1.
Computer network
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A computer network or data network is a telecommunications network which allows nodes to share resources. In computer networks, networked computing devices exchange data with other using a data link. The connections between nodes are established using either cable media or wireless media, the best-known computer network is the Internet. Network computer devices that originate, route and terminate the data are called network nodes, nodes can include hosts such as personal computers, phones, servers as well as networking hardware. Two such devices can be said to be networked together when one device is able to exchange information with the other device, Computer networks differ in the transmission medium used to carry their signals, communications protocols to organize network traffic, the networks size, topology and organizational intent. In most cases, application-specific communications protocols are layered over other more general communications protocols and this formidable collection of information technology requires skilled network management to keep it all running reliably. The chronology of significant computer-network developments includes, In the late 1950s, in 1960, the commercial airline reservation system semi-automatic business research environment went online with two connected mainframes. Licklider developed a group he called the Intergalactic Computer Network. In 1964, researchers at Dartmouth College developed the Dartmouth Time Sharing System for distributed users of computer systems. The same year, at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a group supported by General Electric and Bell Labs used a computer to route. Throughout the 1960s, Leonard Kleinrock, Paul Baran, and Donald Davies independently developed network systems that used packets to transfer information between computers over a network, in 1965, Thomas Marill and Lawrence G. Roberts created the first wide area network. This was an precursor to the ARPANET, of which Roberts became program manager. Also in 1965, Western Electric introduced the first widely used telephone switch that implemented true computer control, in 1972, commercial services using X.25 were deployed, and later used as an underlying infrastructure for expanding TCP/IP networks. In July 1976, Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs published their paper Ethernet, Distributed Packet Switching for Local Computer Networks, in 1979, Robert Metcalfe pursued making Ethernet an open standard. In 1976, John Murphy of Datapoint Corporation created ARCNET, a network first used to share storage devices. In 1995, the transmission speed capacity for Ethernet increased from 10 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s, by 1998, Ethernet supported transmission speeds of a Gigabit. Subsequently, higher speeds of up to 100 Gbit/s were added, the ability of Ethernet to scale easily is a contributing factor to its continued use. Providing access to information on shared storage devices is an important feature of many networks, a network allows sharing of files, data, and other types of information giving authorized users the ability to access information stored on other computers on the network
2.
Bulletin board system
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A bulletin board system, or BBS, is a computer server running software that allows users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Many BBSes also offer on-line games, in users can compete with each other. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the form of the World Wide Web, social networks. Low-cost, high-performance modems drove the use of services and BBSes through the early 1990s. Infoworld estimated there were 60,000 BBSes serving 17 million users in the United States alone in 1994, over the next year, many of the leading BBS software providers went bankrupt and tens of thousands of BBSes disappeared. Today, BBSing survives largely as a hobby in most parts of the world. Most BBSes are now accessible over Telnet and typically offer free email accounts, FTP services, IRC, some offer access through packet switched networks, or packet radio connections. A precursor to the bulletin board system was Community Memory, started in August 1973 in Berkeley. Useful microcomputers did not exist at that time, and modems were both expensive and slow, Community Memory therefore ran on a mainframe computer and was accessed through terminals located in several San Francisco Bay Area neighborhoods. The poor quality of the original modem connecting the terminals to the mainframe prompted a user to invent the Pennywhistle modem, Community Memory allowed the user to type messages into a computer terminal after inserting a coin, and offered a pure bulletin board experience with public messages only. It did offer the ability to tag messages with keywords, which the user could use in searches, the system acted primarily in the form of a buy and sell system with the tags taking the place of the more traditional classifications. But users found ways to express themselves outside these bounds, unfortunately, the system was expensive to operate, and when their host machine became unavailable and a new one could not be found, the system closed in January 1975. Similar functionality was available to most mainframe users, which might be considered a sort of ultra-local BBS when used in this fashion. Commercial systems, expressly intended to offer features to the public, became available in the late 1970s. Early modems were very simple devices using acoustic couplers to handle telephone operation. The user would first pick up the phone, dial a number, disconnecting at the end of a call required the user to pick up the handset and return it to the phone. With the introduction of microcomputers with expansion slots, like the S-100 bus machines and Apple II, it possible for the modem to communicate instructions. A number of modems of this sort were available by the late 1970s
3.
Data compression
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In signal processing, data compression, source coding, or bit-rate reduction involves encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation. Compression can be lossy or lossless. Lossless compression reduces bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy, no information is lost in lossless compression. Lossy compression reduces bits by removing unnecessary or less important information, the process of reducing the size of a data file is referred to as data compression. In the context of data transmission, it is called coding in opposition to channel coding. Compression is useful because it reduces resources required to store and transmit data, computational resources are consumed in the compression process and, usually, in the reversal of the process. Data compression is subject to a space–time complexity trade-off, Lossless data compression algorithms usually exploit statistical redundancy to represent data without losing any information, so that the process is reversible. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statistical redundancy, for example, an image may have areas of color that do not change over several pixels, instead of coding red pixel, red pixel. The data may be encoded as 279 red pixels and this is a basic example of run-length encoding, there are many schemes to reduce file size by eliminating redundancy. The Lempel–Ziv compression methods are among the most popular algorithms for lossless storage, DEFLATE is a variation on LZ optimized for decompression speed and compression ratio, but compression can be slow. DEFLATE is used in PKZIP, Gzip, and PNG, LZW is used in GIF images. LZ methods use a table-based compression model where table entries are substituted for repeated strings of data, for most LZ methods, this table is generated dynamically from earlier data in the input. The table itself is often Huffman encoded, current LZ-based coding schemes that perform well are Brotli and LZX. LZX is used in Microsofts CAB format, the best modern lossless compressors use probabilistic models, such as prediction by partial matching. The Burrows–Wheeler transform can also be viewed as a form of statistical modelling. The basic task of grammar-based codes is constructing a context-free grammar deriving a single string, sequitur and Re-Pair are practical grammar compression algorithms for which software is publicly available. In a further refinement of the use of probabilistic modelling. Arithmetic coding is a more modern coding technique that uses the mathematical calculations of a machine to produce a string of encoded bits from a series of input data symbols
4.
Modem
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A modem is a network hardware device that modulates one or more carrier wave signals to encode digital information for transmission and demodulates signals to decode the transmitted information. The goal is attempting to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily, modems can be used with any means of transmitting analog signals, from light emitting diodes to radio. Modems are generally classified by the amount of data they can send in a given unit of time, usually expressed in bits per second. Modems can also be classified by their rate, measured in baud. The baud unit denotes symbols per second, or the number of times per second the modem sends a new signal. For example, the ITU V.21 standard used audio frequency shift keying with two frequencies, corresponding to two distinct symbols, to carry 300 bits per second using 300 baud. By contrast, the original ITU V.22 standard, which could transmit and receive four distinct symbols, news wire services in the 1920s used multiplex devices that satisfied the definition of a modem. However, the function was incidental to the multiplexing function, so they are not commonly included in the history of modems. S. SAGE modems were described by AT&Ts Bell Labs as conforming to their newly published Bell 101 dataset standard, while they ran on dedicated telephone lines, the devices at each end were no different from commercial acoustically coupled Bell 101,110 baud modems. The 201A and 201B Data-Phones were synchronous modems using two-bit-per-baud phase-shift keying, the famous Bell 103A dataset standard was also introduced by AT&T in 1962. It provided full-duplex service at 300 bit/s over normal phone lines, frequency-shift keying was used, with the call originator transmitting at 1,070 or 1,270 Hz and the answering modem transmitting at 2,025 or 2,225 Hz. The readily available 103A2 gave an important boost to the use of remote low-speed terminals such as the Teletype Model 33 ASR and KSR, AT&T reduced modem costs by introducing the originate-only 113D and the answer-only 113B/C modems. For many years, the Bell System maintained a monopoly on the use of its phone lines, however, the seminal Hush-a-Phone v. FCC case of 1956 concluded it was within the FCCs jurisdiction to regulate the operation of the Bell System. The FCC found that as long as a device was not electronically attached to the system and this led to a number of devices that mechanically connected to the phone through a standard handset. Since most handsets were supplied by Western Electric and thus of a standard design and this type of connection was used for many devices, such as answering machines. Acoustically coupled Bell 103A-compatible 300 bit/s modems were common during the 1970s, well-known models included the Novation CAT and the Anderson-Jacobson, the latter spun off from an in-house project at Stanford Research Institute. An even lower-cost option was the Pennywhistle modem, designed to be built using parts from electronics scrap, in December 1972, Vadic introduced the VA3400, notable for full-duplex operation at 1,200 bit/s over the phone network. Like the 103A, it used different frequency bands for transmit, in November 1976, AT&T introduced the 212A modem to compete with Vadic
5.
Long-distance calling
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In telecommunications, a long-distance call or trunk call is a telephone call made to a location outside a defined local calling area. Long-distance calls are charged a higher billing rate than local calls. The term is not necessarily synonymous with placing calls to another area code. Before direct distance dialing all long-distance calls were established by special switchboard operators even in exchanges where calls within the exchange were dialed directly. Completion of long-distance calls was time-consuming and costly as each call was handled by operators in multiple cities. Record keeping was more complex, as the duration of every toll call had to be manually recorded for billing purposes. In some countries, such as Canada and the United States, in 1892, AT&T built an interconnected long-distance telephone network, which reached from New York to Chicago, the technological limit for non-amplified wiring. The invention of loading coils extended the range to Denver in 1911 and this process, nevertheless, involved five intermediary telephone operators and took 23 minutes to connect by manually patching in the route of the call. On October 9,1876, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson talked by telephone to each other over a wire stretched between Cambridge and Boston. It was the first wire conversation ever held, yesterday afternoon the same two men talked by telephone to each other over a 3, 400-mile wire between New York and San Francisco. Dr. Bell, the inventor of the telephone, was in New York. They heard each other much more distinctly than they did in their first talk thirty-eight years ago, the ten digit call was connected automatically within 18 seconds. The first subscriber trunk dialling in the United Kingdom was deployed December 5,1958 with Elizabeth II placing a call from Bristol to Edinburgh. International calling After World War II, priority was given by AT&T in the USA, thus, when TAT-1 was opened for service, it was connected to international gateway offices at White Plains, NY and London that were already automated for domestic calls. These were designed to be able to automatically switch outward and inward international circuits as soon as common signalling standards could be negotiated, International Direct Dialling from London to Paris was first offered in March 1963, with Amsterdam following by the end of 1963. Operator-dialed transpacific calling to Hawaii, Japan, and Australia began with the completion of the COMPAC cable, also in 1963. By mid-1968, transatlantic cable capacity had increased to the point where scheduling calls between Western Europe, the UK, and USA was no necessary and calls were completed on demand. Transatlantic International Direct Dialing between New York City and London was introduced in 1970, with service extended to the whole of the USA and this smart network was further refined to provide toll-free number portability in the 1990s
6.
UUCP
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UUCP is an abbreviation of Unix-to-Unix Copy. The term generally refers to a suite of programs and protocols allowing remote execution of commands and transfer of files, email. A command named uucp is one of the programs in the suite, the UUCP suite also includes uux, uucico, uustat, uuxqt, and uuname. Some versions of the suite include uuencode/uudecode, UUCP can use several different types of physical connections and link layer protocols, but was most commonly used over dial-up connections. Before the widespread availability of Internet access, computers were connected by smaller private networks within a company or organization. They were also equipped with modems so they could be used remotely from character-mode terminals via dial-up telephone lines. UUCP used the computers modems to dial out to other computers, establishing temporary, each system in a UUCP network has a list of neighbor systems, with phone numbers, login names and passwords, etc. When work is queued for a system, the uucico program typically calls that system to process the work. The uucico program can also poll its neighbors periodically to check for work queued on their side, today, UUCP is rarely used over dial-up links, but is occasionally used over TCP/IP. The number of systems involved, as of early 2006, ran between 1500 and 2000 sites across 60 enterprises, UUCPs longevity can be attributed to its low cost, extensive logging, native failover to dialup, and persistent queue management. UUCP was originally written at AT&T Bell Laboratories by Mike Lesk, by 1978 it was in use on 82 UNIX machines inside the Bell system, primarily for software distribution. It was released in 1979 as part of Version 7 Unix, the original UUCP was rewritten by AT&T researchers Peter Honeyman, David A. Nowitz, and Brian E. Redman around 1983. The rewrite is referred to as HDB or HoneyDanBer uucp, which was enhanced, bug fixed. Each of these versions was distributed as software, which inspired Ian Lance Taylor to write a new free software version from scratch in 1991. Taylor UUCP was released under the GNU General Public License, Taylor UUCP addressed security holes which allowed some of the original network worms to remotely execute unexpected shell commands. Taylor UUCP also incorporated features of all versions of UUCP, allowing it to communicate with any other version. UUCP was also implemented for non-UNIX operating systems, most-notably MS-DOS systems, packages such as UUSLAVE/GNUUCP, UUPC and FSUUCP, brought early Internet connectivity to personal computers, expanding the network beyond the interconnected university systems. FSUUCP formed the basis for many bulletin board system packages such as Galacticomms Major BBS, BBS to connect to the UUCP network and exchange email and Usenet traffic
7.
Internet
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The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that use the Internet protocol suite to link devices worldwide. The origins of the Internet date back to research commissioned by the United States federal government in the 1960s to build robust, the primary precursor network, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1980s. Although the Internet was widely used by academia since the 1980s, Internet use grew rapidly in the West from the mid-1990s and from the late 1990s in the developing world. In the two decades since then, Internet use has grown 100-times, measured for the period of one year, newspaper, book, and other print publishing are adapting to website technology, or are reshaped into blogging, web feeds and online news aggregators. The entertainment industry was initially the fastest growing segment on the Internet, the Internet has enabled and accelerated new forms of personal interactions through instant messaging, Internet forums, and social networking. Business-to-business and financial services on the Internet affect supply chains across entire industries, the Internet has no centralized governance in either technological implementation or policies for access and usage, each constituent network sets its own policies. The term Internet, when used to refer to the global system of interconnected Internet Protocol networks, is a proper noun. In common use and the media, it is not capitalized. Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized when used as a noun, the Internet is also often referred to as the Net, as a short form of network. Historically, as early as 1849, the word internetted was used uncapitalized as an adjective, the designers of early computer networks used internet both as a noun and as a verb in shorthand form of internetwork or internetworking, meaning interconnecting computer networks. The terms Internet and World Wide Web are often used interchangeably in everyday speech, however, the World Wide Web or the Web is only one of a large number of Internet services. The Web is a collection of interconnected documents and other web resources, linked by hyperlinks, the term Interweb is a portmanteau of Internet and World Wide Web typically used sarcastically to parody a technically unsavvy user. The ARPANET project led to the development of protocols for internetworking, the third site was the Culler-Fried Interactive Mathematics Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, followed by the University of Utah Graphics Department. In an early sign of growth, fifteen sites were connected to the young ARPANET by the end of 1971. These early years were documented in the 1972 film Computer Networks, early international collaborations on the ARPANET were rare. European developers were concerned with developing the X.25 networks, in December 1974, RFC675, by Vinton Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine, used the term internet as a shorthand for internetworking and later RFCs repeated this use. Access to the ARPANET was expanded in 1981 when the National Science Foundation funded the Computer Science Network, in 1982, the Internet Protocol Suite was standardized, which permitted worldwide proliferation of interconnected networks.5 Mbit/s and 45 Mbit/s. Commercial Internet service providers emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990
8.
Tom Jennings
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Tom Jennings is a Los Angeles-based artist and technician. He is the creator of FidoNet, the first message and file networking system for BBSes, while he lived in San Francisco from 1988 until 1991, Jennings was the publisher and co-editor, with Deke Nihilson, of Homocore, one of the earliest Queercore zines. The name came from the pages of J. D. s zine, Jennings currently resides in Los Angeles, California, with his partner Josh Stehlik. He is faculty at Calarts Art+Technology program, and also works as a technician at the University of California, Irvines Arts Computation Engineering graduate program
9.
MS-DOS
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MS-DOS is a discontinued operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. MS-DOS resulted from a request in 1981 by IBM for a system to use in its IBM PC range of personal computers. Microsoft quickly bought the rights to 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, IBM licensed and released it in August 1981 as PC DOS1.0 for use in their PCs. During its life, several competing products were released for the x86 platform and it was also the underlying basic operating system on which early versions of Windows ran as a GUI. It is a operating system, and consumes negligible installation space. MS-DOS was a form of 86-DOS – owned by Seattle Computer Products. This first version was shipped in August 1980, Microsoft, which needed an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer hired Tim Paterson in May 1981 and bought 86-DOS1.10 for $75,000 in July of the same year. Microsoft kept the number, but renamed it MS-DOS. They also licensed MS-DOS1. 10/1.14 to IBM, within a year Microsoft licensed MS-DOS to over 70 other companies. It was designed to be an OS that could run on any 8086-family computer, thus, there were many different versions of MS-DOS for different hardware, and there is a major distinction between an IBM-compatible machine and an MS-DOS machine. This design would have worked well for compatibility, if application programs had only used MS-DOS services to perform device I/O, Microsoft omitted multi-user support from MS-DOS because Microsofts Unix-based operating system, Xenix, was fully multi-user. After the breakup of the Bell System, however, AT&T Computer Systems started selling UNIX System V, believing that it could not compete with AT&T in the Unix market, Microsoft abandoned Xenix, and in 1987 transferred ownership of Xenix to the Santa Cruz Operation. On 25 March 2014, Microsoft made the code to SCP MS-DOS1.25, as an April Fools joke in 2015, Microsoft Mobile launched a Windows Phone application called MS-DOS Mobile which was presented as a new mobile operating system and worked similar to MS-DOS. Version 3.1 – Support for Microsoft Networks Version 3.2 – First version to support 3.5 inch,720 kB floppy drives and diskettes. Version 3.21 Version 3.22 – Version 3.25 Version 3.3 – First version to support 3.5 inch,1.44 MB floppy drives and diskettes, Version 3. 3a Version 3.31 – supports FAT16B and larger drives. MS-DOS4.0 and MS-DOS4.1 – A separate branch of development with additional multitasking features and it is unrelated to any later versions, including versions 4.00 and 4.01 listed below MS-DOS4. x – includes a graphical/mouse interface. It had many bugs and compatibility issues. Version 4.00 – First version to support a hard disk partition that is greater than 32 MiB. Version 4.01 – Microsoft rewritten Version 4.00 released under MS-DOS label, First version to introduce volume serial number when formatting hard disks and floppy disks
10.
San Francisco
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San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the birthplace of the United Nations, the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856, after three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was a port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. Politically, the city votes strongly along liberal Democratic Party lines, San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co. Dolby, Airbnb, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Yelp, Pinterest, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, as of 2016, San Francisco is ranked high on world liveability rankings. The earliest archaeological evidence of habitation of the territory of the city of San Francisco dates to 3000 BC. Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the became part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, the system gradually ended, and its lands became privatized. In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, and the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers. Commodore John D. Sloat claimed California for the United States on July 7,1846, during the Mexican–American War, montgomery arrived to claim Yerba Buena two days later. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco on January 30 of the next year, despite its attractive location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography. The California Gold Rush brought a flood of treasure seekers, with their sourdough bread in tow, prospectors accumulated in San Francisco over rival Benicia, raising the population from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849. The promise of fabulous riches was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor. Some of these approximately 500 abandoned ships were used at times as storeships, saloons and hotels, many were left to rot, by 1851 the harbor was extended out into the bay by wharves while buildings were erected on piles among the ships. By 1870 Yerba Buena Cove had been filled to create new land, buried ships are occasionally exposed when foundations are dug for new buildings. California was quickly granted statehood in 1850 and the U. S. military built Fort Point at the Golden Gate, silver discoveries, including the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, further drove rapid population growth. With hordes of fortune seekers streaming through the city, lawlessness was common, and the Barbary Coast section of town gained notoriety as a haven for criminals, prostitution, entrepreneurs sought to capitalize on the wealth generated by the Gold Rush
11.
Baltimore
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Baltimore is the largest city in the U. S. state of Maryland, and the 29th-most populous city in the country. It was established by the Constitution of Maryland and is not part of any county, thus, it is the largest independent city in the United States, with a population of 621,849 as of 2015. As of 2010, the population of the Baltimore Metropolitan Area was 2.7 million, founded in 1729, Baltimore is the second largest seaport in the Mid-Atlantic. Baltimores Inner Harbor was once the leading port of entry for immigrants to the United States. With hundreds of identified districts, Baltimore has been dubbed a city of neighborhoods, in the War of 1812, Francis Scott Key wrote The Star-Spangled Banner, later the American national anthem, in Baltimore. More than 65,000 properties, or roughly one in three buildings in the city, are listed on the National Register, more than any city in the nation. The city has 289 properties listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the historical records of the government of Baltimore are located at the Baltimore City Archives. The city is named after Cecil Calvert, second Lord Baltimore, of the Irish House of Lords, Baltimore Manor was the name of the estate in County Longford on which the Calvert family lived in Ireland. Baltimore is an anglicization of the Irish name Baile an Tí Mhóir, in 1608, Captain John Smith traveled 210 miles from Jamestown to the uppermost Chesapeake Bay, leading the first European expedition to the Patapsco River. The name Patapsco is derived from pota-psk-ut, which translates to backwater or tide covered with froth in Algonquian dialect, a quarter century after John Smiths voyage, English colonists began to settle in Maryland. The area constituting the modern City of Baltimore and its area was first settled by David Jones in 1661. He claimed the area today as Harbor East on the east bank of the Jones Falls stream. In the early 1600s, the immediate Baltimore vicinity was populated, if at all. The Baltimore area had been inhabited by Native Americans since at least the 10th millennium BC, one Paleo-Indian site and several Archaic period and Woodland period archaeological sites have been identified in Baltimore, including four from the Late Woodland period. During the Late Woodland period, the culture that is called the Potomac Creek complex resided in the area from Baltimore to the Rappahannock River in Virginia. It was located on the Bush River on land that in 1773 became part of Harford County, in 1674, the General Assembly passed An Act for erecting a Court-house and Prison in each County within this Province. The site of the house and jail for Baltimore County was evidently Old Baltimore near the Bush River. In 1683, the General Assembly passed An Act for Advancement of Trade to establish towns, ports, one of the towns established by the act in Baltimore County was on Bush River, on Town Land, near the Court-House
12.
Rainbow 100
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The Rainbow 100 was a microcomputer introduced by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1982. This desktop unit had a similar to the VT220 in a dual-CPU box with both 4 MHz Zilog Z80 and 4.81 MHz Intel 8088 CPUs. The Rainbow 100 was a machine, VT100 mode, 8-bit CP/M mode. The Rainbow came in three models, the 100A, 100B and 100+, the A model was the first released, followed later by the B model. The most noticeable differences between the two models were the firmware and slight hardware changes, the systems were referred to with model numbers PC-100A and PC-100B respectively, later B models were also designated PC-100B2. The A model was the first produced by Digital, the distinguishing characteristic of the A model from an end-user perspective was that the earlier firmware did not support booting from a hard disk. Other distinguishing hardware features included the three 2764 ROM chips holding the system firmware and the case fan/power supply combinations, versions of the 100A shipped outside the USA included a user-changeable ROM chip in a special casing. The user changed the built-in ROM for this one to support their keyboard layout, the B model followed the A model, and introduced a number of changes. The B model featured the ability to boot from a hard disk via the menu due to updated firmware. The hardware changes included bigger firmware stored on two 27128 ROMs and an improved case fan/power supply, the firmware allowed selection of the boot screen language and keyboard layout, eliminating the need to switch ROM. The 100+ model was actually a marketing designation signifying that the system shipped with a hard drive installed, when a hard-disk option was installed on the Rainbow, the kit included the 100+ emblem for the computers case. The Rainbow contained two separate data buses controlled by the Zilog Z80 and the Intel 8088 respectively, the buses exchanged information via a shared 62 kB memory. When not executing 8-bit code, the Zilog Z80 was used for disk access. The 8088 bus was used for control of all subsystems, including graphics, hard disk access. While it may have been possible to load Z80 binary code into the Rainbow to execute alongside 8088 code. The 100A model shipped with 64 kB memory on the motherboard, daughterboards were available from Digital Equipment Corporation that could increase system memory with up to an additional 768 kB. The floppy disk drives, known as the RX50, accepted proprietary 400 kB single-sided, initial versions of the operating systems on the Rainbow did not allow for low-level formatting, requiring users to purchase RX50 media from Digital Equipment Corporation. The high cost of media led to accusations of vendor lock-in against Digital, however, later versions of MS-DOS and CP/M allowed formatting of diskettes
13.
McDonnell Douglas
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McDonnell Douglas was a major American aerospace manufacturing corporation and defense contractor formed by the merger of McDonnell Aircraft and the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1967. Between then and its own merger with Boeing in 1997, it produced a number of commercial and military aircraft such as the DC-10 airliner. The corporation was based at Lambert–St, the company was formed from the firms of James Smith McDonnell and Donald Wills Douglas in 1967. Both men were of Scottish ancestry, graduates of MIT and had worked for the aircraft manufacturer Glenn L. Martin Company, Douglas had been chief engineer at Martin before leaving to establish Davis-Douglas Company in early 1920 in Los Angeles. He bought out his backer and renamed the firm the Douglas Aircraft Company in 1921, McDonnell & Associates in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1926. His idea was to produce an aircraft for family use. The economic depression from 1929 ruined his ideas and the company collapsed and he worked at three companies with the final being Glenn Martin Company in 1933. He left Martin in 1938 to try again with his own firm, McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, World War II was a major earner for Douglas. The company produced almost 30,000 aircraft from 1942 to 1945, both companies suffered at the end of hostilities, facing an end of government orders and a surplus of aircraft. After the war Douglas continued to new aircraft, including the DC-6 in 1946. The company moved into jet propulsion, producing its first for the military – the conventional F3D Skyknight in 1948, in 1955, Douglas introduced the first attack jet of the United States Navy with the A4D Skyhawk. Designed to operate from the decks of the World War II Essex class aircraft carriers, the Skyhawk was small, reliable, variants of it continued in use in the Navy for almost 50 years, finally serving in large numbers in a two-seat version as a jet trainer. Douglas also made commercial jets, producing the DC-8 in 1958 to compete with the Boeing 707, the Korean War-era Banshee and later the F-4 Phantom II produced during the Vietnam War helped push McDonnell into a major military fighter supply role. Douglas created a series of experimental high-speed jet aircraft in the Skyrocket family, Douglas also gained contracts from NASA, notably for part of the enormous Saturn V rocket. The two companies were now major employers, but both were having problems, Douglas was strained by the cost of the DC-8 and DC-9, while McDonnell suffered lean times during any downturns in military procurement. The two companies began to sound each other out about a merger, inquiries began in 1963, Douglas offered bid invitations from December 1966 and accepted that of McDonnell. The two firms were merged on 28 April 1967 as the McDonnell Douglas Corporation. The two companies were a fit for each other
14.
St. Louis
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St. Louis is an independent city and major U. S. port in the state of Missouri, built along the western bank of the Mississippi River, on the border with Illinois. Prior to European settlement, the area was a regional center of Native American Mississippian culture. The city of St. Louis was founded in 1764 by French fur traders Pierre Laclède and Auguste Chouteau, in 1764, following Frances defeat in the Seven Years War, the area was ceded to Spain and retroceded back to France in 1800. In 1803, the United States acquired the territory as part of the Louisiana Purchase, during the 19th century, St. Louis developed as a major port on the Mississippi River. In the 1870 Census, St. Louis was ranked as the 4th-largest city in the United States and it separated from St. Louis County in 1877, becoming an independent city and limiting its own political boundaries. In 1904, it hosted the Louisiana Purchase Exposition and the Summer Olympics, the economy of metro St. Louis relies on service, manufacturing, trade, transportation of goods, and tourism. This city has become known for its growing medical, pharmaceutical. St. Louis has 2 professional sports teams, the St. Louis Cardinals of Major League Baseball, the city is commonly identified with the 630-foot tall Gateway Arch in Downtown St. Louis. The area that would become St. Louis was a center of the Native American Mississippian culture and their major regional center was at Cahokia Mounds, active from 900 AD to 1500 AD. Due to numerous major earthworks within St. Louis boundaries, the city was nicknamed as the Mound City and these mounds were mostly demolished during the citys development. Historic Native American tribes in the area included the Siouan-speaking Osage people, whose territory extended west, European exploration of the area was first recorded in 1673, when French explorers Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette traveled through the Mississippi River valley. Five years later, La Salle claimed the region for France as part of La Louisiane. The earliest European settlements in the area were built in Illinois Country on the east side of the Mississippi River during the 1690s and early 1700s at Cahokia, Kaskaskia, migrants from the French villages on the opposite side of the Mississippi River founded Ste. In early 1764, after France lost the 7 Years War, Pierre Laclède, the early French families built the citys economy on the fur trade with the Osage, as well as with more distant tribes along the Missouri River. The Chouteau brothers gained a monopoly from Spain on the fur trade with Santa Fe, French colonists used African slaves as domestic servants and workers in the city. In 1780 during the American Revolutionary War, St. Louis was attacked by British forces, mostly Native American allies, the founding of St. Louis began in 1763. Pierre Laclede led an expedition to set up a fur-trading post farther up the Mississippi River, before then, Laclede had been a very successful merchant. For this reason, he and his trading partner Gilbert Antoine de St. Maxent were offered monopolies for six years of the fur trading in that area
15.
CP/M
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Initially confined to single-tasking on 8-bit processors and no more than 64 kilobytes of memory, later versions of CP/M added multi-user variations and were migrated to 16-bit processors. The combination of CP/M and S-100 bus computers was loosely patterned on the MITS Altair and this computer platform was widely used in business through the late 1970s and into the mid-1980s. CP/M increased the size for both hardware and software by greatly reducing the amount of programming required to install an application on a new manufacturers computer. An important driver of innovation was the advent of low-cost microcomputers running CP/M, as independent programmers and hackers bought them. CP/M was displaced by MS-DOS soon after the 1981 introduction of the IBM PC, manufacturers of CP/M-compatible systems customized portions of the operating system for their own combination of installed memory, disk drives, and console devices. CP/M would also run on based on the Zilog Z80 processor since the Z80 was compatible with 8080 code. CP/M used the 7-bit ASCII set, the other 128 characters made possible by the 8-bit byte were not standardized. For example, one Kaypro used them for Greek characters, WordStar used the 8th bit as an end-of-word marker. The BIOS and BDOS were memory-resident, while the CCP was memory-resident unless overwritten by an application, a number of transient commands for standard utilities were also provided. The transient commands resided in files with the extension. COM on disk, the BIOS directly controlled hardware components other than the CPU and main memory. It contained functions such as input and output and the reading and writing of disk sectors. The BDOS implemented the CP/M file system and some input/output abstractions on top of the BIOS, the CCP took user commands and either executed them directly or loaded and started an executable file of the given name. Third-party applications for CP/M were also essentially transient commands, the BDOS, CCP and standard transient commands were the same in all installations of a particular revision of CP/M, but the BIOS portion was always adapted to the particular hardware. Adding memory to a computer, for example, meant that the CP/M system had to be reinstalled with an updated BIOS capable of addressing the additional memory, a utility was provided to patch the supplied BIOS, BDOS and CCP to allow them to be run from higher memory. Once installed, the system was stored in reserved areas at the beginning of any disk which would be used to boot the system. On start-up, the bootloader would load the system from the disk in drive A. By modern standards CP/M was primitive, owing to the constraints on program size. With version 1.0 there was no provision for detecting a changed disk, if a user changed disks without manually rereading the disk directory the system would write on the new disk using the old disks directory information, ruining the data stored on the disk
16.
CBBS
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For the Canadian radio station, see CBBS-FM. CBBS was a program created by Ward Christensen to allow him. In January 1978, Chicago was hit by the Great Blizzard of 1978, among those caught in it were Christensen and Randy Suess, who were members of CACHE, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists Exchange. They had met at that club in the mid-1970s and become friends. Christensen had created a file transfer protocol for sending binary computer files through modem connections, later improvements to the program motivated a name change into the now familiar XMODEM. The success of this project encouraged further experiments, however, they needed some quiet time to set aside for such a project, and the blizzard gave them that time. Christensen worked on the software and Suess cobbled together an S-100 computer to put the program on and they had a working version within two weeks, but claimed soon afterwards that it had taken four so that it wouldnt seem like a rushed project. Time and tradition have settled that date to be February 16,1978, Christensen and Suess described their innovation in an article entitled Hobbyist Computerized Bulletin Board in the November 1978 issue of Byte Magazine. Because the Internet was still small and not available to most computer users, users had to dial CBBS directly using a modem, despite these limitations, the system was seen as very useful, and ran for many years and inspired the creation of many other bulletin board systems. Ward & Randy would often watch the users while they were online, at times, online users wondered if Ward & Randy actually existed. The program had many forward thinking ideas, now accepted as canonical in the creation of message bases or forums. As Christensen and Suess went their ways, the CBBS name lived on. Christensens version of CBBS, called Wards Board, closed in the early 1990s, on February 16,2003, Chicagos Mayor Richard M. Daley declared the day BBS day in honor of the worlds first BBS being created 25 years ago that day. An article with a photo of Ward and the CBBS hardware appeared shortly thereafter in the Chicago Tribune
17.
Digital Equipment Corporation
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Digital Equipment Corporation, also known as DEC and using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1950s to the 1990s. DEC was a vendor of computer systems, including computers, software. Their PDP and successor VAX products were the most successful of all minicomputers in terms of sales, DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. At the time, Compaq was focused on the market and had recently purchased several other large vendors. DEC was a major player overseas where Compaq had less presence, however, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, and soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own. The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002, as of 2007 some of DECs product lines were still produced under the HP name. From 1957 until 1992, DECs headquarters were located in a wool mill in Maynard. DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, which merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002. Some parts of DEC, notably the business and the Hudson. Initially focusing on the end of the computer market allowed DEC to grow without its potential competitors making serious efforts to compete with them. Their PDP series of machines became popular in the 1960s, especially the PDP-8, looking to simplify and update their line, DEC replaced most of their smaller machines with the PDP-11 in 1970, eventually selling over 600,000 units and cementing DECs position in the industry. Originally designed as a follow-on to the PDP-11, DECs VAX-11 series was the first widely used 32-bit minicomputer and these systems were able to compete in many roles with larger mainframe computers, such as the IBM System/370. The VAX was a best-seller, with over 400,000 sold, at its peak, DEC was the second largest employer in Massachusetts, second only to the Massachusetts State Government. The rapid rise of the business microcomputer in the late 1980s, DECs last major attempt to find a space in the rapidly changing market was the DEC Alpha 64-bit RISC instruction set architecture. DEC initially started work on Alpha as a way to re-implement their VAX series, DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. At the time, Compaq was focused on the market and had recently purchased several other large vendors. DEC was a major player overseas where Compaq had less presence, however, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, and soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own. The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002, as of 2007 some of DECs product lines were still produced under the HP name
18.
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
19.
Intel 8088
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The Intel 8088 microprocessor is a variant of the Intel 8086. Introduced on July 1,1979, the 8088 had an 8-bit external data bus instead of the 16-bit bus of the 8086, the 16-bit registers and the one megabyte address range were unchanged, however. In fact, according to the Intel documentation, the 8086 and 8088 have the execution unit —only the bus interface unit is different. The original IBM PC was based on the 8088, the 8088 was designed in Israel, at Intels Haifa laboratory, as were a large number of Intels processors. The prefetch queue of the 8088 was shortened to four bytes, from the 8086s six bytes, and these modifications of the basic 8086 design were one of the first jobs assigned to Intels then new design office and laboratory in Haifa, Israel. Later followed the 80C88, a fully static CHMOS design, which could operate with clock speeds from 0 to 8 MHz, there were also several other, more or less similar, variants from other manufacturers. For instance, the NEC V20 was a pin compatible and slightly faster variant of the 8088, successive NEC8088 compatible processors would run at up to 16 MHz. In 1984, Commodore International signed a deal to manufacture the 8088 for use in a licensed Dynalogic Hyperion clone, when announced, the list price of the 8088 was US $124.80. The 8088 is architecturally similar to the 8086. The main difference is there are only 8 data lines instead of the 8086s 16 lines. All of the pins of the device perform the same function as they do with the 8086 with two exceptions. First, pin 34 is no longer BHE, instead it outputs a maximum mode status, SSO. Combined with the IO/M and DT/R signals, the bus cycles can be decoded, the second change is the pin that signals if a memory access or input/output access is being made has had it sense reversed. The pin on the 8088 is IO/M, on the 8086 part it is IO/M. The reason for the reversal is that it makes the 8088 compatible with the 8085. 33–1 million instructions per second. The speed of the unit and the bus of the 8086 CPU was well balanced, with a typical instruction mix. Cutting down the bus to 8 bits made it a bottleneck in the 8088. With the speed of instruction fetch reduced by 50% in the 8088 as compared to the 8086, when the queue is empty, instructions take as long to complete as they take to fetch
20.
Zilog Z80
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The Z80 CPU is an 8-bit based microprocessor. It was introduced by Zilog in 1976 as the companys first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his employees at Zilog from early 1975 until March 1976. With the revenue from the Z80, the company built its own chip factories, the Zilog Z80 was a software compatible extension and enhancement of the Intel 8080 and, like it, was mainly aimed at embedded systems. In the early 1980s, the Z80 was the most commonly used CPU of all time, Zilog licensed the Z80 to the US-based Synertek and Mostek, that had helped them with initial production, as well as to a European second source manufacturer, SGS. The design was copied also by several Japanese, East European and Russian manufacturers and this enabled the Z80 to gain acceptance in the world market since large companies like NEC, Toshiba, Sharp, and Hitachi, started to manufacture the device. The Z80 came about when physicist Federico Faggin left Intel at the end of 1974 to found Zilog with Ralph Ungermann, at Fairchild Semiconductor, and later at Intel, Faggin had been working on fundamental transistor and semiconductor manufacturing technology. He also developed the design methodology used for memories and microprocessors at Intel and led the work on the Intel 4004. Masatoshi Shima, the logic and transistor level-designer of the 4004. By March 1976, Zilog had developed the Z80 as well as an accompanying assembler based development system for its customers, and by July 1976, early Z80s were manufactured by Synertek and Mostek, before Zilog had its own manufacturing factory ready, in late 1976. Masatoshi Shima designed most of the microarchitecture as well as the gate and transistor levels of the Z80 CPU, assisted by a number of engineers. CEO Federico Faggin was actually involved in the chip layout work. Faggin worked 80 hours a week in order to meet the tight schedule given by the financial investors, a non maskable interrupt which can be used to respond to power down situations and/or other high priority events. Two separate register files, which could be switched, to speed up response to interrupts such as fast asynchronous event handlers or a multitasking dispatcher. Although they were not intended as extra registers for general code, less hardware required for power supply, clock generation and interface to memory and I/O Single 5-volt power supply. A built-in DRAM refresh mechanism that would otherwise have to be provided by external circuitry, a special reset function which clears only the program counter so that a single Z80 CPU could be used in a development system such as an in-circuit emulator. The Z80 took over from the 8080 and its offspring, the 8085, in the processor market, perhaps a key to the initial success of the Z80 was the built-in DRAM refresh, and other features which allowed systems to be built with fewer support chips. For the original NMOS design, the specified upper frequency limit increased successively from the introductory 2.5 MHz, via the well known 4 MHz
21.
USRobotics
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U. S. Robotics Corporation, often called USR, is a company that produces USRobotics computer modems and related products. Its initial marketing was aimed at bulletin board systems, where its high-speed HST protocol made FidoNet transfers much faster, during the 1990s it became a major consumer brand with its Sportster line. The company had a reputation for quality and support for the latest communications standards as they emerged, notably in its V. Everything line. With the reduced usage of analog or voiceband modems in North America in the early 21st century, the company purchased Palm, Inc. for its PalmPilot PDA, but was itself purchased by 3Com soon after. 3Com spun off USR again in 2000, keeping Palm and returning USR to the now much smaller modem market, after 2004 the company is formally known as USR. It is one of the few left in the modem market today. The company name is a reference to the fiction of Isaac Asimov, asimovs robot stories featured a fictional company named U. S. Cowell stated at a popular BBS convention they named the company as an homage to Asimov, robots eventually became the biggest company in the universe. USR was one of many companies to offer dial-up modems for personal computers, prior to the development of standards such as the V.32 family of protocols, USR introduced its own HST protocol in 1986, which operated at 9600 bit/s. In 1989 HST was expanded to 14.4 kbit/s,16.8 kbit/s in 1992, however, USR became the most successful of the three, due to a marketing scheme that offered large discounts to BBS sysops. The proprietary nature of HST allowed USR to maintain its market even when off-brand V. 32-based modems began selling for less than equivalent HST modems. As the price decreased, however, V. 32-based modems eventually became a cost-effective alternative to HST. The Sportster used the same motherboard as the Couriers, and on certain 14.4 kbit/s models a sequence of AT commands could be issued to enable the faster 16.8 kbit/s HST mode. The Courier modems remained a favorite in the BBS and emerging Internet service provider world, a similar situation emerged a few years later when the 56kbit/s V.90 standard was first being proposed. USR developed its own 56k standard known as X2, while a consortium of companies introduced its own K56flex. In contrast to the success of HST, neither X2 nor K56flex saw any real market uptake, after the introduction of V.90, USR abandoned support for X2. In a further effort to reduce the price of its modems. Some models of Courier modems were known for their long-term upgradeability, because they used an upgradeable DSP design
22.
Usenet
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Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP dial-up network architecture, tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups, Usenet resembles a bulletin board system in many respects and is the precursor to Internet forums that are widely used today. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially, the name comes from the term users network. One notable difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store, individual users may read messages from and post messages to a local server operated by a commercial usenet provider, their Internet service provider, university, employer, or their own server. Usenet has significant cultural importance in the world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as FAQ, flame. The name Usenet emphasized its creators hope that the USENIX organization would take a role in its operation. The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories called newsgroups, for instance, sci. math and sci. physics are within the sci. * hierarchy, for science. Or, talk. origins and talk. atheism are in the talk. * hierarchy, when a user subscribes to a newsgroup, the news client software keeps track of which articles that user has read. In most newsgroups, the majority of the articles are responses to some other article, the set of articles that can be traced to one single non-reply article is called a thread. Most modern newsreaders display the articles arranged into threads and subthreads, when a user posts an article, it is initially only available on that users news server. Each news server talks to one or more servers and exchanges articles with them. In this fashion, the article is copied from server to server, the later peer-to-peer networks operate on a similar principle, but for Usenet it is normally the sender, rather than the receiver, who initiates transfers. Usenet was designed under conditions when networks were much slower and not always available, many sites on the original Usenet network would connect only once or twice a day to batch-transfer messages in and out. This is largely because the POTS network was used for transfers. The format and transmission of Usenet articles is similar to that of Internet e-mail messages, today, Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to Internet forums, blogs and mailing lists. The groups in alt. binaries are still used for data transfer
23.
Offline reader
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An offline reader is computer software that downloads e-mail, newsgroup posts or web pages, making them available when the computer is offline, not connected to the Internet. Offline readers are useful for computers and dial-up access. Website mirroring software is software is that allows for the download of a copy of a website to the local hard disk for offline browsing. In effect, the downloaded copy serves as a mirror of the original site, web crawler software such as Wget can be used to generate a site mirror. Offline mail readers are computer programs allow users to read electronic mail or other messages with a minimum of connection time to the server storing the messages. This is accomplished by the server packaging up multiple messages into a file for the user to download. The user then reads the message packet locally and any replies or new messages generated are packaged up, most e-mail systems, like the common POP and IMAP formats used for internet mail, are on-line by their very nature. Most end-user mailers, such as Outlook Express and AOL, can be used even if they are mainly intended to be used online. Users of large networks such as FidoNet regularly used offline mail readers, and it was used for UseNet messages on the internet. The two most common formats for FidoNet BBSs were Blue Wave and QWK, less well-known examples include Silver Xpresss OPX, XRS, OMEM, SOUP and ZipMail. Online and offline Cache manifest in HTML5 Kiwix, Wikipedia offline reader
24.
PCBoard
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PCBoard was a bulletin board system application first introduced for DOS in 1983 by Clark Development Corporation. Clark Development was founded by Fred Clark, PCBoard was one of the first commercial BBS packages for DOS systems, and was considered one of the high end packages during the rapid expansion of BBS systems in the early 1990s. Like many BBS companies, the rise of the Internet starting around 1994 led to serious downturns in fortunes, most PCB sales were of two-line licenses, additional line licenses were also available. A native 32-bit IBM OS/2 version became available with PCB V15.22. There were also a few available for PCBoard, which were specifically developed for the OS/22.0. Some sysops tried to run PCBoard on the new Windows 95 operating system by Microsoft, stability was critical for a BBS, which was usually running 24/7, and the early version of the Microsoft 32-bit operating system lacked it. Windows 95 was never supported by CDC. Standard PCs then and today have only one or two ports, which are needed to connect an external modem to a computer. This made multiport cards like the G-Tek BlackBoard, BBS550 or SmartCard, other options were internal multi-modem cards and multiple computers connected by local area network. PCBoard also supports ISDN and Telnet access via the Internet, the first version of PCBoard was released in 1983. A compiled interpreter script written in PPL was called PPE, PPEs were generated by the PCBoard Programming Language Compiler, which was an optional tool provided by Clark Development Company and was also available for purchase as stand alone tool. It was less than $100 by itself and less than $50 in combination with any BBS license and this allowed programmers to develop PPEs for PCBoard without having to purchase a PCBoard BBS license. Also optional and available by itself were the printed PCBoard manual, the script language was introduced with version 15.0 and made this version of PCBoard even more successful than PCBoard V14.5. Various door programs were in use, including Sam Smiths Prodoor, the warez BBSs used mostly pirated versions of the BBS software and thus did not appear in any official sales or usage statistic for the software. What PCBoard was for warez BBSes on the IBM PC, was Amiexpress for BBSes running on Commodore Amiga computers, despite the high price tag Clark Development Company sold more than 50,000 PCBoard licenses by 1995. The last full release of PCBoard by Clark Development Company was version 15.3 in September 1996, Clark Technologies, a division of Clark Development Company announced on July 29,1996 the availability of source code and OEM licenses for the PCBoard BBS software. The final release was 15.4 beta, which had a trial period. Clark Development Company went bankrupt in July 1997 and closed its offices without warning, leaving a great number of upset customers behind
25.
Commodore 64
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The Commodore 64, also known as the C64, C-64, C=64, or occasionally CBM64 or VIC-64 in Sweden, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International. It is listed in the Guinness World Records as the single computer model of all time. Volume production started in early 1982, marketing in August for US$595, preceded by the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore PET, the C64 took its name from its 64 kilobytes of RAM. It had superior sound and graphical specifications compared to earlier systems such as the Apple II and Atari 800, with multi-color sprites. The C64 dominated the low-end computer market for most of the 1980s. Sam Tramiel, a later Atari president and the son of Commodores founder, said in a 1989 interview, When I was at Commodore we were building 400,000 C64s a month for a couple of years. In the UK market, the C64 faced competition from the BBC Micro and the ZX Spectrum, part of the Commodore 64s success was its sale in regular retail stores instead of only electronics and/or computer hobbyist specialty stores. Commodore produced many of its parts in-house to control costs, including custom integrated circuit chips from MOS Technology and it has been compared to the Ford Model T automobile for its role in bringing a new technology to middle-class households via creative and affordable mass-production. Approximately 10,000 commercial software titles have made for the Commodore 64 including development tools, office productivity applications. C64 emulators allow anyone with a computer, or a compatible video game console. The C64 is also credited with popularizing the computer demoscene and is used today by some computer hobbyists. In 2008,17 years after it was taken off the market, in January 1981, MOS Technology, Inc. Commodores integrated circuit design subsidiary, initiated a project to design the graphic, Design work for the chips, named MOS Technology VIC-II and MOS Technology SID, was completed in November 1981. Commodore then began a game console project that would use the new chips—called the Ultimax or the Commodore MAX Machine and this project was eventually cancelled after just a few machines were manufactured for the Japanese market. At the same time, Robert Bob Russell and Robert Bob Yannes were critical of the current product line-up at Commodore, with the support of Al Charpentier and Charles Winterble, they proposed to Commodore CEO Jack Tramiel a true low-cost sequel to the VIC-20. Tramiel dictated that the machine should have 64 KB of random-access memory, although 64-Kbit dynamic random-access memory chips cost over US$100 at the time, he knew that DRAM prices were falling, and would drop to an acceptable level before full production was reached. The product was named the VIC-40 as the successor to the popular VIC-20. The team that constructed it consisted of Yash Terakura, Bob Russell, Bob Yannes, the design, prototypes and some sample software were finished in time for the show, after the team had worked tirelessly over both Thanksgiving and Christmas weekends
26.
AlterNet
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AlterNet is a progressive activist news service and a project of the non-profit Independent Media Institute. Launched in 1998, AlterNet claims a readership of over 5.9 million visitors per month, AlterNet publishes original content as well as journalism from a wide variety of other sources. AlterNet states that its mission is to inspire action and advocacy on the environment, human rights and civil liberties, social justice, media. AlterNets tagline is The Mix is the Message, founded in 1998, AlterNet publishes a combination of policy critiques, investigative reports and analysis, grassroots success stories, and personal narratives. Waging Nonviolence, Asia Times, New America Media and Mother Jones, the editorial staff is headed by founder and executive editor Don Hazen, a former publisher of Mother Jones. AlterNet is financed through donations, by grants from major donors. In 2001–2005, the top three financial backers of the Independent Media Institute were the Nathan Cummings Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, after 9/11, Solutions for a Saner World at the Wayback Machine. ISBN 0-9633687-1-0 The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq, archived from the original on 15 March 2006. CS1 maint, BOT, original-url status unknown,2003, ISBN 1-58322-644-3 Hazen, Don, and Lakshmi Chaudhry. Start Making Sense, Turning the Lessons of Election 2004 into Winning Progressive Politics, white River Junction, Vt. T, Chelsea Green Pub
27.
Internet protocol suite
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The Internet protocol suite is the conceptual model and set of communications protocols used on the Internet and similar computer networks. It is commonly known as TCP/IP because the protocols in the suite are the Transmission Control Protocol. It is occasionally known as the Department of Defense model, because the development of the model was funded by DARPA. The Internet protocol suite provides end-to-end data communication specifying how data should be packetized, addressed, transmitted, routed and received and this functionality is organized into four abstraction layers which are used to sort all related protocols according to the scope of networking involved. Technical standards specifying the Internet protocol suite and many of its constituent protocols are maintained by the Internet Engineering Task Force, the Internet protocol suite model is a simpler model developed prior to the OSI model. The Internet protocol suite resulted from research and development conducted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960s, after initiating the pioneering ARPANET in 1969, DARPA started work on a number of other data transmission technologies. In 1972, Robert E. Cerf credits Hubert Zimmermann and Louis Pouzin, designer of the CYCLADES network, the protocol was implemented as the Transmission Control Program, first published in 1974. Initially, the TCP managed both datagram transmissions and routing, but as the protocol grew, other researchers recommended a division of functionality into protocol layers, postel stated, “we are screwing up in our design of Internet protocols by violating the principle of layering”. Encapsulation of different mechanisms was intended to create an environment where the layers could access only what was needed from the lower layers. A monolithic design would be inflexible and lead to scalability issues, the Transmission Control Program was split into two distinct protocols, the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. The new suite replaced all protocols used previously and this design is known as the end-to-end principle. Using this design, it possible to connect almost any network to the ARPANET, irrespective of the local characteristics. One popular expression is that TCP/IP, the product of Cerf and Kahns work. A computer called a router is provided with an interface to each network and it forwards packets back and forth between them. Originally a router was called gateway, but the term was changed to avoid confusion with other types of gateways, from 1973 to 1974, Cerfs networking research group at Stanford worked out details of the idea, resulting in the first TCP specification. A significant technical influence was the early networking work at Xerox PARC, DARPA then contracted with BBN Technologies, Stanford University, and the University College London to develop operational versions of the protocol on different hardware platforms. Four versions were developed, TCP v1, TCP v2, TCP v3 and IP v3, the last protocol is still in use today. In 1975, a two-network TCP/IP communications test was performed between Stanford and University College London, in November,1977, a three-network TCP/IP test was conducted between sites in the US, the UK, and Norway
28.
ASCII
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ASCII, abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices, most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, although they support many additional characters. ASCII was developed from telegraph code and its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on the ASCII standard began on October 6,1960, the first edition of the standard was published in 1963, underwent a major revision during 1967, and experienced its most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting of lists, and added features for other than teleprinters. Originally based on the English alphabet, ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers as shown by the ASCII chart above. The characters encoded are numbers 0 to 9, lowercase letters a to z, uppercase letters A to Z, basic punctuation symbols, control codes that originated with Teletype machines, for example, lowercase j would become binary 1101010 and decimal 106. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters,33 are non-printing control characters that affect how text and space are processed and 95 printable characters, of these, the IANA encourages use of the name US-ASCII for Internet uses of ASCII. The ASA became the United States of America Standards Institute and ultimately the American National Standards Institute, there was some debate at the time whether there should be more control characters rather than the lowercase alphabet. The X3.2.4 task group voted its approval for the change to ASCII at its May 1963 meeting, the X3 committee made other changes, including other new characters, renaming some control characters and moving or removing others. ASCII was subsequently updated as USAS X3. 4-1967, then USAS X3. 4-1968, ANSI X3. 4-1977 and they proposed a 9-track standard for magnetic tape, and attempted to deal with some punched card formats. The X3.2 subcommittee designed ASCII based on the earlier teleprinter encoding systems, like other character encodings, ASCII specifies a correspondence between digital bit patterns and character symbols. This allows digital devices to communicate each other and to process, store. Before ASCII was developed, the encodings in use included 26 alphabetic characters,10 numerical digits, ITA2 were in turn based on the 5-bit telegraph code Émile Baudot invented in 1870 and patented in 1874. The committee debated the possibility of a function, which would allow more than 64 codes to be represented by a six-bit code. In a shifted code, some character codes determine choices between options for the character codes. It allows compact encoding, but is reliable for data transmission. The standards committee decided against shifting, and so ASCII required at least a seven-bit code, the committee considered an eight-bit code, since eight bits would allow two four-bit patterns to efficiently encode two digits with binary-coded decimal
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Dial-up Internet access
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The users computer or router uses an attached modem to encode and decode information into and from audio frequency signals, respectively. In 1979, Tom Truscott and Steve Bellovin, graduate students for Duke University, the USENET was a UNIX based system that used a dial-up connection to transfer data through telephone modems. Dial-up Internet has been around since the 1980s via public providers such as NSFNET-linked universities and was first offered commercially in July 1992 by Sprint. Despite losing ground to broadband since the late-1990s, dial-up may still be used other forms are not available or the cost is too high. Dial-up connections to the Internet require no other than the telephone network. Dial-up requires time to establish a connection and perform configuration for protocol synchronization before data transfers can take place. In locales with telephone connection charges, each connection incurs an incremental cost, if calls are time-metered, the duration of the connection incurs costs. Dial-up access is a transient connection, because either the user, technically inclined users often find a way to disable the auto-disconnect program such that they can remain connected for more days than one. A2008 Pew research center study stated that only 10 percent of US adults still used dial-up Internet access, the study found that the most common reason for retaining dial-up access was high broadband prices. Users cited lack of infrastructure as a less often than stating that they would never upgrade to broadband. According to the United States Federal Communications Commission, 6% used dial-up in 2010, by 2013, that number had fallen to 3%. Broadband internet access via cable, digital line, satellite. Broadband connections typically offer speeds of 700 kbit/s or higher for more than the price of dial-up on average. In addition broadband connections are always on, thus avoiding the need to connect and disconnect at the start, however, many rural areas still remain without high speed Internet despite the eagerness of potential customers. This can be attributed to population, location, or sometimes ISPs lack of interest due to little chance of profitability and high costs to build the required infrastructure. Some dial-up ISPs have responded to the competition by lowering their rates. Dial-up Internet access has undergone a precipitous fall in usage, in contrast to the year 2000 when about 34% of Internet users used dial-up, this dropped to 3% in 2013. Many newer websites also now assume broadband speeds as the norm, modern dial-up modems typically have a maximum theoretical transfer speed of 56 kbit/s, although in most cases, 40–50 kbit/s is the norm
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Zip (file format)
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ZIP is an archive file format that supports lossless data compression. A. ZIP file may contain one or more files or directories that may have been compressed, the. ZIP file format permits a number of compression algorithms, though DEFLATE is the most common. This format was created in 1989 by Phil Katz, and was first implemented in PKWARE, Inc. s PKZIP utility. The. ZIP format is now supported by many software utilities other than PKZIP, Microsoft has included built-in. ZIP support in versions of Microsoft Windows since 1998. Apple has included built-in. ZIP support in Mac OS X10.3 and later. Most free operating systems have built in support for. ZIP in similar manners to Windows and Mac OS X. ZIP files generally use the file extensions. zip or. ZIP, ZIP is used as a base file format by many programs, usually under a different name. When navigating a file system via an interface, graphical icons representing. ZIP files often appear as a document or other object prominently featuring a zipper. The. ZIP file format was created by Phil Katz of PKWARE and they created the format after PKWARE had a lawsuits filed against them by Systems Enhancement Associates claiming that his archiving products were derivatives of SEAs ARC archiving system. The name zip was suggested by Katzs friend, Robert Mahoney and they wanted to imply that their product would be faster than ARC and other compression formats of the time. The earliest known version of. ZIP File Format Specification was first published as part of PKZIP0.9 package under the file APPNOTE. TXT in 1989, the. ZIP file format was released into the public domain. The. ZIP File Format Specification has its own version number, other companies or organizations support the PKWARE specifications at their own pace. The. ZIP file format specification is formally named APPNOTE -. ZIP File Format Specification, several versions of the specification were not published. Specifications of some such as BZIP2 compression, strong encryption specification. The URL of the specification was changed several times on the PKWARE website. A summary of key advances in various versions of the PKWARE specification,2.0, File entries can be compressed with DEFLATE,2.1, Deflate64 compression 4.5, Documented 64-bit zip format. 4.6, BZIP2 compression 5.0, DES, Triple DES, RC2, RC4 supported for encryption 5.2, AES encryption support, expanded list of supported hash, compression, encryption algorithms. 6.3.1, Corrected standard hash values for SHA-256/384/512,6.3.4, Updates the PKWARE, Inc. office address. WinZip, starting with version 12.1, uses the extension. zipx for. ZIP files that use compression methods newer than DEFLATE, specifically, methods BZip, LZMA, PPMd, Jpeg and Wavpack
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North America
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North America is a continent entirely within the Northern Hemisphere and almost all within the Western Hemisphere. It can also be considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the west and south by the Pacific Ocean, and to the southeast by South America and the Caribbean Sea. North America covers an area of about 24,709,000 square kilometers, about 16. 5% of the land area. North America is the third largest continent by area, following Asia and Africa, and the fourth by population after Asia, Africa, and Europe. In 2013, its population was estimated at nearly 565 million people in 23 independent states, or about 7. 5% of the worlds population, North America was reached by its first human populations during the last glacial period, via crossing the Bering land bridge. The so-called Paleo-Indian period is taken to have lasted until about 10,000 years ago, the Classic stage spans roughly the 6th to 13th centuries. The Pre-Columbian era ended with the migrations and the arrival of European settlers during the Age of Discovery. Present-day cultural and ethnic patterns reflect different kind of interactions between European colonists, indigenous peoples, African slaves and their descendants, European influences are strongest in the northern parts of the continent while indigenous and African influences are relatively stronger in the south. Because of the history of colonialism, most North Americans speak English, Spanish or French, the Americas are usually accepted as having been named after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci by the German cartographers Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann. Vespucci, who explored South America between 1497 and 1502, was the first European to suggest that the Americas were not the East Indies, but a different landmass previously unknown by Europeans. In 1507, Waldseemüller produced a map, in which he placed the word America on the continent of South America. He explained the rationale for the name in the accompanying book Cosmographiae Introductio, for Waldseemüller, no one should object to the naming of the land after its discoverer. He used the Latinized version of Vespuccis name, but in its feminine form America, following the examples of Europa, Asia and Africa. Later, other mapmakers extended the name America to the continent, In 1538. Some argue that the convention is to use the surname for naming discoveries except in the case of royalty, a minutely explored belief that has been advanced is that America was named for a Spanish sailor bearing the ancient Visigothic name of Amairick. Another is that the name is rooted in a Native American language, the term North America maintains various definitions in accordance with location and context. In Canadian English, North America may be used to refer to the United States, alternatively, usage sometimes includes Greenland and Mexico, as well as offshore islands
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Soviet Union
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The Soviet Union, officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a socialist state in Eurasia that existed from 1922 to 1991. It was nominally a union of national republics, but its government. The Soviet Union had its roots in the October Revolution of 1917 and this established the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and started the Russian Civil War between the revolutionary Reds and the counter-revolutionary Whites. In 1922, the communists were victorious, forming the Soviet Union with the unification of the Russian, Transcaucasian, Ukrainian, following Lenins death in 1924, a collective leadership and a brief power struggle, Joseph Stalin came to power in the mid-1920s. Stalin suppressed all opposition to his rule, committed the state ideology to Marxism–Leninism. As a result, the country underwent a period of rapid industrialization and collectivization which laid the foundation for its victory in World War II and postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. Shortly before World War II, Stalin signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact agreeing to non-aggression with Nazi Germany, in June 1941, the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, opening the largest and bloodiest theater of war in history. Soviet war casualties accounted for the highest proportion of the conflict in the effort of acquiring the upper hand over Axis forces at battles such as Stalingrad. Soviet forces eventually captured Berlin in 1945, the territory overtaken by the Red Army became satellite states of the Eastern Bloc. The Cold War emerged by 1947 as the Soviet bloc confronted the Western states that united in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1949. Following Stalins death in 1953, a period of political and economic liberalization, known as de-Stalinization and Khrushchevs Thaw, the country developed rapidly, as millions of peasants were moved into industrialized cities. The USSR took a lead in the Space Race with Sputnik 1, the first ever satellite, and Vostok 1. In the 1970s, there was a brief détente of relations with the United States, the war drained economic resources and was matched by an escalation of American military aid to Mujahideen fighters. In the mid-1980s, the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize the economy through his policies of glasnost. The goal was to preserve the Communist Party while reversing the economic stagnation, the Cold War ended during his tenure, and in 1989 Soviet satellite countries in Eastern Europe overthrew their respective communist regimes. This led to the rise of strong nationalist and separatist movements inside the USSR as well, in August 1991, a coup détat was attempted by Communist Party hardliners. It failed, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin playing a role in facing down the coup. On 25 December 1991, Gorbachev resigned and the twelve constituent republics emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union as independent post-Soviet states
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Australasia
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Australasia, a region of Oceania, comprises Australia, New Zealand, the island of New Guinea, and neighbouring islands in the Pacific Ocean. Charles de Brosses coined the term in Histoire des navigations aux terres australes and he derived it from the Latin for south of Asia and differentiated the area from Polynesia and the southeast Pacific. The bulk of Australasia sits on the Indo-Australian Plate, together with India, physiographically, Australasia includes New Zealand, Australia, and Melanesia, New Guinea and neighbouring islands north and east of Australia in the Pacific Ocean. The designation is applied to all the lands and islands of the Pacific Ocean lying between the equator and latitude 47° south. Most of Australasia lies on the portion of the Indo-Australian Plate, flanked by the Indian Ocean to the west. Sometimes the term encompasses the island of New Guinea. Many organisations whose names include the prefix Australasian Society of, limit their scope of operation to just Australia and New Zealand. In the past, Australasia has been used as a name for combined Australia/New Zealand sporting teams, examples include tennis between 1905 and 1915, when New Zealand and Australia combined to compete in the Davis Cup international tournament, and at the Olympic Games of 1908 and 1912. From an ecological perspective the Australasia ecozone forms a region with a common geologic and evolutionary history. In this context, Australasia is limited to Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand, New Caledonia, the Wallace Line marks the biological divide from the Indomalaya ecozone of tropical Asia – Borneo and Bali lie on the western, Asian side. These three land masses have been separated from other continents, and from one another, for millions of years, all of Australasia shares the Antarctic flora, although the northern, tropical islands also share many plants with Southeast Asia. Mainland Australia, New Guinea and Tasmania are separated from one another by shallow continental shelves and they share a similar fauna which includes marsupial and monotreme mammals and ratite birds. Eucalypts are the predominant trees in much of Australia and New Guinea, New Zealand has no extant native land mammals aside from bats, but also had ratite birds, including the kiwi and the extinct moa. Media related to Australasia at Wikimedia Commons
