1.
Grace Hopper
–
Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. In 1944, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer and she popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages. Owing to her accomplishments and her rank, she was sometimes referred to as Amazing Grace. The U. S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper was named for her, on November 22,2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. Hopper was born in New York City and she was the eldest of three children. Her parents, Walter Fletcher Murray and Mary Campbell Van Horne, were of Scottish and Dutch descent and her great-grandfather, Alexander Wilson Russell, an admiral in the US Navy, fought in the Battle of Mobile Bay during the Civil War. Grace was very curious as a child, this was a lifelong trait, at the age of seven, she decided to determine how an alarm clock worked, and dismantled seven alarm clocks before her mother realized what she was doing. For her preparatory school education, she attended the Hartridge School in Plainfield, Hopper was initially rejected for early admission to Vassar College at age 16, but she was admitted the following year. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with a degree in mathematics and physics. In 1934, she earned a Ph. D. in mathematics from Yale under the direction of Øystein Ore and her dissertation, New Types of Irreducibility Criteria, was published that same year. Hopper began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931, and was promoted to professor in 1941. She was married to New York University professor Vincent Foster Hopper from 1930 until their divorce in 1945 and she did not marry again, but chose to retain his surname. Hopper had tried to enlist in the Navy early in the war and she was at age 34, too old to enlist, and her weight to height ratio was too low. She was also denied on the basis that her job as a mathematician—she was a professor at Vassar College—was valuable to the war effort. During World War II in 1943, Hopper obtained a leave of absence from Vassar and was sworn into the United States Navy Reserve and she had to get an exemption to enlist, she was 15 pounds below the Navy minimum weight of 120 pounds. She reported in December and trained at the Naval Reserve Midshipmens School at Smith College in Northampton, Hopper graduated first in her class in 1944, and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University as a lieutenant, junior grade. She served on the Mark I computer programming staff headed by Howard H. Aiken, Hopper and Aiken coauthored three papers on the Mark I, also known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Hoppers request to transfer to the regular Navy at the end of the war was declined due to her age of 38
2.
UNIVAC I
–
The UNIVAC I was the first commercial computer produced in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, design work was started by their company, Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, and was completed after the company had been acquired by Remington Rand. In the years before successor models of the UNIVAC I appeared, the first Univac was accepted by the United States Census Bureau on March 31,1951, and was dedicated on June 14 that year. The fifth machine was used by CBS to predict the result of the 1952 presidential election, with a sample of just 1% of the voting population it famously predicted an Eisenhower landslide while the conventional wisdom favored Stevenson. As such the UNIVAC competed directly against punch-card machines, though the UNIVAC originally could neither read nor punch cards and that shortcoming hindered sales to companies concerned about the high cost of manually converting large quantities of existing data stored on cards. This was corrected by adding offline card processing equipment, the UNIVAC Card to Tape converter, however, the early market share of the UNIVAC I was lower than the Remington Rand Company wished. To promote sales, the company joined with CBS to have UNIVAC I predict the result of the 1952 Presidential election, UNIVAC I predicted Eisenhower would have a landslide victory over Adlai Stevenson whom the pollsters favored. The result was a public awareness of computing technology. The first contracts were with government agencies such as the Census Bureau, the U. S. Air Force, contracts were also signed by the ACNielsen Company, and the Prudential Insurance Company. Following the sale of Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation to Remington Rand, due to the cost overruns on the project, Remington Rand convinced Nielsen and Prudential to cancel their contracts. The first sale, to the Census Bureau, was marked with a ceremony on March 31,1951, at the Eckert–Mauchly Divisions factory at 3747 Ridge Avenue. As a result, the first installation was with the second computer, UNIVAC installations, 1951–1954 Originally priced at US$159,000, the UNIVAC I rose in price until they were between $1,250,000 and $1,500,000. A total of 46 systems were built and delivered. The UNIVAC I was too expensive for most universities, and Sperry Rand, a few UNIVAC I systems stayed in service long after they were made obsolete by advancing technology. The Census Bureau used its two systems until 1963, amounting to 12 and nine years of service, respectively, Sperry Rand itself used two systems in Buffalo, New York until 1968. The insurance company Life and Casualty of Tennessee used its system until 1970, UNIVAC I used 5,000 vacuum tubes, weighed 16,000 pounds, consumed 125 kW, and could perform about 1,905 operations per second running on a 2.25 MHz clock. The Central Complex alone was 4.3 m by 2.4 m by 2.6 m high, the complete system occupied more than 35.5 m² of floor space. The main memory consisted of 1000 words of 12 characters, when representing numbers, they were written as 11 decimal digits plus sign
3.
Remington Rand
–
Remington Rand was a diversified conglomerate making other office equipment, electric shavers, etc. The Remington Rand Building at 315 Park Avenue South in New York City is a 20-floor skyscraper completed in 1911, Remington Rand was formed in 1927 by the merger of the Remington Typewriter Company and Rand Kardex Corporation. One of its earliest factories, the former Herschell–Spillman Motor Company Complex, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. Within the first year Remington Rand acquired the Dalton Adding Machine Company, the Powers Accounting Machine Company, the Baker-Vawter Company and the Kalamazoo Loose-Leaf Binder Company. From 1942 to 1945, Remington Rand was one manufacturer of the M1911A1.45 caliber semi-automatic pistol used by the United States Armed Forces during World War II, Remington Rand produced more M1911A1 pistols than any other wartime manufacturer. Remington Rand ranked 66th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts, at that time, Remington Rand had become one of the biggest computer companies in the United States. Remington Rand was acquired by Sperry Corporation in 1955 to form a company known as Sperry Rand. However the brand name of Remington Rand remained as a subdivision for many years, Sperry merged in 1986 with Burroughs to form Unisys. Initially produced by E. Remington and Sons, the Remington Typewriters were the first to use the QWERTY keyboard layout, Remington had bought the design from Christopher Sholes. The Remington No.1 was the first model released, Remington spun off Remington Typewriter Company in 1886, and after the 1927 merger, the Remington Rand Corp. continued to manufacture and sell typewriters. The UNIVAC I was the commercial computer made in the United States. It was designed principally by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, design work was begun by their company, Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, and was completed after the company had been acquired by Remington Rand. The first UNIVAC was delivered to the United States Census Bureau on March 31,1951, the fifth machine was used by CBS to predict the result of the 1952 U. S. presidential election. With a sample of 1% of the population it predicted Eisenhowers win. In 1949, Remington Rand designed the Remington Rand 409, a control panel programmed punched card calculator, Remington Rand also made electric razors. The Remington brand of razor was produced by a division of Remington Rand. Sperry Corporation sold the division in 1979 to Victor Kiam, who became the spokesman of the new Remington Products Company. His line, I liked the shaver so much, I bought the company one of the more memorable advertising slogans of the early 1980s
4.
Electronic data processing
–
Electronic data processing can refer to the use of automated methods to process commercial data. Typically, this relatively simple, repetitive activities to process large volumes of similar information. The modifier electronic or automatic was used with data processing, especially c,1960, to distinguish human clerical data processing from that done by computer. The first commercial computer was developed in the United Kingdom in 1951, by the J. Lyons. This was known as the Lyons Electronic Office - or LEO for short and it was developed further and used widely during the 1960s and early 1970s. (Joe Lyons formed a company to develop the LEO computers. By the end of the 1950s punched card manufacturers, Hollerith, Powers-Samas, IBM, early commercial systems were installed exclusively by large organizations. At first, individual organizations developed their own software, including data management utilities, themselves, different products might also have one-off bespoke software. This fragmented approach led to duplicated effort and the production of management information needed manual effort, high hardware costs and relatively slow processing speeds forced developers to use resources efficiently. Data storage formats were heavily compacted, for example, a common example is the removal of the century from dates, which eventually led to the millennium bug. Data input required intermediate processing via punched tape or punched card and separate input to a repetitive, labor-intensive task, removed from user control. Invalid or incorrect data needed correction and resubmission with consequences for data, Data storage was strictly serial on paper tape, and then later to magnetic tape, the use of data storage within readily accessible memory was not cost-effective. Significant developments took place in 1959 with IBM announcing the 1401 computer, Data processing facilities became available to smaller organization in the form of the computer services bureau. These offered processing of specific applications e. g. payroll and were often a prelude to the purchase of customers own computer, organizations used these facilities for testing programs while awaiting the arrival of their own machine. These initial machines were delivered to customers with limited software, the design staff was divided into two groups. Systems analysts produced a specification and programmers translated the specification into machine language. Literature on computers and EDP was sparse through articles appearing in accountancy publications, the first issue of The Computer Journal published by The British Computer Society appeared in mid 1958. The Committee produced its first booklet in 1959, An Introduction to Electronic Computers, also in 1958 The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales produced a paper Accounting by Electronic Methods
5.
COBOL
–
COBOL is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented, COBOL is primarily used in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments. COBOL is still used in legacy applications deployed on mainframe computers, such as large-scale batch. Most programming in COBOL is now purely to maintain existing applications, COBOL was designed in 1959 by CODASYL and was partly based on previous programming language design work by Grace Hopper, commonly referred to as the mother of COBOL. It was created as part of a US Department of Defense effort to create a programming language for data processing. Intended as a stopgap, the Department of Defense promptly forced computer manufacturers to provide it and it was standardized in 1968 and has since been revised four times. Expansions include support for structured and object-oriented programming, the current standard is ISO/IEC1989,2014. COBOL has an English-like syntax, which was designed to be self-documenting, however, it is verbose and uses over 300 reserved words. In contrast with modern, succinct syntax like y = x, COBOL code is split into four divisions containing a rigid hierarchy of sections, paragraphs and sentences. Lacking a large library, the standard specifies 43 statements,87 functions. COBOL has been criticized throughout its life, however, for its verbosity, design process and poor support for structured programming, in the late 1950s, computer users and manufacturers were becoming concerned about the rising cost of programming. A1959 survey had found that in any data processing installation, the programming cost US$800,000 on average, representatives included Grace Hopper, inventor of the English-like data processing language FLOW-MATIC, Jean Sammet and Saul Gorn. The group asked the Department of Defense to sponsor an effort to create a business language. The delegation impressed Charles A. Phillips, director of the Data System Research Staff at the DoD, the DoD operated 225 computers, had a further 175 on order and had spent over $200 million on implementing programs to run on them. Portable programs would save time, reduce costs and ease modernization, Phillips agreed to sponsor the meeting and tasked the delegation with drafting the agenda. On May 28 and 29 of 1959, a meeting was held at the Pentagon to discuss the creation of a programming language for business. It was attended by 41 people and was chaired by Phillips, the Department of Defense was concerned about whether it could run the same data processing programs on different computers. FORTRAN, the mainstream language at the time, lacked the features needed to write such programs
6.
Computing platform
–
Computing platform means in general sense, where any piece of software is executed. It may be the hardware or the system, even a web browser or other application. The term computing platform can refer to different abstraction levels, including a hardware architecture, an operating system. In total it can be said to be the stage on which programs can run. For example, an OS may be a platform that abstracts the underlying differences in hardware, platforms may also include, Hardware alone, in the case of small embedded systems. Embedded systems can access hardware directly, without an OS, this is referred to as running on bare metal, a browser in the case of web-based software. The browser itself runs on a platform, but this is not relevant to software running within the browser. An application, such as a spreadsheet or word processor, which hosts software written in a scripting language. This can be extended to writing fully-fledged applications with the Microsoft Office suite as a platform, software frameworks that provide ready-made functionality. Cloud computing and Platform as a Service, the social networking sites Twitter and facebook are also considered development platforms. A virtual machine such as the Java virtual machine, applications are compiled into a format similar to machine code, known as bytecode, which is then executed by the VM. A virtualized version of a system, including virtualized hardware, OS, software. These allow, for instance, a typical Windows program to run on what is physically a Mac, some architectures have multiple layers, with each layer acting as a platform to the one above it. In general, a component only has to be adapted to the layer immediately beneath it, however, the JVM, the layer beneath the application, does have to be built separately for each OS
7.
Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
–
The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing is an online, searchable, encyclopedic dictionary of computing subjects. It was founded in 1985 by Denis Howe and was hosted by Imperial College London, in May 2015, the site was updated to state that it was no longer supported by Imperial College Department of Computing. Howe has served as the editor-in-chief since the inception, with visitors to the website able to make suggestions for additions or corrections to articles. The dictionary incorporates the text of other resources, such as the Jargon File. Due to its availability under the GNU Free Documentation License, a license, it has in turn been incorporated in whole or part into other free content projects
8.
International Standard Book Number
–
The International Standard Book Number is a unique numeric commercial book identifier. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an e-book, a paperback and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, the method of assigning an ISBN is nation-based and varies from country to country, often depending on how large the publishing industry is within a country. The initial ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 based upon the 9-digit Standard Book Numbering created in 1966, the 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108. Occasionally, a book may appear without a printed ISBN if it is printed privately or the author does not follow the usual ISBN procedure, however, this can be rectified later. Another identifier, the International Standard Serial Number, identifies periodical publications such as magazines, the ISBN configuration of recognition was generated in 1967 in the United Kingdom by David Whitaker and in 1968 in the US by Emery Koltay. The 10-digit ISBN format was developed by the International Organization for Standardization and was published in 1970 as international standard ISO2108, the United Kingdom continued to use the 9-digit SBN code until 1974. The ISO on-line facility only refers back to 1978, an SBN may be converted to an ISBN by prefixing the digit 0. For example, the edition of Mr. J. G. Reeder Returns, published by Hodder in 1965, has SBN340013818 -340 indicating the publisher,01381 their serial number. This can be converted to ISBN 0-340-01381-8, the check digit does not need to be re-calculated, since 1 January 2007, ISBNs have contained 13 digits, a format that is compatible with Bookland European Article Number EAN-13s. An ISBN is assigned to each edition and variation of a book, for example, an ebook, a paperback, and a hardcover edition of the same book would each have a different ISBN. The ISBN is 13 digits long if assigned on or after 1 January 2007, a 13-digit ISBN can be separated into its parts, and when this is done it is customary to separate the parts with hyphens or spaces. Separating the parts of a 10-digit ISBN is also done with either hyphens or spaces, figuring out how to correctly separate a given ISBN number is complicated, because most of the parts do not use a fixed number of digits. ISBN issuance is country-specific, in that ISBNs are issued by the ISBN registration agency that is responsible for country or territory regardless of the publication language. Some ISBN registration agencies are based in national libraries or within ministries of culture, in other cases, the ISBN registration service is provided by organisations such as bibliographic data providers that are not government funded. In Canada, ISBNs are issued at no cost with the purpose of encouraging Canadian culture. In the United Kingdom, United States, and some countries, where the service is provided by non-government-funded organisations. Australia, ISBNs are issued by the library services agency Thorpe-Bowker
9.
Programming paradigm
–
Programming paradigms are a way to classify programming languages based on the features of various programming languages. Other paradigms are concerned mainly with the way that code is organized, yet others are concerned mainly with the style of syntax and grammar. The communication between the units of code is not explicit, meanwhile, in object-oriented programming, code is organized into objects that contain state that is only modified by the code that is part of the object. Most object-oriented languages are also imperative languages, in contrast, languages that fit the declarative paradigm do not state the order in which to execute operations. Instead, they supply a number of operations that are available in the system, the implementation of the languages execution model tracks which operations are free to execute and chooses the order on its own. More at Comparison of multi-paradigm programming languages, just as software engineering is defined by differing methodologies, so the programming languages are defined by differing paradigms. Some languages are designed to support one paradigm, while other programming languages support multiple paradigms, for example, programs written in C++, Object Pascal or PHP can be purely procedural, purely object-oriented, or can contain elements of both or other paradigms. Software designers and programmers decide how to use those paradigm elements, in object-oriented programming, programs are treated as a set of interacting objects. In functional programming, programs are treated as a sequence of function evaluations. When programming computers or systems with many processors, in process-oriented programming, many programming paradigms are as well known for the techniques they forbid as for those they enable. For instance, pure functional programming disallows use of side-effects, while structured programming disallows use of the goto statement, partly for this reason, new paradigms are often regarded as doctrinaire or overly rigid by those accustomed to earlier styles. Yet, avoiding certain techniques can make it easier to understand program behavior, programming paradigms can also be compared with programming models which allow invoking an external execution model by using only an API. Programming models can also be classified into paradigms, based on features of the execution model, for parallel computing, using a programming model instead of a language is common. The reason is that details of the parallel hardware leak into the used to program the hardware. This causes the programmer to have to map patterns in the algorithm onto patterns in the execution model, as a consequence, no one parallel programming language maps well to all computation problems. It is thus convenient to use a base sequential language and insert API calls to parallel execution models. These can be considered flavors of programming paradigm that apply to only parallel languages, different approaches to programming have developed over time, being identified as such either at the time or retrospectively. An early approach consciously identified as such is structured programming, advocated since the mid 1960s and these are sometimes called first- and second-generation languages
10.
GNU Free Documentation License
–
The GNU Free Documentation License is a copyleft license for free documentation, designed by the Free Software Foundation for the GNU Project. It is similar to the GNU General Public License, giving readers the rights to copy, redistribute, copies may also be sold commercially, but, if produced in larger quantities, the original document or source code must be made available to the works recipient. The GFDL was designed for manuals, textbooks, other reference and instructional materials, however, it can be used for any text-based work, regardless of subject matter. For example, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia uses the GFDL for all of its text. The GFDL was released in form for feedback in September 1999. After revisions, version 1.1 was issued in March 2000, version 1.2 in November 2002, the current state of the license is version 1.3. The first discussion draft of the GNU Free Documentation License version 2 was released on September 26,2006, material licensed under the current version of the license can be used for any purpose, as long as the use meets certain conditions. All previous authors of the work must be attributed, all changes to the work must be logged. All derivative works must be licensed under the same license, the full text of the license, unmodified invariant sections as defined by the author if any, and any other added warranty disclaimers and copyright notices from previous versions must be maintained. Technical measures such as DRM may not be used to control or obstruct distribution or editing of the document, the license explicitly separates any kind of Document from Secondary Sections, which may not be integrated with the Document, but exist as front-matter materials or appendices. Secondary sections can contain information regarding the authors or publishers relationship to the subject matter, if the material is modified, its title has to be changed. The license also has provisions for the handling of front-cover and back-cover texts of books, as well as for History, Acknowledgements, Dedications and Endorsements sections. These features were added in part to make the more financially attractive to commercial publishers of software documentation. Endorsements sections are intended to be used in official standard documents, the GFDL requires the ability to copy and distribute the Document in any medium, either commercially or noncommercially and therefore is incompatible with material that excludes commercial re-use. Material that restricts commercial re-use is incompatible with the license and cannot be incorporated into the work, one example of such liberal and commercial fair use is parody. Although the two work on similar copyleft principles, the GFDL is not compatible with the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. These exemptions allow a GFDL-based collaborative project with multiple authors to transition to the CC BY-SA3, if it was not originally published on an MMC, it can only be relicensed if it were added to an MMC before November 1,2008. To prevent the clause from being used as a general compatibility measure, at the release of version 1.3, the FSF stated that all content added before November 1,2008 to Wikipedia as an example satisfied the conditions
