1.
NeXT
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NeXT was founded by Jobs after he was ousted at Apple, along with several co-workers. NeXT introduced the first NeXT Computer in 1988, and the smaller NeXTstation in 1990, the NeXT computers experienced relatively limited sales, with estimates of about 50,000 units shipped in total. Nevertheless, their innovative object-oriented NeXTSTEP operating system and development environment were highly influential, NeXT later released much of the NeXTSTEP system as a programming environment standard called OpenStep. NeXT withdrew from the business in 1993 to concentrate on marketing OPENSTEP for Mach, its own OpenStep implementation. NeXT also developed WebObjects, one of the first enterprise Web application frameworks, Apple purchased NeXT in 1997 for $429 million, and 1.5 million shares of Apple stock. As part of the agreement, Steve Jobs, Chairman and CEO of NeXT Software, returned to Apple, the founder promised to merge software from NeXT with Apples hardware platforms, eventually resulting in macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS. Parts of these systems incorporated the OPENSTEP foundation. In 1985, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs led Apples SuperMicro division, the Macintosh had been successful on university campuses partly because of the Apple University Consortium, which allowed students and institutions to buy the computers at a discount. The consortium had earned more than $50 million on computers by February 1984, while chairman, Jobs visited university departments and faculty members to sell Macintosh. Jobs met Paul Berg, a Nobel Laureate in chemistry, at a luncheon held in Silicon Valley to honor François Mitterrand, wet labs were prohibitively expensive for lower-level courses and were too complex to be simulated on personal computers of the time. Jobs was intrigued by Bergs concept of a workstation and contemplated starting a higher education company in the fall of 1985. Jobs division did not release upgraded versions of the Macintosh and most of the Macintosh Office, as a result, sales plummeted, and Apple was forced to write off millions of dollars in unsold inventory. Apples chief executive officer John Sculley ousted Jobs from his role at Apple. Later that year, Jobs began a struggle to regain control of the company. The board of directors sided with Sculley while Jobs took a visit to Western Europe. After several months of being sidelined, Jobs resigned from Apple on September 13,1985 and he told the board he was leaving to set up a new computer company, and that he would be taking several Apple employees from the SuperMicro division with him. He also told the board that his new company would not compete with Apple, Jobs named his new company Next, Inc. A number of former Apple employees followed him to Next, including Joanna Hoffman, Bud Tribble, George Crow, Rich Page, Susan Barnes, Susan Kare, and Danl Lewin
2.
Fremont, California
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Fremont is a city in Alameda County, California, United States. It was incorporated on January 23,1956, from the merger of five communities, Centerville, Niles, Irvington, Mission San Jose. The city is named after American explorer John Charles Frémont, located in the southeast section of the San Francisco Bay Area in the East Bay region primarily, Fremont has a population of around 230,000. It is the fourth most populous city in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it is the closest East Bay city to Silicon Valley, and is thus sometimes associated with it. The area consisting of Fremont, Newark, and Union City, is now known as the Tri-City Area, Fremont is home to the largest population of Afghan Americans in the United States. The recorded history of the Fremont area began on June 6,1795, the Mission was established at the site of the Ohlone village of Oroysom. On their second day in the area, the Mission party killed a bear in Niles Canyon. The first English-speaking visitor to Fremont was the renowned trapper and explorer Jedediah Smith in 1827, the Mission prospered, eventually reaching a population of 1,887 inhabitants in 1831. The influence of the missionaries declined after 1834, when the Mexican government enacted secularization, José de Jesus Vallejo, brother of Mariano Vallejo, was the grantee of the Rancho Arroyo de la Alameda Mexican land grant. His family was influential in the Fremont area in the colonial era. In 1846 they were visited by the towns namesake John C, Frémont, who mapped a trail through Mission Pass to provide access for American settlers into the southeastern San Francisco Bay Area. The Fremont area grew rapidly at the time of the California Gold Rush, a town called Mission San Jose grew up around the old mission, with its own post office from 1850. Agriculture dominated the economy with grapes, nursery plants and olives as leading crops, in 1868 the 6. 8-magnitude Hayward earthquake on the Hayward Fault collapsed buildings throughout the Fremont area, ruining Mission San José and its outbuildings. Until the 1906 San Francisco earthquake caused its destruction, the Fremont areas Palmdale Winery was the largest in California, the ruins of the Palmdale Winery are still visible near the Five Corners in Irvington. From 1912 to 1915 the Niles section of the Fremont area was the earliest home of Californias motion picture industry, Charlie Chaplin filmed several movies in the Fremont area, most notably The Tramp. Fremont was incorporated under the leadership of Wally Pond in 1956, when the Glenmoor Gardens Homeowners Association was incorporated, in March 1953, there were no more than 75 houses in the subdivision. It was probably the first such organization in the Fremont area, in its scope, the five-member board of directors was set up to oversee a full range of services, from police and fire protection to street maintenance. Fremont became more industrialized between 1953 and 1962, a boom in high-tech employment in the 1980s to the late 1990s, especially in the Warm Springs District, caused rapid development in the city and linked the city with the Silicon Valley
3.
Workstation
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A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are connected to a local area network. Workstations offered higher performance than mainstream personal computers, especially with respect to CPU and graphics, memory capacity, and multitasking capability. Typically, the factor is that of a desktop computer, consist of a high resolution display, a keyboard and a mouse at a minimum. Workstations were the first segment of the market to present advanced accessories. The increasing capabilities of mainstream PCs in the late 1990s have blurred the lines somewhat with technical/scientific workstations, perhaps the first computer that might qualify as a workstation was the IBM1620, a small scientific computer designed to be used interactively by a single person sitting at the console. One peculiar feature of the machine was that it lacked any actual arithmetic circuitry, to perform addition, it required a memory-resident table of decimal addition rules. This saved on the cost of logic circuitry, enabling IBM to make it inexpensive, the machine was code-named CADET and rented initially for $1000 a month. In 1965, IBM introduced the IBM1130 scientific computer, which was meant as the successor to the 1620, both of these systems came with the ability to run programs written in Fortran and other languages. Both the 1620 and the 1130 were built into roughly desk-sized cabinets, both were available with add-on disk drives, printers, and both paper-tape and punched-card I/O. A console typewriter for direct interaction was standard on each, early examples of workstations were generally dedicated minicomputers, a system designed to support a number of users would instead be reserved exclusively for one person. A notable example was the PDP-8 from Digital Equipment Corporation, regarded to be the first commercial minicomputer, Lisp Machines were commercialized beginning 1980 by companies like Symbolics, Lisp Machines, Texas Instruments and Xerox. The first computer designed for single-users, with high-resolution graphics facilities was the Xerox Alto developed at Xerox PARC in 1973, other early workstations include the Terak 8510/a, Three Rivers PERQ and the later Xerox Star. Meanwhile, DARPAs VLSI Project created several spinoff graphics products as well, notably the SGI3130 and it was not uncommon to differentiate the target market for the products, with Sun and Apollo considered to be network workstations, while the SGI machines were graphics workstations. As RISC microprocessors became available in the mid-1980s, these were adopted by many workstation vendors, workstations tended to be very expensive, typically several times the cost of a standard PC and sometimes costing as much as a new car. However, minicomputers sometimes cost as much as a house, additionally, workstations, given their more specialized nature, tend to have higher profit margins than commodity-driven PCs. Additionally, the companies that make the products tend to have very good repair/replacement plans, some low-cost workstations are still expensive by PC standards, but offer binary compatibility with higher-end workstations and servers made by the same vendor. This allows software development to take place on low-cost desktop machines, Graphics workstations often shipped with graphics accelerators
4.
United States dollar
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The United States dollar is the official currency of the United States and its insular territories per the United States Constitution. It is divided into 100 smaller cent units, the circulating paper money consists of Federal Reserve Notes that are denominated in United States dollars. The U. S. dollar was originally commodity money of silver as enacted by the Coinage Act of 1792 which determined the dollar to be 371 4/16 grain pure or 416 grain standard silver, the currency most used in international transactions, it is the worlds primary reserve currency. Several countries use it as their currency, and in many others it is the de facto currency. Besides the United States, it is used as the sole currency in two British Overseas Territories in the Caribbean, the British Virgin Islands and Turks and Caicos Islands. A few countries use the Federal Reserve Notes for paper money, while the country mints its own coins, or also accepts U. S. coins that can be used as payment in U. S. dollars. After Nixon shock of 1971, USD became fiat currency, Article I, Section 8 of the U. S. Constitution provides that the Congress has the power To coin money, laws implementing this power are currently codified at 31 U. S. C. Section 5112 prescribes the forms in which the United States dollars should be issued and these coins are both designated in Section 5112 as legal tender in payment of debts. The Sacagawea dollar is one example of the copper alloy dollar, the pure silver dollar is known as the American Silver Eagle. Section 5112 also provides for the minting and issuance of other coins and these other coins are more fully described in Coins of the United States dollar. The Constitution provides that a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and that provision of the Constitution is made specific by Section 331 of Title 31 of the United States Code. The sums of money reported in the Statements are currently being expressed in U. S. dollars, the U. S. dollar may therefore be described as the unit of account of the United States. The word dollar is one of the words in the first paragraph of Section 9 of Article I of the Constitution, there, dollars is a reference to the Spanish milled dollar, a coin that had a monetary value of 8 Spanish units of currency, or reales. In 1792 the U. S. Congress passed a Coinage Act, Section 20 of the act provided, That the money of account of the United States shall be expressed in dollars, or units. And that all accounts in the offices and all proceedings in the courts of the United States shall be kept and had in conformity to this regulation. In other words, this act designated the United States dollar as the unit of currency of the United States, unlike the Spanish milled dollar the U. S. dollar is based upon a decimal system of values. Both one-dollar coins and notes are produced today, although the form is significantly more common
5.
Operating system
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An operating system is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs. All computer programs, excluding firmware, require a system to function. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer – from cellular phones, the dominant desktop operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 83. 3%. MacOS by Apple Inc. is in place, and the varieties of Linux is in third position. Linux distributions are dominant in the server and supercomputing sectors, other specialized classes of operating systems, such as embedded and real-time systems, exist for many applications. A single-tasking system can run one program at a time. Multi-tasking may be characterized in preemptive and co-operative types, in preemptive multitasking, the operating system slices the CPU time and dedicates a slot to each of the programs. Unix-like operating systems, e. g. Solaris, Linux, cooperative multitasking is achieved by relying on each process to provide time to the other processes in a defined manner. 16-bit versions of Microsoft Windows used cooperative multi-tasking, 32-bit versions of both Windows NT and Win9x, used preemptive multi-tasking. Single-user operating systems have no facilities to distinguish users, but may allow multiple programs to run in tandem, a distributed operating system manages a group of distinct computers and makes them appear to be a single computer. The development of networked computers that could be linked and communicate with each other gave rise to distributed computing, distributed computations are carried out on more than one machine. When computers in a work in cooperation, they form a distributed system. The technique is used both in virtualization and cloud computing management, and is common in large server warehouses, embedded operating systems are designed to be used in embedded computer systems. They are designed to operate on small machines like PDAs with less autonomy and they are able to operate with a limited number of resources. They are very compact and extremely efficient by design, Windows CE and Minix 3 are some examples of embedded operating systems. A real-time operating system is a system that guarantees to process events or data by a specific moment in time. A real-time operating system may be single- or multi-tasking, but when multitasking, early computers were built to perform a series of single tasks, like a calculator. Basic operating system features were developed in the 1950s, such as resident monitor functions that could run different programs in succession to speed up processing
6.
NeXTSTEP
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NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on UNIX. Although relatively unsuccessful at the time, it attracted interest from computer scientists and it was also the platform on which Tim Berners-Lee created the first web browser. After the purchase of NeXT by Apple, it became the source of the operating systems macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS. Many bundled macOS applications, such as TextEdit, Mail and Chess, are descendants of NeXTSTEP applications, the toolkits offer considerable power, and are the canonical development system for all of the software on the machine. NeXTSTEPs user interface is considered to be refined and consistent and it introduced the idea of the Dock and the Shelf. Additional kits were added to the line to make the system more attractive. These include Portable Distributed Objects, which allow easy remote invocation, and Enterprise Objects Framework, the kits made the system particularly interesting to custom application programmers, and NeXTSTEP had a long history in the financial programming community. A preview release of NeXTSTEP was shown with the launch of the NeXT Computer on October 12,1988, the first full release, NeXTSTEP1.0, shipped on September 18,1989. NeXTSTEP was later modified to separate the underlying operating system from the higher-level object libraries, the result was the OpenStep API, which ran on multiple underlying operating systems, including NeXTs own OPENSTEP, Windows NT and SUN Solaris. NeXTSTEPs legacy stands today in the form of its direct descendents, from day one, the operating system of NeXTSTEP was built upon Mach/BSD. It was built on 4. 3BSD Tahoe and it changed to 4. 3BSD Reno after the release of NeXTSTEP3.0. It changed to 4. 4BSD during the development of Rhapsody, the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, and the first ever app store were all invented on the NeXTSTEP platform. Some features and keyboard shortcuts now commonly found in web browsers can be traced back to NeXTSTEP conventions, the basic layout options of HTML1.0 and 2.0 are attributable to those features available in NeXTs Text class. Other games based on the Doom engine such as Heretic and its sequel Hexen by Raven Software as well as Strife by Rogue Entertainment were also developed on NeXT hardware using ids tools. Altsys made a NeXTSTEP application called Virtuoso, version 2 of which was ported to Mac OS, the modern Notebook interface for Mathematica, and the advanced spreadsheet Lotus Improv, were developed using NeXTSTEP. The software that controlled MCIs Friends and Family calling plan program was developed using NeXTSTEP, about the time of the release of NeXTSTEP3.2, NeXT partnered with Sun Microsystems to develop OpenStep. It is the product of an effort to separate the underlying operating system from the higher-level object libraries to create a cross-platform object-oriented API standard derived from NeXTSTEP, the OpenStep API targets multiple underlying operating systems, including NeXTs own OPENSTEP. Implementations of that standard were released for Suns Solaris, Windows NT, NeXTs implementation is called OPENSTEP for Mach and its first release superseded NeXTSTEP3.3 on NeXT, Sun and Intel IA-32 systems
7.
Central processing unit
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The computer industry has used the term central processing unit at least since the early 1960s. The form, design and implementation of CPUs have changed over the course of their history, most modern CPUs are microprocessors, meaning they are contained on a single integrated circuit chip. An IC that contains a CPU may also contain memory, peripheral interfaces, some computers employ a multi-core processor, which is a single chip containing two or more CPUs called cores, in that context, one can speak of such single chips as sockets. Array processors or vector processors have multiple processors that operate in parallel, there also exists the concept of virtual CPUs which are an abstraction of dynamical aggregated computational resources. Early computers such as the ENIAC had to be rewired to perform different tasks. Since the term CPU is generally defined as a device for software execution, the idea of a stored-program computer was already present in the design of J. Presper Eckert and John William Mauchlys ENIAC, but was initially omitted so that it could be finished sooner. On June 30,1945, before ENIAC was made, mathematician John von Neumann distributed the paper entitled First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC and it was the outline of a stored-program computer that would eventually be completed in August 1949. EDVAC was designed to perform a number of instructions of various types. Significantly, the programs written for EDVAC were to be stored in high-speed computer memory rather than specified by the wiring of the computer. This overcame a severe limitation of ENIAC, which was the considerable time, with von Neumanns design, the program that EDVAC ran could be changed simply by changing the contents of the memory. Early CPUs were custom designs used as part of a larger, however, this method of designing custom CPUs for a particular application has largely given way to the development of multi-purpose processors produced in large quantities. This standardization began in the era of discrete transistor mainframes and minicomputers and has accelerated with the popularization of the integrated circuit. The IC has allowed increasingly complex CPUs to be designed and manufactured to tolerances on the order of nanometers, both the miniaturization and standardization of CPUs have increased the presence of digital devices in modern life far beyond the limited application of dedicated computing machines. Modern microprocessors appear in electronic devices ranging from automobiles to cellphones, the so-called Harvard architecture of the Harvard Mark I, which was completed before EDVAC, also utilized a stored-program design using punched paper tape rather than electronic memory. Relays and vacuum tubes were used as switching elements, a useful computer requires thousands or tens of thousands of switching devices. The overall speed of a system is dependent on the speed of the switches, tube computers like EDVAC tended to average eight hours between failures, whereas relay computers like the Harvard Mark I failed very rarely. In the end, tube-based CPUs became dominant because the significant speed advantages afforded generally outweighed the reliability problems, most of these early synchronous CPUs ran at low clock rates compared to modern microelectronic designs. Clock signal frequencies ranging from 100 kHz to 4 MHz were very common at this time, the design complexity of CPUs increased as various technologies facilitated building smaller and more reliable electronic devices
8.
Motorola 68030
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The Motorola 68030 is a 32-bit microprocessor in Motorolas 68000 family. The 68030 was the successor to the Motorola 68020, and was followed by the Motorola 68040, in keeping with general Motorola naming, this CPU is often referred to as the 030. The 68030 features 273,000 transistors with on-chip instruction and data caches of 256 bytes each and it also has an on-chip MMU 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 also released, lacking the on-chip MMU. It was commonly 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. The PGA 68030s included 40 MHz and 50 MHz versions, there was also a small supply of QFP packaged EC variants. Motorola used the process shrink to pack more hardware on the die, in case it was the MMU. The integration of the MMU made it more cost-effective than the 68020 with an external MMU, however, the 68030 can switch between synchronous and asynchronous buses without a reset. The 68030 also lacks some of the 68020s instructions but it lowers power draw by ~25%, when used with a 68020 bus, the 68030 did not differentiate itself in performance from the 68020 that it was derived from. However, the 68030 provides a synchronous bus interface which, if used. The finer manufacturing process allowed Motorola to scale the full-version processor to 50 MHz, the EC variety topped out at 40 MHz. It was also used in Unix workstations such as the Sun Microsystems Sun 3/80 desktop workstation, Laser printers, more recently, the 68030 core has also been adapted by Freescale into a microcontroller for embedded applications. The 68EC030 is a low cost version of the 68030, the difference between the two being that the 68EC030 does not have a memory management unit. The 68EC030 was used as the CPU of the Amiga 3000, one model of the Amiga 4000, and in the Cisco Systems 2500 Series router, a small-to-medium enterprise computer internetworking appliance. The 50 MHz speed is exclusive to the ceramic PGA package and 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
9.
Hertz
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The hertz is the unit of frequency in the International System of Units and is defined as one cycle per second. It is named for Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, the first person to provide proof of the existence of electromagnetic waves. Hertz are commonly expressed in SI multiples kilohertz, megahertz, gigahertz, kilo means thousand, mega meaning million, giga meaning billion and tera for trillion. Some of the units most common uses are in the description of waves and musical tones, particularly those used in radio-. It is also used to describe the speeds at which computers, the hertz is equivalent to cycles per second, i. e. 1/second or s −1. In English, hertz is also used as the plural form, as an SI unit, Hz can be prefixed, commonly used multiples are kHz, MHz, GHz and THz. One hertz simply means one cycle per second,100 Hz means one hundred cycles per second, and so on. The unit may be applied to any periodic event—for example, a clock might be said to tick at 1 Hz, the rate of aperiodic or stochastic events occur is expressed in reciprocal second or inverse second in general or, the specific case of radioactive decay, becquerels. Whereas 1 Hz is 1 cycle per second,1 Bq is 1 aperiodic radionuclide event per second, the conversion between a frequency f measured in hertz and an angular velocity ω measured in radians per second is ω =2 π f and f = ω2 π. This SI unit is named after Heinrich Hertz, as with every International System of Units unit named for a person, the first letter of its symbol is upper case. Note that degree Celsius conforms to this rule because the d is lowercase. — Based on The International System of Units, the hertz is named after the German physicist Heinrich Hertz, who made important scientific contributions to the study of electromagnetism. The name was established by the International Electrotechnical Commission in 1930, the term cycles per second was largely replaced by hertz by the 1970s. One hobby magazine, Electronics Illustrated, declared their intention to stick with the traditional kc. Mc. etc. units, sound is a traveling longitudinal wave which is an oscillation of pressure. Humans perceive frequency of waves as pitch. Each musical note corresponds to a frequency which can be measured in hertz. An infants ear is able to perceive frequencies ranging from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, the range of ultrasound, infrasound and other physical vibrations such as molecular and atomic vibrations extends from a few femtoHz into the terahertz range and beyond. Electromagnetic radiation is described by its frequency—the number of oscillations of the perpendicular electric and magnetic fields per second—expressed in hertz. Radio frequency radiation is measured in kilohertz, megahertz, or gigahertz
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