1.
Cheque
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A cheque or check is a document that orders a bank to pay a specific amount of money from a persons account to the person in whose name the cheque has been issued. The person writing the cheque, the drawer, has a banking account where their money is held. Cheques are a type of bill of exchange and were developed as a way to make payments without the need to carry large amounts of money, both the drawer and payee may be natural persons or legal entities. Cheques are order instruments, and are not in general payable simply to the bearer as bearer instruments are, in some countries, such as the US, the payee may endorse the cheque, allowing them to specify a third party to whom it should be paid. By the second half of the 20th century, as cheque processing became automated, billions of cheques were issued annually, since then cheque usage has fallen, being partly replaced by electronic payment systems. In an increasing number of countries cheques have either become a marginal payment system or have been phased out. The spellings check, checque, and cheque were used interchangeably from the 17th century until the 20th century, in American English, the usual spelling for both is check. The cheque had its origins in the ancient banking system, in which bankers would issue orders at the request of their customers, such an order was referred to as a bill of exchange. The use of bills of exchange facilitated trade by eliminating the need for merchants to carry large quantities of currency to purchase goods, the ancient Romans are believed to have used an early form of cheque known as praescriptiones in the 1st century BC. Muslim traders are known to have used the cheque or ṣakk system since the time of Harun al-Rashid of the Abbasid Caliphate, transporting a paper saqq was more secure than transporting money. In the 9th century, a merchant in country A could cash a saqq drawn on his bank in country B. In the 13th century in Venice the bill of exchange was developed as a device to allow international trade without the need to carry large amounts of gold. Their use subsequently spread to other European countries, in the early 1500s in the Dutch Republic, to protect large accumulations of cash, people began depositing their money with cashiers. These cashiers held the money for a fee, competition drove cashiers to offer additional services including paying money to any person bearing a written order from a depositor to do so. They kept the note as proof of payment and this concept went on to spread to England and elsewhere. By the 17th century, bills of exchange were being used for payments in England. Cheques, a type of bill of exchange, then began to evolve, initially they were called drawn notes, because they enabled a customer to draw on the funds that he or she had in the account with a bank and required immediate payment. These were handwritten, and one of the earliest known still to be in existence was drawn on Messrs Morris and Clayton, scriveners and bankers based in the City of London, in 1717, the Bank of England pioneered the first use of a pre-printed form
2.
Crossing of cheques
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A crossed cheque is a cheque that has been marked to specify an instruction about the way it is to be redeemed. A common instruction is to specify that it must be deposited directly into an account with a bank, the format and wording varies between countries, but generally two parallel lines may be placed either vertically across the cheque or in the top left hand corner. By using crossed cheques, cheque writers can effectively protect the cheques they write from being stolen, cheques can be open or crossed. An open is a cheque that is not crossed on the left corner, a crossed cheque is a cheque that is payable only through a collecting banker and not directly at the counter of the bank. When two parallel lines, with or without any words, are drawn generally, on the left hand top corner of the cheque. Generally-crossed cheques can only be paid into an account, so that the beneficiary can be traced. A crossed cheque on its own does not affect the negotiability of the instrument, the example is A/c Payee only or State Bank of India. In these cases, the respective restrictions mandate to pay the cheque in the account of the only or to pay the cheque through State Bank of India only. A crossing may have the name of a specific banker added between the lines, a cheque with a such a crossing can only be paid into an account at that bank. The beneficiary bank can add an additional crossing to another bank. The words not negotiable can be added to a crossing, a banks failure to comply with the crossings amounts to a breach of contract with its customer. The bank may not be able to debit the drawers account and may be liable to the true owner for his loss
3.
Barcode
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A barcode is an optical, machine-readable, representation of data, the data usually describes something about the object that carries the barcode. Originally barcodes systematically represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines, later two-dimensional codes were developed, using rectangles, dots, hexagons and other geometric patterns in two dimensions, usually called barcodes although they do not use bars as such. Barcodes originally were scanned by special optical scanners called barcode readers, later applications software became available for devices that could read images, such as smartphones with cameras. An early use of one type of barcode in a context was sponsored by the Association of American Railroads in the late 1960s. Two plates were used per car, one on side, with the arrangement of the colored stripes encoding information such as ownership, type of equipment. The plates were read by a scanner, located for instance, at the entrance to a classification yard. The project was abandoned after ten years because the system proved unreliable after long-term use. Barcodes became commercially successful when they were used to automate supermarket checkout systems and their use has spread to many other tasks that are generically referred to as automatic identification and data capture. The very first scanning of the now ubiquitous Universal Product Code barcode was on a pack of Wrigley Company chewing gum in June 1974, silver told his friend Norman Joseph Woodland about the request, and they started working on a variety of systems. Their first working system used ultraviolet ink, but the ink faded too easily and was expensive, convinced that the system was workable with further development, Woodland left Drexel, moved into his fathers apartment in Florida, and continued working on the system. His next inspiration came from Morse code, and he formed his first barcode from sand on the beach, I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them. To read them, he adapted technology from optical soundtracks in movies and he later decided that the system would work better if it were printed as a circle instead of a line, allowing it to be scanned in any direction. The patent was issued on 7 October 1952 as US Patent 2,612,994, in 1951, Woodland moved to IBM and continually tried to interest IBM in developing the system. IBM offered to buy the patent, but its offer was not high enough, philco purchased their patent in 1962 and then sold it to RCA sometime later. During his time as an undergraduate, David Collins worked at the Pennsylvania Railroad, immediately after receiving his masters degree from MIT in 1959, he started work at GTE Sylvania and began addressing the problem. He developed a system called KarTrak using blue and red reflective stripes attached to the side of the cars, encoding a six-digit company identifier, light reflected off the stripes was fed into one of two photomultipliers, filtered for blue or red. The Boston and Maine Railroad tested the KarTrak system on their cars in 1961. The tests continued until 1967, when the Association of American Railroads selected it as a standard, Automatic Car Identification, the installations began on 10 October 1967
4.
International Organization for Standardization
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The International Organization for Standardization is an international standard-setting body composed of representatives from various national standards organizations. Founded on 23 February 1947, the organization promotes worldwide proprietary and it is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and as of March 2017 works in 162 countries. It was one of the first organizations granted general consultative status with the United Nations Economic, ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, is an independent, non-governmental organization, the members of which are the standards organizations of the 162 member countries. It is the worlds largest developer of international standards and facilitates world trade by providing common standards between nations. Nearly twenty thousand standards have been set covering everything from manufactured products and technology to food safety, use of the standards aids in the creation of products and services that are safe, reliable and of good quality. The standards help businesses increase productivity while minimizing errors and waste, by enabling products from different markets to be directly compared, they facilitate companies in entering new markets and assist in the development of global trade on a fair basis. The standards also serve to safeguard consumers and the end-users of products and services, the three official languages of the ISO are English, French, and Russian. The name of the organization in French is Organisation internationale de normalisation, according to the ISO, as its name in different languages would have different abbreviations, the organization adopted ISO as its abbreviated name in reference to the Greek word isos. However, during the meetings of the new organization, this Greek word was not invoked. Both the name ISO and the logo are registered trademarks, the organization today known as ISO began in 1926 as the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations. ISO is an organization whose members are recognized authorities on standards. Members meet annually at a General Assembly to discuss ISOs strategic objectives, the organization is coordinated by a Central Secretariat based in Geneva. A Council with a membership of 20 member bodies provides guidance and governance. The Technical Management Board is responsible for over 250 technical committees, ISO has formed joint committees with the International Electrotechnical Commission to develop standards and terminology in the areas of electrical and electronic related technologies. Information technology ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 was created in 1987 to evelop, maintain, ISO has three membership categories, Member bodies are national bodies considered the most representative standards body in each country. These are the members of ISO that have voting rights. Correspondent members are countries that do not have their own standards organization and these members are informed about ISOs work, but do not participate in standards promulgation. Subscriber members are countries with small economies and they pay reduced membership fees, but can follow the development of standards
5.
Typeface
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In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font was a set of type, one piece for each glyph. In modern usage, with the advent of digital typography, font is frequently synonymous with typeface, in particular, the use of vector or outline fonts means that different sizes of a typeface can be dynamically generated from one design. The word font derives from Middle French fonte melted, a casting, the term refers to the process of casting metal type at a type foundry. In a manual printing house the word font would refer to a set of metal type that would be used to typeset an entire page. Unlike a digital typeface it would not include a definition of each character. A font when bought new would often be sold as 12pt 14A 34a, meaning that it would be a size 12-point font containing 14 uppercase As, given the name upper and lowercase because of which case the metal type was located in, otherwise known as majuscule and minuscule. The rest of the characters would be provided in quantities appropriate for the distribution of letters in that language. Some metal type characters required in typesetting, such as dashes, spaces and line-height spacers, were not part of a specific font, line spacing is still often called leading, because the strips used for line spacing were made of lead. In the 1880s–90s, hot lead typesetting was invented, in which type was cast as it was set, either piece by piece or in entire lines of type at one time. In European alphabetic scripts, i. e. Latin, Cyrillic and Greek, the main properties are the stroke width, called weight, the style or angle. The regular or standard font is sometimes labeled roman, both to distinguish it from bold or thin and from italic or oblique. The keyword for the default, regular case is often omitted for variants and never repeated, otherwise it would be Bulmer regular italic, Bulmer bold regular, Roman can also refer to the language coverage of a font, acting as a shorthand for Western European. Different fonts of the same typeface may be used in the work for various degrees of readability and emphasis. The weight of a font is the thickness of the character outlines relative to their height. A typeface may come in fonts of many weights, from ultra-light to extra-bold or black, four to six weights are not unusual, many typefaces for office, web and non-professional use come with just a normal and a bold weight which are linked together. If no bold weight is provided, many renderers support faking a bolder font by rendering the outline a second time at an offset, the base weight differs among typefaces, that means one normal font may appear bolder than some other normal font. For example, fonts intended to be used in posters are often quite bold by default while fonts for long runs of text are rather light, therefore, weight designations in font names may differ in regard to the actual absolute stroke weight or density of glyphs in the font
6.
Groupe Bull
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Bull SAS is a French-owned computer company headquartered in Les Clayes-sous-Bois, in the western suburbs of Paris. The company has also known at various times as Bull General Electric, Honeywell Bull, CII Honeywell Bull. Bull was founded in 1931, as H. W. Egli - Bull, after a reorganization in 1933, with new owners coming in, the name was changed to Compagnie des Machines Bull. The company has undergone many takeovers and mergers since its formation, in particular, it has had various ownership relations with General Electric, Honeywell, and NEC from the 1960s to the 1980s, and with Motorola, Debeka, and France Télécom more recently. It acquired Honeywell Information Systems in the late 1980s, and later also had a share of Zenith Data Systems, Bull was nationalised in 1982 and was merged with most of the rest of the French computer industry. In 1994, the company was re-privatised, Bull has a worldwide presence in more than 100 countries, and is particularly active in the defense, finance, health care, manufacturing, public and telecommunication sectors. In August,2014 the French IT company Atos announced that it had acquired a stake in Bull SA through a tender offer launched in May. Atos announced plans in October,2014 to buy out or squeeze out the remaining share, the Hoox range of secure mobiles and smartphones ensures confidentiality of voice, SMS, e-mail and data communication. Storebrand integrated his device into its operations in 1921, the following year Bull sold his second machine to the Danish insurer Hafnia who had learned of the technology through an article in an insurance trade magazine. At the time of Bulls death of cancer in 1925 at the age of 43, the commercial and technical development of the machines continued under the direction of Bulls childhood friend and long-time collaborator Reidar Knutsen along with his brother Kurt Andréas Knutsen. As the business grew several outside investors were brought in, leading to the incorporation of the company H. W. Egli Bull in 1931, in 1933 more investors joined and the company changed its name to Compagnie des Machines Bull, a name it would keep until 1964. The Eagle System was used by the Gaddafi regime to spy on citizens, a judicial inquiry was opened by the French government in May 2012 following allegations of complicity in torture by the International Federation for Human Rights. In March 2012 Groupe Bull divested itself of the Eagle System, selling it for the sum of 4 million euros to Nexa Technologies, Bull, A World-Wide Company Born in Europe. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, History of Bull Extracted and translated from Science et Vie Micro magazine, No. 74, July–August,1990, The very international history of a French giant Official website
7.
Iron oxide
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Iron oxides are chemical compounds composed of iron and oxygen. All together, there are sixteen known iron oxides and oxyhydroxides, common rust is a form of iron oxide. Iron oxides are used as inexpensive, durable pigments in paints, coatings. Colors commonly available are in the end of the yellow/orange/red/brown/black range. When used as a coloring, it has E number E172. Limonite Iron oxide nanoparticles List of inorganic pigments Information from Nano-Oxides, http, //chemed. chem. purdue. edu/demos/demosheets/12.3. html http, //minerals. usgs. gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/iron_oxide/ CDC - NIOSH Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards de
8.
Tape recorder
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In its present-day form, it records a fluctuating signal by moving the tape across a tape head that polarizes the magnetic domains in the tape in proportion to the audio signal. Tape-recording devices include reel-to-reel tape deck and the cassette deck, the use of magnetic tape for sound recording originated around 1930. Magnetizable tape revolutionized both the radio broadcast and music recording industries and it gave artists and producers the power to record and re-record audio with minimal loss in quality as well as edit and rearrange recordings with ease. The alternative recording technologies of the era, transcription discs and wire recorders, since some early refinements improved the fidelity of the reproduced sound, magnetic tape has been the highest quality analog sound recording medium available. As of the first decade of the 21st century, analog magnetic tape has been replaced by digital recording technologies for consumer purposes. Some individuals and organizations developed innovative uses for magnetic wire recorders while others investigated variations of the technology, one particularly important variation was the application of an oxide powder to a long strip of paper. This German invention was the start of a string of innovations that have led to present day magnetic tape recordings. The earliest known audio tape recorder was a non-magnetic, non-electric version invented by Alexander Graham Bells Volta Laboratory and patented in 1886. It employed a 3⁄16-inch-wide strip of wax-covered paper that was coated by dipping it in a solution of beeswax and paraffin and then had one side scraped clean, the machine was of sturdy wood and metal construction, and hand-powered by means of a knob fastened to the flywheel. The tape was taken up on the other reel. The sharp recording stylus, actuated by a vibrating mica diaphragm, in playback mode, a dull, loosely mounted stylus, attached to a rubber diaphragm, carried the reproduced sounds through an ear tube to its listener. Both recording and playback heads, mounted alternately on the two posts, could be adjusted vertically so that several recordings could be cut on the same 3⁄16-inch-wide strip. While the machine was never developed commercially, it was an ancestor to the modern magnetic tape recorder which it resembled somewhat in design. The tapes and machine created by Bells associates, examined at one of the Smithsonian Institutions museums, became brittle, the machines playback head was also missing. Otherwise, with some reconditioning, they could be placed into working condition, during the recording process, the tape moved through a pair of electrodes which immediately imprinted the modulated sound signals as visible black stripes into the paper tapes surface. On 13 August 1931, Duston filed USPTO Patent Application #556,743 for Method Of And Apparatus For Electrically Recording And Reproducing Sound And Other Vibrations, and which was renewed in 1934. Magnetic recording was conceived as early as 1877 by the American engineer Oberlin Smith, Analog magnetic wire recording, and its successor, magnetic tape recording, involve the use of a magnetizable medium which moves with a constant speed past a recording head. An electrical signal, which is analogous to the sound that is to be recorded, is fed to the recording head, inducing a pattern of magnetization similar to the signal
9.
Waveform
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A waveform is the shape and form of a signal such as a wave moving in a physical medium or an abstract representation. In many cases the medium in which the wave propagates does not permit a direct observation of the true form, in these cases, the term waveform refers to the shape of a graph of the varying quantity against time. An instrument called an oscilloscope can be used to represent a wave as a repeating image on a screen. To be more specific, a waveform is depicted by a graph that shows the changes in a signals amplitude over the duration of recording. The amplitude of the signal is measured on the y -axis, most programs show waveforms to give the user a visual aid of what has been recorded. If the waveform is of low or high height, the recording was most likely conducted under conditions with a low or high input volume, respectively. From this example, it follows that the represented by the waveform is affected by both the input signal and conditions under which it is recorded. A periodic waveforms include these while t is time, λ is wavelength, the amplitude of the waveform follows a trigonometric sine function with respect to time. Square wave = { a, mod λ < duty − a and this waveform is commonly used to represent digital information. A square wave of constant period contains odd harmonics that decrease at −6 dB/octave, triangle wave =2 a π arcsin sin 2 π t − ϕ λ. It contains odd harmonics that decrease at −12 dB/octave, sawtooth wave =2 a π arctan tan 2 π t − ϕ2 λ. This looks like the teeth of a saw, found often in time bases for display scanning. It is used as the point for subtractive synthesis, as a sawtooth wave of constant period contains odd. Other waveforms are often called composite waveforms and can often be described as a combination of a number of waves or other basis functions added together. The Fourier series describes the decomposition of periodic waveforms, such that any periodic waveform can be formed by the sum of a set of fundamental, finite-energy non-periodic waveforms can be analyzed into sinusoids by the Fourier transform. AC waveform Arbitrary waveform generator Spectrum analyzer Waveform monitor Waveform viewer Wave packet Yuchuan Wei, common Waveform Analysis, A New And Practical Generalization of Fourier Analysis. Springer US, Aug 31,2000 Waveform Definition Hao He, Jian Li, Waveform design for active sensing systems, a computational approach. Solomon W. Golomb, and Guang Gong, Signal design for good correlation, for wireless communication, cryptography, and radar
10.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
11.
American Bankers Association
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The American Bankers Association is a Washington, D. C. -based trade association for the U. S. banking industry. ABA is considered the largest financial group in the United States. Relying on help and intelligence from peer bankers in the form of frequent correspondence, Howenstein escaped his dilemma, Howenstein later recalled, The 1873 panic was a well spring of subject matter for correspondence and we cashiers availed of it for the general information. We were acquaintances before we had more of each other than handwriting. But the time had now come for something better, with our pens we had wished each other the good cheer of a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and that scarcely discharged the pensiveness of our unrelief of bank work. We wanted to meet each other, among the ABA’s earliest activities was the American Institute of Banking, which was founded in 1903 to provide professional education via examinations and certificates through local chapters. AIB provided a path to careers in banking to collegiate training in finance. The ABA, first headquartered in New York City, organized its activities through sections focused on particular bank types, the trust company section was organized in 1896, followed by one for clearing houses in 1899, savings banks in 1902, and state bankers associations in 1908. The ABA’s growth continued with the emergence of the Federal Reserve System, in 1915, the ABA organized a section for national banks and an additional section for state banks in 1916. To facilitate advocacy before the Comptroller of the Currency, the bank section opened the ABA’s first office in Washington. The state bank section also used the Washington office to represent its banks’ interest before the Federal Reserve, the Educational Foundation went on to house the ABA’s youth financial literacy initiatives. The 1930s saw an expansion of the ABA’s professional development activities led by Harold Stonier, Stonier founded the ABA Graduate School of Banking at Rutgers University in 1935 with 220 students. The school later moved to Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and in 2007, ABA launched other professional development programs in the years that followed, including for bank marketers, compliance officers, trust bankers, and commercial lenders. Federal-level advocacy became increasingly important to ABA members over the 20th century, with these changes in the industry, the ABA consolidated its operations in its current Washington, D. C. location in 1971, closing the New York office. The ABA achieved a goal with the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in November 1999. The ABAs activities are overseen by a board of directors consisting of several bankers, the association is led by four volunteer banker officers and a paid president and CEO, and the offices of chairman, chairman-elect, and vice chairman rotate annually. Previous notable ABA officers include, George Fisher Baker, ABA treasurer from 1875 to 1895, co-founder of the First National Bank of New York in 1863, lyman J. Gage, ABA president from 1883 to 1886 and U. S. Treasury Secretary from 1897 to 1902. Representative from 1893 to 1895 and ABA president from 1897 to 1898, francis Henry Fries, textiles businessman and ABA trust company division president from 1911 to 1912
12.
Negotiable instrument
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A negotiable instrument is a document guaranteeing the payment of a specific amount of money, either on demand, or at a set time, with the payer named on the document. More specifically, it is a document contemplated by or consisting of a contract, which promises the payment of money without condition, which may be paid either on demand or at a future date. The term can have different meanings, depending on what law is being applied and what country it is used in, examples of negotiable instruments include promissory notes, bills of exchange, banknotes, demand draft and cheques. Because money is promised to be paid, the instrument itself can be used by the holder in due course as a store of value. The instrument may be transferred to a party, it is the holder of the instrument who will ultimately get paid by the payer on the instrument. Transfers can happen at less than the value of the instrument. In the Commonwealth of Nations almost all jurisdictions have codified the law relating to negotiable instruments in a Bills of Exchange Act, the collapse was caused by the court accepting the cha only at progressive discount. Later such document for money used by Middle Eastern merchants. Such prototypes came to be used later by the Iberian and Italian merchants in the 12th century, in Italy in the 13–15th centuries, bills of exchange and promissory notes obtain their main features, while further phases of their development have been associated with France and Germany. English exchange law was different than continental European law because of different legal systems, the modern emphasis on negotiability may also be traced to Lord Mansfield. Germanic Lombards documents may also have elements of negotiability. Certain exceptions exist, such as instances of loss or theft of the instrument, wherein the possessor of the note may be a holder, negotiation requires a valid endorsement of the negotiable instrument. In some instances, the instrument can serve as the writing memorializing a contract. Negotiation can be effected by endorsement and delivery, or by delivery alone, promissory notes and bills of exchange are two primary types of negotiable instruments. The law applicable to the instrument will determine whether it is a negotiable instrument or a non-negotiable instrument. Bank notes are referred to as promissory notes, a promissory note made by a bank. A negotiable instrument or draft is an order by the drawer to the drawee to pay money to the payee. A common type of bill of exchange is the cheque, defined as a bill of exchange drawn on a banker and payable on demand
13.
France
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France, officially the French Republic, is a country with territory in western Europe and several overseas regions and territories. The European, or metropolitan, area of France extends from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea, Overseas France include French Guiana on the South American continent and several island territories in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans. France spans 643,801 square kilometres and had a population of almost 67 million people as of January 2017. It is a unitary republic with the capital in Paris. Other major urban centres include Marseille, Lyon, Lille, Nice, Toulouse, during the Iron Age, what is now metropolitan France was inhabited by the Gauls, a Celtic people. The area was annexed in 51 BC by Rome, which held Gaul until 486, France emerged as a major European power in the Late Middle Ages, with its victory in the Hundred Years War strengthening state-building and political centralisation. During the Renaissance, French culture flourished and a colonial empire was established. The 16th century was dominated by civil wars between Catholics and Protestants. France became Europes dominant cultural, political, and military power under Louis XIV, in the 19th century Napoleon took power and established the First French Empire, whose subsequent Napoleonic Wars shaped the course of continental Europe. Following the collapse of the Empire, France endured a succession of governments culminating with the establishment of the French Third Republic in 1870. Following liberation in 1944, a Fourth Republic was established and later dissolved in the course of the Algerian War, the Fifth Republic, led by Charles de Gaulle, was formed in 1958 and remains to this day. Algeria and nearly all the colonies became independent in the 1960s with minimal controversy and typically retained close economic. France has long been a centre of art, science. It hosts Europes fourth-largest number of cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites and receives around 83 million foreign tourists annually, France is a developed country with the worlds sixth-largest economy by nominal GDP and ninth-largest by purchasing power parity. In terms of household wealth, it ranks fourth in the world. France performs well in international rankings of education, health care, life expectancy, France remains a great power in the world, being one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council with the power to veto and an official nuclear-weapon state. It is a member state of the European Union and the Eurozone. It is also a member of the Group of 7, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, originally applied to the whole Frankish Empire, the name France comes from the Latin Francia, or country of the Franks
14.
Electronic Recording Machine, Accounting
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ERMA, was a pioneering computer development project run at SRI International under contract to Bank of America in order to automate banking bookkeeping. The project ran from 1950 to 1955, ERMA was under the technical leadership of computer scientist Jerre Noe. After the projects successful conclusion, General Electric was contracted to build 32 ERMA machines and they were so successful in operation that Bank of America was propelled ahead of other banks in profitability, and became the worlds largest bank by 1970. In 1950, Bank of America was the largest bank in California and this presented a serious problem due to the workload processing them. An experienced bookkeeper could post 245 accounts in an hour, about 2,000 in an 8-hour workday and approximately 10,000 per week. Bank of Americas checking accounts were growing at a rate of 23,000 per month, S. Clark Beise was a senior vice president at BoA who was introduced to Thomas H. Morrin, SRIs Director of Engineering. They formed an alliance under which SRI would essentially act as BoAs R&D arm, in July 1950 they contracted SRI for an initial feasibility study for automating their bookkeeping and check handling. Because accounts were kept alphabetically, adding a new account required a reshuffling of the account listings, SRI instead suggested using account numbers, simply adding new ones to the end of the list. In addition these numbers would be pre-printed on checks, thereby reducing the time to match the checks with account information. Numbered accounts are now a feature of almost all banks, with that problem out of the way, SRI returned a report in September 1950 that stated a computer-based system was certainly feasible, which they called ERM, the Electronic Recording Machine. Bank of America then offered a second contract in November to fully study the changes needed to banking procedures. While this was underway, Bank of America went to a number of companies to set up production of the machines. So SRI was given another contract in January 1952 to build a prototype machine, one of the biggest problems found in the second phase was how to input the check information, especially the account numbers, with any sort of speed. Beise demanded a system that would not require the information to be changed from one medium to another, from check to punched card for instance, SRI investigated several solutions to the problem, including the first OCR system from a company in Arlington, Virginia. However, they found that it was all too easy for banks, instead, they decided to combine the two technologies, and used MICR-printed account numbers which could be read by a magnetic reader similar to those in a cassette tape recorder. The resulting reader was a mechanical tour-de-force, combining five MICR readers with a rotating drum that forced checks dumped in the top to come out the bottom single-file. The system was able to read ten checks a second. ERM weighed about 25 tons, used more than 80 kW of power, by 1955, the system was still in development, but Bank of America was anxious to announce the project
15.
OCR-A
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OCR-A uses simple, thick strokes to form recognizable characters. The font is monospaced, with the required to place glyphs 0.254 cm apart. The OCR-A font was standardized by the American National Standards Institute as ANSI X3. 17-1981, X3.4 has since become the INCITS and the OCR-A standard is now called ISO 1073-1,1976. There is also a German standard for OCR-A called DIN66008, in 1968, American Type Founders produced OCR-A, one of the first optical character recognition typefaces to meet the criteria set by the U. S. Bureau of Standards. The design is simple so that it can be read by a machine. As metal type gave way to computer-based typesetting, Tor Lillqvist used MetaFont to describe the OCR-A font and that definition was subsequently improved by Richard B. Wales. Their work is available from CTAN, to make the free version of the font more accessible to users of Microsoft Windows, John Sauter converted the MetaFont definitions to TrueType using potrace and FontForge in 2004. In 2007, Gürkan Sengün created a Debian package from this implementation, luc Devroye corrected the vertical positioning in John Sauters implementation, and fixed the name of lower case z. Independently, Matthew Skala used mftrace to convert the Metafont definitions to TrueType format in 2006, in 2011 he released a new version created by rewriting the Metafont definitions to work with METATYPE1, generating outlines directly without an intermediate tracing step. On September 27,2012, he updated his implementation to version 0.2, in addition to these free implementations of OCR-A, there are also implementations sold by several vendors. Although optical character recognition technology has advanced to the point where such simple fonts are no longer necessary and its usage remains widespread in the encoding of cheques around the world. Some lockbox companies still insist that the account number and amount owed on a bill return form be printed in OCR-A, also, because of its unusual look, it is sometimes used in advertising and display graphics. It is used for the subtitles in the show Blacklist, a font is a set of character shapes, or glyphs. For a computer to use a font, each glyph must be assigned a point in a character set. When OCR-A was being standardized the usual character coding was the American Standard Code for Information Interchange or ASCII. Not all of the glyphs of OCR-A fit into ASCII, and for five of the characters there were alternate glyphs, the modern descendant of ASCII is Unicode, also known as ISO10646. Unicode contains ASCII and has provisions for OCR characters, so some implementations of OCR-A have looked to Unicode for guidance on character code assignments. In addition to the digits and unaccented letters, many of the characters of OCR-A have obvious code points in ASCII, of those that do not, most, including all of OCR-As accented letters, have obvious code points in Unicode
16.
OCR-B
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OCR-B is a monospace font developed in 1968 by Adrian Frutiger for Monotype by following the European Computer Manufacturers Association standard. Its function was to facilitate the optical character recognition operations by specific electronic devices, originally for financial and it was accepted as the world standard in 1973. It follows the ISO 1073/II-1976 standard, refined in 1979 and it includes all ASCII symbols, and other symbols included for the bank environment. It is widely used for the human readable digits in UPC / EAN barcodes and it is also used for machine-readable passports. It shares that purpose with OCR-A, but it is easier for the eye and brain to read. ISO Web-page where possible to buy the copy of the standard Web-page where possible to download a version of OCR-B linotype. com web-page on OCR-B Article about OCR font on wordpress. com
17.
Westminster (typeface)
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Westminster is a printing and display typeface inspired by the machine-readable numbers printed on cheques and designed by Leo Maggs. In the 1960s, Leo Bragg was working at the Hazell Sun Group’s design studio in Covent Garden, at that time, he was commanded to create a futuristic style title for an article of About the House. Bragg based the letters of that title on the MICR system, E-13B and he then continued to design the rest of the letters of the alphabet in his spare time, basing their proportions on that of the Gill Sans typeface. The MICR E-13B font was designed for automated reading by a simple magnetic reader in the early days of automatic character recognition. The weight of strokes in the characters can be recognised as light or heavy by a simple circuit and this made the characters practical to read before smart OCR, but limited the length of the character set. E-13B has only 14 characters, the digits and a few control codes. None of the alphanumeric computer typefaces like Westminster could be read magnetically, the work was presented to Letraset, but it was Robert Norton, founder of the Photoscript Ltd photo-typesetting company, who decided to produce it. The font was named by Norton and, according to Microsoft, it received its name from the then Westminster Bank Limited from the United Kingdom, since its design, the typeface has been strongly associated with computers—especially in the late 1960s and early-to-mid-1970s. It is used frequently to indicate computer involvement in series, films, books. List of typefaces MICR OCR-A font, another font designed to be machine-readable
18.
Magnetic storage
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Magnetic storage or magnetic recording is the storage of data on a magnetised medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of magnetisation in a material to store data and is a form of non-volatile memory. The information is accessed using one or more read/write heads, as of 2017, magnetic storage media, primarily hard disks, are widely used to store computer data as well as audio and video signals. In the field of computing, the magnetic storage is preferred and in the field of audio and video production. The distinction is less technical and more a matter of preference, other examples of magnetic storage media include floppy disks, magnetic recording tape, and magnetic stripes on credit cards. Magnetic storage in the form of wire recording—audio recording on a wire—was publicized by Oberlin Smith in the Sept 8,1888 issue of the Electrical World. Smith had previously filed a patent in September,1878 but found no opportunity to pursue the idea as his business was machine tools, the first publicly demonstrated magnetic recorder was invented by Valdemar Poulsen in 1898. Poulsens device recorded a signal on a wire wrapped around a drum, in 1928, Fritz Pfleumer developed the first magnetic tape recorder. Early magnetic storage devices were designed to record analog audio signals, computers and now most audio and video magnetic storage devices record digital data. In old computers, magnetic storage was used for primary storage in a form of magnetic drum, or core memory, core rope memory, thin film memory. Unlike modern computers, magnetic tape was often used for secondary storage. Information is written to and read from the medium as it moves past devices called read-and-write heads that operate very close over the magnetic surface. The read-and-write head is used to detect and modify the magnetisation of the material immediately under it, there are two magnetic polarities, each of which is used to represent either 0 or 1. The magnetic surface is divided into many small sub-micrometer-sized magnetic regions, referred to as magnetic domains. Due to the nature of the magnetic material each of these magnetic regions is composed of a few hundred magnetic grains. Magnetic grains are typically 10 nm in size and each form a single magnetic domain. Each magnetic region in total forms a magnetic dipole which generates a magnetic field, for reliable storage of data, the recording material needs to resist self-demagnetisation, which occurs when the magnetic domains repel each other. Magnetic domains written too densely together to a weakly magnetisable material will degrade over time due to rotation of the moment one or more domains to cancel out these forces
19.
Wire recording
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Wire recording or magnetic wire recording was the first early magnetic recording technology, an analog type of audio storage in which a magnetic recording is made on thin steel wire. The first crude magnetic recorder was invented in 1898 by Valdemar Poulsen, the principles and electronics involved are nearly identical. The first wire recorder was invented in 1898 by Danish-American engineer Valdemar Poulsen, Wire recorders for dictation and telephone recording were made almost continuously by various companies through the 1920s and 1930s, but use of this new technology was extremely limited. Dictaphone and Ediphone recorders, which still employed wax cylinders as the medium, were the devices normally used for these applications during this period. The brief heyday of wire recording lasted from approximately 1946 to 1954, the two organizations licensed dozens of manufacturers in the U. S. Japan, and Europe. Examples are Wilcox-Gay, Pierce, Webcor, and Air King, the popularity even encouraged Sears to provide a model, and some authors to prepare specialized manuals. The earliest magnetic tape recorders, not commercially available in the U. S. until 1948, were too expensive, complicated, for any given level of audio quality, the nearly hair-thin wire had the advantage that it was a much more compact storage medium than tape. The Minifon wire recorder was designed for use and its accessories included a microphone disguised as a wristwatch. There were also wire recorders made to data in satellites. Poulsens original telegraphone and other very early recorders placed the two poles of the head on opposite sides of the wire. The wire is thus magnetised transversely to the direction of travel, the development was to place the two poles on the same side of the wire so that the wire was magnetised along its length or longitudinally. Additionally, the poles were shaped into a V so that the head wrapped around the wire to some extent and this increased the magnetising effect and also increased the sensitivity of the head on replay because it collected more of the magnetic flux from the wire. This system was not entirely immune to twisting but the effects were far less marked, the longitudinal method survives into magnetic tape recording to this day. Compared to tape recorders, wire recording devices have a high media speed, standard postwar wire recorders use a nominal speed of 24 inches per second, making a typical one-hour spool of wire 7,200 feet long. Smaller 30- and 15-minute lengths of wire were employed by the majority of recorders made after 1945, some heavy-duty recorders use the larger Armour spools, which can contain enough wire to record continuously for several hours. Because the wire is pulled past the head by the take-up spool, to facilitate handling as the user threaded the wire across the recording head and affixed it to the take-up spool, some manufacturers attached a strip of plastic to each end of the wire. This was designed to press-fit snugly into either spool, on some machines, moving wire guides perform this function, like the mechanism that distributes line across a fishing reel. After recording or playback, the wire has to be rewound before any further use can be made of the machine, unlike with reel-to-reel tape recorders, the take-up reel on most wire recorders is not removable
20.
Magnetic tape
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Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany, based on magnetic wire recording, devices that record and play back audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape recorders. A device that stores data on magnetic tape is a tape drive. Magnetic tape revolutionized broadcast and recording, when all radio was live, it allowed programming to be recorded. At a time when gramophone records were recorded in one take, it allowed recordings to be made in multiple parts, which were then mixed and edited with tolerable loss in quality. It was a key technology in computer development, allowing unparalleled amounts of data to be mechanically created, stored for long periods. Nowadays, other technologies can perform the functions of magnetic tape, in many cases, these technologies are replacing tape. Despite this, innovation in the technology continues, and Sony, over years, magnetic tape made in the 1970s and 1980s can suffer from a type of deterioration called sticky-shed syndrome. Caused by hydrolysis of the binder of the tape, it can render the tape unusable, the oxide side of a tape is the surface that can be magnetically manipulated by a tape head. This is the side that stores the information, the side is simply a substrate to hold the tape together. The name originates from the fact that the side of most tapes is made of an oxide of iron. Magnetic tape was invented for recording sound by Fritz Pfleumer in 1928 in Germany, based on the invention of magnetic wire recording by Oberlin Smith in 1888, pfleumers invention used a ferric oxide powder coating on a long strip of paper. This invention was developed by the German electronics company AEG, which manufactured the recording machines and BASF. In 1933, working for AEG, Eduard Schuller developed the ring-shaped tape head, previous head designs were needle-shaped and tended to shred the tape. An important discovery made in this period was the technique of AC biasing, due to the escalating political tensions, and the outbreak of World War II, these developments were largely kept secret. A wide variety of recorders and formats have developed since, most significantly reel-to-reel, the practice of recording and editing audio using magnetic tape rapidly established itself as an obvious improvement over previous methods. Many saw the potential of making the same improvements in recording television, television signals are similar to audio signals. A major difference is that video signals use more bandwidth than audio signals, existing audio tape recorders could not practically capture a video signal
21.
Drum memory
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Drum memory was a magnetic data storage device invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria. It was widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s as computer memory, for many early computers, drum memory formed the main working memory of the computer. It was so common that these computers were often referred to as drum machines, some drum memories were also used as secondary storage. Drums were displaced as primary computer memory by magnetic core memory which was a balance of size, speed, cost, reliability. Similarly, drums were replaced by hard disk drives for secondary storage, the manufacture of drums ceased in the 1970s. A drum memory contained a metal cylinder, coated on the outside surface with a ferromagnetic recording material. It could be considered the precursor to the disk drive. In most designs, one or more rows of fixed read-write heads ran along the axis of the drum. The drums controller simply selected the head and waited for the data to appear under it as the drum turned. Not all drum units were designed with each track having its own head, some, such as the English Electric DEUCE drum and the Univac FASTRAND had multiple heads moving a short distance on the drum in contrast to modern HDDs, which have one head per platter surface. This method of timing-compensation, called the skip factor or interleaving, was used for years in storage memory controllers. Tauscheks original drum memory had a capacity of about 500,000 bits, the drum could be removed and connected to another output system, but this was not done often due the size and complications that could occur. One of the earliest functioning computers to employ drum memory was the Atanasoff–Berry computer, however, it employed capacitance rather than magnetism to store information. The outer surface of the drum was lined with electrical contacts leading to capacitors contained within, the first mass-produced computer, the IBM650, had about 8.5 kilobytes of drum memory. As late as 1980, PDP-11/45 machines using magnetic core main memory, Librascope LGP-30, The drum memory computer referenced in the above story, also referenced on Librascope LGP-30. Librascope RPC-4000, Another drum memory computer referenced in the above story Oral history interview with Dean Babcock
22.
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
23.
Hard disk drive
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The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored or retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of storage, retaining stored data even when powered off. Introduced by IBM in 1956, HDDs became the dominant secondary storage device for computers by the early 1960s. Continuously improved, HDDs have maintained this position into the era of servers. More than 200 companies have produced HDDs historically, though after extensive industry consolidation most current units are manufactured by Seagate, Toshiba, as of 2016, HDD production is growing, although unit shipments and sales revenues are declining. While SSDs have higher cost per bit, SSDs are replacing HDDs where speed, power consumption, small size, the primary characteristics of an HDD are its capacity and performance. Capacity is specified in unit prefixes corresponding to powers of 1000, the two most common form factors for modern HDDs are 3. 5-inch, for desktop computers, and 2. 5-inch, primarily for laptops. HDDs are connected to systems by standard interface cables such as PATA, SATA, Hard disk drives were introduced in 1956, as data storage for an IBM real-time transaction processing computer and were developed for use with general-purpose mainframe and minicomputers. The first IBM drive, the 350 RAMAC in 1956, was approximately the size of two medium-sized refrigerators and stored five million six-bit characters on a stack of 50 disks. In 1962 the IBM350 RAMAC disk storage unit was superseded by the IBM1301 disk storage unit, cylinder-mode read/write operations were supported, and the heads flew about 250 micro-inches above the platter surface. Motion of the head array depended upon a binary system of hydraulic actuators which assured repeatable positioning. The 1301 cabinet was about the size of three home refrigerators placed side by side, storing the equivalent of about 21 million eight-bit bytes, access time was about a quarter of a second. Also in 1962, IBM introduced the model 1311 disk drive, users could buy additional packs and interchange them as needed, much like reels of magnetic tape. Later models of removable pack drives, from IBM and others, became the norm in most computer installations, non-removable HDDs were called fixed disk drives. Some high-performance HDDs were manufactured with one head per track so that no time was lost physically moving the heads to a track, known as fixed-head or head-per-track disk drives they were very expensive and are no longer in production. In 1973, IBM introduced a new type of HDD code-named Winchester and its primary distinguishing feature was that the disk heads were not withdrawn completely from the stack of disk platters when the drive was powered down. Instead, the heads were allowed to land on an area of the disk surface upon spin-down
24.
Magnetic stripe card
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A magnetic stripe card is a type of card capable of storing data by modifying the magnetism of tiny iron-based magnetic particles on a band of magnetic material on the card. The magnetic stripe, sometimes called swipe card or magstripe, is read by swiping past a reading head. Magnetic stripe cards are used in credit cards, identity cards. They may also contain an RFID tag, a transponder device and/or a microchip mostly used for business premises access control or electronic payment, Magnetic recording on steel tape and wire was invented during World War II for recording audio. In the 1950s, magnetic recording of computer data on plastic tape coated with iron oxide was invented. In 1960 IBM used the magnetic tape idea to develop a way of securing magnetic stripes to plastic cards. They also provide the standards for financial cards, including the allocation of number ranges to different card issuing institutions. Magnetic storage was known from World War II and computer data storage in the 1950s, in 1969 Forrest Parry, an IBM engineer, had the idea of securing a piece of magnetic tape, the predominant storage medium at the time, to a plastic card base. He became frustrated because every adhesive he tried produced unacceptable results, the tape strip either warped or its characteristics were affected by the adhesive, rendering the tape strip unusable. After a frustrating day in the laboratory, trying to get the right adhesive, he came home with several pieces of magnetic tape, as he walked in the door at home, his wife Dorothea was ironing clothing. When he explained the source of his frustration, inability to get the tape to stick to the plastic in a way that would work and he tried it and it worked. The heat of the iron was just high enough to bond the tape to the card, the major development of the magnetic striped plastic card began in 1969 at the IBM Information Records Division headquartered in Dayton N. J. This engineering effort resulted in IBM IRD producing the first magnetic striped plastic credit and ID cards used by banks, insurance companies, hospitals and many others. Arthur E. Hahn Jr. was hired by IBM IRD in Dayton, other members of the group were David Morgan, Billy House, William Creeden, and E. J. Gillen. They were given a recently announced IBM360 Model 30 computer with 50k of RAM for control of the encoding/embossing of the Magnetic Stripe Cards. The IBM360 computer was for scientific/business applications so the IRD engineers first had to convert the 360 into a control computer. Due to the limited RAM the software was developed in 360 Assembler Language and this conversion enabled the 360 computer to monitor and control the entire production process the IRD engineers designed and built. The engineering design/build effort was carried out in a raised floor secured area of IBM IRD in Dayton and this tightly secured area with limited access was required because of the sensitivity of the data that would ultimately be used to encode and emboss the credit and ID cards
25.
Floppy disk
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Floppy disks are read and written by a floppy disk drive. Floppy disks, initially as 8-inch media and later in 5¼-inch and 3½-inch sizes, were a form of data storage and exchange from the mid-1970s into the mid-2000s. These formats are usually handled by older equipment and these disks and associated drives were produced and improved upon by IBM and other companies such as Memorex, Shugart Associates, and Burroughs Corporation. The term floppy disk appeared in print as early as 1970, in 1976, Shugart Associates introduced the first 5¼-inch FDD. By 1978 there were more than 10 manufacturers producing such FDDs, there were competing floppy disk formats, with hard- and soft-sector versions and encoding schemes such as FM, MFM and GCR. The 5¼-inch format displaced the 8-inch one for most applications, the most common capacity of the 5¼-inch format in DOS-based PCs was 360 kB and in 1984 IBM introduced the 1.2 MB dual-sided floppy disk along with its PC-AT model. IBM started using the 720 kB double-density 3½-inch microfloppy disk on its Convertible laptop computer in 1986 and these disk drives could be added to older PC models. In 1988 IBM introduced a drive for 2.88 MB DSED diskettes in its top-of-the-line PS/2 models, throughout the early 1980s, limitations of the 5¼-inch format became clear. Originally designed to be practical than the 8-inch format, it was itself too large, as the quality of recording media grew. A number of solutions were developed, with drives at 2-, 2½-, 3-, 3½-, the large market share of the 5¼-inch format made it difficult for these new formats to gain significant market share. A variant on the Sony design, introduced in 1982 by a number of manufacturers, was then rapidly adopted. By the end of the 1980s, 5¼-inch disks had been superseded by 3½-inch disks, by the mid-1990s, 5¼-inch drives had virtually disappeared, as the 3½-inch disk became the predominant floppy disk. Floppy disks became ubiquitous during the 1980s and 1990s in their use with computers to distribute software, transfer data. Before hard disks became affordable to the population, floppy disks were often used to store a computers operating system. Most home computers from that period have a primary OS and BASIC stored as ROM, by the early 1990s, the increasing software size meant large packages like Windows or Adobe Photoshop required a dozen disks or more. In 1996, there were a five billion standard floppy disks in use. Then, distribution of packages was gradually replaced by CD-ROMs, DVDs. External USB-based floppy disk drives are available, many modern systems provide firmware support for booting from such drives
26.
Bubble memory
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Bubble memory is a type of non-volatile computer memory that uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas, known as bubbles or domains, each storing one bit of data. The material is arranged to form a series of tracks that the bubbles can move along under the action of an external magnetic field. In operation, bubble memories are similar to delay line memory systems, Bubble memory started out as a promising technology in the 1980s, offering memory density of a similar order to hard drives but performance more comparable to core memory. This led many to consider it a contender for a memory that could be used for all storage needs. Bubble memory was used for time in the 1970s and 80s where its non-moving nature was desirable for maintenance or shock-proofing reasons. The introduction of Flash RAM and similar technologies rendered even this niche uncompetitive, Bubble memory is largely the brainchild of a single person, Andrew Bobeck. Bobeck had worked on many kinds of magnetics-related projects through the 1960s, the first was the development of the first magnetic core memory system driven by a transistor-based controller, and the second was the development of twistor memory. Twistor is essentially a version of core memory that replaces the cores with a piece of magnetic tape, the main advantage of twistor is its ability to be assembled by automated machines, as opposed to core, which was almost entirely manual. AT&T had great hopes for twistor, believing it would reduce the cost of computer memory. Instead, DRAM memories came onto the market in the early 1970s that rapidly replaced all previous random access memory systems, twistor ended up being used only in a few applications, many of them AT&Ts own computers. However, such a system had few advantages over twistor, especially as it did not allow random access, in 1967, Bobeck joined a team at Bell Labs and started work on improving twistor. This would produce a sort of 2D twistor, paul Charles Michaelis working with permalloy magnetic thin films discovered that it was possible to propagate magnetic domains in orthogonal directions within the film. This seminal work led to a patent application, the memory device and method of propagation were described in a paper presented at the 13th Annual Conference on Magnetism and Magnetic Materials, Boston, Massachusetts, September 15,1967. The device used anisotropic thin magnetic films that required different magnetic pulse combinations for orthogonal propagation directions, the propagation velocity was also dependent on the hard and easy magnetic axes. This difference suggested that a magnetic medium would be desirable. Starting work extending this concept using orthoferrite, Bobeck noticed an interesting effect. With the magnetic materials used in twistor the data had to be stored on relatively large patches known as domains. Attempts to magnetize smaller areas would fail, with orthoferrite, if the patch was written and then a magnetic field was applied to the entire material, the patch would shrink down into a tiny circle, which he called a bubble
27.
Magnetoresistive random-access memory
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Magnetoresistive random-access memory is a non-volatile random-access memory technology under development since the 1990s. It is currently in production by Everspin, and other companies including GlobalFoundries, unlike conventional RAM chip technologies, data in MRAM is not stored as electric charge or current flows, but by magnetic storage elements. The elements are formed from two plates, each of which can hold a magnetization, separated by a thin insulating layer. One of the two plates is a permanent magnet set to a polarity, the other plates magnetization can be changed to match that of an external field to store memory. This configuration is known as a Magnetic tunnel junction and is the simplest structure for an MRAM bit, a memory device is built from a grid of such cells. The simplest method of reading is accomplished by measuring the resistance of the cell. A particular cell is selected by powering an associated transistor that switches current from a line through the cell to ground. Due to the Tunnel magnetoresistance, the resistance of the cell changes due to the relative orientation of the magnetization in the two plates. By measuring the current, the resistance inside any particular cell can be determined. Typically if the two plates have the same magnetization alignment this is considered to mean 1, while if the alignment is antiparallel the resistance will be higher, data is written to the cells using a variety of means. In the simplest classic design, each cell lies between a pair of lines arranged at right angles to each other, parallel to the cell, one above. When current is passed through them, a magnetic field is created at the junction. This pattern of operation is similar to memory, a system commonly used in the 1960s. This approach requires a substantial current to generate the field, however. Additionally, as the device is scaled down in size, there comes a time when the induced field overlaps adjacent cells over a small area and this problem, the half-select problem, appears to set a fairly large minimum size for this type of cell. One experimental solution to this problem was to use circular domains written and read using the giant magnetoresistive effect, a newer technique, spin transfer torque or spin transfer switching, uses spin-aligned electrons to directly torque the domains. Specifically, if the electrons flowing into a layer have to change their spin and this lowers the amount of current needed to write the cells, making it about the same as the read process. There are concerns that the type of MRAM cell will have difficulty at high densities due to the amount of current needed during writes
28.
Racetrack memory
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Racetrack memory or domain-wall memory is an experimental non-volatile memory device under development at IBMs Almaden Research Center by a team led by physicist Stuart Parkin. In early 2008, a 3-bit version was successfully demonstrated, racetrack memory uses a spin-coherent electric current to move magnetic domains along a nanoscopic permalloy wire about 200 nm across and 100 nm thick. As current is passed through the wire, the pass by magnetic read/write heads positioned near the wire. A racetrack memory device is made up of such wires. In general operational concept, racetrack memory is similar to the bubble memory of the 1960s and 1970s. Delay line memory, such as mercury delay lines of the 1940s and 1950s, are a form of similar technology. Like bubble memory, racetrack memory uses electrical currents to push a sequence of magnetic domains through a substrate, improvements in magnetic detection capabilities, based on the development of spintronic magnetoresistive sensors, allow the use of much smaller magnetic domains to provide far higher bit densities. In production, it was expected that the wires could be scaled down to around 50 nm, there were two arrangements considered for racetrack memory. The simplest was a series of flat wires arranged in a grid with read, a more widely studied arrangement used U-shaped wires arranged vertically over a grid of read/write heads on an underlying substrate. Both arrangements offered about the same throughput performance, the primary concern in terms of construction was practical, whether or not the three dimensional vertical arrangement would be feasible to mass-produce. Projections in 2008 suggested that memory would offer performance on the order of 20-32 ns to read or write a random bit. This compared to about 10,000,000 ns for a hard drive, the primary authors discussed ways to improve the access times with the use of a reservoir to about 9.5 ns. The only current technology that offered a clear benefit over racetrack memory was SRAM, on the order of 0.2 ns. Larger feature size F of about 45 nm with an area of about 140 F2. Other contenders included magnetoresistive random-access memory, phase-change memory and ferroelectric RAM, most of these technologies offer densities similar to flash memory, in most cases worse, and their primary advantage is the lack of write-endurance limits like those in flash memory. Field-MRAM offers excellent performance as high as 3 ns access time and it might see use as an SRAM replacement, but not as a mass storage device. The highest densities from any of these devices is offered by PCRAM, with a size of about 5.8 F², similar to flash memory. Nevertheless, none of these can come close to competing with racetrack memory in overall terms, especially density
29.
ISO 2
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ISO2 is an international standard for direction of twist designation for yarns, complex yarns, slivers, slubbings, rovings, cordage, and related products. The standard uses capital letters S and Z to indicate the direction of twist, the handedness of the twist is the direction of the twists as they progress away from an observer. Thus Z-twist is said to be right-handed, and S-twist to be left-handed, the convention of using these two letters to unambiguously designate twist direction was already used in the cordage industry by 1957. ISO2,1973 Textiles — Designation of the direction of twist in yarns and related products
30.
Preferred number
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In industrial design, preferred numbers are standard guidelines for choosing exact product dimensions within a given set of constraints. Product developers must choose numerous lengths, distances, diameters, volumes, preferred numbers serve two purposes, Using them increases the probability of compatibility between objects designed at different times by different people. They therefore help to minimize the number of different sizes that need to be manufactured or kept in stock, preferred numbers represent preferences of simple numbers and their powers of a convenient basis, usually 10. In 1870 Charles Renard proposed a set of preferred numbers and his system was adopted in 1952 as international standard ISO3. Renards system divides the interval from 1 to 10 into 5,10,20, the factor between two consecutive numbers in a Renard series is approximately constant, namely the 5th, 10th, 20th, or 40th root of 10, which leads to a geometric sequence. This way, the relative error is minimized if an arbitrary number is replaced by the nearest Renard number multiplied by the appropriate power of 10. In applications for which the R5 series provides a too fine graduation and it is effectively an R3 series rounded to one significant digit. 0.10.20.51251020501002005001000 and this series covers a decade in three steps. Adjacent values differ by factors 2 or 2.5, unlike the Renard series, the 1-2-5 series has not been formally adopted as an international standard. However, the Renard series R10 can be used to extend the 1-2-5 series to a finer graduation and this series is used to define the scales for graphs and for instruments that display in a two-dimensional form with a graticule, such as oscilloscopes. The denominations of most modern currencies, notably the euro and British pound, the United States and Canada follow the series 5,10,25,50,100, and also $5 and $10 which belong to the same series. However, after that comes $20, not $25, the ¼-½-1 series is also used by currencies derived from the former Dutch gulden, some Middle Eastern currencies, and the Seychellois rupee. However, newer notes introduced in Lebanon and Syria due to follow the standard 1-2-5 series instead. The E-series is another system of preferred numbers and it consists of the E3, E6, E12, E24, E48, E96 and E192 series. Originally introduced in 1948, it was standardized in the international standard IEC63 by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 1963. It works similarly to the Renard series, except that it subdivides the interval from 1 to 10 into 3,6,12,24,48,96 or 192 steps. These subdivisions ensure that when some arbitrary value is replaced with the nearest preferred number, use of the E series is mostly restricted to electronic parts like resistors, capacitors, inductors and Zener diodes. Commonly produced dimensions for other types of components are either chosen from the Renard series instead or are defined in relevant product standards
31.
Film speed
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Film speed is the measure of a photographic films sensitivity to light, determined by sensitometry and measured on various numerical scales, the most recent being the ISO system. A closely related ISO system is used to measure the sensitivity of digital imaging systems, highly sensitive films are correspondingly termed fast films. In both digital and film photography, the reduction of exposure corresponding to use of higher sensitivities generally leads to reduced image quality, in short, the higher the sensitivity, the grainier the image will be. Ultimately sensitivity is limited by the efficiency of the film or sensor. The speed of the emulsion was then expressed in degrees Warnerke corresponding with the last number visible on the plate after development. Each number represented an increase of 1/3 in speed, typical speeds were between 10° and 25° Warnerke at the time. The concept, however, was built upon in 1900 by Henry Chapman Jones in the development of his plate tester. In their system, speed numbers were inversely proportional to the exposure required, for example, an emulsion rated at 250 H&D would require ten times the exposure of an emulsion rated at 2500 H&D. The methods to determine the sensitivity were later modified in 1925, the H&D system was officially accepted as a standard in the former Soviet Union from 1928 until September 1951, when it was superseded by GOST 2817-50. The Scheinergrade system was devised by the German astronomer Julius Scheiner in 1894 originally as a method of comparing the speeds of plates used for astronomical photography, Scheiners system rated the speed of a plate by the least exposure to produce a visible darkening upon development. ≈2 The system was extended to cover larger ranges and some of its practical shortcomings were addressed by the Austrian scientist Josef Maria Eder. Scheiners system was abandoned in Germany, when the standardized DIN system was introduced in 1934. In various forms, it continued to be in use in other countries for some time. The DIN system, officially DIN standard 4512 by Deutsches Institut für Normung, was published in January 1934, International Congress of Photography held in Dresden from August 3 to 8,1931. The DIN system was inspired by Scheiners system, but the sensitivities were represented as the base 10 logarithm of the sensitivity multiplied by 10, similar to decibels. Thus an increase of 20° represented an increase in sensitivity. ≈3 /10 As in the Scheiner system, speeds were expressed in degrees, originally the sensitivity was written as a fraction with tenths, where the resultant value 1.8 represented the relative base 10 logarithm of the speed. Tenths were later abandoned with DIN4512, 1957-11, and the example above would be written as 18° DIN, the degree symbol was finally dropped with DIN4512, 1961-10
32.
British Standard Pipe
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It has been adopted as standard in plumbing and pipe fitting, except in the United States, where NPT and related threads are the standard used. These can be combined into two types of joints, Jointing threads These are pipe threads where pressure-tightness is made through the mating of two threads together. In the modern standard version, it is simply a size number. For a taper thread, it is the diameter at the length from the small end of the thread. The taper is 1 to 16, meaning that for each 16 units of measurement increase in the distance from the end, for left-hand threads, the letters, LH, are appended
33.
A440 (pitch standard)
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A440 or A4, which has a frequency of 440 Hz, is the musical note A above middle C and serves as a general tuning standard for musical pitch. Prior to the standardization on 440 Hz, many countries and organizations followed the French standard since the 1860s of 435 Hz, which had also been the Austrian governments 1885 recommendation. Johann Heinrich Scheibler recommended A440 as a standard in 1834 after inventing the tonometer to measure pitch, the American music industry reached an informal standard of 440 Hz in 1926, and some began using it in instrument manufacturing. In 1936 the American Standards Association recommended that the A above middle C be tuned to 440 Hz and this standard was taken up by the International Organization for Standardization in 1955 as ISO16. It is designated A4 in scientific pitch notation because it occurs in the octave that starts with the fourth C key on a standard 88-key piano keyboard, A440 is widely used as concert pitch in the United Kingdom and the United States. In continental Europe the frequency of A4 commonly varies between 440 Hz and 444 Hz, in the period instrument movement, a consensus has arisen around a modern baroque pitch of 415 Hz, baroque for some special church music at 466 Hz, and classical pitch at 430 Hz. A440 is often used as a reference in just intonation regardless of the fundamental note or key. The US time and frequency station WWV broadcasts a 440 Hz signal at two minutes past every hour, with WWVH broadcasting the same tone at the first minute past every hour and this was added in 1936 to aid orchestras in tuning their instruments. History of pitch standards in Western music Concert pitch Pitch Electronic tuner A
34.
Renard series
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Renard series are a system of preferred numbers dividing an interval from 1 to 10 into 5,10,20, or 40 steps. This set of preferred numbers was proposed in the 1870s by French army engineer Colonel Charles Renard and his system was adopted in 1952 as international standard ISO3. Renards system of preferred numbers divides the interval from 1 to 10 into 5,10,20, or 40 steps. The factor between two numbers in a Renard series is approximately constant, namely the 5th, 10th, 20th, or 40th root of 10. This way, the relative error is minimized if an arbitrary number is replaced by the nearest Renard number multiplied by the appropriate power of 10. One application of the Renard series of numbers is fuse amperages, the most basic R5 series consists of these five rounded numbers, which are powers of the fifth root of 10, rounded to two digits. If a finer resolution is needed, another five numbers are added to the series, one each of the original R5 numbers. These are rounded to a multiple of 0.05, where an even finer grading is needed, the R20, R40, and R80 series can be applied. The R20 series is usually rounded to a multiple of 0.05, in the table below, the additional R80 values are written to the right of the R40 values in the column named R80 addl. The R40 numbers 3.00 and 6.00 are higher than they should be by interpolation, in some applications more rounded values are desirable, either because the numbers from the normal series would imply an unrealistically high accuracy, or because an integer value is needed. For these needs, more rounded versions of the Renard series have been defined in ISO3, in the table below, rounded values that differ from their less rounded counterparts are shown in bold. As the Renard numbers repeat after every 10-fold change of the scale and it makes no difference whether the Renard numbers are used with metres or millimetres. But one would need to use a number base to avoid ending up with two incompatible sets of nicely spaced dimensions, if for instance they were applied with both inches and feet. In the case of inches and feet a root of 12 would be desirable, ie n √12 or 12 1⁄n where n is the desired number of divisions within the major step size of twelve. Similarly a base of two, eight, or sixteen would fit nicely with the units commonly found in computer science. Each of the Renard sequences can be reduced to a subset by taking every nth value in a series, which is designated by adding the number n after a slash. For example, “R10′′/3 ” designates a series consisting of every value in the R′′10 series from 1 to 1000. Preferred numbers 1-2-5 series E series Logarithm Decibel Neper Phon Nominal Pipe Size Geometric progression
