1.
Software house
–
A software house is a company whose primary products are software, i. e. a company in the software industry. For example, having sub-teams spread in different time zones may allow a 24-hour company working day, if the teams, systems, a good example is the test team in time zone 8 hours ahead or behind the development team, who fix software bugs found by the testers. Maintenance engineers who are two, three or more lines of support Consultants responsible for making the solution operational, especially if some specialist knowledge is necessary. The manager of a house is usually called the Head Of Development. He or she leads the sub-teams directly or via the managers/leaders depending on the size of the organization, usually teams of up to 10 person are the most operational. In bigger organizations, there are in two models of the hierarchy, All the teams are fully independent and they work separately on the different projects. This leads to private employee having two bosses – the product/project manager and the specialized resource manager. On one hand it optimizes the usage of resources, on the other hand it may give rise to conflicts about which one manager has priority in the structure. There are also a number of variants of these structures, software house may use a number of various methodologies to produce the code. They also support both programmers and testers during the development process to ensure that the final product fulfills the business needs specified at the start. The process ideally puts business analysts as the key players during final delivery of the solution to the customer, programmers do the technical specification during the design phase, which is why they are called programmers/designers, and during testing time they fix bugs. They are delivered from various vendors like Borland, ECM or Compuware, well-established software houses typically have some way of measuring their own efficiency. There are also other systems such as Carnegie-Mellon Universitys SEMA, or particular ISO standards, small software houses will sometimes use less formalized approaches, such as the Joel Test,12 steps to better code. Each organization works out its own style, which lies somewhere between total technocracy and total anarchy, whichever way the organization goes, they consider the pyramid describing the cost and risk of introducing change to already-begun development processes, List of the largest software companies
2.
Unix
–
Among these is Apples macOS, which is the Unix version with the largest installed base as of 2014. Many Unix-like operating systems have arisen over the years, of which Linux is the most popular, Unix was originally meant to be a convenient platform for programmers developing software to be run on it and on other systems, rather than for non-programmer users. The system grew larger as the system started spreading in academic circles, as users added their own tools to the system. Unix was designed to be portable, multi-tasking and multi-user in a time-sharing configuration and these concepts are collectively known as the Unix philosophy. By the early 1980s users began seeing Unix as a universal operating system. Under Unix, the system consists of many utilities along with the master control program. To mediate such access, the kernel has special rights, reflected in the division between user space and kernel space, the microkernel concept was introduced in an effort to reverse the trend towards larger kernels and return to a system in which most tasks were completed by smaller utilities. In an era when a standard computer consisted of a disk for storage and a data terminal for input and output. However, modern systems include networking and other new devices, as graphical user interfaces developed, the file model proved inadequate to the task of handling asynchronous events such as those generated by a mouse. In the 1980s, non-blocking I/O and the set of inter-process communication mechanisms were augmented with Unix domain sockets, shared memory, message queues, and semaphores. In microkernel implementations, functions such as network protocols could be moved out of the kernel, Multics introduced many innovations, but had many problems. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not by the aims and their last researchers to leave Multics, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna, decided to redo the work on a much smaller scale. The name Unics, a pun on Multics, was suggested for the project in 1970. Peter H. Salus credits Peter Neumann with the pun, while Brian Kernighan claims the coining for himself, in 1972, Unix was rewritten in the C programming language. Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are referred to as Research Unix. In 1975, the first source license for UNIX was sold to faculty at the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science, UIUC graduate student Greg Chesson was instrumental in negotiating the terms of this license. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to adoption of Unix by commercial startups, including Sequent, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX. In the late 1980s, AT&T Unix System Laboratories and Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4, in the 1990s, Unix-like systems grew in popularity as Linux and BSD distributions were developed through collaboration by a worldwide network of programmers
3.
AT&T
–
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications conglomerate, headquartered at Whitacre Tower in downtown Dallas, Texas. AT&T is the third-largest company in Texas, as of February 2017, AT&T is the 12th largest company in the world as measured by a composite of revenues, profits, assets and market valuation. AT&T is the largest telecommunications company in the world by revenue, as of 2017, it is also the 18th-largest mobile telecom operator in the world, with 135 million mobile customers. AT&T was ranked at #4 on the 2017 rankings of the worlds most valuable brands published by Brand Finance, Southwestern Bell changed its name to SBC Communications Inc. in 1995. In 2005, SBC purchased former parent AT&T Corp. and took on its branding, with the merged entity naming itself AT&T Inc. and using the iconic AT&T Corp. logo and stock-trading symbol. The current AT&T reconstitutes much of the former Bell System and includes ten of the original 22 Bell Operating Companies, AT&T can trace its origin back to the original Bell Telephone Company founded by Alexander Graham Bell after his invention of the telephone. This monopoly was known as the Bell System, and during this period, for periods of time, the former AT&T was the worlds largest phone company. In 1982, U. S. regulators broke up the AT&T monopoly, requiring AT&T to divest its regional subsidiaries and these new companies were known as Regional Bell Operating Companies, or more informally, Baby Bells. AT&T continued to long distance services, but as a result of this breakup, faced competition from new competitors such as MCI. Southwestern Bell was one of the created by the breakup of AT&T. The architect of divestiture for Southwestern Bell was Robert G. Pope, the company soon started a series of acquisitions. This includes the 1987 acquisition of Metromedia mobile business, and the acquisition of several companies in the early 1990s. In the later half of the 1990s, the company acquired several other companies, including some Baby Bells. During this time, the changed its name to SBC Communications. By 1998, the company was in the top 15 of the Fortune 500, in 2005, SBC purchased AT&T for $16 billion. After this purchase, SBC adopted the better-known AT&T name and brand, the current AT&T claims the original AT&Ts history as its own, though its corporate structure only dates from 1983. It also retains SBCs pre-2005 stock price history, in September 2013, AT&T announced it would expand into Latin America through a collaboration with Carlos Slims América Móvil. In December 2013, AT&T announced plans to sell its Connecticut wireline operations to Stamford-based Frontier Communications, in July 2015, AT&T purchased DirecTV for $48.5 billion, or $67.1 billion including assumed debt
4.
Santa Monica, California
–
Santa Monica is a beachfront city in western Los Angeles County, California, United States. The Census Bureau population for Santa Monica in 2010 was 89,736, due in part to an agreeable climate, Santa Monica became a famed resort town by the early 20th century. The city has experienced a boom since the late 1980s through the revitalization of its core, significant job growth. The Santa Monica Pier remains a popular and iconic destination, Santa Monica was long inhabited by the Tongva people. Santa Monica was called Kecheek in the Tongva language, the first non-indigenous group to set foot in the area was the party of explorer Gaspar de Portolà, who camped near the present-day intersection of Barrington and Ohio Avenues on August 3,1769. Named after the Christian saint Monica, there are two different accounts of how the name came to be. One says it was named in honor of the feast day of Saint Monica, another version says it was named by Juan Crespí on account of a pair of springs, the Kuruvungna Springs, that were reminiscent of the tears Saint Monica shed over her sons early impiety. In Los Angeles, several battles were fought by the Californios, following the Mexican–American War, Mexico signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave Mexicans and Californios living in state certain unalienable rights. US government sovereignty in California began on February 2,1848, in the 1870s the Los Angeles and Independence Railroad, connected Santa Monica with Los Angeles, and a wharf out into the bay. The first town hall was a modest 1873 brick building, later a beer hall and it is Santa Monicas oldest extant structure. By 1885, the towns first hotel was the Santa Monica Hotel, around the start of the 20th century, a growing population of Asian Americans lived in and around Santa Monica and Venice. A Japanese fishing village was near the Long Wharf while small numbers of Chinese lived or worked in Santa Monica, the two ethnic minorities were often viewed differently by White Americans who were often well-disposed towards the Japanese but condescending towards the Chinese. The Japanese village fishermen were an economic part of the Santa Monica Bay community. Donald Wills Douglas, Sr. built a plant in 1922 at Clover Field for the Douglas Aircraft Company, in 1924, four Douglas-built planes took off from Clover Field to attempt the first aerial circumnavigation of the world. Two planes returned after covering 27,553 miles in 175 days, the Douglas Company kept facilities in the city until the 1960s. The Great Depression hit Santa Monica deeply, one report gives citywide employment in 1933 of just 1,000. Hotels and office building owners went bankrupt, in the 1930s, corruption infected Santa Monica. The federal Works Project Administration helped build several buildings, most notably City Hall, the main Post Office and Barnum Hall were also among other WPA projects
5.
Yale University
–
Yale University is an American private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 in Saybrook Colony to train Congregationalist ministers, it is the third-oldest institution of education in the United States. The Collegiate School moved to New Haven in 1716, and shortly after was renamed Yale College in recognition of a gift from British East India Company governor Elihu Yale. Originally restricted to theology and sacred languages, the curriculum began to incorporate humanities and sciences by the time of the American Revolution. In the 19th century the school introduced graduate and professional instruction, awarding the first Ph. D. in the United States in 1861 and organizing as a university in 1887. Yale is organized into fourteen constituent schools, the undergraduate college, the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. While the university is governed by the Yale Corporation, each schools faculty oversees its curriculum, the universitys assets include an endowment valued at $25.4 billion as of June 2016, the second largest of any U. S. educational institution. The Yale University Library, serving all constituent schools, holds more than 15 million volumes and is the third-largest academic library in the United States, Yale College undergraduates follow a liberal arts curriculum with departmental majors and are organized into a social system of residential colleges. Almost all faculty teach courses, more than 2,000 of which are offered annually. Students compete intercollegiately as the Yale Bulldogs in the NCAA Division I – Ivy League, Yale has graduated many notable alumni, including five U. S. Presidents,19 U. S. Supreme Court Justices,20 living billionaires, and many heads of state. In addition, Yale has graduated hundreds of members of Congress,57 Nobel laureates,5 Fields Medalists,247 Rhodes Scholars, and 119 Marshall Scholars have been affiliated with the University. Yale traces its beginnings to An Act for Liberty to Erect a Collegiate School, passed by the General Court of the Colony of Connecticut on October 9,1701, the Act was an effort to create an institution to train ministers and lay leadership for Connecticut. Soon thereafter, a group of ten Congregationalist ministers, Samuel Andrew, Thomas Buckingham, Israel Chauncy, Samuel Mather, the group, led by James Pierpont, is now known as The Founders. Originally known as the Collegiate School, the institution opened in the home of its first rector, Abraham Pierson, the school moved to Saybrook, and then Wethersfield. In 1716 the college moved to New Haven, Connecticut, the feud caused the Mathers to champion the success of the Collegiate School in the hope that it would maintain the Puritan religious orthodoxy in a way that Harvard had not. Cotton Mather suggested that the school change its name to Yale College, meanwhile, a Harvard graduate working in England convinced some 180 prominent intellectuals that they should donate books to Yale. The 1714 shipment of 500 books represented the best of modern English literature, science, philosophy and it had a profound effect on intellectuals at Yale. Undergraduate Jonathan Edwards discovered John Lockes works and developed his original theology known as the new divinity
6.
Kodak
–
Eastman Kodak Company, commonly referred to as Kodak, is an American technology company that produces imaging products with its historic basis on photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York and is incorporated in New Jersey, Kodak provides packaging, functional printing, graphic communications and professional services for businesses around the world. Its main business segments are Print Systems, Enterprise Inkjet Systems, Micro 3D Printing and Packaging, Software and Solutions and it is best known for photographic film products. Kodak was founded by George Eastman and Henry A, during most of the 20th century, Kodak held a dominant position in photographic film. The companys ubiquity was such that its Kodak moment tagline entered the lexicon to describe a personal event that was demanded to be recorded for posterity. Kodak began to struggle financially in the late 1990s, as a result of the decline in sales of photographic film, as a part of a turnaround strategy, Kodak began to focus on digital photography and digital printing, and attempted to generate revenues through aggressive patent litigation. In January 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. In February 2012, Kodak announced that it would stop making digital cameras, pocket video cameras and digital picture frames, in January 2013, the Court approved financing for Kodak to emerge from bankruptcy by mid 2013. Kodak sold many of its patents for approximately $525,000,000 to a group of companies under the names Intellectual Ventures, on September 3,2013, the company emerged from bankruptcy having shed its large legacy liabilities and exited several businesses. Personalized Imaging and Document Imaging are now part of Kodak Alaris, on March 12,2014, it announced that the board of directors elected Jeffrey J. Clarke as chief executive officer and a member of its board of directors. As late as 1976, Kodak commanded 90% of film sales, Japanese competitor Fujifilm entered the U. S. market with lower-priced film and supplies, but Kodak did not believe that American consumers would ever desert its brand. Kodak passed on the opportunity to become the film of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Fuji won these sponsorship rights. Fuji opened a plant in the U. S. and its aggressive marketing. Fuji went from a 10% share in the early 1990s to 17% in 1997, fujis films soon also found a competitive edge in higher-speed negative films, with a tighter grain structure. The complaint was lodged by the United States with the World Trade Organization, on January 30,1998, the WTO announced a sweeping rejection of Kodaks complaints about the film market in Japan. Although Kodak developed a camera in 1975, the first of its kind. In the 1990s, Kodak planned a journey to move to digital technology. CEO George M. C. Fisher reached out to Microsoft, Apples pioneering QuickTake consumer digital cameras, introduced in 1994, had the Apple label but were produced by Kodak
7.
Sun Microsystems
–
Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24,1982, at its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center. On January 27,2010, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun by for US$7.4 billion, other technologies include the Java platform, MySQL, and NFS. Sun was a proponent of open systems in general and Unix in particular, the initial design for what became Suns first Unix workstation, the Sun-1, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Bechtolsheim originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation and it was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced memory management unit to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanfords Department of Computer Science, on February 24,1982, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution. The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network, Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982. By 1983 Sun was known for producing 68000-based systems with high-quality graphics that were the only computers other than DECs VAX to run 4. 2BSD and it licensed the computer design to other manufacturers, which typically used it to build Multibus-based systems running Unix from UniSoft. Suns initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW, the symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA, Sun stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented the companys current strategy. Suns logo, which features four interleaved copies of the sun in the form of a rotationally symmetric ambigram, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was rotated to stand on one corner and re-colored purple. In the dot-com bubble, Sun began making more money. It also began spending more, hiring workers and building itself out. Some of this was because of demand, but much was from web start-up companies anticipating business that would never happen. Sales in Suns important hardware division went into free-fall as customers closed shop, several quarters of steep losses led to executive departures, rounds of layoffs, and other cost cutting. In December 2001, the fell to the 1998, pre-bubble level of about $100. But it kept falling, faster than many other tech companies, a year later it had dipped below $10 but bounced back to $20
8.
PDP-11
–
The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a succession of products in the PDP series. The PDP-11 had several innovative features, and was easier to program than its predecessors through the additional general-purpose registers. The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold and its successor in the mid-range minicomputer niche was the 32-bit VAX-11, named as a nod to the PDP-11s popularity. The PDP-11 is considered by experts to be the most popular minicomputer ever. Design features of the PDP-11 influenced the design of most late-1970s computer systems including the Intel x86, design features of PDP-11 operating systems, as well as other operating systems from Digital Equipment, influenced the design of other operating systems such as CP/M and hence also MS-DOS. For a decade, the PDP-11 was the smallest system that could run Unix and it is commonly stated that the C programming language took advantage of several low-level PDP-11–dependent programming features, albeit not originally by design. In 1967–68, DEC engineers designed a 16-bit, word-addressed machine, management cancelled the project and some of the engineers later left DEC and produced it as the Data General Nova. A subsequent effort, code-named Desk Calculator, looked at a variety of options before choosing what became the 16-bit PDP-11, DECs previous PDP-8 and PDP-9 had 12- and 18-bit words, the PDP-11 family was announced in January 1970 and shipments began early that year. DEC sold over 170,000 PDP-11s in the 1970s, initially manufactured of small-scale transistor–transistor logic, a single-board large scale integration version of the processor was developed in 1975. A two-or-three-chip processor, the J-11 was developed in 1979, the last models of the PDP-11 line were the PDP-11/94 and -11/93 introduced in 1990. The PDP-11 processor architecture has an orthogonal instruction set. For example, instead of such as load and store. More complex instructions such as add likewise can have memory, register, input, most operands can apply any of eight addressing modes to eight registers. The addressing modes provide register, immediate, absolute, relative, deferred, and indexed addressing, use of relative addressing lets a machine-language program be position-independent. Early models of the PDP-11 had no dedicated bus for input/output, an input/output device determined the memory addresses to which it would respond, and specified its own interrupt vector and interrupt priority. DEC openly published the basic Unibus specifications, even offering prototyping bus interface circuit boards, the Unibus made the PDP-11 suitable for custom peripherals. Higher-performance members of the PDP-11 family, starting with the PDP-11/45 Unibus and 11/83 Q-bus systems, instead, memory was interfaced by dedicated circuitry and space in the CPU cabinet, while the Unibus continued to be used for I/O only
9.
UNIX System V
–
UNIX System V is one of the first commercial versions of the Unix operating system. It was originally developed by AT&T and first released in 1983, four major versions of System V were released, numbered 1,2,3, and 4. It was the source of common commercial Unix features. System V is sometimes abbreviated to SysV, as of 2012, the Unix market is divided between three System V variants, IBMs AIX, Hewlett-Packards HP-UX and Oracles Solaris. System V was the successor to 1982s UNIX System III, while AT&T sold their own hardware that ran System V, most customers instead ran a version from a reseller, based on AT&Ts reference implementation. A standards document called the System V Interface Definition outlined the default features, in the 1980s and early-1990s, System V was considered one of the two major versions of UNIX, the other being the Berkeley Software Distribution. Historically, BSD was also commonly called BSD Unix or Berkeley Unix, the dispute had several levels, some technical and some cultural. The divide was roughly between longhairs and shorthairs, programmers and technical people tended to line up with Berkeley and BSD, more business-oriented types with AT&T and System V. While HP, IBM and others chose System V as the basis for their Unix offerings, other such as Sun Microsystems. Throughout its development, though, System V was infused with features from BSD, since the early 1990s, due to standardization efforts such as POSIX and the commercial success of Linux, the division between System V and BSD has become less important. System V, known inside Bell Labs as Unix 5.0, there was never an external release of Unix 4.0, which would have been System IV. This first release of System V was developed by AT&Ts UNIX Support Group, System V also included features such as the vi editor and curses from 4.1 BSD, developed at the University of California, Berkeley, it also improved performance by adding buffer and inode caches. It also added support for communication using messages, semaphores. SVR1 ran on DEC PDP-11 and VAX minicomputers, System V Release 2 was released in April,1984. It added shell functions and the SVID, new kernel features included record and file locking, demand paging, and copy on write. The concept of the base was formalized, and the DEC VAX-11/780 was chosen for this release. The porting base is the original version of a release. Educational source licenses for SVR2 were offered by AT&T for US$800 for the first CPU, a commercial source license was offered for $43,000, with three months of support, and a $16,000 price per additional CPU
10.
IBM Personal Computer
–
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12,1981 and it was created by a team of engineers and designers under the direction of Don Estridge of the IBM Entry Systems Division in Boca Raton, Florida. IBM compatible became an important criterion for sales growth, only the Apple Macintosh family kept significant market share without compatibility with the IBM personal computer, International Business Machines, one of the worlds largest companies, had a 62% share of the mainframe computer market in 1981. Its share of the computer market, however, had declined from 60% in 1970 to 32% in 1980. In 1979 BusinessWeek asked, Is IBM just another stodgy, mature company, by 1981 its stock price had declined by 22%. IBMs earnings for the first half the year grew by 5. 3%—one third of the inflation rate—while those of minicomputer maker Digital Equipment Corporation grew by more than 35%. B. M, No longer dominates the computer business. IBM wished to avoid the outcome with the new personal computer industry, dominated by the Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, Tandy Corporations TRS-80. With $150 million in sales by 1979 and projected growth of more than 40% in the early 1980s. The Japanese project, codenamed Go, ended before the 1981 release of the American-designed IBM PC codenamed Chess, whether IBM had waited too long to enter an industry in which Apple and others were already successful was unclear. An observer stated that IBM bringing out a computer would be like teaching an elephant to tap dance. Successful microcomputer company Vector Graphics fiscal 1980 revenue was $12 million, the company only sold through its internal sales force, had no experience with resellers or retail stores, and did not introduce the first product designed to work with non-IBM equipment until 1980. Another observer claimed that IBM made decisions so slowly that, when tested, as with other large computer companies, its new products typically required about four to five years for development. IBM had to learn how to develop, mass-produce. The potential importance to microcomputers of a company so prestigious, that a saying in American companies stated No one ever got fired for buying IBM, was nonetheless clear. InfoWorld, which described itself as The Newsweekly for Microcomputer Users, stated that for my grandmother, is far and away the media star, not because of its features, but because it exists at all. When the number eight company in the Fortune 500 enters the field, the influence of a personal computer made by a company whose name has literally come to mean computer to most of the world is hard to contemplate. The editorial acknowledged that some factions in our industry have looked upon IBM as the enemy, desktop sized programmable calculators by Hewlett Packard had evolved into the HP9830 BASIC language computer by 1972. In 1972–1973 a team led by Dr. SCAMP emulated an IBM1130 minicomputer to run APL\1130, in 1973 APL was generally available only on mainframe computers, and most desktop sized microcomputers such as the Wang 2200 or HP9800 offered only BASIC
