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
