1.
Remote control
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In electronics, a remote control is a component of an electronic device used to operate the device wirelessly from a distance. For example, in electronics, a remote control can be used to operate devices such as a television set, DVD player, or other home appliance. A remote control is primarily a feature for the user. Early television remote controls used ultrasonic tones, Remote controls for these devices are usually small wireless handheld objects with an array of buttons for adjusting various settings such as television channel, track number, and volume. For many devices, the remote control contains all the controls while the controlled device itself has only a handful of essential primary controls. Remote control has continually evolved and advanced in the 2000s to include Bluetooth connectivity, motion sensor-enabled capabilities, in 1898 Nikola Tesla filed his patent, U. S. Tesla called his boat a teleautomaton. In 1903, Leonardo Torres Quevedo presented the Telekino at the Paris Academy of Science, accompanied by a brief, in the same time he obtained a patent in France, Spain, Great Britain, and the United States. The Telekino consisted of a robot that executed commands transmitted by electromagnetic waves, with the Telekino, Torres-Quevedo laid down modern wireless remote-control operation principles and was a pioneer in the field of remote control. In 1906, in the presence of the king and before a crowd, Torres successfully demonstrated the invention in the port of Bilbao. Later, he would try to apply the Telekino to projectiles and torpedoes, by the late 1930s, several radio manufacturers offered remote controls for some of their higher-end models. Using pulse-count modulation, this also was the first digital wireless remote control, the first remote intended to control a television was developed by Zenith Radio Corporation in 1950. The remote, called Lazy Bones, was connected to the television by a wire, a wireless remote control, the Flashmatic, was developed in 1955 by Eugene Polley. It worked by shining a beam of light onto a photoelectric cell, the Flashmatic also had to be pointed very precisely at the receiver in order to work. In 1956, Robert Adler developed Zenith Space Command, a wireless remote and it was mechanical and used ultrasound to change the channel and volume. When the user pushed a button on the control, it clicked and struck a bar. Each bar emitted a different frequency and circuits in the television detected this sound, the receiver contained a microphone attached to a circuit that was tuned to the same frequency. Some problems with this method were that the receiver could be triggered accidentally by naturally occurring noises, the impetus for a more complex type of television remote control came in 1973, with the development of the Ceefax teletext service by the BBC. Most commercial remote controls at that time had a number of functions
2.
LED lamp
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An LED lamp is a light-emitting diode product which is assembled into a lamp for use in lighting fixtures. The LED lamp market is projected to grow by more than twelve-fold over the decade, from $2 billion in the beginning of 2014 to $25 billion in 2023. As of 2016, LEDs use only about 10% of the energy an incandescent lamp requires, the initial cost of LED is usually higher. Degradation of LED dye and packaging materials reduces light output to some extent over time, Some LED lamps are made to be a directly compatible drop-in replacement for incandescent or fluorescent lamps. LEDs are adversely affected by temperature, so LED lamps typically include heat dissipation elements such as heat sinks. LED drivers are the components of LED lamps or luminaries. A good LED driver can guarantee a life for an LED system and provide additional features such as dimming. The LED drivers can be put inside lamp or luminaire, which is called a type, or be put outside. Before electric lighting became common in the early 20th century, people used candles, gas lights, oil lamps, humphry Davy developed the first incandescent light in 1802, followed by the first practical electric arc light in 1806. By the 1870s, Davys arc lamp had been successfully commercialized, the first LEDs were developed in the early 1960s, however, they were low-powered and only produced light in the low, red frequencies of the spectrum. The first high-brightness blue LED was demonstrated by Shuji Nakamura of Nichia Corporation in 1994, isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Nakamura were later awarded the 2014 Nobel prize in physics for the invention of the blue LED. The EISA legislation established basic requirements and prize amounts for each of the two categories, and authorized up to $20 million in cash prizes. The competition also included the possibility for winners to obtain federal purchasing agreements, utility programs, in May 2008, they announced details of the competition and technical requirements for each category. Lighting products meeting the requirements could use just 17% of the energy used by most incandescent lamps in use today. That same year the DOE also launched the Energy Star program for solid-state lighting products, the EISA legislation also authorized an additional L Prize program for developing a new 21st Century Lamp. Philips Lighting ceased research on compact fluorescents in 2008 and began devoting the bulk of its research, on 3 August 2011, DOE awarded the prize in the 60 W replacement category to a Philips LED lamp after 18 months of extensive testing. Early LED lamps varied greatly in chromaticity from the incandescent lamps they were replacing, a standard was developed, ANSI C78. 377-2008, that specified the recommended color ranges for solid-state lighting products using cool to warm white LEDs with various correlated color temperatures. In June 2008, NIST announced the first two standards for lighting in the United States
3.
Television set
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A television set, more commonly called a television, TV, TV set, television receiver, or telly, is a device that combines a tuner, display, and loudspeakers for the purpose of viewing television. Introduced in the late 1920s in mechanical form, television became a popular consumer product after World War II in electronic form. The addition of color to broadcast television after 1953 further increased the popularity of television sets in the 1960s, the ubiquitous television set became the display device for the first recorded media in the 1970s, such as Betamax, VHS and later DVD. It was also the display device for the first generation of home computers, in the 2010s flat panel television incorporating liquid-crystal displays, especially LED-backlit LCDs, largely replaced cathode ray tubes and other displays. Modern flat panel TVs are typically capable of display and can also play content from a USB device. Mechanical televisions were sold from 1928 to 1934 in the United Kingdom, United States. The Baird Televisor is considered the first mass-produced television, selling about a thousand units, the first commercially made electronic televisions with cathode ray tubes were manufactured by Telefunken in Germany in 1934, followed by other makers in France, Britain, and America. The cheapest model with a 12-inch screen was $445, an estimated 19,000 electronic televisions were manufactured in Britain, and about 1,600 in Germany, before World War II. About 7, 000–8,000 electronic sets were made in the U. S. before the War Production Board halted manufacture in April 1942, production resuming in August 1945. While only 0. 5% of U. S. households had a television in 1946,55. 7% had one in 1954, and 90% by 1962. In Britain, there were 15,000 television households in 1947,1.4 million in 1952, by the late 1960s and early 1970s, color television had come into wide use. In Britain, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV were regularly broadcasting in colour by 1969, during the first decade of the 21st century, CRT picture tube display technology was almost entirely supplanted worldwide by flat panel displays. By the early 2010s, LCD TVs, which increasingly used LED-backlit LCDs, television sets may employ one of several available display technologies. The production of plasma and CRT displays has been almost completely discontinued, the cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing one or more electron guns and a fluorescent screen used to view images. It has a means to accelerate and deflect the beam onto the screen to create the images. The images may represent electrical waveforms, pictures, radar targets or others, the CRT uses an evacuated glass envelope which is large, deep, fairly heavy, and relatively fragile. As a matter of safety, the face is made of thick lead glass so as to be highly shatter-resistant and to block most X-ray emissions. In television sets and computer monitors, the front area of the tube is scanned repetitively and systematically in a fixed pattern called a raster
4.
Embedded system
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An embedded system is a computer system with a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electrical system, often with real-time computing constraints. It is embedded as part of a device often including hardware. Embedded systems control many devices in use today. Ninety-eight percent of all microprocessors are manufactured as components of embedded systems, examples of properties of typically embedded computers when compared with general-purpose counterparts are low power consumption, small size, rugged operating ranges, and low per-unit cost. This comes at the price of limited processing resources, which make them more difficult to program. For example, intelligent techniques can be designed to power consumption of embedded systems. Modern embedded systems are based on microcontrollers, but ordinary microprocessors are also common. In either case, the processor used may be ranging from general purpose to those specialised in certain class of computations. A common standard class of dedicated processors is the signal processor. Since the embedded system is dedicated to tasks, design engineers can optimize it to reduce the size and cost of the product and increase the reliability. Some embedded systems are mass-produced, benefiting from economies of scale, complexity varies from low, with a single microcontroller chip, to very high with multiple units, peripherals and networks mounted inside a large chassis or enclosure. One of the very first recognizably modern embedded systems was the Apollo Guidance Computer, an early mass-produced embedded system was the Autonetics D-17 guidance computer for the Minuteman missile, released in 1961. When the Minuteman II went into production in 1966, the D-17 was replaced with a new computer that was the first high-volume use of integrated circuits. Since these early applications in the 1960s, embedded systems have come down in price and there has been a rise in processing power. An early microprocessor for example, the Intel 4004, was designed for calculators and other systems but still required external memory. By the early 1980s, memory, input and output system components had been integrated into the chip as the processor forming a microcontroller. Microcontrollers find applications where a computer would be too costly. A comparatively low-cost microcontroller may be programmed to fulfill the role as a large number of separate components
5.
Read-only memory
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Read-only memory is a type of non-volatile memory used in computers and other electronic devices. Data stored in ROM can only be modified slowly, with difficulty, or not at all, strictly, read-only memory refers to memory that is hard-wired, such as diode matrix and the later mask ROM, which cannot be changed after manufacture. Although discrete circuits can be altered in principle, integrated circuits cannot and that such memory can never be changed is a disadvantage in many applications, as bugs and security issues cannot be fixed, and new features cannot be added. More recently, ROM has come to include memory that is read-only in normal operation, the simplest type of solid-state ROM is as old as the semiconductor technology itself. Combinational logic gates can be joined manually to map n-bit address input onto arbitrary values of m-bit data output, with the invention of the integrated circuit came mask ROM. In mask ROM, the data is encoded in the circuit. This leads to a number of disadvantages, It is only economical to buy mask ROM in large quantities. The turnaround time between completing the design for a mask ROM and receiving the finished product is long, for the same reason, mask ROM is impractical for R&D work since designers frequently need to modify the contents of memory as they refine a design. If a product is shipped with faulty mask ROM, the way to fix it is to recall the product. Subsequent developments have addressed these shortcomings, PROM, invented in 1956, allowed users to program its contents exactly once by physically altering its structure with the application of high-voltage pulses. This addressed problems 1 and 2 above, since a company can order a large batch of fresh PROM chips. The 1971 invention of EPROM essentially solved problem 3, since EPROM can be reset to its unprogrammed state by exposure to strong ultraviolet light. All of these technologies improved the flexibility of ROM, but at a significant cost-per-chip, rewriteable technologies were envisioned as replacements for mask ROM. The most recent development is NAND flash, also invented at Toshiba, as of 2007, NAND has partially achieved this goal by offering throughput comparable to hard disks, higher tolerance of physical shock, extreme miniaturization, and much lower power consumption. Every stored-program computer may use a form of storage to store the initial program that runs when the computer is powered on or otherwise begins execution. Likewise, every non-trivial computer needs some form of memory to record changes in its state as it executes. Forms of read-only memory were employed as non-volatile storage for programs in most early stored-program computers, consequently, ROM could be implemented at a lower cost-per-bit than RAM for many years. Most home computers of the 1980s stored a BASIC interpreter or operating system in ROM as other forms of storage such as magnetic disk drives were too costly
6.
Integrated circuit
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An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece of semiconductor material, normally silicon. The ICs mass production capability, reliability and building-block approach to circuit design ensured the rapid adoption of standardized ICs in place of using discrete transistors. ICs are now used in all electronic equipment and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, mobile phones, and other home appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the small size. These advances, roughly following Moores law, allow a computer chip of 2016 to have millions of times the capacity, ICs have two main advantages over discrete circuits, cost and performance. Cost is low because the chips, with all their components, are printed as a unit by photolithography rather than being constructed one transistor at a time, furthermore, packaged ICs use much less material than discrete circuits. Performance is high because the ICs components switch quickly and consume little power because of their small size, the main disadvantage of ICs is the high cost to design them and fabricate the required photomasks. This high initial cost means ICs are only practical when high production volumes are anticipated, Circuits meeting this definition can be constructed using many different technologies, including thin-film transistor, thick film technology, or hybrid integrated circuit. However, in general usage integrated circuit has come to refer to the single-piece circuit construction originally known as a integrated circuit. Jacobi disclosed small and cheap hearing aids as typical industrial applications of his patent, an immediate commercial use of his patent has not been reported. The idea of the circuit was conceived by Geoffrey Dummer. Dummer presented the idea to the public at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington and he gave many symposia publicly to propagate his ideas, and unsuccessfully attempted to build such a circuit in 1956. A precursor idea to the IC was to create small ceramic squares, Components could then be integrated and wired into a bidimensional or tridimensional compact grid. This idea, which seemed very promising in 1957, was proposed to the US Army by Jack Kilby, however, as the project was gaining momentum, Kilby came up with a new, revolutionary design, the IC. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as a body of semiconductor material … wherein all the components of the circuit are completely integrated. The first customer for the new invention was the US Air Force, Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit. His work was named an IEEE Milestone in 2009, half a year after Kilby, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor developed his own idea of an integrated circuit that solved many practical problems Kilbys had not. Noyces design was made of silicon, whereas Kilbys chip was made of germanium, Noyce credited Kurt Lehovec of Sprague Electric for the principle of p–n junction isolation, a key concept behind the IC
7.
Apollo Guidance Computer
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The Apollo Guidance Computer was a digital computer produced for the Apollo program that was installed on board each Apollo Command Module and Lunar Module. The AGC provided computation and electronic interfaces for guidance, navigation, the AGC had a 16-bit word length, with 15 data bits and one parity bit. Astronauts communicated with the AGC using a display and keyboard called the DSKY. The AGC and its DSKY user interface were developed in the early 1960s for the Apollo program by the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, the AGC is notable for being one of the first integrated circuit-based computers. Each flight to the Moon had two AGCs, one each in the Command Module and the Lunar Module, the AGC in the Command Module was at the center of that spacecrafts guidance, navigation and control system. The AGC in the Lunar Module ran its Apollo PGNCS, with the acronym pronounced as pings, the AGS could be used to take off from the Moon, and to rendezvous with the Command Module, but not to land. The AGC was designed at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory under Charles Stark Draper, early architectural work came from J. H. Laning Jr. Albert Hopkins, Richard Battin, Ramon Alonso, and Hugh Blair-Smith. The flight hardware was fabricated by Raytheon, whose Herb Thaler was also on the architectural team, the Apollo flight computer was the first computer to use integrated circuits. While the Block I version used 4,100 ICs, each containing a single three-input NOR gate, the ICs, from Fairchild Semiconductor, were implemented using resistor-transistor logic in a flat-pack. They were connected via wire wrap, and the wiring was then embedded in cast epoxy plastic, the computer had 2048 words of erasable magnetic core memory and 36 kilowords of read-only core rope memory. Both had cycle times of 11.72 micro-seconds, the memory word length was 16 bits,15 bits of data and one odd-parity bit. The CPU-internal 16-bit word format was 14 bits of data, one overflow bit, the user interface to the AGC was the DSKY, standing for display and keyboard and usually pronounced dis-key. It had an array of lights, numeric displays and a calculator-style keyboard. Commands were entered numerically, as numbers, Verb. Verb described the type of action to be performed and Noun specified which data was affected by the action specified by the Verb command, the numerals were displayed via green high-voltage electroluminescent seven-segment displays. The segments were driven by electromechanical relays, which limited the display update rate, three five-digit signed numbers could also be displayed in octal or decimal, and were typically used to display vectors such as space craft attitude or a required velocity change. Although data was stored internally in metric units, they were displayed as United States customary units and this calculator-style interface was the first of its kind, the prototype for all similar digital control panel interfaces. The Lunar Module had a single DSKY for its AGC, a flight director attitude indicator, controlled by the AGC, was located above the DSKY on the commanders console and on the LM
8.
Magnetic-core memory
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Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random-access computer memory for 20 years between about 1955 and 1975. Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, Core uses tiny magnetic toroids, the cores, through which wires are threaded to write and read information. Each core represents one bit of information, the cores can be magnetized in two different ways and the bit stored in a core is zero or one depending on that cores magnetization direction. The process of reading the core causes the core to be reset to a zero, when not being read or written, the cores maintain the last value they had, even when power is turned off. Using smaller cores and wires, the density of core slowly increased. However, reaching this density required extremely careful manufacture, almost always carried out by hand in spite of repeated efforts to automate the process. The cost declined over this period from about $1 per bit to about 1 cent per bit, the introduction of the first semiconductor memory SRAM chips in the late 1960s began to erode the core market. The first successful DRAM, the Intel 1103 which arrived in quantity in 1972 at 1 cent per bit, improvements in semiconductor manufacturing led to rapid increases in storage and decreases in price that drove core from the market by around 1974. Although core memory is obsolete, any computer memory is still occasionally called core, in particular, the basic concept of using the square hysteresis loop of certain magnetic materials as a storage or switching device was known from the earliest days of computer development. Much of this knowledge had developed due to an understanding of transformers, the stable switching behavior was well known in the electrical engineering field, and its application in computer systems was immediate. For example, J. Presper Eckert and Jeffrey Chuan Chu had done some development work on the concept in 1945 at the Moore School during the ENIAC efforts. Frederick Viehe applied for patents on the use of transformers for building digital logic circuits in place of relay logic beginning in 1947. A patent on a fully developed core system was granted in 1947 and this development was little-known, however, and the mainstream development of core is normally associated with three independent teams. Substantial work in the field was carried out by the Shanghai-born American physicists An Wang and Way-Dong Woo, the name referred to the way that the magnetic field of the cores could be used to control the switching of current in electromechanical systems. Wang and Woo were working at Harvard Universitys Computation Laboratory at the time, Wang was able to patent the system on his own. The MIT Whirlwind computer required a fast memory system for real-time aircraft tracking use, at first, Williams tubes—a storage system based on cathode ray tubes—were used, but these devices were always temperamental and unreliable. William Papian of Project Whirlwind cited one of these efforts, Harvards Static Magnetic Delay Line, the first core memory of 32 x 32 x 16 bits was installed on Whirlwind in the summer of 1953. In April 2011, Forrester recalled, the Wang use of cores did not have any influence on my development of random-access memory, the Wang memory was expensive and complicated
9.
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
10.
Booting
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In computing, booting is the initialization of a computerized system. The system can be a computer or a computer appliance, the booting process can be hard, e. g. after electrical power to the CPU is switched from off to on, or soft, when those power-on self-tests can be avoided. On some systems a soft boot may optionally clear RAM to zero, both hard and soft booting can be initiated by hardware such as a button press, or by software command. Booting is complete when the normal, operative, runtime environment is attained, within the hard reboot process, it runs after completion of the self-tests, then loads and runs the software. A boot loader is loaded into memory from persistent memory, such as a hard disk drive or, in some older computers, from a medium such as punched cards, punched tape. The boot loader then loads and executes the processes that finalize the boot, the process of hibernating or sleeping does not involve booting. Minimally, some embedded systems do not require a noticeable sequence to begin functioning. All computing systems are state machines, and a reboot may be the method to return to a designated zero-state from an unintended, locked state. In addition to loading an operating system or stand-alone utility, the process can also load a storage dump program for diagnosing problems in an operating system. Boot is short for bootstrap or bootstrap load and derives from the phrase to pull oneself up by ones bootstraps, early computers used a variety of ad-hoc methods to get a small program into memory to solve this problem. The invention of read-only memory of various types solved this paradox by allowing computers to be shipped with a start up program that could not be erased, growth in the capacity of ROM has allowed ever more elaborate start up procedures to be implemented. There are many different methods available to load a short initial program into a computer and these methods reach from simple, physical input to removable media that can hold more complex programs. Early computers in the 1940s and 1950s were one-of-a-kind engineering efforts that could take weeks to program and program loading was one of problems that had to be solved. An early computer, ENIAC, had no program stored in memory, bootstrapping did not apply to ENIAC, whose hardware configuration was ready for solving problems as soon as power was applied. The program was stored as a bit image on a continuously running magnetic drum, core memory was probably cleared manually via the maintenance console, and startup from when power was fully up was very fast, only a few seconds. In its general design, the DIP compared roughly with a DEC PDP-8, thus, it was not the kind of single-button-pressure bootstrap that came later, nor a read-only memory in strict terms, since the magnetic drum involved could be written to. The first programmable computers for commercial sale, such as the UNIVAC I and they typically included instructions that performed a complete input or output operation. The left 18-bit half-word was then executed as an instruction, which usually read additional words into memory, the loaded boot program was then executed, which, in turn, loaded a larger program from that medium into memory without further help from the human operator
11.
Consumer electronics
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Consumer electronics or home electronics are electronic or digital equipment intended for everyday use, typically in private homes. Consumer electronics include devices used for entertainment, communications, and home-office activities, in British English, they are often called brown goods by producers and sellers, to distinguish them from white goods such as washing machines and refrigerators. Radio broadcasting in the early 20th century brought the first major consumer product, later products included telephones, personal computers, MP3 players, audio equipment, televisions and calculators. In the 2010s, consumer electronics stores often sell GPS, automotive electronics, video game consoles, electronic instruments, karaoke machines, digital cameras. Stores also sell digital cameras, camcorders, cell phones, some consumer electronics stores, such as Best Buy have also begun selling office and baby furniture. Consumer electronics stores may be bricks and mortar retail stores, online stores. The CEA estimated the value of 2015 consumer electronics sales at US$220 billion, for its first fifty years the phonograph turntable did not use electronics, the needle and soundhorn were purely mechanical technologies. However, in the 1920s radio broadcasting became the basis of production of radio receivers. The vacuum tubes that had made radios practical were used with record players as well, television was soon invented, but remained insignificant in the consumer market until the 1950s. The transistor, invented in 1947 by Bell Laboratories, led to significant research in the field of semiconductors in the early 1950s. The transistors advantages revolutionized that industry along with other electronics, by 1959 Fairchild Semiconductor had introduced the first planar transistor from which come the origins of Moores Law. Integrated circuits followed when manufacturers built circuits on a substrate using electrical connections between circuits within the chip itself. One overriding characteristic of consumer products is the trend of ever-falling prices. This is driven by gains in manufacturing efficiency and automation, lower costs as manufacturing has moved to lower-wage countries. Semiconductor components benefit from Moores Law, a principle which states that, for a given price. While consumer electronics continues in its trend of convergence, combining elements of many products, there is an ever increasing need to keep product information updated and comparable, for the consumer to make an informed choice. Style, price, specification, and performance are all relevant, there is a gradual shift towards e-commerce web-storefronts. Many products include Internet connectivity using technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, products not traditionally associated with computer use now provide options to connect to the Internet or to a computer using a home network to provide access to digital content
12.
Microwave oven
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A microwave oven is a kitchen appliance that heats and cooks food by exposing it to microwave radiation in the electromagnetic spectrum. This induces polar molecules in the food to rotate and produce energy in a process known as dielectric heating. Percy Spencer is generally credited with inventing the microwave oven after World War II from radar technology developed during the war. Named the Radarange, it was first sold in 1946, Raytheon later licensed its patents for a home-use microwave oven that was first introduced by Tappan in 1955, but these units were still too large and expensive for general home use. The countertop microwave oven was first introduced in 1967 by the Amana Corporation, Microwave ovens are popular for reheating previously cooked foods and cooking a variety of foods. They are also useful for heating of otherwise slowly prepared cooking items, such as hot butter, fats. Unlike conventional ovens, microwave ovens usually do not directly brown or caramelize food, exceptions occur in rare cases where the oven is used to heat frying-oil and other very oily items, which attain far higher temperatures than that of boiling water. Some modern microwave ovens are part of units with built-in extractor hoods. The exploitation of high-frequency radio waves for heating substances was possible by the development of vacuum tube radio transmitters around 1920. By 1930 the application of waves to heat human tissue had developed into the medical therapy of diathermy. At the 1933 Chicago Worlds Fair, Westinghouse demonstrated the cooking of foods between two metal plates attached to a 10 kW,60 MHz shortwave transmitter. The Westinghouse team, led by I. F. Mouromtseff, found that foods like steaks and this patent proposed radio frequency heating, at 10 to 20 megahertz. The invention of the cavity magnetron made possible the production of waves of a small enough wavelength. The magnetron was originally a component in the development of short wavelength radar during World War II. A more high-powered microwave generator that worked at shorter wavelengths was needed, sir Henry Tizard travelled to the U. S. in late September 1940 to offer the magnetron in exchange for their financial and industrial help. An early 6 kW version, built in England by the General Electric Company Research Laboratories, Wembley, contracts were awarded to Raytheon and other companies for mass production of the magnetron. In 1945, the heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that microwaves from a radar set he was working on started to melt a candy bar he had in his pocket
