1.
Computing
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Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating a mathematical sequence of steps known as an algorithm — e. g. through computers. The field of computing includes computer engineering, software engineering, computer science, information systems, the ACM Computing Curricula 2005 defined computing as follows, In a general way, we can define computing to mean any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computers. For example, an information systems specialist will view computing somewhat differently from a software engineer, regardless of the context, doing computing well can be complicated and difficult. Because society needs people to do computing well, we must think of computing not only as a profession, the fundamental question underlying all computing is What can be automated. The term computing is also synonymous with counting and calculating, in earlier times, it was used in reference to the action performed by mechanical computing machines, and before that, to human computers. Computing is intimately tied to the representation of numbers, but long before abstractions like the number arose, there were mathematical concepts to serve the purposes of civilization. These concepts include one-to-one correspondence, comparison to a standard, the earliest known tool for use in computation was the abacus, and it was thought to have been invented in Babylon circa 2400 BC. Its original style of usage was by lines drawn in sand with pebbles, abaci, of a more modern design, are still used as calculation tools today. This was the first known computer and most advanced system of calculation known to date - preceding Greek methods by 2,000 years. The first recorded idea of using electronics for computing was the 1931 paper The Use of Thyratrons for High Speed Automatic Counting of Physical Phenomena by C. E. Wynn-Williams. Claude Shannons 1938 paper A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits then introduced the idea of using electronics for Boolean algebraic operations, a computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a set of instructions called a computer program. The program has a form that the computer can use directly to execute the instructions. The same program in its source code form, enables a programmer to study. Because the instructions can be carried out in different types of computers, the execution process carries out the instructions in a computer program. Instructions express the computations performed by the computer and they trigger sequences of simple actions on the executing machine. Those actions produce effects according to the semantics of the instructions, computer software or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provides the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it. Software refers to one or more programs and data held in the storage of the computer for some purposes. In other words, software is a set of programs, procedures, algorithms, program software performs the function of the program it implements, either by directly providing instructions to the computer hardware or by serving as input to another piece of software
2.
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
3.
Electrical connector
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An electrical connector, is an electro-mechanical device used to join electrical terminations and create an electrical circuit. Electrical connectors consist of plugs and jacks, the connection may be temporary, as for portable equipment, require a tool for assembly and removal, or serve as a permanent electrical joint between two wires or devices. An adapter can be used to bring together dissimilar connectors. There are hundreds of types of electrical connectors, connectors may join two lengths of flexible copper wire or cable, or connect a wire or cable to an electrical terminal. In computing, a connector can also be known as a physical interface. Cable glands, known as cable connectors in the US, connect wires to devices rather than electrically and are distinct from quick-disconnects performing the latter. It is usually desirable for a connector to be easy to visually, rapid to assemble, require only simple tooling. In some cases an equipment manufacturer might choose a connector specifically because it is not compatible with those other sources. No single connector has all the properties, the proliferation of types is a reflection of differing requirements. Fretting is a failure mode in electrical connectors that have not been specifically designed to prevent it. Many connectors are keyed, with some mechanical component which prevents mating except with a correctly oriented matching connector, some connector housings are designed with locking mechanisms to prevent inadvertent disconnection or poor environmental sealing. Locking mechanism designs include locking levers of various sorts, screw locking, a terminal is a simple type of electrical connector that connects two or more wires to a single connection point. Wire nuts are another type of single point connector, terminal blocks provide a convenient means of connecting individual electrical wires without a splice or physically joining the ends. They are usually used to connect wiring among various items of equipment within an enclosure or to make connections among individually enclosed items. Since terminal blocks are available for a wide range of wire sizes and terminal quantity. One type of terminal block accepts wires that are prepared only by removing a short length of insulation from the end, another type accepts wires that have ring or spade terminal lugs crimped onto the wires. Printed circuit board mounted terminal blocks allow individual wires to be connected to the circuit board, a general type of connector that simply screws or clamps bare wire to a post, such connectors are frequently used in electronic test equipment and audio. Many, but not all binding posts will also accept a banana connector plug, since stripping the insulation from wires is time-consuming, many connectors intended for rapid assembly use insulation-displacement connectors so that insulation need not be removed from the wire
4.
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
5.
Backplane
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A backplane is a group of electrical connectors in parallel with each other, so that each pin of each connector is linked to the same relative pin of all the other connectors, forming a computer bus. It is used as a backbone to connect several printed circuit boards together to make up a computer system. Backplanes commonly use a circuit board, but wire-wrapped backplanes have also been used in minicomputers. Early microcomputer systems like the Altair 8800 used a backplane for the processor, a backplane is generally differentiated from a motherboard by the lack of on-board processing and storage elements. A backplane uses plug-in cards for storage and processing, backplanes are normally used in preference to cables because of their greater reliability. In a cabled system, the cables need to be flexed every time that a card is added or removed from the system, a backplane does not suffer from this problem, so its service life is limited only by the longevity of its connectors. For example, the DIN41612 connectors used in the VMEbus system can withstand 50 to 500 insertions and removals, to transmit information, Serial Back-Plane technology uses a low voltage differential signaling transmission method for sending information. These cable sets have a board located in the computer, an expansion board in the remote backplane. Backplanes have grown in complexity from the simple Industry Standard Architecture or S-100 style where all the connectors were connected to a common bus, due to limitations inherent in the Peripheral Component Interconnect specification for driving slots, backplanes are now offered as passive and active. True passive backplanes offer no active bus driving circuitry, any desired arbitration logic is placed on the daughter cards. Active backplanes include chips which buffer the various signals to the slots, the distinction between the two isnt always clear, but may become an important issue if a whole system is expected to not have a single point of failure. A passive backplane, even if it is single, is not usually considered a SPOF, active backplanes are more complicated and thus have a non-zero risk of malfunction. While there are a few motherboards that offer more than 8 slots, in addition, as technology progresses, the availability and number of a particular slot type may be limited in terms of what is currently offered by motherboard manufacturers. However, backplane architecture is somewhat unrelated to the SBC technology plugged into it, there are some limitations to what can be constructed, in that the SBC chip set and processor have to provide the capability of supporting the slot types. In addition, virtually an unlimited number of slots can be provided with 20, including the SBC slot, as a practical though not an absolute limit. Thus, a PICMG backplane can provide any number and any mix of ISA, PCI, PCI-X, for example, an SBC with the latest i7 processor could interface with a backplane providing up to 19 ISA slots to drive legacy I/O cards. Some backplanes are constructed with slots for connecting to devices on both sides, and are referred to as midplanes and this ability to plug cards into either side of a midplane is often useful in larger systems made up primarily of modules attached to the midplane. Midplanes are often used in computers, mostly in blade servers, where server blades reside on one side, orthogonal midplanes connect vertical cards on one side to horizontal boards on the other side
6.
Riser card
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A riser card is a printed circuit board that picks up a multitude of signal lines via a single connector on a mainboard and distributes them via dedicated connectors on the card. A riser card is a board that plugs into the system board, because it rises above the system board, it enables you to connect additional adapters to the system in an orientation that is parallel to the system board and save space within the system case. Riser cards are used in rack-mount server and industrial computer applications, in 1U and 2U rack-mount computer systems, riser cards are integrated into the system to allow the addition of feature cards in a horizontal position. This is due to the limitations of a 1U and 2U system which are 1.75 and 3.5 respectively. Typically, a 1U system uses a 1U single slot riser card whereas a 2U system uses a 2U3 slot riser card
7.
Bus (computing)
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In computer architecture, a bus is a communication system that transfers data between components inside a computer, or between computers. This expression covers all related components and software, including communication protocols. Modern computer buses can use both parallel and bit serial connections, and can be wired in either a multidrop or daisy chain topology, or connected by switched hubs, as in the case of USB. An early computer might contain a hand-wired CPU of vacuum tubes, a drum for main memory. In both examples, computer buses of one form or another move data between all of these devices, in most traditional computer architectures, the CPU and main memory tend to be tightly coupled. In most cases, the CPU and memory share signalling characteristics, the bus connecting the CPU and memory is one of the defining characteristics of the system, and often referred to simply as the system bus. It is possible to allow peripherals to communicate with memory in the same fashion and this is commonly accomplished through some sort of standardized electrical connector, several of these forming the expansion bus or local bus. However, as the differences between the CPU and peripherals varies widely, some solution is generally needed to ensure that peripherals do not slow overall system performance. Many CPUs feature a set of pins similar to those for communicating with memory. Others use smart controllers to place the data directly in memory, most modern systems combine both solutions, where appropriate. As the number of potential peripherals grew, using a card for every peripheral became increasingly untenable. This has led to the introduction of bus systems designed specifically to support multiple peripherals, common examples are the SATA ports in modern computers, which allow a number of hard drives to be connected without the need for a card. However, these systems are generally too expensive to implement in low-end devices. This has led to the development of a number of low-performance bus systems for these solutions. All such examples may be referred to as peripheral buses, although this terminology is not universal, in modern systems the performance difference between the CPU and main memory has grown so great that increasing amounts of high-speed memory is built directly into the CPU, known as a cache. These system buses are used to communicate with most other peripherals, through adaptors. Such systems are more similar to multicomputers, communicating over a bus rather than a network. In these cases, expansion buses are entirely separate and no longer share any architecture with their host CPU, what would have formerly been a system bus is now often known as a front-side bus
8.
Central processing unit
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The computer industry has used the term central processing unit at least since the early 1960s. The form, design and implementation of CPUs have changed over the course of their history, most modern CPUs are microprocessors, meaning they are contained on a single integrated circuit chip. An IC that contains a CPU may also contain memory, peripheral interfaces, some computers employ a multi-core processor, which is a single chip containing two or more CPUs called cores, in that context, one can speak of such single chips as sockets. Array processors or vector processors have multiple processors that operate in parallel, there also exists the concept of virtual CPUs which are an abstraction of dynamical aggregated computational resources. Early computers such as the ENIAC had to be rewired to perform different tasks. Since the term CPU is generally defined as a device for software execution, the idea of a stored-program computer was already present in the design of J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchlys ENIAC, but was initially omitted so that it could be finished sooner. On June 30,1945, before ENIAC was made, mathematician John von Neumann distributed the paper entitled First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC and it was the outline of a stored-program computer that would eventually be completed in August 1949. EDVAC was designed to perform a number of instructions of various types. Significantly, the programs written for EDVAC were to be stored in high-speed computer memory rather than specified by the wiring of the computer. This overcame a severe limitation of ENIAC, which was the considerable time, with von Neumanns design, the program that EDVAC ran could be changed simply by changing the contents of the memory. Early CPUs were custom designs used as part of a larger, however, this method of designing custom CPUs for a particular application has largely given way to the development of multi-purpose processors produced in large quantities. This standardization began in the era of discrete transistor mainframes and minicomputers and has accelerated with the popularization of the integrated circuit. The IC has allowed increasingly complex CPUs to be designed and manufactured to tolerances on the order of nanometers, both the miniaturization and standardization of CPUs have increased the presence of digital devices in modern life far beyond the limited application of dedicated computing machines. Modern microprocessors appear in electronic devices ranging from automobiles to cellphones, the so-called Harvard architecture of the Harvard Mark I, which was completed before EDVAC, also utilized a stored-program design using punched paper tape rather than electronic memory. Relays and vacuum tubes were used as switching elements, a useful computer requires thousands or tens of thousands of switching devices. The overall speed of a system is dependent on the speed of the switches, tube computers like EDVAC tended to average eight hours between failures, whereas relay computers like the Harvard Mark I failed very rarely. In the end, tube-based CPUs became dominant because the significant speed advantages afforded generally outweighed the reliability problems, most of these early synchronous CPUs ran at low clock rates compared to modern microelectronic designs. Clock signal frequencies ranging from 100 kHz to 4 MHz were very common at this time, the design complexity of CPUs increased as various technologies facilitated building smaller and more reliable electronic devices
9.
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
10.
Communications protocol
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These are the rules or standard that defines the syntax, semantics and synchronization of communication and possible error recovery methods. Protocols may be implemented by hardware, software, or a combination of both, Communicating systems use well-defined formats for exchanging various messages. Each message has a meaning intended to elicit a response from a range of possible responses pre-determined for that particular situation. The specified behavior is independent of how it is to be implemented. Communications protocols have to be agreed upon by the parties involved, to reach agreement, a protocol may be developed into a technical standard. Multiple protocols often describe different aspects of a single communication, a group of protocols designed to work together are known as a protocol suite, when implemented in software they are a protocol stack. Most recent protocols are assigned by the IETF for Internet communication, the ITU-T handles telecommunications protocols and formats for the PSTN. As the PSTN and Internet converge, the two sets of standards are also being driven towards convergence, the nature of a communication, the actual data exchanged and any state-dependent behaviors, is defined by these specifications. In digital computing systems, the rules can be expressed by algorithms, expressing the algorithms in a portable programming language makes the protocol software operating-system independent. Operating systems usually contain a set of cooperating processes that manipulate shared data to communicate each other. This communication is governed by protocols, which can be embedded in the process code itself. In contrast, because there is no memory, communicating systems have to communicate with each other using a shared transmission medium. Transmission is not necessarily reliable, and individual systems may use different hardware or operating systems, to implement a networking protocol, the protocol software modules are interfaced with a framework implemented on the machines operating system. This framework implements the functionality of the operating system. The best known frameworks are the TCP/IP model and the OSI model and this gave rise to the concept of layered protocols which nowadays forms the basis of protocol design. Systems typically do not use a protocol to handle a transmission. Instead they use a set of cooperating protocols, sometimes called a family or protocol suite. Some of the best known protocol suites are TCP/IP, IPX/SPX, X.25, AX.25, the protocols can be arranged based on functionality in groups, for instance there is a group of transport protocols
11.
Integrated circuit
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An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece of semiconductor material, normally silicon. The ICs mass production capability, reliability and building-block approach to circuit design ensured the rapid adoption of standardized ICs in place of using discrete transistors. ICs are now used in all electronic equipment and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, mobile phones, and other home appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the small size. These advances, roughly following Moores law, allow a computer chip of 2016 to have millions of times the capacity, ICs have two main advantages over discrete circuits, cost and performance. Cost is low because the chips, with all their components, are printed as a unit by photolithography rather than being constructed one transistor at a time, furthermore, packaged ICs use much less material than discrete circuits. Performance is high because the ICs components switch quickly and consume little power because of their small size, the main disadvantage of ICs is the high cost to design them and fabricate the required photomasks. This high initial cost means ICs are only practical when high production volumes are anticipated, Circuits meeting this definition can be constructed using many different technologies, including thin-film transistor, thick film technology, or hybrid integrated circuit. However, in general usage integrated circuit has come to refer to the single-piece circuit construction originally known as a integrated circuit. Jacobi disclosed small and cheap hearing aids as typical industrial applications of his patent, an immediate commercial use of his patent has not been reported. The idea of the circuit was conceived by Geoffrey Dummer. Dummer presented the idea to the public at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington and he gave many symposia publicly to propagate his ideas, and unsuccessfully attempted to build such a circuit in 1956. A precursor idea to the IC was to create small ceramic squares, Components could then be integrated and wired into a bidimensional or tridimensional compact grid. This idea, which seemed very promising in 1957, was proposed to the US Army by Jack Kilby, however, as the project was gaining momentum, Kilby came up with a new, revolutionary design, the IC. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as a body of semiconductor material … wherein all the components of the circuit are completely integrated. The first customer for the new invention was the US Air Force, Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit. His work was named an IEEE Milestone in 2009, half a year after Kilby, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor developed his own idea of an integrated circuit that solved many practical problems Kilbys had not. Noyces design was made of silicon, whereas Kilbys chip was made of germanium, Noyce credited Kurt Lehovec of Sprague Electric for the principle of p–n junction isolation, a key concept behind the IC
12.
Floating-point unit
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A floating-point unit is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square root, some systems can also perform various transcendental functions such as exponential or trigonometric calculations, though in most modern processors these are done with software library routines. This could be an integrated circuit, an entire circuit board or a cabinet. Where floating-point calculation hardware has not been provided, floating point calculations are done in software, emulation can be implemented on any of several levels, in the CPU as microcode, as an operating system function, or in user space code. When only integer functionality is available the CORDIC floating point emulation methods are most commonly used, in most modern computer architectures, there is some division of floating-point operations from integer operations. This division varies significantly by architecture, some, like the Intel x86 have dedicated floating-point registers, in earlier superscalar architectures without general out-of-order execution, floating-point operations were sometimes pipelined separately from integer operations. Since the early 1990s, many microprocessors for desktops and servers have more than one FPU, the modular architecture of Bulldozer microarchitecture uses a special FPU named FlexFPU, which uses simultaneous multithreading. Each physical integer core, two per module, is threaded, in contrast with Intels Hyperthreading, where two virtual simultaneous threads share the resources of a single physical core. Some floating-point hardware only supports the simplest operations - addition, subtraction, but even the most complex floating-point hardware has a finite number of operations it can support - for example, none of them directly support arbitrary-precision arithmetic. When a CPU is executing a program calls for a floating-point operation that is not directly supported by the hardware. In systems without any floating-point hardware, the CPU emulates it using a series of simpler fixed-point arithmetic operations that run on the arithmetic logic unit. The software that lists the series of operations to emulate floating-point operations is often packaged in a floating-point library. In some cases, FPUs may be specialized, and divided between simpler floating-point operations and more complicated operations, like division, in some cases, only the simple operations may be implemented in hardware or microcode, while the more complex operations are implemented as software. In the 1980s, it was common in IBM PC/compatible microcomputers for the FPU to be separate from the CPU. It would only be purchased if needed to speed up or enable math-intensive programs, the IBM PC, XT, and most compatibles based on the 8088 or 8086 had a socket for the optional 8087 coprocessor. Other companies manufactured co-processors for the Intel x86 series, coprocessors were available for the Motorola 68000 family, the 68881 and 68882. These were common in Motorola 68020/68030-based workstations like the Sun 3 series, there are also add-on FPUs coprocessor units for microcontroller units /single-board computer, which serve to provide floating-point arithmetic capability. These add-on FPUs are host-processor-independent, possess their own programming requirements and are provided with their own integrated development environments
13.
PDP-8
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The 12-bit PDP-8, produced by Digital Equipment Corporation, was the first successful commercial minicomputer. DEC introduced it on March 22,1965 priced at $18,500 and eventually more than 50,000 systems. The PDP-8 was the first computer to be sold for under $20,000 and it was the first widely sold computer in the DEC PDP series of computers. The chief engineer who designed the initial version of the PDP-8 was Edson de Castro, the earliest PDP-8 model uses diode–transistor logic, packaged on flip chip cards, and is about the size of a small household refrigerator. This was followed in 1966 by the PDP-8/S, available in desktop, using a one-bit serial arithmetic logic unit implementation, allowed the PDP-8/S to be smaller, less expensive and slower than the original PDP-8. The PDP-8/S was about 20% of the cost and about 10% of the performance of the PDP-8, the only mass storage peripheral available for the PDP-8/S was the DF32 disk. Later systems returned to a faster, fully parallel implementation but use less costly transistor-transistor logic MSI logic. Most surviving PDP-8s are from this era, the PDP-8/E is common, and well-regarded because so many types of I/O devices were available for it. It was often configured as a general-purpose computer, the last commercial PDP-8 models introduced in 1979 were called CMOS-8s. They use custom complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor microprocessors and they were not priced competitively, and the offering failed. The IBM PC in 1981 cemented the doom of the CMOS-8s by making a legitimate, Intersil sold the integrated circuits commercially through to 1982 as the Intersil 6100 family. By virtue of their CMOS technology they had low power requirements and were used in some embedded military systems, the PDP-8 combined low cost, simplicity, expandability, and careful engineering for value. The greatest historical significance was that the PDP-8s low cost and high volume made a computer available to new people for many new uses. Its continuing significance is as a example of value-engineered computer design. The low complexity brought other costs and it made programming cumbersome, as is seen in the examples in this article and from the discussion of pages and fields. Some ambitious programming projects failed to fit in memory or developed design defects that could not be solved, as design advances reduced the costs of logic and memory, the programmers time became relatively more important. Subsequent computer designs emphasized ease of programming, typically using a larger, eventually, most machine-language programming came to be generated by compilers and report generators. The PDP-8 used ideas from several 12-bit predecessors, most notably the LINC designed by W. A. Clark, the architecture has a simple programmed I/O bus, plus a DMA channel
14.
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
15.
Micral
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Micral is a series of microcomputers produced by the French company Réalisation dÉtudes Électroniques, beginning with the Micral N in early 1973. According to the Computer History Museum, the Micral N was the earliest commercial, alain Perrier of INRA was looking for a computer for process control in his crop evapotranspiration measurements. The software was developed by Benchetrit, beckmann designed the I/O boards and controllers for peripheral magnetic storage. Lacombe was responsible for the system, I/O high speed channel, power supply. Gernelle invented the Micral N, which was smaller than existing minicomputers. The January 1974 Users Manual called it the first of a new generation of mini-computer whose principal feature is its low cost. It does not aim to be an universal mini-computer, the software, the ROM-based MIC01 monitor and the ASMIC01 assembler, was written on an Intertechnique Multi-8 minicomputer using a cross assembler. The computer was based on an Intel 8008 microprocessor clocked at 500 kHz and it had a backplane bus, called the Pluribus with 74-pin connector. 14 boards could be plugged in a Pluribus, with two Pluribus, the Micral N could support up to 24 boards. The computer used MOS memory instead of core memory, the Micral N could support parallel and serial input/output. It had 8 levels of interrupt and a stack, the computer was programmed with punched tape, and used a teleprinter or modem for I/O. The front panel console was optional, offering customers the option of designing their own console to match a particular application. It was delivered to the INRA in January 1973, and commercialized in February 1973 for FF8,500 making it a replacement for minicomputers which augured the era of the PC. France had produced the first microcomputer, a year would pass before the first North American microcomputer, SCELBI, was advertised in the March 1974 issue of QST, an amateur radio magazine. Indeed, INRA was originally planning to use PDP-8 computers for process control, an 8-inch floppy disk reader was added to the Micral in December 1973, following a command of the Commissariat à lEnergie Atomique. This was made possible by the pile-canal, a buffer that could accept one megabyte per second, in 1974, a keyboard and screen were fitted to the Micral computers. A hard disk became available in 1975, in 1979, the Micral 8031 D was equipped with a 5 1/4 inches hard disk of 5 Megabytes made by Shugart. Following the April 1974 introduction of the Intel 8080, R2E introduced the second and third Micral models, 8080-based at 1 MHz, in November 1975, R2E signed Warner & Swasey Company as the exclusive manufacturer and marketer of the Micral line in the United States and Canada
16.
Altair 8800
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The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer designed in 1974 by MITS and based on the Intel 8080 CPU. The designers hoped to sell a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, the Altair also appealed to individuals and businesses that just wanted a computer and purchased the assembled version. The Altair is widely recognized as the spark that ignited the microcomputer revolution as the first commercially successful personal computer, the model rocket kits were a modest success and MITS wanted to try a kit that would appeal to more hobbyists. The November 1970 issue of Popular Electronics featured the Opticom, a kit from MITS that would send voice over an LED light beam, Mims and Cagle were losing interest in the kit business so Roberts bought his partners out, then began developing a calculator kit. Electronic Arrays had just announced a set of six LSI integrated circuit chips that would make a four-function calculator, the MITS816 calculator kit used the chip set and was featured on the November 1971 cover of Popular Electronics. This calculator kit sold for $175, Forrest Mims wrote the assembly manual for this kit and many others over the next several years. He often accepted a copy of the kit as payment, the calculator was successful and was followed by several improved models. The MITS1440 calculator was featured in the July 1973 issues of Radio-Electronics and it had a 14-digit display, memory, and square root function. The kit sold for $200 and the version was $250. MITS later developed a unit that would connect to the 816 or 1440 calculator. In addition to calculators, MITS made a line of test equipment kits and these included an IC tester, a waveform generator, a digital voltmeter, and several other instruments. To keep up with the demand, MITS moved into a building at 6328 Linn NE in Albuquerque in 1973. They installed a wave soldering machine and a line at the new location. In 1972, Texas Instruments developed its own calculator chip and started selling complete calculators at less than half the price of other commercial models, MITS and many other companies were devastated by this, and Roberts struggled to reduce his quarter-million-dollar debt. In January 1972, Popular Electronics merged with another Ziff-Davis magazine, the change in editorial staff upset many of their authors, and they started writing for a competing magazine, Radio-Electronics. In 1972 and 1973, some of the best construction projects appeared in Radio-Electronics, in 1974, Art Salsberg became editor of Popular Electronics. It was Salsbergs goal to reclaim the lead in electronics projects and he was impressed with Don Lancasters TV Typewriter article and wanted computer projects for Popular Electronics. Don Lancaster did an ASCII keyboard for Popular Electronics in April 1974 and they were evaluating a computer trainer project by Jerry Ogdin when the Mark-8 8008-based computer by Jonathan Titus appeared on the July 1974 cover of Radio-Electronics
17.
S-100 bus
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The S-100 bus or Altair bus, IEEE696-1983, was an early computer bus designed in 1974 as a part of the Altair 8800. The S-100 bus was the first industry standard bus for the microcomputer industry. S-100 computers, consisting of processor and peripheral cards, were produced by a number of manufacturers, the S-100 bus formed the basis for homebrew computers whose builders implemented drivers for CP/M and MP/M. These S-100 microcomputers ran the gamut from hobbyist toy to small business workstation and were common in home computers until the advent of the IBM PC. The S-100 bus is a passive backplane of 100-pin printed circuit board edge connectors wired in parallel, circuit cards measuring 5 × 10-inches serving the functions of CPU, memory, or I/O interface plugged into these connectors. The bus signal definitions closely follow those of an 8080 microprocessor system, the 100 lines of the S-100 bus can be grouped into four types, 1) Power, 2) Data, 3) Address, and 4) Clock and control. Power supplied on the bus was unregulated +8 V and ±16 V, designed to be regulated on the cards to +5 V, the onboard voltage regulation was typically performed by devices of the 78xx family. These were linear regulators which commonly were mounted on heat sinks, the bi-directional 8-bit data bus of the Intel 8080 was split into two unidirectional 8-bit data buses. Later these two 8-bit busses would be combined to support a 16-bit data width for more advanced processors, the address bus was 16-bits wide in the initial implementation and later extended to 24-bits wide. A bus control signal could put these lines in a condition to allow direct memory access. The Cromemco Dazzler, for example, was an early S-100 card that retrieved digital images from memory using direct memory access, Clock and control signals were used to manage the traffic on the bus. For example the DO Disable line would tristate the address lines during direct memory access, unassigned lines of the original bus specification were later assigned to support more advanced processors. For example, the Zilog Z-80 processor had an interrupt line that the Intel 8080 processor did not. One unassigned line of the S-100 bus then was reassigned to support the non-maskable interrupt request, during the design of the Altair, the hardware required to make a usable machine was not available in time for the January 1975 launch date. The designer, Ed Roberts, also had the problem of the taking up too much room. Attempting to avoid problems, he placed the existing components in a case with additional slots. The backplane was split into four separate cards, with the CPU on a fifth and he then looked for an inexpensive source of connectors, and he came across a supply of military surplus 100-pin edge connectors. The 100-pin bus was created by a draftsman, who selected the connector from a parts catalog
18.
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
19.
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
20.
Industry Standard Architecture
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Industry Standard Architecture is a retronym term for the 16-bit internal bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, originally referred to as the PC/AT-bus it was also termed I/O Channel by IBM. The 16-bit ISA bus was used with 32-bit processors for several years. An attempt to extend it to 32 bits, called Extended Industry Standard Architecture, was not very successful, later buses such as VESA Local Bus and PCI were used instead, often along with ISA slots on the same mainboard. Derivatives of the AT bus structure were and still are used in ATA/IDE, the PCMCIA standard, Compact Flash, the PC/104 bus, compaq created the term Industry Standard Architecture to replace PC compatible. The ISA bus was developed by a led by Mark Dean at IBM as part of the IBM PC project in 1981. It originated as an 8-bit system, the newer 16-bit standard, the IBM AT bus, was introduced in 1984. Therefore, the ISA bus was synchronous with the CPU clock, designed to connect peripheral cards to the motherboard, ISA allows for bus mastering although only the first 16 MB of main memory are available for direct access. The 8-bit bus ran at 4.77 MHz, while the 16-bit bus operated at 6 or 8 MHz IBM RT/PC also used the 16-bit bus. It was also available on some non-IBM compatible machines such as Motorola 68k-based Apollo and Amiga 3000 workstations, the short-lived AT&T Hobbit and later PowerPC based BeBox. MCA had many features that would appear in PCI, the successor of ISA. The system was far more advanced than the AT bus, and computer manufacturers responded with the Extended Industry Standard Architecture and later, in fact, VLB used some electronic parts originally intended for MCA because component manufacturers already were equipped to manufacture them. Both EISA and VLB were backwards-compatible expansions of the AT bus, users of ISA-based machines had to know special information about the hardware they were adding to the system. While a handful of devices were essentially plug-n-play, this was rare, users frequently had to configure several parameters when adding a new device, such as the IRQ line, I/O address, or DMA channel. MCA had done away with this complication, and PCI actually incorporated many of the ideas first explored with MCA, in reality, ISA PnP can be troublesome, and did not become well-supported until the architecture was in its final days. PCI slots were the first physically incompatible expansion ports to directly squeeze ISA off the motherboard, at first, motherboards were largely ISA, including a few PCI slots. By the mid-1990s, the two types were roughly balanced, and ISA slots soon were in the minority of consumer systems. Which was why the software compatible LPC bus was created, in late 2008, even floppy disk drives and serial ports were disappearing, and the extinction of vestigial ISA from chipsets was on the horizon
21.
IBM Personal Computer XT
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The IBM Personal Computer XT, often shortened to the IBM XT, PC XT, or simply XT, is a version of the IBM PC with a built-in hard drive. It was released as IBM Machine Type number 5160 on March 8,1983, apart from the hard drive, it was essentially the same as the original PC, with only minor improvements. The XT was mainly intended as an enhanced IBM PC for business users, later floppy-only models would effectively replace the original model 5150 PC. A corresponding 3270 PC featuring 3270 terminal emulation was released later in October 1983, the motherboard had an Intel 8088 microprocessor running at 4.77 MHz, with a socket for an optional 8087 math coprocessor. IBM recognized soon after the IBM PCs release in 1981 that its five 8-bit I/O channel expansion slots were insufficient. An internal IBM publication stated in October 1981 about the number that In my opinion, it could be a problem, a BYTE Magazine article commented that DOS2.0 is more revolutionary and advanced than the computer itself. Unlike many hard disk systems on microcomputers at the time, the XT was able to boot directly off the drive, aside from the hard disk, a serial port card was also standard equipment on the XT, all other cards being optional. By the end of 1983, the XT was neck-and-neck with the original PC for sales, two were behind the floppy drive and shorter than PCs slots. The other six fit into the space as the PCs five slots. Most PC cards would not fit into the two slots, and some would not fit into the six standard-length, but narrower, slots. The floppy and hard drive adapters, the serial port card, the basic specification was soon upgraded to have 256 KB of RAM as standard. Expansion slots could be used for I/O devices or for memory expansion, available Video cards were initially the Monochrome Display Adapter and Color Graphics Adapter, with Enhanced Graphics Adapter and Professional Graphics Controller becoming available in 1984. The XT had a case similar to that of the IBM PC. It weighed 32 pounds and was approximately 19.5 inches wide by 16 inches deep by 5.5 inches high, the power supply of the original XT sold in the US was configured for 120 V AC only and could not be used with 240 V mains supplies. XTs with 240V-compatible power supplies were sold in international markets. Both were rated at 130 Watts, the operating system usually sold with the XT was PC DOS2.0 or, by the time the XT was discontinued in early 1987, DOS3.2. Like the original PC, the XT came with IBM BASIC in its ROM, the XT BIOS also displayed a memory count during the POST, unlike the PC. The XT was discontinued in the spring of 1987, replaced by the PS/2 Model 30, XT motherboards came in two different versions
22.
Micro Channel architecture
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Micro Channel architecture, or the Micro Channel bus, was a proprietary 16- or 32-bit parallel computer bus introduced by IBM in 1987 which was used on PS/2 and other computers until the mid-1990s. Its name is abbreviated as MCA, although not by IBM. In IBM products, it superseded the ISA bus and was subsequently superseded by the PCI bus architecture. The development of Micro Channel was driven by both technical and business pressures, the IBM AT bus, which later became known as the Industry Standard Architecture bus had a number of technical design limitations, including, A slow bus speed. A limited number of interrupts, fixed in hardware, a limited number of I/O device addresses, also fixed in hardware. Hardwired and complex configuration with no conflict resolution, deep links to the architecture of the 80x86 chip family In addition, it suffered from other problems, Poor grounding and power distribution. Undocumented bus interface standards that varied between systems and manufacturers and these limitations became more serious as the range of tasks and peripherals, and the number of manufacturers for IBM PC-compatibles, grew. It was thought that by creating a new standard, IBM would regain control of standards via the required licensing, as patents can take three years or more to be granted, however, only those relating to ISA could be licensed when Micro Channel was announced. Patents on important Micro Channel features, such as Plug and Play automatic configuration, were not granted to IBM until after PCI had replaced Micro Channel in the marketplace, the Micro Channel architecture was designed by engineer Chet Heath. A lot of the Micro Channel cards that were developed used the CHIPS P82C612 MCA interface controller, the Micro Channel was primarily a 32-bit bus, but the system also supported a 16-bit mode designed to lower the cost of connectors and logic in Intel-based machines like the IBM PS/2. In time, memory moved to the CPUs local bus, thereby eliminating the problem, another connector extension was included for graphics cards. This extension was used for analog output from the video card, the advantage of this was that Micro Channel system boards could have a basic VGA or MCGA graphics system on board, and higher level graphics could then share the same port. Micro Channel cards also featured a unique, 16-bit software-readable ID, the BIOS and/or OS can read IDs, compare against a list of known cards, and perform automatic system configuration to suit. This led to boot failures whereby an older BIOS would not recognize a newer card, in turn, this required IBM to release updated Reference Disks on a regular basis. A fairly complete list of known IDs is available, to accompany these reference disks were ADF files which were read by setup which in turn provided configuration information for the card. The ADF was a text file, containing information about the cards memory addressing. In this critical area, Micro Channel architectures biggest advantage was also its greatest disadvantage, in practice, however, this meant that the user must keep that same floppy disk matched to that PC. For a small company with a few PCs, this was annoying, but for large organizations with hundreds or even thousands of PCs, permanently matching each PC with its own floppy disk was logistically unlikely or impossible
23.
Compaq
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Compaq was a company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compatible computers, being the first company to reverse engineer the IBM Personal Computer. It rose to become the largest supplier of PC systems during the 1990s before being overtaken by HP in 2001, struggling in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble bust, as well as with a risky acquisition of DEC, Compaq was acquired for US$25 billion by HP in 2002. The Compaq brand remained in use by HP for lower-end systems until 2013 when it was discontinued, the company was formed by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto—former Texas Instruments senior managers. Murto departed Compaq in 1987, while Canion and Harris left under a shakeup in 1991, prior to its takeover the company was headquartered in a facility in northwest unincorporated Harris County, Texas, that now continues as HPs largest United States facility. Compaq was founded in February 1982 by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto, the three of them had left due to lack of faith and loss of confidence in TIs management, and initially considered but ultimately decided against starting a chain of Mexican restaurants. Each invested $1,000 to form the company, which was founded with the temporary name Gateway Technology, the name COMPAQ was said to be derived from Compatibility and Quality but this explanation was an afterthought. The name was chosen from many suggested by Ogilvy and Mather, the first Compaq PC was sketched out on a placemat by Canion while dining with the founders in a Houston pie shop. Their first venture came from Benjamin M. Rosen and Sevin Rosen Funds who helped the fledgling company secure $1.5 million to produce their initial computer. Overall, the managed to raise $25 million from venture capitalists. In contrast to Dell Computer and Gateway 2000, Compaq hired veteran engineers with an average of 15 years experience, under Canions direction, Compaq sold computers only through dealers to avoid potential competition that a direct sales channel would foster, which helped foster loyalty among resellers. By giving dealers considerable leeway in pricing Compaqs offerings, either a significant markup for more profits or discount for more sales, dealers had a major incentive to advertise Compaq. During its first year of sales, the company sold 53,000 PCs for sales of $111 million, Compaq went public in 1983 on the NYSE and raised $67 million. In 1986, it enjoyed record sales of $329 million from 150,000 PCs, in 1987, Compaq hit the $1 billion revenue mark, taking the least amount of time to reach that milestone. By 1991, Compaq held the fifth spot in the PC market with $3 billion in sales that year. Two key marketing executives in Compaqs early years, Jim DArezzo, other key executives responsible for the companys meteoric growth in the late 80s and early 90s were Ross A. In the United States, Brendan A. Mac McLoughlin led the companys sales organization after starting up the Western U. S. The soft-spoken Canion was popular with employees and the culture that he built helped Compaq to attract the best talent, at semi-annual meetings, turnout was high as any employee could ask questions to senior managers
24.
VESA Local Bus
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The VESA Local Bus is a short-lived expansion bus that was mostly used in personal computers. VESA Local Bus worked alongside the ISA bus, acting as a conduit for memory-mapped I/O and DMA, while the ISA bus handled interrupts. In the early 1990s, the I/O bandwidth of the ISA bus was becoming a bottleneck to PC graphics performance. The need for faster graphics was being driven by increasing adoption of graphical user interfaces in PC operating systems, the competing EISA open standard was still unable to offer enough performance improvement over ISA to provide a solution. However, as these manufacturer-specific solutions were not standardized, there were no provisions for providing interoperability between them and this led to the VESA consortium proposing and defining a Local Bus standard in 1992. A VLB slot itself was simply an additional edge connector placed in-line with the traditional ISA or EISA connector, the result was a normal ISA or EISA slot being additionally capable of accepting VLB-compatible cards. Traditional ISA cards remained compatible as they would not have pins past the normal ISA or EISA portion of the slot. The reverse was also true – VLB cards were by necessity quite long in order to reach the VLB connector, and were reminiscent of older full-length expansion cards from the earlier IBM XT era. Ironically, the VLB portion of a slot looked similar to an IBM MCA slot, as indeed it was the same physical 116-pin connector used by MCA cards, rotated by 180 degrees. The IBM MCA standard had not been as popular as IBM expected and there was a surplus of the connector, making it inexpensive. The VESA Local Bus was designed as a solution to the problem of the ISA buss limited bandwidth. As VLB fundamentally tied a card directly to the 486 processor bus with minimal intermediary logic, timing and arbitration duties were strongly dependent on the cards and CPU. When the Pentium processor arrived there were differences in its bus design. Few Pentium motherboards with VLB slots were ever made, and used VLB-to-PCI bridges such as the OPTi 82C822, also moving the bus to non-x86 architectures was nearly impossible. Limited number of slots available Most PCs that used VESA Local Bus had only one or two VLB capable ISA slots from the five or six available, thus, four ISA slots generally were just that, ISA only. This was a result of VESA Local Bus being a branch of the 80486 memory bus. The processor did not have the ability to correctly drive more than two or three devices at a time directly from this bus. Reliability problems The strict electrical limitations on the bus also reduced any safety margin available, glitches between cards were common, as the interaction between individual cards, combinations of cards, motherboard implementation, and even the processor itself was difficult to predict
25.
PC/104
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PC/104 is a family of embedded computer standards which define both form factors and computer buses. PC/104 is intended for specialized environments where a small, rugged computer system is required, the standard is modular, and allows consumers to stack together boards from a variety of COTS manufacturers to produce a customized embedded system. The original PC/104 form factor is somewhat smaller than a desktop PC motherboard at 3.550 ×3.775 inches. Unlike other popular computer form factors such as ATX, which rely on a motherboard or backplane, the PC/104 specification defines four mounting holes at the corners of each module, which allow the boards to be fastened to each other using standoffs. The stackable bus connectors and use of standoffs provides a more rugged mounting than slot boards found in desktop PCs, the compact board size further contributes to the ruggedness of the form factor by reducing the possibility of PCB flexing under shock and vibration. A typical PC/104 system will include a CPU board, power supply board, a wide array of peripheral boards are available from various vendors. Users may design a stack that incorporates boards from multiple vendors, the overall height, weight, and power consumption of the stack can vary depending on the number of boards that are used. PC/104 is sometimes referred to as a stackable PC, as most of the architecture derives from the desktop PC, the majority of PC/104 CPU boards are x86 compatible and include standard PC interfaces such as Serial Ports, USB, Ethernet, and VGA. A x86 PC/104 system is capable of standard PC operating system such as DOS, Windows. However, it is quite common to use a real-time operating system. The PC/104 bus and form factor was originally devised by Ampro in 1987, an IEEE standard corresponding to PC/104 was drafted as IEEE P996.1, but never ratified. In 1997, the PC/104 Consortium introduced a standard based on the PCI bus. A PCI Express-based standard was introduced in 2008, pC/104-related specifications are controlled by the PC/104 Consortium. There are currently 47 members of the Consortium, all specifications published by the Consortium are freely available. Membership in the Consortium is not required to design and manufacture a PC/104 board, the specifications released by the PC/104 Consortium define multiple of Bus Structures and Form Factors. Bus Structure defines the location and pinout of the bus connector, Form Factor refers to size and shape of the board. It is possible to one of the PC/104 stackable expansion buses on a number of different form factors. Note the term PC/104 is often used interchangeably to refer to either the Bus Structure or Form Factor and this can be a source of confusion
26.
Conventional PCI
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Conventional PCI, often shortened to PCI, is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer. PCI is the initialism for Peripheral Component Interconnect and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard, the PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format that is independent of any particular processors native bus. Devices connected to the PCI bus appear to a bus master to be connected directly to its own bus and are assigned addresses in the address space. It is a bus, synchronous to a single bus clock. Attached devices can take either the form of an integrated circuit fitted onto the motherboard itself or a card that fits into a slot. The PCI Local Bus was first implemented in IBM PC compatibles and it has subsequently been adopted for other computer types. Typical PCI cards used in PCs include, network cards, sound cards, modems, extra ports such as USB or serial, TV tuner cards, PCI video cards replaced ISA and VESA cards until growing bandwidth requirements outgrew the capabilities of PCI. The preferred interface for video cards then became AGP, itself a superset of conventional PCI and these have one locating notch in the card. Version 2.0 of the PCI standard introduced 3.3 V slots, universal cards, which can operate on either voltage, have two notches. Version 2.1 of the PCI standard introduced optional 66 MHz operation, a server-oriented variant of conventional PCI, called PCI-X operated at frequencies up to 133 MHz for PCI-X1.0 and up to 533 MHz for PCI-X2.0. An internal connector for laptop cards, called Mini PCI, was introduced in version 2.2 of the PCI specification, the PCI bus was also adopted for an external laptop connector standard – the CardBus. The first PCI specification was developed by Intel, but subsequent development of the standard became the responsibility of the PCI Special Interest Group, Conventional PCIs heyday in the desktop computer market was approximately 1995–2005. PCI and PCI-X have become obsolete for most purposes, however, they are common on modern desktops for the purposes of backwards compatibility. Many kinds of devices available on PCI expansion cards are now commonly integrated onto motherboards or available in USB. Work on PCI began at Intels Architecture Development Lab c. 1990, a team of Intel engineers defined the architecture and developed a proof of concept chipset and platform partnering with teams in the companys desktop PC systems and core logic product organizations. PCI was immediately put to use in servers, replacing MCA, in mainstream PCs, PCI was slower to replace VESA Local Bus, and did not gain significant market penetration until late 1994 in second-generation Pentium PCs. By 1996, VLB was all but extinct, and manufacturers had adopted PCI even for 486 computers, EISA continued to be used alongside PCI through 2000. Apple Computer adopted PCI for professional Power Macintosh computers in mid-1995, the 64-bit version of plain PCI remained rare in practice though, although it was used for example by all G3 and G4 Power Macintosh computers
27.
P5 (microarchitecture)
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The first Pentium microprocessor was introduced by Intel on March 22,1993. Dubbed P5, its microarchitecture was the fifth generation for Intel, in 1996, the Pentium with MMX Technology was introduced with the same basic microarchitecture complemented with an MMX instruction set, larger caches, and some other enhancements. Intels Larrabee multicore architecture project uses a processor core derived from a P5 core, augmented by multithreading, 64-bit instructions, Intels low-powered Bonnell microarchitecture employed in early Atom processor cores also uses an in-order dual pipeline similar to P5. The P5 microarchitecture was designed by the same Santa Clara team which designed the 386 and 486, design work started in 1989, the team decided to use a superscalar architecture, with on-chip cache, floating-point, and branch prediction. The preliminary design was first successfully simulated in 1990, followed by the laying-out of the design, by this time, the team had several dozen engineers. The design was taped out, or transferred to silicon, in April 1992, by mid-1992, the P5 team had 200 engineers. John H. Crawford, chief architect of the original 386, co-managed the design of the P5, along with Donald Alpert, dror Avnon managed the design of the FPU. Vinod K. Dham was general manager of the P5 group, the P5 microarchitecture brings several important advancements over the preceding i486 architecture. Performance, Superscalar architecture — The Pentium has two datapaths that allow it to two instructions per clock cycle in many cases. The main pipe can handle any instruction, while the other can handle the most common simple instructions, some RISC proponents had argued that the complicated x86 instruction set would probably never be implemented by a tightly pipelined microarchitecture, much less by a dual pipeline design. The 486 and the Pentium demonstrated that this was indeed possible and feasible, separation of code and data caches lessens the fetch and operand read/write conflicts compared to the 486. To reduce access time and implementation cost, both of them are 2-way associative, instead of the single 4-way cache of the 486. A related enhancement in the Pentium is the ability to read a block from the code cache even when it is split between two cache lines. Some instructions showed an improvement, most notably FMUL, with up to 15 times higher throughput than in the 80486 FPU. The Pentium is also able to execute a FXCH ST instruction in parallel with an ordinary FPU instruction, four-input address-adders enables the Pentium to further reduce the address calculation latency compared to the 80486. The microcode can employ both pipelines to enable auto-repeating instructions such as rep movsw perform one iteration every clock cycle, while the 80486 needed three clocks per iteration, some examples are, CALL, RET, shifts/rotates, etc. Virtualized interrupt to speed up virtual 8086 mode, other features, Enhanced debug features with the introduction of the Processor-based debug port. Enhanced self test features like the L1 cache parity check, new instructions, CPUID, CMPXCHG8B, RDTSC, RDMSR, WRMSR, RSM
28.
Pentium
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Pentium is a brand used for a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel since 1993. The name Pentium is originally derived from the Greek word penta-πεντα, meaning five (a reference to the prior numeric naming convention of Intels 80n86 processors, during development, Intel generally identifies processors with codenames, such as Prescott, Willamette, Coppermine, Katmai, Klamath, or Deschutes. These usually become widely known, even after the processors are given names on launch. The original Pentium branded CPUs were expected to be named 586 or i586, following Intels prior series of 8086,80186,80286,80386, and 80486 microprocessors, the firms first P5-based microprocessor was released as the original Intel Pentium on March 22,1993. Marketing firm Lexicon Branding was hired to coin a name for the new processor, the suffix -ium was chosen as it could connote a fundamental ingredient of a computer, like a chemical element, while the prefix pent- could refer to the fifth generation of x86. Due to its success, the Pentium brand would continue through several generations of high-end processors, in 2006, the name briefly disappeared from Intels technology roadmaps, only to re-emerge in 2007. In 1998, Intel introduced the Celeron brand for low-priced microprocessors, with the 2006 introduction of the Intel Core brand as the companys new flagship line of processors, the Pentium series was to be discontinued. In 2009, the Dual-Core suffix was dropped, and new x86 microprocessors started carrying the plain Pentium name again, in 2014, Intel released the Pentium 20th Anniversary Edition, to mark the 20th anniversary of the Pentium brand. The processors are unlocked and highly overclockable, the original Intel P5 or Pentium and Pentium MMX processors were the superscalar follow-on to the 80486 processor and were marketed from 1993 to 1999. Some versions of these were available as Pentium OverDrive that would fit into older CPU sockets, in parallel with the P5 microarchitecture, Intel developed the P6 microarchitecture and started marketing it as the Pentium Pro for the high-end market in 1995. It introduced out-of-order execution and a second level cache on dual-chip processor package. The second P6 generation replaced the original P5 with the Pentium II and it was followed by a third version named the Pentium III and Pentium III Xeon, respectively. The Pentium II line added the MMX instructions that were present in the Pentium MMX. Versions of these processors for the Laptop market were initially named Mobile Pentium II and Mobile Pentium III, later versions were named Pentium III-M. Starting with the Pentium II, the Celeron brand was used for versions of most Pentium processors with a reduced feature set such as a smaller cache or missing power management features. In 2000, Intel introduced a new microarchitecture named NetBurst, with a much longer pipeline enabling higher clock frequencies than the P6 based processors, initially, these were named Pentium 4 and the high-end versions have since been named simply Xeon. As with Pentium III, there are both Mobile Pentium 4 and Pentium 4 M processors for the market, with Pentium 4 M denoting the more power-efficient versions. Enthusiast versions of the Pentium 4 with the highest clock rate were named Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, the Pentium D was the first multi-core Pentium, integrating two Pentium 4 chips in one package and was available as the enthusiast Pentium Extreme Edition
29.
PC Card
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In computing, PC Card is a configuration for computer parallel communication peripheral interface, designed for laptop computers. Originally introduced as PCMCIA, the PC Card standard as well as its successors like CardBus were defined and developed by the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association and it was originally designed as a standard for memory-expansion cards for computer storage. The existence of a general standard for notebook peripherals led to many kinds of devices being made available based on its configurability, including network cards, modems. The PCMCIA1.0 card standard was published by the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association in November 1990 and was adopted by more than eighty vendors. It corresponds with the Japanese JEIDA memory card 4.0 standard, sanDisk launched its PCMCIA card in October 1992. The company was the first to introduce a writeable Flash RAM card for the HP 95LX and these cards conformed to a supplemental PCMCIA-ATA standard that allowed them to appear as more conventional IDE hard drives to the 95LX or a PC. This had the advantage of raising the limit on capacity to the full 32M available under DOS3.22 on the 95LX. It soon became clear that the PCMCIA card standard needed expansion to support smart I/O cards to address the emerging need for fax, modem, LAN, harddisk and it also needed interrupt facilities and hot plugging, which required the definition of new BIOS and operating system interfaces. This led to the introduction of release 2.0 of the PCMCIA standard and JEIDA4.1 in September 1991, many notebooks in the 1990s had two adjacent type-II slots, which allowed installation of two type-II cards or one, double-thickness, type-III card. The cards were used in early digital SLR cameras, such as the Kodak DCS300 series. However, their use as storage expansion is no longer common. The PC Card port has been superseded by the ExpressCard interface since 2003, some Japanese brand consumer entertainment devices such as TV sets include a PC Card slot for playback of media. PC Card = PCMCIA Card, 16-bit or 32-bit PC Card 32-bit version = Cardbus 16-bit vs. 32-bit,32 bit includes DMA or bus mastering, 16-bit does not Types I–III, Type I, configuration thickness 3.3 mm Type II, 16-bit or 32-bit. Configuration thickness 5.0 mm Type III, 16-bit or 32-bit, configuration thickness 10.5 mm PC Card was superseded by ExpressCard in 2003. PCMCIA stands for Personal Computer Memory Card International Association, the group of companies that defined the standard and this acronym was difficult to say and remember, and was sometimes jokingly referred to as People Cant Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms. To recognize increased scope beyond memory, and to aid in marketing and this was the name of the standard from version 2 of the specification onwards. These cards were used for wireless networks, modems, and other functions in notebook PCs, all PC Card devices use a similar sized package which is 85.6 millimetres long and 54.0 millimetres wide, the same size as a credit card. The shape is used by the Common Interface form of conditional-access modules for DVB broadcasts
30.
ExpressCard
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ExpressCard, initially called NEWCARD, is an interface to connect peripheral devices to a computer, usually a laptop computer. The ExpressCard technical standard specifies the design of slots built into the computer, the cards contain electronic circuits and sometimes connectors for external devices. The ExpressCard standard replaces the PC Card standards, originally developed by the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association, the ExpressCard standard is maintained by the USB Implementers Forum. The host device supports PCI Express, USB2.0, the ExpressCard standard is an open standard by ITU-T definition, and can be obtained from the USB-IF website free of charge. USB-IF administers the ExpressCard Compliance Program, under which companies earn the right to obtain a license to use the ExpressCard logo on their compliant products, the ExpressCard standard specifies two form factors, ExpressCard/34 and ExpressCard/54 —the connector is the same on both. Standard cards are 75 mm long and 5 mm thick, but may be thicker on sections that extend outside the standard form for antennas, sockets, the 34 mm slot accepts only 34 mm cards. The 54 mm slot accepts both 34 mm and 54 mm cards, a diagonal guide in the rear of the 54 mm slot guides 34 mm cards to the connector. Adapters are available for connecting an ExpressCard/34 card to a CardBus slot via internal USB2.0 bus only, the older PC Cards came in 16-bit and the later 32-bit CardBus designs. The ExpressCard standard specifies voltages of either 1.5 V or 3.3 V, the ExpressCard FAQ claims lower cost, better scalability, and better integration with motherboard chipset technology than Cardbus. PCMCIA devices can be connected to an ExpressCard slot via an adapter, some laptop computers do not have an ExpressCard slot. An ExpressCard slot had been included on high-end laptops made since 2006. Lenovo integrated the slot into their flagship ThinkPad T43 in May 2005, Dell Computer also incorporates this in their Precision, Inspiron, Latitude, Studio, Vostro and XPS Laptop product lines. Fujitsu-Siemens began shipping systems with ExpressCard in mid-2005, Apple Inc. included single ExpressCard/34 slots in every MacBook Pro notebook computer from January 2006 through June 2009. In June 2012 Apple discontinued the 17-inch model and no further Macbooks have offered an ExpressCard slot, ASUS has also replaced the PC Card slot with an ExpressCard slot on many of its new models. Sony also began shipping systems with ExpressCard with its new laptop VGN-C, VGN-SZ, VGN-NS, VPC, the Acer Aspire laptop series also has a single ExpressCard/54 slot on most new models. Panasonic incorporates ExpressCard/54 slots in all the rugged and semi-rugged models of their Toughbook brand of laptop computers. Gateway notebooks also ship with ExpressCard/54 interfaces, eurocom notebooks Panther 3.0, Panther 2.0 currently ship with ExpressCard/34 while the Leopard 2.0 ships with ExpressCard/34/54. Older models such as the Panther, Leopard, Xcaliber, Montebello also supported ExpressCard interfaces, overam integrates an ExpressCard slot in its Mirage 7283 and 9570 laptops
31.
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
32.
Accelerated Graphics Port
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The Accelerated Graphics Port is a high-speed point-to-point channel for attaching a video card to a computer system, primarily to assist in the acceleration of 3D computer graphics. It was originally designed as a successor to PCI-type connections for video cards, since 2004, AGP has been progressively phased out in favor of PCI Express, by mid-2008, PCI Express cards dominated the market and only a few AGP models were available. As computers increasingly became graphically oriented, successive generations of graphics adapters began to push the limits of PCI and this led to the development of AGP, a bus dedicated to graphics adapters. AGP is heavily based on PCI, and in fact the AGP bus is a superset of the conventional PCI bus, the primary advantage of AGP over PCI is that it provides a dedicated pathway between the slot and the processor rather than sharing the PCI bus. In addition to a lack of contention for the bus, the direct connection allows for higher clock speeds, the second major change is that AGP uses split transactions, where the address and data phases of a PCI transaction are separated. The card may send many address phases, and the host processes them in order and this avoids long delays, with the bus idle, during read operations. Third, PCI bus handshaking is simplified, further, rather than using the IRDY# and TRDY# signals for each word, data is transferred in blocks of four clock cycles, and pauses are allowed only between blocks. Finally, AGP allows sideband addressing, meaning that the address and this is done by adding an extra 8-bit SideBand Address bus over which the graphics controller can issue new AGP requests while other AGP data is flowing over the main 32 address/data lines. This results in improved overall AGP data throughput, system memory is made available using the graphics address remapping table, which apportions main memory as needed for texture storage. The maximum amount of memory available to AGP is defined as the AGP aperture. The AGP slot first appeared on x86-compatible system boards based on Socket 7 Intel P5 Pentium, Intel introduced AGP support with the i440LX Slot 1 chipset on August 26,1997, and a flood of products followed from all the major system board vendors. The first Socket 7 chipsets to support AGP were the VIA Apollo VP3, SiS 5591/5592, Intel never released an AGP-equipped Socket 7 chipset. Some early AGP boards used graphics processors built around PCI and were bridged to AGP. This resulted in the cards benefiting little from the new bus, with the only improvement used being the 66 MHz bus clock, with its resulting doubled bandwidth over PCI, examples of such cards were the Voodoo Banshee, Vérité V2200, Millennium II, and S3 ViRGE GX/2. Intels i740 was explicitly designed to exploit the new AGP feature set, after applying the patch the Windows 95 system became Windows 95 version 4.00.950 B. The first Windows NT-based operating system to receive AGP support was Windows NT4.0 with Service Pack 3, linux support for AGP enhanced fast data transfers was first added in 1999 with the implementation of the AGPgart kernel module. Intel released AGP specification 1.0 in 1997 and it specified 3.3 V signals and 1× and 2× speeds. Specification 2.0 documented 1.5 V signaling, which could be used at 1×, 2× and the additional 4× speed and 3.0 added 0.8 V signaling, available versions are listed in the table on the right
33.
BIOS
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The BIOS is a type of firmware used to perform hardware initialization during the booting process on IBM PC compatible computers, and to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs. The BIOS firmware is built into personal computers, and it is the first software they run when powered on, the name itself originates from the Basic Input/Output System used in the CP/M operating system in 1975. Originally proprietary to the IBM PC, the BIOS has been engineered by companies looking to create compatible systems. The fundamental purposes of the BIOS in modern PCs are to initialize and test the hardware components. Variations in the hardware are hidden by the BIOS from programs that use BIOS services instead of directly accessing the hardware. MS-DOS, which was the dominant PC operating system from the early 1980s until the mid-1990s, relied on BIOS services for disk, keyboard, and text display functions. Most BIOS implementations are specifically designed to work with a computer or motherboard model. This allows easy updates to the BIOS firmware so new features can be added or bugs can be fixed, unified Extensible Firmware Interface was designed as a successor to BIOS, aiming to address its technical shortcomings. As of 2014, new PC hardware predominantly ships with UEFI firmware, together with the underlying hardware-specific, but operating system-independent System BIOS, which resides in ROM, it represents the analogous to the CP/M BIOS. With the introduction of PS/2 machines, IBM divided the System BIOS into real-mode, the BIOS of the original IBM PC XT had no interactive user interface. Options on the IBM PC and XT were set by switches and jumpers on the main board, starting around the mid-1990s, it became typical for the BIOS ROM to include a BIOS configuration utility or BIOS setup utility, accessed at system power-up by a particular key sequence. This program allowed the user to set configuration options, of the type formerly set using DIP switches. The disk was supplied with the computer, and if it was lost the settings could not be changed. Instead of battery-backed RAM, the modern Wintel machine may store the BIOS configuration settings in flash ROM, early Intel processors started at physical address 000FFFF0h. When a modern x86 microprocessor is reset, it starts in pseudo 16-bit real mode, the code segment register is initialized with selector F000h, base FFFF0000h, and limit FFFFh, so that execution starts at 4 GB minus 16 bytes. The platform logic maps this address into the system ROM, mirroring address 000FFFF0h, if the system has just been powered up or the reset button was pressed, the full power-on self-test is run. This saves the time used to detect and test all memory. If the download was apparently successful, the BIOS would verify a checksum on it and then run it
34.
Mini-ITX
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Mini-ITX is a 17 ×17 cm motherboard, developed by VIA Technologies in 2001. They are commonly used in small-configured computer systems, the four mounting holes in a Mini-ITX board line up with four of the holes in ATX-specification motherboards, and the locations of the backplate and expansion slot are the same. Mini-ITX boards can therefore often be used in cases designed for ATX, micro-ATX, the design has provision for one expansion slot. Earlier motherboards conventionally have a standard 33 MHz 5V 32-bit PCI slot, many older case designs use riser cards and some even have two-slot riser cards, although the two-slot riser cards are not compatible with all boards. Designed by Robert Kuo, VIAs chief R&D expert, the 215×191 mm VT6009 ITX Reference Board was demonstrated in Information PC and he would later go on to design the Mini-ITX design. At that point, few took up the ITX design. Other manufactures instead produced smaller boards based on the very similar 229×191 mm FlexATX configuration, in October 2001, VIA announced their decision to create a new motherboard division, to provide standardized infrastructure for lower-cost PC iterations, and focus on embedded devices. The result was the November 2001 release of the VT6010 Mini-ITX reference design, once touted as an Information PC. Manufacturers were still reluctant, but customer response was more receptive, so VIA decided to manufacture. In April 2002 the first Mini-ITX motherboards—VIAs EPIA5000 and EPIA800 —were sold to industrial customers, Mini-ITX boards primarily appeal to the industrial and embedded PC markets, with the majority sold as bulk components or integrated into a finished system for single-purpose computing applications. They are produced with a much longer sales life-cycle than consumer boards, manufacturers can prototype using standard cases and power supplies, then build their own enclosures if volumes get high enough. Typical applications include playing music in supermarkets, powering self-service kiosks, VIA has continued to expand its Mini-ITX motherboard line. Some of the earlier generations included the original PL133 chipset boards, CLE266 chipset boards, second generation boards featured the EPIA M, MII, CL, PD, TC and MS — all tailored to slightly different markets. Legacy VIA boards use their x86-compatible CPUs — the C3, C7 or low-power Eden variants, with newer boards featuring the VIA Nano CPU and this new wave of offerings has caused Mini-ITX to explode in popularity among home users, hobbyists and even overclockers. Intel is currently one of few manufacturers of Mini-ITX mainboards that also include the mechanical dimensions in their manuals. A number of manufacturers have released Intel Mini-ITX motherboards that feature onboard CPUs and these Intel processors are designed to draw minimal power resulting in lower TDP ideal for fanless configurations and embedded applications. Starting from LGA775, socketed Intel Mini-ITX motherboards have been released by Intel and this was followed by LGA1156 motherboards Starting from LGA1155, Mini-ITX motherboards have started to become mainstream, with many different manufacturers releasing products. This trend has continued with LGA1150 CPUs, despite this, manufacturers have released LGA2011 based Mini-ITX motherboards
35.
Tandy 1000
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The Tandy 1000 was the first in a line of more-or-less IBM PC compatible home computer systems produced by the Tandy Corporation for sale in its RadioShack chain of stores. In December 1983 an executive with Tandy Corporation, maker of TRS-80 computers, said about the new IBM PCjr home computer, Im sure a lot of people will be coming out with PCjr look-alikes. Released in November 1984, the $1,200 Tandy 1000 was designed as an inexpensive PC clone with enhancements compatible with the PCjr, but with a better keyboard. How could IBM have made that mistake with the PCjr. an amazed Tandy executive said regarding its chiclet keyboard, the 1000 included joystick ports like the PCjr, and copied its 16-color graphics and 3-voice sound, but not the PCjr ROM cartridge ports. Since IBM discontinued the PCjr soon after the release of the 1000, although Tandy initially marketed the 1000 as a business computer like the IBM PC, InfoWorld stated in 1985 that the unwritten potential for the machine is in the elusive home computer market. Tandy produced a home computer. The company claimed that the 1000 was the first fully IBM PC-compatible computer available for less than $1000. It helped the company obtain a 9. 5% share of the US home-computer market in 1986, in 1988 CEO John Roach disagreed with Apple counterpart John Sculleys rejection of the home market, Let him deny it. Hes the only person thats well-represented in the home market. Tandy also gained a significant share of the market, which Apple historically had dominated. The PCjrs enhanced graphics and sound standards became known as Tandy-compatible, with its graphics, sound, and built-in joystick ports, the 1000 was the best computer for PC games until VGA graphics became popular in the 1990s. Software companies of the era advertised their support for the Tandy platform,28 of 66 games that Computer Gaming World tested in 1989 supported Tandy graphics, successors to the 1000 appended two or three letters to the name, after a space. In a few instances, after these letters a slash was appended, followed by either a number or additional letters, although the original 1000 came in an IBM PC-like desktop case, some others used home-computer-style cases with the keyboard, motherboard and disk drives in one enclosure. Tandy 1000 computers were some of the first IBM PC clones to incorporate a set of basic peripherals on the motherboard using proprietary ASICs. This is in addition to the standard on the IBM PC, PC/XT, and PC/AT motherboards, keyboard interface, expansion slots, memory subsystem, interrupt controller. Like the PCjr, the 1000 uses up to 32K of system RAM for display memory, the earlier models of the Tandy 1000 had a composite video output, and could be used with a color or monochrome composite monitor, or a TV with an RF modulator. The original 1000 and SX had a light-pen port, unlike most PC clones, several Tandy 1000 computers had MS-DOS built into ROM and could boot in a few seconds. Tandy bundled DeskMate, a suite of consumer-oriented applications, with various Tandy 1000 models
36.
IBM PCjr
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The IBM PCjr was IBMs first attempt to enter the home computer market. It was manufactured for IBM in Lewisburg, Tennessee by Teledyne, the PCjr is also the first PC compatible machine that supports page flipping for graphics operation. The fully programmable 16-color palette logic in the PCjr allows any set of colors from among the 16-color RGBI color set—the same set of colors available in CGA text modes—in each mode. That is, in graphics mode, each pixel color value can be independently mapped to any one of the 16 real RGBI colors. When the BIOS is used to set a video mode, it sets up the PCjr palette table to emulate the CGA color palette for that mode. Programs specifically written to use PCjr graphics can subsequently reprogram the palette table to use any colors desired, palette changes must be made during horizontal or vertical blanking periods of a video frame in order to avoid corrupting the display. However, the provision of a vertical retrace interrupt simplifies this, the video hardware of the PCjr is the first to offer a vertical retrace interrupt, or any raster interrupt. In general, the PCjr video hardware can do anything that a CGA can, but the design of hardware-control registers, the functions of the CGA Mode Register and Color Select Register are implemented in the VGA using different registers. The Status Register has been moved into the VGA and has significant differences. Those are the registers, the light pen registers. Alteration of other CRTC registers cannot be assumed to produce the results from the PCjr video system as from the CGA. The 6845 CRTC and the VGA together are responsible for refreshing the internal DRAM of the PCjr. Additional external DRAM, in sidecar expansion modules, is refreshed separately, not by the CRTC, the PCjrs sound is provided by a Texas Instruments SN76489 which can produce three square waves of varying amplitude and frequency along with a noise channel powered by a shift register. Only one sound source can be selected at a time, the sources cannot be mixed, IBM claimed that an average of two wait states are added, but the designers of the Tandy 1000 claimed that six was a more accurate figure. Therefore, under some circumstances the 8088 in the PCjr actually can run at the rated 4.77 MHz, for infrared wireless operation, it was powered by common AA cells. With a built-in RF modulator, the PCjr can send video and audio to a TV, the PCjr Color Display sold by IBM included an internal amplified speaker, being the only IBM monitor in the PC line to do so. Cartridge BASIC enhances the standard IBM BASIC with commands to support the new video, further reinforcing the home-friendly goal, the PCjr also introduced two ROM cartridge slots on the front of the unit, meant to load software quickly and easily. The cartridge are plugged in from the front, prompting the computer to automatically reboot, loading and saving data from cartridge software is possible via the floppy drive
37.
Interrupt
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In system programming, an interrupt is a signal to the processor emitted by hardware or software indicating an event that needs immediate attention. An interrupt alerts the processor to a high-priority condition requiring the interruption of the current code the processor is executing, the processor responds by suspending its current activities, saving its state, and executing a function called an interrupt handler to deal with the event. This interruption is temporary, and, after the interrupt handler finishes, there are two types of interrupts, hardware interrupts and software interrupts. Hardware interrupts are used by devices to communicate that they require attention from the operating system, for example, pressing a key on the keyboard or moving the mouse triggers hardware interrupts that cause the processor to read the keystroke or mouse position. Unlike the software type, hardware interrupts are asynchronous and can occur in the middle of instruction execution, the act of initiating a hardware interrupt is referred to as an interrupt request. A software interrupt is caused either by a condition in the processor itself. The former is called a trap or exception and is used for errors or events occurring during program execution that are exceptional enough that they cannot be handled within the program itself. For example, an exception will be thrown if the processors arithmetic logic unit is commanded to divide a number by zero as this instruction is in error. The operating system will catch this exception, and can choose to abort the instruction, each interrupt has its own interrupt handler. The number of interrupts is limited by the number of interrupt request lines to the processor. Interrupts are a commonly used technique for computer multitasking, especially in real-time computing, such a system is said to be interrupt-driven. Hardware interrupts were introduced as an optimization, eliminating unproductive waiting time in polling loops and they may be implemented in hardware as a distinct system with control lines, or they may be integrated into the memory subsystem. If implemented as part of the controller, interrupts are mapped into the systems memory address space. Interrupts can be categorized into different types, Maskable interrupt. Non-maskable interrupt, an interrupt that lacks an associated bit-mask. NMIs are used for the highest priority tasks such as timers, inter-processor interrupt, a special case of interrupt that is generated by one processor to interrupt another processor in a multiprocessor system. Software interrupt, an interrupt generated within a processor by executing an instruction, software interrupts are often used to implement system calls because they result in a subroutine call with a CPU ring level change. Spurious interrupt, an interrupt that is unwanted
38.
Direct memory access
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Direct memory access is a feature of computer systems that allows certain hardware subsystems to access main system memory, independent of the central processing unit. Without DMA, when the CPU is using programmed input/output, it is fully occupied for the entire duration of the read or write operation. This feature is useful at any time that the CPU cannot keep up with the rate of data transfer, many hardware systems use DMA, including disk drive controllers, graphics cards, network cards and sound cards. DMA is also used for data transfer in multi-core processors. Computers that have DMA channels can transfer data to and from devices with much less CPU overhead than computers without DMA channels, DMA can also be used for memory to memory copying or moving of data within memory. DMA can offload expensive memory operations, such as copies or scatter-gather operations. An implementation example is the I/O Acceleration Technology, Standard DMA, also called third-party DMA, uses a DMA controller. A DMA controller can generate memory addresses and initiate memory read or write cycles and it contains several hardware registers that can be written and read by the CPU. These include an address register, a byte count register. To carry out an input, output or memory-to-memory operation, the host processor initializes the DMA controller with a count of the number of words to transfer, the CPU then sends commands to a peripheral device to initiate transfer of data. The DMA controller then provides addresses and read/write control lines to the system memory, each time a byte of data is ready to be transferred between the peripheral device and memory, the DMA controller increments its internal address register until the full block of data is transferred. In a bus mastering system, also known as a first-party DMA system, where a peripheral can become bus master, it can directly write to system memory without involvement of the CPU, providing memory address and control signals as required. Some measure must be provided to put the processor into a hold condition so that bus contention does not occur, DMA transfers can either occur one byte at a time or all at once in burst mode. In burst mode DMA, the CPU can be put on hold while the DMA transfer occurs, when memory cycles are much faster than processor cycles, an interleaved DMA cycle is possible, where the DMA controller uses memory while the CPU cannot. An entire block of data is transferred in one contiguous sequence, the mode is also called Block Transfer Mode. It is also used to stop unnecessary data, the cycle stealing mode is used in systems in which the CPU should not be disabled for the length of time needed for burst transfer modes. However, in cycle stealing mode, after one byte of data transfer and it is then continually requested again via BR, transferring one byte of data per request, until the entire block of data has been transferred. By continually obtaining and releasing the control of the system bus, the CPU processes an instruction, then the DMA controller transfers one data value, and so on
39.
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
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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
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Tandy Corporation
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Tandy Corporation, was an American family-owned leather goods company based in Fort Worth, Texas. Tandy Leather was founded in 1919 as a supply store. In 2000, the Tandy Corporation name was dropped and the entity became the RadioShack Corporation, Hinckley and Tandy opened their first branch store in 1927 in Beaumont, Texas and in 1932, Dave Tandy moved the store from Beaumont to Houston, Texas. Tandys business survived the economic storms of the Depression, gathered strength, Dave Tandy had a son, Charles Tandy, who was drafted into the business during his early twenties. Charles obtained a B. A degree at Texas Christian University then began attending the Harvard Business School to further expand his education, as World War II escalated Charles was called to serve his country in the military and relocated to Hawaii. Leathercraft gave the men something useful to do and their handiwork, Charles Tandy returned home from the service as a Lieutenant Commander in 1948 and negotiated to operate the fledgling leathercraft division himself. He had encouraged and followed the development of that venture through correspondence with his father, within a short time Charles succeeded in opening the first of two retail stores in 1950 that specialized exclusively in leathercraft. Mr. Hinckley did not share the enthusiasm of Dave and Charles Tandy for the new leathercraft division, the first Tandy Catalog, only 8 pages long, was mailed to readers of Popular Science magazine who had responded to two-inch test ads that were placed by Tandy. From 1950 forward Tandy operated retail mail order stores supported by direct mail advertising and this successful formula helped the company expand into a chain of some 150 leathercraft stores. A growing do-it-yourself movement prompted by a shortage of consumer goods, the fifteen leathercraft stores opened during this divisions first two years of operation became quite successful. Sixteen additional retail stores were opened in 1953, and by 1955 Tandy Leather was a company with leased sales sites in 75 cities across the United States. Tandy Leather became a commodity and was purchased in 1955 by the American Hide. Charles continued to control of managing the Tandy Leather division while owned by GAI. During 1956, General American Industries acquired three other companies unrelated to the industry and a struggle for control of the parent company began. Charles saw the need to emancipate from the direction initiated by GAI and he used all his resources, raised additional money, and exercised his right to purchase the 500,000 shares of stock that were included in the original settlement. When the votes were counted on the day of that pivotal stockholders meeting, Tandy had a landmark year in 1961. The company name was changed to Tandy Corporation and the headquarters were moved to Fort Worth, Texas where Charles Tandy became the President. Tandy Leather was operating 125 stores in 105 cities of the United States and Canada, the first of the Tandy Marts was also opened in Fort Worth in December 1961
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Commodore International
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Commodore International was a North American home computer and electronics manufacturer. Commodore International, along with its subsidiary Commodore Business Machines, participated in the development of the computer industry in the 1970s and 1980s. The company developed and marketed one of the worlds best-selling desktop computers, the company that would become Commodore Business Machines, Inc. was founded in 1954 in Toronto as the Commodore Portable Typewriter Company by Polish immigrant and Auschwitz survivor Jack Tramiel. He moved to Toronto to start production, by the late 1950s a wave of Japanese machines forced most North American typewriter companies to cease business, but Tramiel instead turned to adding machines. In 1955, the company was incorporated as Commodore Business Machines. In 1962, Commodore went public on the New York Stock Exchange, in the late 1960s, history repeated itself when Japanese firms started producing and exporting adding machines. The companys main investor and chairman, Irving Gould, suggested that Tramiel travel to Japan to understand how to compete, instead, he returned with the new idea to produce electronic calculators, which were just coming on the market. Commodore soon had a profitable calculator line and was one of the popular brands in the early 1970s. However, in 1975, Texas Instruments, the supplier of calculator parts, entered the market directly. Commodore obtained an infusion of cash from Gould, which Tramiel used beginning in 1976 to purchase several second-source chip suppliers, including MOS Technology, Inc. in order to assure his supply. He agreed to buy MOS, which was having troubles of its own, through the 1970s, Commodore also produced numerous peripherals and consumer electronic products such as the Chessmate, a chess computer based around a MOS6504 chip, released in 1978. In December 2007 when Tramiel was visiting the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for the 25th anniversary of the Commodore 64 and he said, I wanted to call my company General, but theres so many Generals in the U. S. Then I went to Admiral, but that was taken, so I wind up in Berlin, Germany, with my wife, and we were in a cab, and the cab made a short stop, and in front of us was an Opel Commodore. Tramiel gave this account in interviews, but Opels Commodore didnt debut until 1967. Once Chuck Peddle had taken over engineering at Commodore, he convinced Jack Tramiel that calculators were already a dead end, from PETs 1977 debut, Commodore would be a computer company. The operational headquarters, where research and development of new products occurred, retained the name Commodore Business Machines, in 1980 Commodore launched production for the European market in Braunschweig. By 1980 Commodore was one of the three largest microcomputer companies, and the largest in the Common Market and this was addressed with the introduction of the VIC-20 in 1981, which was introduced at a cost of US$299 and sold in retail stores. Commodore took out ads featuring William Shatner asking consumers Why buy just a video game
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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
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Atari
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Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972, currently by Atari Interactive, a subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA. The original Atari, Inc. founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney was a pioneer in arcade games, home game consoles. The companys products, such as Pong and the Atari 2600, in 1984, the original Atari Inc. was split due to its role in the video game crash of 1983, and the arcade division was turned into Atari Games Inc. Atari Games received the rights to use the logo and brand name with appended text Games on arcade games, the Atari Consumer Electronics Division properties were in turn sold to Jack Tramiels Tramel Technology Ltd. which then renamed itself to Atari Corporation. In 1996, Atari Corporation reverse-merged with disk-drive manufacturer JT Storage, in 1998,6 November Hasbro Interactive acquired all Atari Corporation related properties from JTS, creating a new subsidiary, Atari Interactive. After IESAs acquisition of Hasbro Interactive, Infogrames, Inc. intermittently published Atari branded titles for Infogrames Interactive, on October 11,2008, Infogrames completed its acquisition of Atari, Inc. making it a wholly owned subsidiary. In 1971, Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded a firm, Syzygy Engineering, that designed and built Computer Space. On June 27,1972 Atari, Inc. was incorporated, Bushnell asked Alcorn produce an arcade version of the Magnavox Odysseys Tennis game, which would be named Pong. While Bushnell incorporated Atari in June 1972, Syzygy Company was never formally incorporated, Atari was incorporated in the state of California on June 27,1972. Joe Keenans management of the led to him being promoted president of Atari that same year. In 1976, Bushnell, through Grass Valley, CA firm Cyan Engineering, the result was the Atari Video Computer System, or VCS. The introductory price of $199 included a console, two joysticks, a pair of paddles, and the Combat game cartridge, Bushnell knew he had another potential hit on his hands but bringing the machine to market would be extremely expensive. Looking for outside investors, Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications in 1976 for an estimated $28–32 million, Nolan continued to have disagreements with Warner Management over the direction of the company, the discontinuation of the pinball division, and most important, the notion of discontinuing the 2600. In 1978, Kee Games was disbanded, in December of that year, Nolan Bushnell was fired following an argument with Manny Gerard. E started fighting like cats and dogs, and then the wheels came off that fall. Warner claimed they fired me, recalled Bushnell, development of a successor to the 2600 started as soon as it shipped. The original team estimated the 2600 had a lifespan of three years, it then set forth to build the most powerful machine possible within that time frame. Mid-way into their effort the home computer revolution took off, leading to the addition of a keyboard and features to produce the Atari 800 and its smaller sibling, the new machines had some success when they finally became available in quantity in 1980
