1.
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
2.
Unix
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Among these is Apples macOS, which is the Unix version with the largest installed base as of 2014. Many Unix-like operating systems have arisen over the years, of which Linux is the most popular, Unix was originally meant to be a convenient platform for programmers developing software to be run on it and on other systems, rather than for non-programmer users. The system grew larger as the system started spreading in academic circles, as users added their own tools to the system. Unix was designed to be portable, multi-tasking and multi-user in a time-sharing configuration and these concepts are collectively known as the Unix philosophy. By the early 1980s users began seeing Unix as a universal operating system. Under Unix, the system consists of many utilities along with the master control program. To mediate such access, the kernel has special rights, reflected in the division between user space and kernel space, the microkernel concept was introduced in an effort to reverse the trend towards larger kernels and return to a system in which most tasks were completed by smaller utilities. In an era when a standard computer consisted of a disk for storage and a data terminal for input and output. However, modern systems include networking and other new devices, as graphical user interfaces developed, the file model proved inadequate to the task of handling asynchronous events such as those generated by a mouse. In the 1980s, non-blocking I/O and the set of inter-process communication mechanisms were augmented with Unix domain sockets, shared memory, message queues, and semaphores. In microkernel implementations, functions such as network protocols could be moved out of the kernel, Multics introduced many innovations, but had many problems. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not by the aims and their last researchers to leave Multics, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna, decided to redo the work on a much smaller scale. The name Unics, a pun on Multics, was suggested for the project in 1970. Peter H. Salus credits Peter Neumann with the pun, while Brian Kernighan claims the coining for himself, in 1972, Unix was rewritten in the C programming language. Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are referred to as Research Unix. In 1975, the first source license for UNIX was sold to faculty at the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science, UIUC graduate student Greg Chesson was instrumental in negotiating the terms of this license. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to adoption of Unix by commercial startups, including Sequent, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX. In the late 1980s, AT&T Unix System Laboratories and Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4, in the 1990s, Unix-like systems grew in popularity as Linux and BSD distributions were developed through collaboration by a worldwide network of programmers
3.
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
4.
San Francisco
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San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. It is the birthplace of the United Nations, the California Gold Rush of 1849 brought rapid growth, making it the largest city on the West Coast at the time. San Francisco became a consolidated city-county in 1856, after three-quarters of the city was destroyed by the 1906 earthquake and fire, San Francisco was quickly rebuilt, hosting the Panama-Pacific International Exposition nine years later. In World War II, San Francisco was a port of embarkation for service members shipping out to the Pacific Theater. Politically, the city votes strongly along liberal Democratic Party lines, San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as Levi Strauss & Co. Dolby, Airbnb, Weebly, Pacific Gas and Electric Company, Yelp, Pinterest, Twitter, Uber, Lyft, Mozilla, Wikimedia Foundation, as of 2016, San Francisco is ranked high on world liveability rankings. The earliest archaeological evidence of habitation of the territory of the city of San Francisco dates to 3000 BC. Upon independence from Spain in 1821, the became part of Mexico. Under Mexican rule, the system gradually ended, and its lands became privatized. In 1835, Englishman William Richardson erected the first independent homestead, together with Alcalde Francisco de Haro, he laid out a street plan for the expanded settlement, and the town, named Yerba Buena, began to attract American settlers. Commodore John D. Sloat claimed California for the United States on July 7,1846, during the Mexican–American War, montgomery arrived to claim Yerba Buena two days later. Yerba Buena was renamed San Francisco on January 30 of the next year, despite its attractive location as a port and naval base, San Francisco was still a small settlement with inhospitable geography. The California Gold Rush brought a flood of treasure seekers, with their sourdough bread in tow, prospectors accumulated in San Francisco over rival Benicia, raising the population from 1,000 in 1848 to 25,000 by December 1849. The promise of fabulous riches was so strong that crews on arriving vessels deserted and rushed off to the gold fields, leaving behind a forest of masts in San Francisco harbor. Some of these approximately 500 abandoned ships were used at times as storeships, saloons and hotels, many were left to rot, by 1851 the harbor was extended out into the bay by wharves while buildings were erected on piles among the ships. By 1870 Yerba Buena Cove had been filled to create new land, buried ships are occasionally exposed when foundations are dug for new buildings. California was quickly granted statehood in 1850 and the U. S. military built Fort Point at the Golden Gate, silver discoveries, including the Comstock Lode in Nevada in 1859, further drove rapid population growth. With hordes of fortune seekers streaming through the city, lawlessness was common, and the Barbary Coast section of town gained notoriety as a haven for criminals, prostitution, entrepreneurs sought to capitalize on the wealth generated by the Gold Rush
5.
Steve Jobs
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Steven Paul Steve Jobs was an American entrepreneur, businessman, inventor, and industrial designer. He was the co-founder, chairman, and chief officer of Apple Inc. CEO and majority shareholder of Pixar, a member of The Walt Disney Companys board of directors following its acquisition of Pixar, and founder, chairman, Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak are widely recognized as pioneers of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Jobs was born in San Francisco and adopted at birth, he was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s, Jobs briefly attended Reed College in 1972 before dropping out. He then decided to travel through India in 1974 seeking enlightenment, Jobss declassified FBI report stated that an acquaintance knew that Jobs had used the illegal drugs marijuana and LSD while he was in college. Jobs once told a reporter that taking LSD was one of the two or three most important things he did in his life, Jobs and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniaks Apple I personal computer. The visionaries gained fame and wealth a year later for the Apple II, in 1979, after a tour of PARC, Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto, which was mouse-driven and had a graphical user interface. This led to development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, following a long power struggle, Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985. In addition, Jobs helped to initiate the development of the effects industry when he funded the spinout of the computer graphics division of George Lucass Lucasfilm in 1986. The new company, Pixar, would produce the first fully computer-animated film. In 1997, Apple merged with NeXT, within a few months of the merger, Jobs became CEO of his former company, reviving Apple at the verge of bankruptcy. Mac OS was also revamped into OS X, based on NeXTs NeXTSTEP platform, Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in 2003 and died on October 5,2011 of respiratory arrest related to the tumor. Steve Jobss biological father, Abdulfattah John Jandali, was born into a Muslim household and grew up in Homs, Jandali is the son of a self-made millionaire who did not go to college and a mother who was a traditional housewife. While an undergraduate at the American University of Beirut, he was a student activist, although Jandali initially wanted to study law, he eventually decided to study economics and political science. He pursued a PhD in the subject at the University of Wisconsin, where he met Joanne Carole Schieble, a Catholic of Swiss and German descent. As a doctoral candidate, Jandali was an assistant for a course Schieble was taking. Mona Simpson, notes that her grandparents were not happy that their daughter was dating Jandali. But there are a lot of Arabs in Michigan and Wisconsin, Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobss official biographer, additionally states that Schiebles father threatened to cut Joanne off completely if she continued the relationship
6.
Apple II
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The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak. It was introduced in 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire by Jobs and was the first consumer product sold by Apple Computer and it is the first model in a series of computers which were produced until Apple IIe production ceased in November 1993. The Apple II marks Apples first launch of a computer aimed at a consumer market – branded towards American households rather than businessmen or computer hobbyists. Along with the PET2001 and the TRS-80, Byte magazine referred to these as the 1977 Trinity of personal computing. The Apple II had the feature of being able to display color graphics. By 1976, Steve Jobs had convinced the product designer Jerry Manock to create the shell for the Apple II – a smooth case inspired by kitchen appliances that would conceal the internal mechanics. The earliest Apple IIs were assembled in Silicon Valley, and later in Texas, printed circuit boards were manufactured in Ireland, the original retail price of the computer was $1,298 and $2,638. To reflect the color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing has rainbow stripes. Perhaps most significantly, the Apple II was a catalyst for personal computers across many industries, the Apple II used a multiplicity of idiosyncratic engineering shortcuts to save hardware and reduce costs. This arrangement simultaneously eliminated the need for a separate circuit for the DRAM chips. Similarly, in the graphics mode, color is determined by pixel position and can thus be implemented in software. This also allows for subpixel font rendering since orange and blue pixels appear half a pixel-width farther to the right on the screen than green, the Apple II at first used data cassette storage like most other microcomputers of the time. In 1978 the company introduced an external 5 1⁄4-inch floppy disk drive, the Disk II interface, created by Wozniak, is regarded as an engineering masterpiece for its economy of electronic components. The approach taken in the Disk II controller is typical of Wozniaks designs, with a few small-scale logic chips and a cheap PROM, he created a functional floppy-disk interface at a fraction of the component cost of standard circuit configurations. The cost of such terminals could easily exceed the price of the computer itself, the Apple IIs PCB underwent several revisions as Steve Wozniak made modifications to it. The earliest version was known as Revision 0, and the first 6000 units shipped used it, later revisions added a color killer circuit to prevent color fringing when the computer was in text mode, as well as modifications to improve the reliability of cassette I/O. Revision 0 Apple IIs powered up in a mode and had garbage on screen. This was eliminated on the later board revisions, Revision 0 Apple IIs could display only four colors, but Wozniak was later able to generate 16 in low-res mode
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