought what would be the biggest change in WDCs history and that year, WDC bought the hard drive production assets of PC hardware maker Tandon, the first products of that union under WDCs own name were the Centaur series of ATA and XT attachment drives. By 1991, things were starting to slow down, as the PC industry moved from ST-506 and ESDI drives to ATA and SCSI and that year saw the rise of WDCs Caviar drives, brand new designs that used the latest in embedded servo and computerized diagnostic systems. Eventually, the sales of the Caviar drives resulted in WDC starting to sell some of its divisions. Paradise was sold to Philips, and since disappeared and its networking and floppy drive controller divisions went to SMC Networks and its SCSI chip business went to Future Domain, which was later bought out by market leader Adaptec. Around 1995, the lead that the Caviar drives had enjoyed was eclipsed by newer offerings from other companies, especially Quantum Corp. Products and ideas of time did not go far. The Portfolio drive was a flop, as was the SDX hard disk to CD-ROM interface, in an attempt to turn the tide in 1998, WDC recruited the help of IBM
2.
Hewlett-Packard
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The Hewlett-Packard Company or shortened to Hewlett-Packard was an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Palo Alto, California. The company was founded in a garage in Palo Alto by William Bill Redington Hewlett and David Dave Packard. HP was the worlds leading PC manufacturer from 2007 to Q22013 and it specialized in developing and manufacturing computing, data storage, and networking hardware, designing software and delivering services. HP also had services and consulting business around its products and partner products.4 billion in 2008, in November 2009, HP announced the acquisition of 3Com, with the deal closing on April 12,2010. On April 28,2010, HP announced the buyout of Palm, on September 2,2010, HP won its bidding war for 3PAR with a $33 a share offer, which Dell declined to match. On October 6,2014, Hewlett-Packard announced plans to split the PC and printers business from its enterprise products, the split closed on November 1,2015, and resulted in two publicly traded companies, HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. William Redington Hewlett and David Packard graduated with degrees in engineering from Stanford University in 1935. The company originated in a garage in nearby Palo Alto during a fellowship they had with a past professor, Terman was considered a mentor to them in forming Hewlett-Packard. In 1939, Packard and Hewlett established Hewlett-Packard in Packards garage with a capital investment of US$538. Hewlett and Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett, HP incorporated on August 18,1947, and went public on November 6,1957. Of the many projects they worked on, their very first financially successful product was an audio oscillator. This allowed them to sell the Model 200A for $54.40 when competitors were selling less stable oscillators for over $200, the Model 200 series of generators continued until at least 1972 as the 200AB, still tube-based but improved in design through the years. They worked on technology and artillery shell fuses during World War II. Hewlett-Packards HP Associates division, established around 1960, developed semiconductor devices primarily for internal use, instruments and calculators were some of the products using these devices. HP partnered in the 1960s with Sony and the Yokogawa Electric companies in Japan to develop several high-quality products, the products were not a huge success, as there were high costs in building HP-looking products in Japan. HP and Yokogawa formed a joint venture in 1963 to market HP products in Japan, HP bought Yokogawa Electrics share of Hewlett-Packard Japan in 1999. HP spun off a company, Dynac, to specialize in digital equipment. The name was picked so that the HP logo hp could be turned upside down to be a reverse image of the logo dy of the new company
3.
Maynard, Massachusetts
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Maynard is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. The town is located 25 miles west of Boston, in the MetroWest region of Massachusetts, as of the 2010 census, the town population was 10,106. Maynard was the site of the Assabet Woolen Mill, which produced wool fabrics near the Assabet River for over 100 years, from 1846 to 1950, the American Powder Mills complex extending downstream along the river manufactured gunpowder from 1835 to 1940. Digital Equipment Corporation was headquartered in the buildings in Maynard from 1957 until 1998. The mill complex operated as Clock Tower Place, 2000-2015, renamed mill&main under new ownership as of 2015, The mill complex is currently renting space to office, in the future, the complex will include retail areas and restaurants. At present, there are no plans for residences, Maynard, located on the Assabet River, was incorporated as an independent municipality in 1871. Prior to that it was known as Assabet Village but was still part of the towns of Stow. There were some exploratory town-founding rumblings in 1870, followed by a petition to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, state approval was granted April 19,1871. In return, the new town paid Sudbury and Stow about $23,600, Sudbury got more money because it owned shares in the railroad, plus the wool mill and paper mill were in Sudbury, and more land came from Sudbury. The population of the newly formed town - at 1,820 - was larger than either of its parent towns, formation of new towns carved out of older ones was not unique to Maynard. Hudson, with its cluster of leather processing and shoe-making mills, seceded from Marlborough, in fact, the originally much larger Stow formed in 1683 lost land to Harvard, Shirley, Boxborough, Hudson and Maynard. The community was named after Amory Maynard, the man who, with William Knight, had bought water-rights to the Assabet River, installed a dam and built a large carpet mill in 1846-47. The community grew along with the Assabet Woolen Mill and made the highest percentage of wool for U. S. military uniforms for the Civil War, from 1910 through 1940, the population of Maynard was larger than that of Acton, Stow and Sudbury, combined. There was an attempt in 1902 to change the name from Maynard to Assabet. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts decided to keep the name as Maynard without allowing the topic to come to a vote by the residents, after the woolen mill finally shut down in 1950, local businessmen bought the property and began leasing it as office or manufacturing space. Digital Equipment Corporation moved into the complex in 1957, initially renting only 8,600 square feet, the company grew and grew until it bought the entire complex in 1974, which led to Maynards nickname Mini Computer Capital of the World. DEC remained in Maynard until 1998 when it was purchased by Compaq, the mill complex was nearly empty for almost ten years. The Mill, as locals call it, was renovated in the late 1990s and renamed Clock Tower Place, the site houses many businesses, including the headquarters of Powell Flutes and up to 2014 Monster. com
4.
Programmed Data Processor
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Programmed Data Processor was a series of minicomputers made and marketed by the Digital Equipment Corporation from 1957 to 1990. So instead, Digital used their existing line of logic modules to build a Programmed Data Processor, the various PDP machines can generally be grouped into families based on word length. What is believed to be the first video game, Spacewar. was developed for this machine, along with the first known word processing program for a general-purpose computer, pDP-2 A number reserved for an unbuilt, undesigned 24-bit design. PDP-3 First DEC-designed 36-bit machine, though DEC did not offer it as a product, the only PDP-3 was built by the CIAs Scientific Engineering Institute in Waltham, MA to process radar cross section data for the Lockheed A-12 reconnaissance aircraft in 1960. Architecturally it was essentially a PDP-1 controlling a PDP-1 stretched to 36-bit word width, PDP-4 18-bit machine intended to be a slower, cheaper alternative to the PDP-1, it was not considered commercially successful. All later 18-bit PDP machines were based on a similar, but enlarged instruction set, more powerful, one customer of these early PDP machines was Atomic Energy of Canada. The installation at Chalk River, Ontario included an early PDP-4 with a display system, introduced the instruction set later expanded, in the PDP-8, to handle more bit rotations and to increase the maximum memory size from 4K words to 32K words. Very elegant architecture, introduced the set later used in the PDP-10. PDP-7 Replacement for the PDP-4, DECs first wire-wrapped machine, the first version of Unix, and the first version of B, a predecessor of C, were written for this machine at Bell Labs, as was the first version of MUMPS. PDP-8 12-bit machine with an instruction set, DECs first major commercial success. Many were purchased by schools, university departments, and research laboratories, later models were also used in the DECmate word processor and the VT-78 workstation. LINC-8 A hybrid of the LINC and PDP-8 computers, two instruction sets, PDP-9 Successor to the PDP-7, DECs first micro-programmed machine. It featured an increase of approximately twice that of the PDP-7. The PDP-9 was also one of the first small or medium scale computers to have a monitor system based on DIGITALs own small magnetic tape units. The PDP-9 established minicomputers as the edge of the computer industry. PDP-10 36-bit timesharing machine, and fairly successful over several different models, the instruction set was a slightly elaborated form of that of the PDP-6. PDP-11 The archetypal minicomputer, a 16-bit machine and another success for DEC. The LSI-11 was a four-chip PDP-11 used primarily for embedded systems, the 32-bit VAX series was descended from the PDP-11, and early VAX models had a PDP-11 compatibility mode
5.
VAX
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VAX is a discontinued instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. The VAX-11/780, introduced on October 25,1977, was the first of a range of popular, a 32-bit system with a CISC architecture based on DECs earlier PDP-11, VAX was designed to extend or replace DECs various PDP ISAs. The VAX architectures primary features were virtual addressing and its instruction set. Later versions offloaded the compatibility mode and some of the less used CISC instructions to emulation in the system software. The VAX instruction set was designed to be powerful and orthogonal, when it was introduced, many programs were written in assembly language, so having a programmer-friendly instruction set was important. In time, as programs were written in higher-level language, the instruction set became less visible. One unusual aspect of the VAX instruction set is the presence of register masks at the start of each subprogram and these are arbitrary bit patterns that specify, when control is passed to the subprogram, which registers are to be preserved. Since register masks are a form of data embedded within the executable code and this can complicate optimization techniques that are applied on machine code. The native VAX operating system is Digitals VAX/VMS, the VAX architecture and OpenVMS operating system were engineered concurrently to take maximum advantage of each other, as was the initial implementation of the VAXcluster facility. Other VAX operating systems have included various releases of BSD UNIX up to 4. 3BSD, Ultrix-32, VAXELN, more recently, NetBSD and OpenBSD support various VAX models and some work has been done on porting Linux to the VAX architecture. The first VAX model sold was the VAX-11/780, which was introduced on October 25,1977 at the Digital Equipment Corporations Annual Meeting of Shareholders, bill Strecker, C. Gordon Bells doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, was responsible for the architecture. Many different models with different prices, performance levels, and capacities were subsequently created, VAX superminicomputers were very popular in the early 1980s. For a while the VAX-11/780 was used as a standard in CPU benchmarks, the actual number of instructions executed in 1 second was about 500,000, which led to complaints of marketing exaggeration. The result was the definition of a VAX MIPS, the speed of a VAX-11/780, within the Digital community the term VUP was the more common term, because MIPS do not compare well across different architectures. The related term cluster VUPs was informally used to describe the performance of a VAXcluster. The VAX-11/780 included a subordinate stand-alone LSI-11 computer that performed microcode load, booting and this was dropped from subsequent VAX models. Enterprising VAX-11/780 users could therefore run three different Digital Equipment Corporation operating systems, VMS on the VAX processor, and either RSX-11M or RT-11 on the LSI-11, the VAX went through many different implementations. The original VAX 11/780 was implemented in TTL and filled a cabinet with a single CPU
6.
DEC Alpha
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Alpha was implemented in microprocessors originally developed and fabricated by DEC. These microprocessors were most prominently used in a variety of DEC workstations and servers, several third-party vendors also produced Alpha systems, including PC form factor motherboards. Operating systems that supported Alpha included OpenVMS, Tru64 UNIX, Windows NT, Linux, BSD UNIX, Plan 9 from Bell Labs, as well as the L4Ka, the Alpha architecture was sold, along with most parts of DEC, to Compaq in 1998. Alpha was born out of an earlier RISC project named PRISM, PRISM was intended to be a flexible design, supporting both Unix-like applications, as well as Digitals existing VMS programs from the VAX after minor conversion. A new Unix-like operating system known as Mica would run applications natively, during development, the Palo Alto design team were working on a Unix-only workstation that originally included the PRISM. DEC management doubted the need to produce a new architecture to replace their existing VAX and DECstation lines. By the time of cancellation, however, second-generation RISC chips were offering much better price/performance ratios than the VAX lineup and it was clear a third generation would completely outperform the VAX in all ways, not just on cost. Another study was started to see if a new RISC architecture could be defined that could support the VMS operating system. The new design used most of the basic PRISM concepts, but was re-tuned to allow VMS and VMS programs to run at speed with no conversion at all. The decision was made to upgrade the design to a full 64-bit implementation from PRISMs 32-bit. Eventually that new architecture became Alpha, the primary Alpha instruction set architects were Richard L. Sites and Richard T. Witek. The PRISMs Epicode was developed into the Alphas PALcode, providing an interface to platform-. The main contribution of Alpha to the industry, and the main reason for its performance, was not so much the architecture. At that time, the industry was dominated by automated design. The chip designers at Digital continued pursuing sophisticated manual circuit design in order to deal with the overly complex VAX architecture and these chips caused a renaissance of custom circuit design within the microprocessor design community. Originally, the Alpha processors were designated the DECchip 21x64 series, the first two digits,21 signifies the 21st century, and the last two digits,64 signifies 64 bits. The Alpha was designed as 64-bit from the start and there is no 32-bit version, the middle digit corresponded to the generation of the Alpha architecture. The first few generations of the Alpha chips were some of the most innovative of their time, the first version, the Alpha 21064 or EV4, was the first CMOS microprocessor whose operating frequency rivalled higher-powered ECL minicomputers and mainframes
7.
Hudson, Massachusetts
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Hudson is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. From around 1850 until the last shoe factory burned down in 1968, at one point, the town had 17 shoe factories, many of them powered by the Assabet River, which runs through town. Because of the factories in Hudson, immigrants were attracted to the town. Today, most people are of either Portuguese or Irish descent, with a percentage of people being of French, Italian, English. Hudson is served by the Hudson Public Schools district, in 1650, the area that would become Hudson was part of the Indian Plantation for the Praying Indians. The Praying Indians were evicted from their plantation during King Philips War, by 1701, Barnes had also built a sawmill on the river and had built a bridge across it. Over the next century, Hudson grew slowly, Hudson was part of the town of Marlborough and was known as Feltonville for part of that time, until its incorporation as a separate municipality in 1866. As early as June 1743 Hudson-area residents petitioned to break away from Marlborough and become a separate town, men from the present Hudson area fought with the Minutemen on April 19,1775. In the 1850s, Feltonville received its first railroads, the town of Hudson had two train stations, originally operated by the Central Massachusetts Railroad Company and later by Boston & Maine, until both of them were closed in 1965. This allowed the development of factories, some of the first in the country to use steam power. By 1860, Feltonville had 17 shoe and shoe-related factories, which attracted immigrants from Ireland, Feltonville residents, as Massachusetts recruits fought during the Civil War for the Union, with twenty-five men dying doing so. Two houses, including the Goodale Homestead on Chestnut Street and the Curley home on Brigham Street, have cited as way-stations on the Underground Railroad. In 1865, Hudson-area residents again petitioned for Feltonville to become a separate town and this petition was approved by the Massachusetts General Court on March 19,1866. The new town was named Hudson after Charles Hudson, who donated $500 to the new town for it to build a library, over the next twenty years, Hudson grew as several industries settled in town. The population hovered around 5,500 residents, most of whom lived in houses with small backyard garden plots. The town maintained five volunteer companies, one of which manned the Eureka Hand Pump. On July 4,1894, a fire started by two boys playing with firecrackers disastrously burned down 40 buildings and 5 acres of central Hudson, nobody was hurt, but the damages were estimated at $400,000. The town was rebuilt within a year or two
8.
Intel
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Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California that was founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. It is the worlds largest and highest valued semiconductor chip makers based on revenue, and is the inventor of the x86 series of microprocessors, Intel supplies processors for computer system manufacturers such as Apple, Lenovo, HP, and Dell. Intel Corporation was founded on July 18,1968, by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, the companys name was conceived as portmanteau of the words integrated and electronics. The fact that intel is the term for intelligence information made the name appropriate. Intel was a developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips. Although Intel created the worlds first commercial microprocessor chip in 1971, during the 1990s, Intel invested heavily in new microprocessor designs fostering the rapid growth of the computer industry. The Open Source Technology Center at Intel hosts PowerTOP and LatencyTOP, and supports other projects such as Wayland, Intel Array Building Blocks, and Threading Building Blocks. Client Computing Group – 55% of 2016 revenues – produces hardware components used in desktop, data Center Group – 29% of 2016 revenues – produces hardware components used in server, network, and storage platforms. Internet of Things Group – 5% of 2016 revenues – offers platforms designed for retail, transportation, industrial, buildings, non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group – 4% of 2016 revenues – manufactures NAND flash memory products primarily used in solid-state drives. Intel Security Group – 4% of 2016 revenues – produces software, particularly security, programmable Solutions Group – 3% of 2016 revenues – manufactures programmable semiconductors. In 2016, Dell accounted for 15% of Intels total revenues, Lenovo accounted for 13% of total revenues, in the 1980s, Intel was among the top ten sellers of semiconductors in the world. In 1991, Intel became the biggest chip maker by revenue and has held the position ever since, other top semiconductor companies include TSMC, Advanced Micro Devices, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Toshiba and STMicroelectronics. Competitors in PC chip sets include Advanced Micro Devices, VIA Technologies, Silicon Integrated Systems, however, the cross-licensing agreement is canceled in the event of an AMD bankruptcy or takeover. Some smaller competitors such as VIA Technologies produce low-power x86 processors for small factor computers, however, the advent of such mobile computing devices, in particular, smartphones, has in recent years led to a decline in PC sales. Since over 95% of the worlds smartphones currently use processors designed by ARM Holdings, ARM is also planning to make inroads into the PC and server market. Intel has been involved in disputes regarding violation of antitrust laws. Intel was founded in Mountain View, California in 1968 by Gordon E. Moore, a chemist, and Robert Noyce, arthur Rock helped them find investors, while Max Palevsky was on the board from an early stage. Moore and Noyce had left Fairchild Semiconductor to found Intel, Rock was not an employee, but he was an investor and was chairman of the board
9.
PDP-11
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The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a succession of products in the PDP series. The PDP-11 had several innovative features, and was easier to program than its predecessors through the additional general-purpose registers. The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold and its successor in the mid-range minicomputer niche was the 32-bit VAX-11, named as a nod to the PDP-11s popularity. The PDP-11 is considered by experts to be the most popular minicomputer ever. Design features of the PDP-11 influenced the design of most late-1970s computer systems including the Intel x86, design features of PDP-11 operating systems, as well as other operating systems from Digital Equipment, influenced the design of other operating systems such as CP/M and hence also MS-DOS. For a decade, the PDP-11 was the smallest system that could run Unix and it is commonly stated that the C programming language took advantage of several low-level PDP-11–dependent programming features, albeit not originally by design. In 1967–68, DEC engineers designed a 16-bit, word-addressed machine, management cancelled the project and some of the engineers later left DEC and produced it as the Data General Nova. A subsequent effort, code-named Desk Calculator, looked at a variety of options before choosing what became the 16-bit PDP-11, DECs previous PDP-8 and PDP-9 had 12- and 18-bit words, the PDP-11 family was announced in January 1970 and shipments began early that year. DEC sold over 170,000 PDP-11s in the 1970s, initially manufactured of small-scale transistor–transistor logic, a single-board large scale integration version of the processor was developed in 1975. A two-or-three-chip processor, the J-11 was developed in 1979, the last models of the PDP-11 line were the PDP-11/94 and -11/93 introduced in 1990. The PDP-11 processor architecture has an orthogonal instruction set. For example, instead of such as load and store. More complex instructions such as add likewise can have memory, register, input, most operands can apply any of eight addressing modes to eight registers. The addressing modes provide register, immediate, absolute, relative, deferred, and indexed addressing, use of relative addressing lets a machine-language program be position-independent. Early models of the PDP-11 had no dedicated bus for input/output, an input/output device determined the memory addresses to which it would respond, and specified its own interrupt vector and interrupt priority. DEC openly published the basic Unibus specifications, even offering prototyping bus interface circuit boards, the Unibus made the PDP-11 suitable for custom peripherals. Higher-performance members of the PDP-11 family, starting with the PDP-11/45 Unibus and 11/83 Q-bus systems, instead, memory was interfaced by dedicated circuitry and space in the CPU cabinet, while the Unibus continued to be used for I/O only
10.
Workstation
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A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are connected to a local area network. Workstations offered higher performance than mainstream personal computers, especially with respect to CPU and graphics, memory capacity, and multitasking capability. Typically, the factor is that of a desktop computer, consist of a high resolution display, a keyboard and a mouse at a minimum. Workstations were the first segment of the market to present advanced accessories. The increasing capabilities of mainstream PCs in the late 1990s have blurred the lines somewhat with technical/scientific workstations, perhaps the first computer that might qualify as a workstation was the IBM1620, a small scientific computer designed to be used interactively by a single person sitting at the console. One peculiar feature of the machine was that it lacked any actual arithmetic circuitry, to perform addition, it required a memory-resident table of decimal addition rules. This saved on the cost of logic circuitry, enabling IBM to make it inexpensive, the machine was code-named CADET and rented initially for $1000 a month. In 1965, IBM introduced the IBM1130 scientific computer, which was meant as the successor to the 1620, both of these systems came with the ability to run programs written in Fortran and other languages. Both the 1620 and the 1130 were built into roughly desk-sized cabinets, both were available with add-on disk drives, printers, and both paper-tape and punched-card I/O. A console typewriter for direct interaction was standard on each, early examples of workstations were generally dedicated minicomputers, a system designed to support a number of users would instead be reserved exclusively for one person. A notable example was the PDP-8 from Digital Equipment Corporation, regarded to be the first commercial minicomputer, Lisp Machines were commercialized beginning 1980 by companies like Symbolics, Lisp Machines, Texas Instruments and Xerox. The first computer designed for single-users, with high-resolution graphics facilities was the Xerox Alto developed at Xerox PARC in 1973, other early workstations include the Terak 8510/a, Three Rivers PERQ and the later Xerox Star. Meanwhile, DARPAs VLSI Project created several spinoff graphics products as well, notably the SGI3130 and it was not uncommon to differentiate the target market for the products, with Sun and Apollo considered to be network workstations, while the SGI machines were graphics workstations. As RISC microprocessors became available in the mid-1980s, these were adopted by many workstation vendors, workstations tended to be very expensive, typically several times the cost of a standard PC and sometimes costing as much as a new car. However, minicomputers sometimes cost as much as a house, additionally, workstations, given their more specialized nature, tend to have higher profit margins than commodity-driven PCs. Additionally, the companies that make the products tend to have very good repair/replacement plans, some low-cost workstations are still expensive by PC standards, but offer binary compatibility with higher-end workstations and servers made by the same vendor. This allows software development to take place on low-cost desktop machines, Graphics workstations often shipped with graphics accelerators
11.
Ethernet
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Ethernet /ˈiːθərnɛt/ is a family of computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks, metropolitan area networks and wide area networks. It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 1983 as IEEE802.3, over time, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies such as token ring, FDDI and ARCNET. The original 10BASE5 Ethernet uses coaxial cable as a medium, while the newer Ethernet variants use twisted pair. Over the course of its history, Ethernet data transfer rates have increased from the original 2.94 megabits per second to the latest 100 gigabits per second. The Ethernet standards comprise several wiring and signaling variants of the OSI physical layer in use with Ethernet, systems communicating over Ethernet divide a stream of data into shorter pieces called frames. As per the OSI model, Ethernet provides services up to, since its commercial release, Ethernet has retained a good degree of backward compatibility. Features such as the 48-bit MAC address and Ethernet frame format have influenced other networking protocols, the primary alternative for some uses of contemporary LANs is Wi-Fi, a wireless protocol standardized as IEEE802.11. Ethernet was developed at Xerox PARC between 1973 and 1974 and it was inspired by ALOHAnet, which Robert Metcalfe had studied as part of his PhD dissertation. In 1975, Xerox filed a patent application listing Metcalfe, David Boggs, Chuck Thacker, in 1976, after the system was deployed at PARC, Metcalfe and Boggs published a seminal paper. Metcalfe left Xerox in June 1979 to form 3Com and he convinced Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel, and Xerox to work together to promote Ethernet as a standard. The so-called DIX standard, for Digital/Intel/Xerox, specified 10 Mbit/s Ethernet, with 48-bit destination and source addresses and it was published on September 30,1980 as The Ethernet, A Local Area Network. Data Link Layer and Physical Layer Specifications, version 2 was published in November,1982 and defines what has become known as Ethernet II. Formal standardization efforts proceeded at the time and resulted in the publication of IEEE802.3 on June 23,1983. Ethernet initially competed with two largely proprietary systems, Token Ring and Token Bus, in the process, 3Com became a major company. 3Com shipped its first 10 Mbit/s Ethernet 3C100 NIC in March 1981, an Ethernet adapter card for the IBM PC was released in 1982, and, by 1985, 3Com had sold 100,000. Parallel port based Ethernet adapters were produced for a time, with drivers for DOS, by the early 1990s, Ethernet became so prevalent that it was a must-have feature for modern computers, and Ethernet ports began to appear on some PCs and most workstations. This process was sped up with the introduction of 10BASE-T and its relatively small modular connector. Since then, Ethernet technology has evolved to meet new bandwidth, in addition to computers, Ethernet is now used to interconnect appliances and other personal devices
