1.
National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics
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The National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was a U. S. federal agency founded on March 3,1915, to undertake, promote, and institutionalize aeronautical research. On October 1,1958, the agency was dissolved, and its assets and personnel transferred to the newly created National Aeronautics, NACA was pronounced as discrete letters, rather than as a whole word. NACA was also key in developing the area rule that is used on all modern supersonic aircraft and it was modeled on similar national agencies found in Europe. The most influential agency upon which the NACA was based was the British Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, in December 1912, President William Howard Taft had appointed a National Aerodynamical Laboratory Commission chaired by Robert S. Woodward, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Legislation was introduced in both houses of Congress early in January 1913 to approve the commission, but when it came to a vote, assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote that he heartily the principle on which the legislation was based. Walcott suggested the tactic of adding the resolution to the Naval Appropriations Bill, according to one source, The enabling legislation for the NACA slipped through almost unnoticed as a rider attached to the Naval Appropriation Bill, on 3 March 1915. The committee of 12 people, all unpaid, were allocated a budget of $5,000 per year. President Woodrow Wilson signed it into law the day, thus formally creating the Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. On January 29,1920, President Wilson appointed pioneering flier, by the early 1920s, it had adopted a new and more ambitious mission, to promote military and civilian aviation through applied research that looked beyond current needs. NACA researchers pursued this mission through the impressive collection of in-house wind tunnels, engine test stands. Commercial and military clients were also permitted to use NACA facilities on a contract basis, facilities Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory Ames Aeronautical Laboratory Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory Muroc Flight Test Unit In 1922, NACA had 100 employees. In addition to assignments, staff were encouraged to pursue unauthorized bootleg research. The result was a string of fundamental breakthroughs, including thin airfoil theory, NACA engine cowl, the NACA airfoil series. The full-size 30-by-60-foot Langley wind tunnel operated at no more than 100 miles per hour and these were speeds Lockheed engineers considered useless for their purposes. Arnold took up the matter and overruled NACA objections to higher air speeds, NACA built a handful of new high-speed wind tunnels, and Mach 0.75 (570 mph was reached at Moffetts 16-foot wind tunnel late in 1942. In the years immediately preceding World War II, NACA was involved in the development of designs that served key roles in the war effort. This enabled the B-17 to be used as a key aircraft in the war effort, the designs and information gained from NACA research on the B-17 were used in nearly every major U. S. military powerplant of the Second World War. Nearly every aircraft used some form of forced induction that relied on information developed by NACA, because of this, U. S. -produced aircraft had a significant power advantage above 15,000 feet, which was never fully countered by Axis forces
2.
IBM 727
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The IBM727 Magnetic Tape Unit was announced for the IBM701 and IBM702 on September 25,1953. It became IBMs standard tape drive for their vacuum tube era computer systems. Later vacuum tube machines and first-generation transistor computers used the IBM 729-series tape drive, the 727 was withdrawn on May 12,1971. The tape had seven tracks, six for data and one to maintain parity. Tapes with character data were recorded in even parity, aluminum strips were glued several feet from the ends of the tape to serve as logical beginning and end of tape markers. Write protection was provided by a plastic ring in the back of the tape reel
3.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is an American federal research facility in Livermore, California, United States, founded by the University of California in 1952. A Federally Funded Research and Development Center, it is funded by the U. S. In 2012, the laboratory had the synthetic chemical element livermorium named after it, LLNL is self-described as a premier research and development institution for science and technology applied to national security. Its principal responsibility is ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nuclear weapons through the application of advanced science, engineering. The Laboratory is located on a site at the eastern edge of Livermore. It also operates a 7,000 acres remote experimental test site, called Site 300, LLNL has an annual budget of about $1.5 billion and a staff of roughly 5,800 employees. LLNL was established in 1952 as the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Livermore and it was intended to spur innovation and provide competition to the nuclear weapon design laboratory at Los Alamos in New Mexico, home of the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic weapons. Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence, director of the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, are regarded as the co-founders of the Livermore facility, the new laboratory was sited at a former naval air station of World War II. About half an hour southeast of Berkeley, the Livermore site provided much greater security for classified projects than a university campus. Lawrence tapped 32-year-old Herbert York, a graduate student of his. Under York, the Lab had four programs, Project Sherwood, Project Whitney, diagnostic weapon experiments. Lawrence died in August 1958 and shortly after, the board of regents named both laboratories for him, as the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory. Historically, the Berkeley and Livermore laboratories have had close relationships on research projects, business operations. The Livermore Lab was established initially as a branch of the Berkeley Laboratory, the Livermore Lab was not officially severed administratively from the Berkeley Lab until 1971. The laboratory was renamed Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in 1971, on October 1,2007 LLNS assumed management of LLNL from the University of California, which had exclusively managed and operated the Laboratory since its inception 55 years before. The laboratory was honored in 2012 by having the chemical element livermorium named after it. The LLNS takeover of the Laboratory has been controversial, in May 2013, an Alameda County jury awarded over $2.7 million to five former Laboratory employees who were among 430 employees LLNS laid off during 2008. The jury found that LLNS breached an obligation to terminate the employees only for “reasonable cause. ”The five plaintiffs also have pending age discrimination claims against LLNS
4.
IBM
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International Business Machines Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States, with operations in over 170 countries. The company originated in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and was renamed International Business Machines in 1924, IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware, middleware and software, and offers hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a research organization, holding the record for most patents generated by a business for 24 consecutive years. IBM has continually shifted its business mix by exiting commoditizing markets and focusing on higher-value, also in 2014, IBM announced that it would go fabless, continuing to design semiconductors, but offloading manufacturing to GlobalFoundries. Nicknamed Big Blue, IBM is one of 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the worlds largest employers, with nearly 380,000 employees. Known as IBMers, IBM employees have been awarded five Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards, ten National Medals of Technology, in the 1880s, technologies emerged that would ultimately form the core of what would become International Business Machines. On June 16,1911, their four companies were amalgamated in New York State by Charles Ranlett Flint forming a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company based in Endicott, New York. The five companies had 1,300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, New York, Dayton, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, Washington, D. C. and Toronto. They manufactured machinery for sale and lease, ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorders, meat and cheese slicers, to tabulators and punched cards. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. fired from the National Cash Register Company by John Henry Patterson, called on Flint and, Watson joined CTR as General Manager then,11 months later, was made President when court cases relating to his time at NCR were resolved. Having learned Pattersons pioneering business practices, Watson proceeded to put the stamp of NCR onto CTRs companies and his favorite slogan, THINK, became a mantra for each companys employees. During Watsons first four years, revenues more than doubled to $9 million, Watson had never liked the clumsy hyphenated title of the CTR and in 1924 chose to replace it with the more expansive title International Business Machines. By 1933 most of the subsidiaries had been merged into one company, in 1937, IBMs tabulating equipment enabled organizations to process unprecedented amounts of data, its clients including the U. S. During the Second World War the company produced small arms for the American war effort, in 1949, Thomas Watson, Sr. created IBM World Trade Corporation, a subsidiary of IBM focused on foreign operations. In 1952, he stepped down after almost 40 years at the company helm, in 1957, the FORTRAN scientific programming language was developed. In 1961, IBM developed the SABRE reservation system for American Airlines, in 1963, IBM employees and computers helped NASA track the orbital flight of the Mercury astronauts. A year later it moved its headquarters from New York City to Armonk. The latter half of the 1960s saw IBM continue its support of space exploration, on April 7,1964, IBM announced the first computer system family, the IBM System/360
5.
Computer
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A computer is a device that can be instructed to carry out an arbitrary set of arithmetic or logical operations automatically. The ability of computers to follow a sequence of operations, called a program, such computers are used as control systems for a very wide variety of industrial and consumer devices. The Internet is run on computers and it millions of other computers. Since ancient times, simple manual devices like the abacus aided people in doing calculations, early in the Industrial Revolution, some mechanical devices were built to automate long tedious tasks, such as guiding patterns for looms. More sophisticated electrical machines did specialized analog calculations in the early 20th century, the first digital electronic calculating machines were developed during World War II. The speed, power, and versatility of computers has increased continuously and dramatically since then, conventionally, a modern computer consists of at least one processing element, typically a central processing unit, and some form of memory. The processing element carries out arithmetic and logical operations, and a sequencing, peripheral devices include input devices, output devices, and input/output devices that perform both functions. Peripheral devices allow information to be retrieved from an external source and this usage of the term referred to a person who carried out calculations or computations. The word continued with the same meaning until the middle of the 20th century, from the end of the 19th century the word began to take on its more familiar meaning, a machine that carries out computations. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the first attested use of computer in the 1640s, one who calculates, the Online Etymology Dictionary states that the use of the term to mean calculating machine is from 1897. The Online Etymology Dictionary indicates that the use of the term. 1945 under this name, theoretical from 1937, as Turing machine, devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one correspondence with fingers. The earliest counting device was probably a form of tally stick, later record keeping aids throughout the Fertile Crescent included calculi which represented counts of items, probably livestock or grains, sealed in hollow unbaked clay containers. The use of counting rods is one example, the abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks. The Roman abacus was developed from used in Babylonia as early as 2400 BC. Since then, many forms of reckoning boards or tables have been invented. In a medieval European counting house, a checkered cloth would be placed on a table, the Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the earliest mechanical analog computer, according to Derek J. de Solla Price. It was designed to calculate astronomical positions and it was discovered in 1901 in the Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera, between Kythera and Crete, and has been dated to circa 100 BC
6.
Floating-point arithmetic
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In computing, floating-point arithmetic is arithmetic using formulaic representation of real numbers as an approximation so as to support a trade-off between range and precision. A number is, in general, represented approximately to a number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent in some fixed base. For example,1.2345 =12345 ⏟ significand ×10 ⏟ base −4 ⏞ exponent, the term floating point refers to the fact that a numbers radix point can float, that is, it can be placed anywhere relative to the significant digits of the number. This position is indicated as the exponent component, and thus the floating-point representation can be thought of as a kind of scientific notation. The result of dynamic range is that the numbers that can be represented are not uniformly spaced. Over the years, a variety of floating-point representations have been used in computers, however, since the 1990s, the most commonly encountered representation is that defined by the IEEE754 Standard. A floating-point unit is a part of a computer system designed to carry out operations on floating point numbers. A number representation specifies some way of encoding a number, usually as a string of digits, there are several mechanisms by which strings of digits can represent numbers. In common mathematical notation, the string can be of any length. If the radix point is not specified, then the string implicitly represents an integer, in fixed-point systems, a position in the string is specified for the radix point. So a fixed-point scheme might be to use a string of 8 decimal digits with the point in the middle. The scaling factor, as a power of ten, is then indicated separately at the end of the number, floating-point representation is similar in concept to scientific notation. Logically, a floating-point number consists of, A signed digit string of a length in a given base. This digit string is referred to as the significand, mantissa, the length of the significand determines the precision to which numbers can be represented. The radix point position is assumed always to be somewhere within the significand—often just after or just before the most significant digit and this article generally follows the convention that the radix point is set just after the most significant digit. A signed integer exponent, which modifies the magnitude of the number, using base-10 as an example, the number 7005152853504700000♠152853.5047, which has ten decimal digits of precision, is represented as the significand 1528535047 together with 5 as the exponent. In storing such a number, the base need not be stored, since it will be the same for the range of supported numbers. Symbolically, this value is, s b p −1 × b e, where s is the significand, p is the precision, b is the base
7.
IBM 701
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The IBM701, known as the Defense Calculator while in development, was announced to the public on April 29,1952, and was IBM’s first commercial scientific computer. Its business computer siblings were the IBM702 and IBM650 and it was based on the IAS machine. The system used vacuum tube logic circuitry and electrostatic storage, consisting of 72 Williams tubes with a capacity of 1024 bits each, each of the 72 Williams tubes was 3 inches in diameter. Memory could be expanded to a maximum of 4096 words of 36 bits by the addition of a set of 72 Williams tubes or by replacing the entire memory with magnetic core memory. The Williams tube memory and later core memory each had a cycle time of 12 microseconds. The Williams tube memory required periodic refreshing, mandating the insertion of refresh cycles into the 701s timing, an addition operation required five 12-microsecond cycles, two of which were refresh cycles, while a multiplication or division operation required 38 cycles. Instructions were 18 bits long, single address, sign - Whole word or Half word operand address Opcode -32 instructions Address -4096 Half word addresses Numbers were either 36 bits or 18 bits long, signed magnitude, fixed point. The IBM701 had only two programmer accessible registers, The accumulator was 38 bits long, the multiplier/quotient was 36 bits long. Nineteen IBM701 systems were installed, the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Livermore developed a language compilation and runtime system called the KOMPILER for their 701. A Fortran compiler was not released by IBM until the IBM704, the 701 can claim to be the first computer displaying the potential of artificial intelligence in Arthur Samuels Checkers-playing Program. IBM701 competed with Remington Rands ERA1103 in the scientific computation market, in early 1954, a committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff requested that the two machines be compared for the purpose of using them for a Joint Numerical Weather Prediction project. The successor of the 701 was the index register-equipped IBM704, the 704 was not compatible with the 701, however, as the 704 increased the size of instructions from 18 bits to 36 bits to support the extra features. The 704 also marked the transition to magnetic core memory, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers is often attributed to Thomas Watson, Senior in 1943 and Junior at several dates in the 1950s. This misquote is from the 1953 IBM annual stockholders meeting, Thomas Watson, Jr. was describing the market acceptance of the IBM701 computer. Before production began, Watson visited with 20 companies that were potential customers. This is what he said at the meeting, as a result of our trip, on which we expected to get orders for five machines, we came home with orders for 18. ”Aviation Week for 11 May 1953 says the 701 rental charge was about $12,000 a month. A second 40-hour shift ups the rental to $20,000 a month, amdahl discusses his role in the design of several computers for IBM including the IBM701, the IBM704 and the STRETCH. He discusses his work with Nathaniel Rochester and IBMs management of the process for computers
8.
Vacuum tube
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In electronics, a vacuum tube, an electron tube, or just a tube, or valve, is a device that controls electric current between electrodes in an evacuated container. Vacuum tubes mostly rely on thermionic emission of electrons from a hot filament or a cathode heated by the filament and this type is called a thermionic tube or thermionic valve. A phototube, however, achieves electron emission through the photoelectric effect, the simplest vacuum tube, the diode, contains only a heater, a heated electron-emitting cathode, and a plate. Current can only flow in one direction through the device between the two electrodes, as electrons emitted by the travel through the tube and are collected by the anode. Adding one or more control grids within the tube allows the current between the cathode and anode to be controlled by the voltage on the grid or grids, Tubes with grids can be used for many purposes, including amplification, rectification, switching, oscillation, and display. In the 1940s the invention of devices made it possible to produce solid-state devices, which are smaller, more efficient, more reliable, more durable. Hence, from the mid-1950s solid-state devices such as transistors gradually replaced tubes, the cathode-ray tube remained the basis for televisions and video monitors until superseded in the 21st century. However, there are still a few applications for which tubes are preferred to semiconductors, for example, the used in microwave ovens. One classification of vacuum tubes is by the number of active electrodes, a device with two active elements is a diode, usually used for rectification. Devices with three elements are used for amplification and switching. Additional electrodes create tetrodes, pentodes, and so forth, which have additional functions made possible by the additional controllable electrodes. X-ray tubes are vacuum tubes. Phototubes and photomultipliers rely on electron flow through a vacuum, though in those cases electron emission from the cathode depends on energy from photons rather than thermionic emission, since these sorts of vacuum tubes have functions other than electronic amplification and rectification they are described in their own articles. A vacuum tube consists of two or more electrodes in a vacuum inside an airtight enclosure, most tubes have glass envelopes, though ceramic and metal envelopes have been used. The electrodes are attached to leads which pass through the envelope via an airtight seal, Tubes were a frequent cause of failure in electronic equipment, and consumers were expected to be able to replace tubes themselves. In addition to the terminals, some tubes had an electrode terminating at a top cap. The principal reason for doing this was to avoid leakage resistance through the tube base, the bases were commonly made with phenolic insulation which performs poorly as an insulator in humid conditions. There was even a design that had two top cap connections
