AMD Am2900
Am2900 is a family of integrated circuits created in 1975 by Advanced Micro Devices. They were constructed with bipolar devices, in a bit-slice topology, were designed to be used as modular components each representing a different aspect of a computer control unit. By using the bit slicing technique, Am2900 family was able to implement a CCU with data and instructions to be any multiple of 4 bits by multiplying the number of ICs. One major problem with this modular technique was that it required a larger number of ICs to implement what could be done on a single CPU IC; the Am2901 chip was the arithmetic-logic unit, the "core" of the series. It could count using 4 bits and implement binary operations as well as various bit-shifting operations; the 2901 and some other chips in the family were second sourced by an unusually large number of other manufacturers, starting with Motorola and Raytheon – both in 1975 – and Cypress Semiconductor, National Semiconductor, NEC, Signetics. In the Soviet Union and Russia the Am2900 family was manufactured as the 1804 series, still in production as of 2016.
There are many more, but here are some known machines using these parts: The Apollo Computer Tern family: DN460, DN660 and DSP160. All used the same system board emulating the Mc68010 instruction set; the Itek Advanced Technology Airborne Computer used on the Galileo Attitude and Articulation Control Computer System and some Navy aircraft had a 16-register, 16-bit word width assembled from 4-bit-wide 2900 series processors. Four special instructions were added to the Galileo version of the ATAC, some chips were replaced with radiation-hardened 2901 chips. Data General Nova 4, which obtained 16-bit word width using four Am2901 ALUs in parallel. Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 models PDP-11/23, PDP-11/34, PDP-11/44 floating-point options Hewlett-Packard 1000 A-series model A600 used four AM2901 ALUs for its 16-bit processor The Xerox Dandelion, the machine used in the Xerox Star and Xerox 1108 Lisp machine. Several models of the GEC 4000 series minicomputers: 4060, 4150, 4160, 4090 and all 418x and 419x systems.
The DEC KS10 PDP-10 model. The UCSD Pascal P-machine processor designed at NCR by Joel McCormack. A number of MAI Basic Four machines; the Tektronix 4052 graphics system computer. The SM-1420, Soviet clone of PDP-11, used Soviet clone of AM2901 also used in others; the Lilith computer designed at ETH Zürich by Niklaus Wirth. Atari's vector graphics arcade machines Tempest and Red Baron each used 4 Am2901 ICs in their "math box" auxiliary circuit boards. Atari's raster graphics arcade machine I, the first commercial game featuring filled polygons, included a math processor built around four AMD 2901 4-bit chip slices. Pixar Image Computer, 4 Channel Processors each with 4 Am2900's Simulation Excel, Norway: Typographical workstation / typesetter; the Sim-X machine used a 16-bit integer multiplier to optimize graphical transformations. The machine debuted in 1983 and the company shut down in 1987. Eventide H949 Harmonizer. Many Siemens Teleperm and S5 PLCs used for industrial control were built using the 2900 series.
AT&T 3B20D processor. Metheus / Barco Omega 400 and 500 Series graphics systems. Geac Computer Corporation 2000, 6000, 8000, 9000 were all based on 4 x AM2901 chips; the GEAC 9500 was based on the AM29101. The GEAC 2000 was used in pharmacies; the other models were used in library and insurance automation. The 2000 was a single processor unit; the 6000 and 8000 contained four processors, each dedicated to one of comms, tape, or program processing. The 8000 had local processor memory; the 9000 and 9500 were AMP systems with up to 8 CPU modules. AES Data Systems C20 Multiuser Word Processors. AES of Montreal designed a series of modules and systems based on their AES-800 bit-slice processors. 8- 12- and 16-bit buses were part of the design. Iterations of the Ferranti Argus 700 e.g. the 700F and 700G, used AM2901 devices, as did as some of the A700 peripheral channel controllers for e.g. hard and floppy disc drives The Am2900 Family Data Book lists: Am2901 – 4-bit bit-slice ALU Am2902 – Look-Ahead Carry Generator Am2903 – 4-bit-slice ALU, with hardware multiply Am2904 – Status and Shift Control Unit Am2905 – Bus Transceiver Am2906 – Bus Transceiver with Parity Am2907 – Bus Transceiver with Parity Am2908 – Bus Transceiver with Parity Am2909 – 4-bit-slice address sequencer Am2910 – 12-bit address sequencer Am2911 – 4-bit-slice address sequencer Am2912 – Bus Transceiver Am2913 – Priority Interrupt Expander Am2914 – Priority Interrupt Controller Am2915 – Quad 3-State Bus Transceiver Am2916 – Quad 3-State Bus Transceiver Am2917 – Quad 3-State Bus Transceiver Am2918 – Instruction Register, Quad D Register Am2919 – Instruction Register, Quad Register Am2920 – Octal D-Type Flip-Flop Am2921 – 1-to-8 Decoder Am2922 – 8-Input Multiplexer Am2923 – 8-Input MUX Am2924 – 3-Line to 8-Line Decoder Am2925 – System Clock Generator and
MC88100
The MC88100 is a microprocessor developed by Motorola that implemented 88000 instruction set architecture. Announced in 1988, the MC88100 was the first 88000 implementation, it was succeeded by the MC88110 in the early 1990s. The microprocessor was a superscalar design with multiple integer and floating-point units that executed instructions in-order; the MC88100 had separate instruction and data caches. These caches were implemented with the MC88200 integrated circuit, which contains a memory management unit and an amount of cache; the MC88100 requires two of these devices for each cache, additional MC88200s could be added to increase the size of the caches. This partitioned scheme was chosen to provide system flexibility, the amount of cache could be varied depending on the price point. In practice, these additional chips required more space on the circuit board and the buses between the MC88200s and MC88100 added complexity and cost; the MC88100 contained the MC88200 750,000 transistors. Both were fabricated by Motorola in its 1.5 μm complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor process.
The MC88100 was commercially unsuccessful. This was due to a number of reasons, including requirement of MC88200s, but was due to Motorola being a vendor of the successful 68000 family; as the 68000 division viewed the 88000 as a competitor, they forced the MC88100 to be priced unacceptably high for a volume part. The part did find use in the high-end embedded market, in Motorola's own computers, in large computers from companies such as Data General and the Unisys S-8400 Unix Servers. Furber, Stephen Bo. VLSI RISC Architecture and Organization. CRC Press. Pp. 184–192. Tabak, Daniel. RISC Systems. Research Studies Press. Pp. 121–143. Tabak, Daniel. Advanced Microprocessors. McGraw-Hill. Pp. 433–434, 437
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering; the Institute is a land-grant, sea-grant, space-grant university, with a campus that extends more than a mile alongside the Charles River. Its influence in the physical sciences and architecture, more in biology, linguistics and social science and art, has made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world. MIT is ranked among the world's top universities; as of March 2019, 93 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 73 Marshall Scholars, 45 Rhodes Scholars, 41 astronauts, 16 Chief Scientists of the US Air Force have been affiliated with MIT.
The school has a strong entrepreneurial culture, the aggregated annual revenues of companies founded by MIT alumni would rank as the tenth-largest economy in the world. MIT is a member of the Association of American Universities. In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a "Conservatory of Art and Science", but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by the governor of Massachusetts on April 10, 1861. Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia, wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances, he did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that: The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.
The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories. Two days after MIT was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT's first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865; the new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes" and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay. MIT was informally called "Boston Tech"; the institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker.
Programs in electrical, chemical and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand. The curriculum drifted with less focus on theoretical science; the fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these "Boston Tech" years, MIT faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot's repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College's Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding; the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court put an end to the merger scheme. In 1916, the MIT administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT's move to a spacious new campus consisting of filled land on a mile-long tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River.
The neoclassical "New Technology" campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded by anonymous donations from a mysterious "Mr. Smith", starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million in cash and Kodak stock to MIT. In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios; the Compton reforms "renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering". Unlike Ivy League schools, MIT catered more to middle-class families, depended more on tuition than on endow
Motorola 68030
The Motorola 68030 is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 family. It was released in 1987; the 68030 was the successor to the Motorola 68020, was followed by the Motorola 68040. In keeping with general Motorola naming, this CPU is referred to as the 030; the 68030 features 273,000 transistors with on-chip data caches of 256 bytes each. It has an on-chip memory management unit but does not have a built in floating-point unit; the 68881 and the faster 68882 floating point unit chips could be used with the 68030. A lower cost version of the 68030, the Motorola 68EC030, was released, lacking the on-chip MMU, it was available in both 132 pin QFP and 128 pin PGA packages. The poorer thermal characteristics of the QFP package limited the full 68030 QFP variant to 33 MHz. There was a small supply of QFP packaged EC variants; as a microarchitecture, the 68030 is a 68020 core with an additional 256 byte data cache and a process shrink and an added burst mode for the caches, where four longwords can be placed in the cache without further CPU intervention.
Motorola used the process shrink to pack more hardware on the die. The integration of the MMU made it more cost-effective than the 68020 with an external MMU. However, the 68030 can switch between asynchronous buses without a reset; the 68030 lacks some of the 68020's instructions, but it increases performance by ≈5% while reducing power draw by ≈25% compared to the 68020. The 68030 can be used with the 68020 bus, in which case its performance is similar to 68020 that it was derived from. However, the 68030 provides an additional synchronous bus interface which, if used, accelerates memory accesses up to 33% compared to an clocked 68020; the finer manufacturing process allowed Motorola to scale the full-version processor to 50 MHz. The EC variety topped out at 40 MHz; the 68030 was used in many models of the Apple Macintosh II and Commodore Amiga series of personal computers, NeXT Cube Alpha Microsystems multiuser systems, some descendants of the Atari ST line such as the Atari TT and the Atari Falcon.
It was used in Unix workstations such as the Sun Microsystems Sun-3x line of desktop workstations, laser printers and the Nortel Networks DMS-100 telephone central office switch. More the 68030 core has been adapted by Freescale into a microcontroller for embedded applications. LeCroy has used the 68EC030 in certain models of their 9300 Series digital oscilloscopes including “C” suffix models:87-88 and high performance 9300 Series models, along with the Mega Waveform Processing hardware option for 68020-based 9300 Series models; the 68EC030 is a low cost version of the 68030, the difference between the two being that the 68EC030 omits the on-chip memory management unit and is thus an upgraded 68020. The 68EC030 was used as the CPU for the low-cost model of the Amiga 4000, on a number of CPU accelerator cards for the Commodore Amiga line of computers, it was used in the Cisco Systems 2500 Series router, a small-to-medium enterprise computer internetworking appliance. The 50 MHz speed is exclusive to the plastic' 030 stopped at 40 MHz.
This article is based on material taken from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing prior to 1 November 2008 and incorporated under the "relicensing" terms of the GFDL, version 1.3 or later. 68030 images and descriptions at cpu-collection.de Official information about the Freescale MC68030 microcontroller Motorola 68k family data sheets at bitsavers.org
Nortel
Nortel Networks Corporation commonly known as Northern Electric and Northern Telecom, was a multinational telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer headquartered in Mississauga, Canada. It was founded in Quebec, in 1895 as the Northern Electric and Manufacturing Company; until an antitrust settlement in 1949, Northern Electric was owned principally by Bell Canada and the Western Electric Company of the Bell System, producing large volumes of telecommunication equipment based on licensed Western Electric designs. At its height, Nortel accounted for more than a third of the total valuation of all the companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange, employing 94,500 people worldwide. In 2009, Nortel filed for bankruptcy protection in Canada and the United States, triggering a 79% decline of its corporate stock; the bankruptcy case was the largest in Canadian history, left pensioners and former employees with enormous losses. By 2016 Nortel had sold billions of dollars' worth of assets.
Courts in the U. S. and Canada approved a negotiated settlement of bankruptcy proceedings in 2017. Alexander Graham Bell conceived the technical aspects of the telephone and invented it in July 1874, while residing with his parents at their farm in Tutela Heights, on the outskirts of Brantford, Ontario, he refined its design at Brantford after producing his first working prototype in Boston. Canada's first telephone factory, created by James Cowherd of Brantford, was a three-story brick building that soon started manufacturing telephones for the Bell System, leading to the city's style as The Telephone City. After Cowherd's death in 1881 which resulted in the closure of his Brantford factory, a mechanical production department was created within the Bell Telephone Company of Canada and production of Canadian telephone equipment was transferred to Montreal in 1882, to compensate the restrictions on importing telephone equipment from the United States. In addition to telephones, four years the department started manufacturing switchboards, at first the 50-line Standard Magneto Switchboard.
The small manufacturing department expanded yearly with the growth and popularity of the telephone to 50 employees in 1888. By 1890 it had been transformed into its own branch of operations with 200 employees, a new factory was under construction; as the manufacturing branch expanded, its production ability increased beyond the demand for telephones, it faced closure for several months a year without manufacturing other products. The Bell Telephone Company of Canada's charter prohibited the company to build other products. In 1895, the Bell Telephone of Canada spun off its manufacturing arm to build telephones for sale to other companies, as well as other products, such as fire alarm boxes, police street call boxes, fire department call equipment; this company was incorporated as the Northern Manufacturing Company Limited. Northern Electric and Manufacturing Company Limited was incorporated on December 7, 1895, by the following corporate members: Charles Fleetford Sise Sr. President of Bell Canada – Provisional Director.
McFarlane, all of the city and district of Montreal, Quebec. The initial stock capital was $50,000 at $100 per share, with 93 percent held by the Bell Telephone Company of Canada and the remainder held by the seven corporate members above; the first general stockholders meeting was held on March 24, 1896. In December 1899, The Bell Telephone Company of Canada bought a cabling company for $500,000. Northern Electric and Manufacturing further expanded its product line in 1900, manufacturing the first Canadian wind-up gramophones that played flat discs. In 1911 the Wire and Cable company changed its name to the Imperial Cable Company; the construction of a new manufacturing plant started in 1913 at Shearer Street in Montreal, Canada, as preparations began for the two manufacturing companies' integration. In January 1914, the Northern Electric and Manufacturing Company and the Imperial Wire and Cable Company merged into the Northern Electric Company known as Northern Electric, the new company opened the doors on a new manufacturing plant in January 1915.
This facility at Shearer Street was the primary manufacturing centre until the mid-1950s. Edward Fleetford Sise was the president and his brother Paul Fleetford Sise was the vice-president and general manager. During the First World War Northern Electric manufactured the Portable Commutator, a one-wire telegraphic switchboard for military operations in the field. In 1922, Northern started to produce, for $5, the "Peanut" vacuum tube, which required only a single dry-cell battery; the use of alternating current was still under development during this time. The "Northern Electric Peanut tube was the smallest tube made, drew only one-tenth of an ampere and was the most remarkable radio frequency amplifier made." During the 1920s Northern Electric made kettles, cigar lighters, electric stoves, washing machines. In January 1923, Northern Electric started to operate an AM radio station with call letters CHYC, in the Shearer Street plant, much of the programming was religious services for the Northern Electric employees and families in the community.
In July 1923, CHYC-AM was the first radio station to provide entertainment to the riders of the transcontinental train, in a parl
Raster graphics editor
A raster graphics editor is a computer program that allows users to create and edit images interactively on the computer screen and save them in one of many "bitmap" or "raster" formats such as JPEG, PNG, GIF. Vector graphics editors are contrasted with raster graphics editors, yet their capabilities complement each other; the technical difference between vector and raster editors stem from the difference between vector and raster images. Vector graphics are created mathematically; each element is manipulated numerically. Raster images include digital photos. A raster image is made up of rows and columns of dots, called pixels, is more photo-realistic; this is the standard form for digital cameras. The image is represented pixel like a microscopic jigsaw puzzle. Vector editors tend to be better suited for graphic design, page layout, logos, sharp-edged artistic illustrations, e.g. cartoons, clip art, complex geometric patterns, technical illustrations and flowcharting. Advanced raster editors, like GIMP and Adobe Photoshop, use vector methods for general layout and elements such as text, but are equipped to deal with raster images down to the pixel and have special capabilities in doing so, such as brightness/contrast, adding "lighting" to a raster image or photograph.
Select a region for editing Draw lines with simulated brushes of different color, size and pressure Fill a region with a single color, gradient of colors, or a texture Select a color using different color models, e.g. RGB, HSV, or by using a color dropper Edit and convert between various color models. Add typed letters in various font styles Remove imperfections from photo images Composite editing using layers Apply filters for effects including sharpening and blurring Convert between various image file formats Comparison of raster graphics editors Vector graphics editor Texture map Text editor 3D modelling software Media related to Bitmap graphics editors at Wikimedia Commons
