1.
Matrox
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Matrox is a producer of video card components and equipment for personal computers. Based in Dorval, Quebec, Canada it was founded by Lorne Trottier, Matrox is an umbrella name for two legal entities, Matrox Graphics Inc. the entity most recognized by the public which has been making graphics cards for over 30 years Matrox Electronic Systems Ltd. Matroxs first graphics card product was the ALT-256 for S-100 bus computers, the ALT-256 produced a 256 by 256 pixel monochrome display using an 8 kilobyte frame buffer consisting of 16 TMS4027 DRAM chips. An expanded version followed, the ALT-512, both available for Intel SBC bus machines as well, through the 1980s, Matroxs cards followed changes in the hardware side of the market, to Multibus and then the variety of PC standards. During the 1990s, the Matrox Millennium series of cards attracted buyers willing to pay for a higher quality, in 1994 Matrox introduced the Matrox Impression, an add-on card that worked in conjunction with a Millennium card to provide 3D acceleration. The Impression was aimed primarily at the CAD market, a later version of the Millennium included features similar to the Impression but by this time the series was lagging behind emerging vendors like 3dfx Interactive. Matrox made several attempts to increase its share of the market for 3D-capable cards, the Matrox Mystique, released in 1996, was the companys first attempt to make a card with good gaming performance and with pricing suitable for that market. Another attempt was the Matrox G100 and G200, the G200 was sold as two models, the Millennium G200 was a higher-end version typically equipped with 8 MB SGRAM memory, while the Mystique G200 used slower SDRAM memory but added a TV-out port. The G200 offered competent 3D performance for the first time, but was released shortly before a new generation of cards from Nvidia and ATI which completely outperformed it. Later versions in the Matrox G400 series were never able to regain the crown, since then, Matrox has continued to shift the focus of its card designs towards specialized, niche markets, moving more deeply into enterprise, industrial, and government applications. In recent years they have no more than a 3–5% share of the total video card market. Matrox is now divided in three divisions, Matrox Graphics, Matrox Video, and Matrox Imaging and these drivers were tested and are allegedly supported for quite old distributions. They do not work on newer Linux kernels and X. Org Server versions, in addition to the proprietary drivers provided by Matrox, the DRI community has provided drivers under the GPL license for many more of the devices. Computer graphics Graphics chip Graphics processing unit Matrox RT
2.
Technology
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Technology is the collection of techniques, skills, methods and processes used in the production of goods or services or in the accomplishment of objectives, such as scientific investigation. Technology can be the knowledge of techniques, processes, and the like, the human species use of technology began with the conversion of natural resources into simple tools. The steady progress of technology has brought weapons of ever-increasing destructive power. It has helped develop more advanced economies and has allowed the rise of a leisure class, many technological processes produce unwanted by-products known as pollution and deplete natural resources to the detriment of Earths environment. Various implementations of technology influence the values of a society and raise new questions of the ethics of technology, examples include the rise of the notion of efficiency in terms of human productivity, and the challenges of bioethics. Philosophical debates have arisen over the use of technology, with disagreements over whether technology improves the condition or worsens it. The use of the technology has changed significantly over the last 200 years. Before the 20th century, the term was uncommon in English, the term was often connected to technical education, as in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The term technology rose to prominence in the 20th century in connection with the Second Industrial Revolution, the terms meanings changed in the early 20th century when American social scientists, beginning with Thorstein Veblen, translated ideas from the German concept of Technik into technology. In German and other European languages, a distinction exists between technik and technologie that is absent in English, which translates both terms as technology. By the 1930s, technology referred not only to the study of the industrial arts, dictionaries and scholars have offered a variety of definitions. Ursula Franklin, in her 1989 Real World of Technology lecture, gave another definition of the concept, it is practice, the way we do things around here. The term is used to imply a specific field of technology, or to refer to high technology or just consumer electronics. Bernard Stiegler, in Technics and Time,1, defines technology in two ways, as the pursuit of life by other than life, and as organized inorganic matter. Technology can be most broadly defined as the entities, both material and immaterial, created by the application of mental and physical effort in order to some value. In this usage, technology refers to tools and machines that may be used to solve real-world problems and it is a far-reaching term that may include simple tools, such as a crowbar or wooden spoon, or more complex machines, such as a space station or particle accelerator. Tools and machines need not be material, virtual technology, such as software and business methods. W. Brian Arthur defines technology in a broad way as a means to fulfill a human purpose
3.
Seagate Technology
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Seagate Technology PLC is an American data storage company. It was incorporated in 1978, as Shugart Technology, since 2010, the company is incorporated in Dublin, Ireland, with operational headquarters in Cupertino, California, United States. Seagate developed the first 5. 25-inch hard disk drive, the 5-megabyte ST-506 and they were a major supplier in the microcomputer market during the 1980s, especially after the introduction of the IBM XT in 1983. Today Seagate along with Western Digital dominates the HDD market, much of their growth has come through acquisition of competitors. In 1989, Seagate acquired Control Data Corporations Imprimis division, makers of CDCs HDD products, Seagate acquired Conner Peripherals in 1996, Maxtor in 2006, and Samsungs HDD business in 2011. Seagate Technology was incorporated on November 1,1978, and commenced operations with co-founders Al Shugart, Tom Mitchell, Doug Mahon, Finis Conner, the name was changed to Seagate Technology to avoid a lawsuit from Xeroxs subsidiary Shugart Associates. The companys first product, the 5-megabyte ST-506, was released in 1980 and it was the first hard disk to fit the 5. 25-inch form factor of the Shugart mini-floppy drive. The hard disk, which used a Modified Frequency Modulation encoding, was a hit, and was released in a 10-megabyte version. With this Seagate secured a contract as a major OEM supplier for the IBM XT, the large volumes of units sold to IBM, the then-dominant supplier of PCs, fueled Seagates early growth. In their first year, Seagate shipped $10 million of units to consumers, by 1983, the company shipped over 200,000 units for revenues of $110 million. The 20-megabyte version, the ST-225, and the 30-megabyte version and these were also made in SCSI versions. In 1983, Al Shugart was replaced as president by then chief operating officer, Tom Mitchell, Shugart continued to oversee corporate planning. By this point the company had a 45% market share of the hard drive market. In 1989, Seagate acquired Control Datas Imprimis Technology, CDCs disk storage division, in September 1991, Tom Mitchell resigned as president under pressure from the board of directors, with Al Shugart reassuming presidency of the company. Shugart refocused the company on its more lucrative markets, and on mainframe drives instead of external drives and this included a domestic partnership with Corning Inc. which began using a new glass ceramic compound to manufacture disk substrates. In 1991, Seagate also introduced the Barracuda HDDs, the industrys first hard disk with a 7200-RPM spindle speed, in May 1993, Seagate became the first company to cumulatively ship 50 million HDDs over its firms history. The following year Seagate Technology Inc moved from the Nasdaq exchange to the New York Stock Exchange, upon leaving, the company was the 17th-largest company in terms of trading volume on the Nasdaq exchange. In 1996, Seagate merged with Conner Peripherals to form worlds largest independent hard-drive manufacturer, in 1996, Seagate introduced the industrys first hard disk with a 10, 000-RPM spindle speed, the Cheetah 4LP
4.
Milpitas, California
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Milpitas /mɪlˈpiːtəs/ is a city in Santa Clara County, California. It is located with San Jose to its south and Fremont to its north, at the end of State Route 237. With Alameda County bordering directly on the north, Milpitas sits in the extreme northeast section of the South Bay, bordering the East Bay, Milpitas is also located within the Silicon Valley. The corporate headquarters of Maxtor, LSI Corporation, Adaptec, Intersil, FireEye, Viavi and Lumentum, KLA-Tencor, SanDisk, Flex and Cisco also have offices in Milpitas. The population was 66,790 at the 2010 census, Milpitas was first inhabited by the Tamyen, a linguistic subgroup of the Muwekma Ohlone people who had resided in the San Francisco Bay Area for thousands of years. The Ohlone Indians lived a life based on everyday hunting and gathering. Some of the Ohlone lived in villages within what is now Milpitas, including sites underneath what are now the Calvary Assembly of God Church. Archaeological evidence gathered from Ohlone graves at the Elmwood Correctional Facility in 1993 revealed a rich trade with tribes from Sacramento to Monterey. During the Spanish expeditions of the late 18th century, several missions were founded in the San Francisco Bay Area, during the mission period, Milpitas served as a crossroads between Mission San José de Guadalupe in modern-day Fremont and Mission Santa Clara de Asis, in present Santa Clara. Jose Maria Alviso was the son of Francisco Xavier Alviso and Maria Bojorquez, both landowners had built prominent adobe homes on their properties. Today, both still exist and are the oldest structures in Milpitas. The seriously eroded walls of the Jose Higuera Adobe, now in Higuera Adobe Park, are encapsulated in a shell built c.1970 by Marian Weller. The Alviso Adobe can be mostly in its original form with one kitchen addition made by the Cuciz family after they purchased the adobe from the Gleason family in 1922. Alviso Adobe History Park is to be opened, after the restoration of the adobe and outbuildings is completed, as an educational museum with historic items, trees, buildings. In the 1850s, large numbers of Americans of English, German, the Burnett, Rose, Dempsey, Jacklin, Trimble, Ayer, Parks, Wool, Weller, Minnis, and Evans are among the early settlers of Milpitas. These early settlers farmed the land that was once the ranchos, some set up businesses on what was then called Mission Road between Calaveras Road and the Alviso-Milpitas Road. By the late 20th century this became known as the Midtown district. Yet another influx of immigration came in the 1870s and 1880s as Portuguese sharecroppers from the Azores came to farm the Milpitas hillsides, many of the Azoreans had such locally well-known surnames like Coelho, Covo, Mattos, Nunes, Spangler, Serpa, and Silva
5.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
6.
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
7.
Initial public offering
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Through this process, a privately held company transforms into a public company. Initial public offerings are used by companies to raise the expansion of capital, possibly to monetize the investments of early private investors. A company selling shares is never required to repay the capital to its public investors, after the IPO, when shares trade freely in the open market, money passes between public investors. The IPO process is known as going public. Details of the offering are disclosed to potential purchasers in the form of a lengthy document known as a prospectus. Most companies undertake an IPO with the assistance of an investment banking firm acting in the capacity of an underwriter, underwriters provide several services, including help with correctly assessing the value of shares and establishing a public market for shares. Alternative methods such as the dutch auction have also been explored, in terms of size and public participation, the two most notable examples of this method is the Google IPO and Snapchats parent company Snap Inc. China has recently emerged as a major IPO market, with several of the largest IPOs taking place in that country, the earliest form of a company which issued public shares was the case of the publicani during the Roman Republic. Like modern joint-stock companies, the publicani were legal bodies independent of their members whose ownership was divided into shares, there is evidence that these shares were sold to public investors and traded in a type of over-the-counter market in the Forum, near the Temple of Castor and Pollux. The shares fluctuated in value, encouraging the activity of speculators, mere evidence remains of the prices for which partes were sold, the nature of initial public offerings, or a description of stock market behavior. Publicanis lost favor with the fall of the Republic and the rise of the Empire, the first modern IPO occurred in March 1602 when the Dutch East India Company offered shares of the company to the public in order to raise capital. All the shares were tradable, and the shareholders received receipts for the purchase, a share certificate documenting payment and ownership such as we know today was not issued but ownership was instead entered in the companys share register. In the United States, the first IPO was the offering of Bank of North America around 1783. An IPO, therefore, allows a company to tap into a pool of potential investors to provide itself with capital for future growth, repayment of debt. A company selling shares is never required to repay the capital to its public investors. Those investors must endure the unpredictable nature of the market to price. After the IPO, when shares trade freely in the open market, for early private investors who choose to sell shares as part of the IPO process, the IPO represents an opportunity to monetize their investment. This type of offering is not dilutive, since no new shares are being created, once a company is listed, it is able to issue additional common shares in a number of different ways, one of which is the follow-on offering
8.
New York Stock Exchange
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The New York Stock Exchange, is an American stock exchange located at 11 Wall Street, Lower Manhattan, New York City, New York. It is by far the worlds largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its companies at US$19.3 trillion as of June 2016. The average daily trading value was approximately US$169 billion in 2013, the NYSE trading floor is located at 11 Wall Street and is composed of 21 rooms used for the facilitation of trading. A fifth trading room, located at 30 Broad Street, was closed in February 2007, the main building and the 11 Wall Street building were designated National Historic Landmarks in 1978. The NYSE is owned by Intercontinental Exchange, an American holding company that it also lists, previously, it was part of NYSE Euronext, which was formed by the NYSEs 2007 merger with Euronext. NYSE and Euronext now operate as divisions of Intercontinental Exchange, the NYSE has been the subject of several lawsuits regarding fraud or breach of duty and in 2004 was sued by its former CEO for breach of contract and defamation. The earliest recorded organization of securities trading in New York among brokers directly dealing with each other can be traced to the Buttonwood Agreement, previously securities exchange had been intermediated by the auctioneers who also conducted more mundane auctions of commodities such as wheat and tobacco. In 1817 the stockbrokers of New York operating under the Buttonwood Agreement instituted new reforms, after sending a delegation to Philadelphia to observe the organization of their board of brokers, restrictions on manipulative trading were adopted as well as formal organs of governance. Several locations were used between 1817 and 1865, when the present location was adopted, the invention of the electrical telegraph consolidated markets, and New Yorks market rose to dominance over Philadelphia after weathering some market panics better than other alternatives. The Civil War greatly stimulated speculative securities trading in New York, by 1869 membership had to be capped, and has been sporadically increased since. The latter half of the century saw rapid growth in securities trading. Securities trade in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was prone to panics. The Stock Exchange Luncheon Club was situated on the floor from 1898 until its closure in 2006. The main building, located at 18 Broad Street, between the corners of Wall Street and Exchange Place, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1978, as was the 11 Wall Street building. The NYSE announced its plans to merge with Archipelago on April 21,2005, NYSEs governing board voted to merge with rival Archipelago on December 6,2005, and became a for-profit, public company. It began trading under the name NYSE Group on March 8,2006, Wall Street is the leading US money center for international financial activities and the foremost US location for the conduct of wholesale financial services. It comprises a matrix of wholesale financial sectors, financial markets, financial institutions, the principal sectors are securities industry, commercial banking, asset management, and insurance. Prior to the acquisition of NYSE Euronext by the ICE in 2013, Marsh Carter was the Chairman of the NYSE, presently, the chairman is Jeffrey Sprecher
9.
MiniScribe
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MiniScribe was a manufacturer of disk storage products, founded in Longmont, Colorado in 1980. MiniScribe designed and sold stepper motor-based hard disk drives with an amount of onboard logic for the time. They eventually moved into higher-profile voice coil designs, and won major contracts with IBM. They were a relatively well-known brand through the early 1980s, the company was started by Terry Johnson, who had a 20-year career in the hard drive business at such companies as IBM, Memorex and Storage Technology Corporation. However, slow sales of the IBM XT led IBM to dramatically scale back their orders late that year, forcing MiniScribe to lay off 26% of its staff and causing the value of the stock plummet. Johnson left the company, at the time he stated that he had been planning to do this for some time, Johnson would later comment that Its a very low inertia industry, you can blow your way into it and get blown out of it very quickly. Roger Gower, recently promoted to President, took over the CEO role as well, shortly thereafter the company was recapitalized with a $20 million investment from Hambrecht & Quist, a venture capital firm. One of H&Qs officers was Quentin Thomas Wiles, a turnaround specialist nicknamed Dr. Fix-It, Wiles took over the CEO position from Gower, running the company remotely from his office in Sherman Oaks, Los Angeles, with a management team made up primarily of accountants. Their major customer at time was Compaq, but the company was also bidding for major contracts with Apple Computer. In January 1987 the company conducted a quick inventory in order to estimate their accounts prior to an independent review by a third party accounting firm. Their internal inventory count showed that there was a shortfall of between $2 and $4 million and this implied the cost to produce those drives that did sell was higher than initially thought, which, if properly booked against sales, would mean their operating margins would be unimpressive. Instead of reporting this, a number of the decided to cover it up with various means. They produced an inventory count, and then broke into the accountants lock boxes. The team continued to roll these numbers forward through the quarters, in July 1987, Parker, director of far east operations, told Wiles that something was amiss, and in August Wiles travelled to Hong Kong and Singapore where he found a complete loss of control. The inventory count that fall showed the numbers had grown to $15 million, a report was prepared to consider various solution, but Wiles suggested they continue hiding the problem and ordered all copies of the report be destroyed. The company continued to post impressive numbers, but there were troubling signs and those two numbers are normally at odds, increased receivables should indicate increased sales, which would normally result in decreased inventory. The directors began an investigation in October, while the company reported another record-setting quarter for that period in spite of failing to win either the Apple or DEC contracts. The investigation revealed that Wiles set iron-clad sales forecasts and pushed these requirements down into the team, leaving no room for failure
