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.
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
3.
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
4.
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
5.
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
6.
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
7.
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
8.
Magnetic-core memory
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Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random-access computer memory for 20 years between about 1955 and 1975. Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, Core uses tiny magnetic toroids, the cores, through which wires are threaded to write and read information. Each core represents one bit of information, the cores can be magnetized in two different ways and the bit stored in a core is zero or one depending on that cores magnetization direction. The process of reading the core causes the core to be reset to a zero, when not being read or written, the cores maintain the last value they had, even when power is turned off. Using smaller cores and wires, the density of core slowly increased. However, reaching this density required extremely careful manufacture, almost always carried out by hand in spite of repeated efforts to automate the process. The cost declined over this period from about $1 per bit to about 1 cent per bit, the introduction of the first semiconductor memory SRAM chips in the late 1960s began to erode the core market. The first successful DRAM, the Intel 1103 which arrived in quantity in 1972 at 1 cent per bit, improvements in semiconductor manufacturing led to rapid increases in storage and decreases in price that drove core from the market by around 1974. Although core memory is obsolete, any computer memory is still occasionally called core, in particular, the basic concept of using the square hysteresis loop of certain magnetic materials as a storage or switching device was known from the earliest days of computer development. Much of this knowledge had developed due to an understanding of transformers, the stable switching behavior was well known in the electrical engineering field, and its application in computer systems was immediate. For example, J. Presper Eckert and Jeffrey Chuan Chu had done some development work on the concept in 1945 at the Moore School during the ENIAC efforts. Frederick Viehe applied for patents on the use of transformers for building digital logic circuits in place of relay logic beginning in 1947. A patent on a fully developed core system was granted in 1947 and this development was little-known, however, and the mainstream development of core is normally associated with three independent teams. Substantial work in the field was carried out by the Shanghai-born American physicists An Wang and Way-Dong Woo, the name referred to the way that the magnetic field of the cores could be used to control the switching of current in electromechanical systems. Wang and Woo were working at Harvard Universitys Computation Laboratory at the time, Wang was able to patent the system on his own. The MIT Whirlwind computer required a fast memory system for real-time aircraft tracking use, at first, Williams tubes—a storage system based on cathode ray tubes—were used, but these devices were always temperamental and unreliable. William Papian of Project Whirlwind cited one of these efforts, Harvards Static Magnetic Delay Line, the first core memory of 32 x 32 x 16 bits was installed on Whirlwind in the summer of 1953. In April 2011, Forrester recalled, the Wang use of cores did not have any influence on my development of random-access memory, the Wang memory was expensive and complicated
9.
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
10.
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
