1.
Atari, Inc.
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Atari, Inc. was an American video game developer and home computer company founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. In 1966, Nolan Bushnell saw Spacewar. for the first time at the University of Utah, the resulting game, Computer Space, was released by a coin-op game company, Nutting Associates. For the first time at the University of Utah, Computer Space did not fare well commercially when it was placed in Nuttings customary market, bars. Feeling that the game was too complex for the average customer unfamiliar and unsure with the new technology. Bushnell and Ted Dabney left Nutting to form their own engineering firm, Syzygy Engineering, initially wanting to start Syzygy off with a driving game, Bushnell had concerns that it might be too complicated for the young Alcorns first game. In May 1972, Bushnell had seen a demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey, according to Alcorn, Bushnell decided to have him produce an arcade version of the Odysseys Tennis game, which would go on to be named Pong. Atari later had to pay Magnavox a licensing fee after the latter sued Atari because of this, when they went to incorporate their firm that June, they soon found that Syzygy already existed in California. Atari was incorporated in the state of California on June 27,1972, by August 1972, the first Pong was completed. It consisted of a black and white television from Walgreens, the game hardware. It was placed in a Sunnyvale tavern by the name of Andy Capps to test its viability. When the game begun malfunctioning a few days later and Alcorn returned to fix the machine, he was met by a lineup of people waiting for the bar to open so they could play the game. On examination, the turned out to be mundane, the coin collector was filled to overflowing with quarters, and when customers tried to jam them in anyway. Though Kees relationship to Atari was discovered in 1974, Joe Keenan did such a job managing the subsidiary that he was promoted to president of Atari that same year. In 1975, Bushnell started an effort to produce a video game console that was capable of playing all four of Ataris then-current games. Development took place at an engineering lab, which initially had serious difficulties trying to produce such a machine. However, in early 1976 the now-famous MOS Technology 6502 was released, the result was the Atari 2600, released in October 1977 as the Video Computer System, one of the most successful consoles in history. Bushnell knew he had another hit on his hands. In 1976 Bushnell sold Atari to Warner Communications for $28 million and he departed from the division in 1979
2.
Allan Alcorn
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Allan Alcorn is an American pioneering engineer and computer scientist. He grew up in San Francisco, California, and attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences in 1971. He worked for the video company Ampex, where he met Ted Dabney and several other people that would end up being constants through the Atari. Apple, Cyan Engineering and Pizza Time Theater companies, Alcorn was the designer of the video arcade game Pong, creating it under the direction of Nolan Bushnell and Dabney. Pong was a hit in the 1970s, Alcorn later became an Apple Fellow, and led and consulted to a variety of startups during the tech boom. In 1998, Alcorn co-founded Zowie Intertainment, a spinoff from Interval Research, there he developed a childs playset with a location system that allowed a PC to respond to the childs play. In 2000, Zowie Entertainment was acquired by Lego, in 2011, Alcorn co-founded Hack the Future, a technology festival and hackathon for elementary school children. Alcorn was portrayed by David Denman in the 2013 biographical drama Jobs, a two and a half hour interview with Al Alcorn
3.
Computing platform
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Computing platform means in general sense, where any piece of software is executed. It may be the hardware or the system, even a web browser or other application. The term computing platform can refer to different abstraction levels, including a hardware architecture, an operating system. In total it can be said to be the stage on which programs can run. For example, an OS may be a platform that abstracts the underlying differences in hardware, platforms may also include, Hardware alone, in the case of small embedded systems. Embedded systems can access hardware directly, without an OS, this is referred to as running on bare metal, a browser in the case of web-based software. The browser itself runs on a platform, but this is not relevant to software running within the browser. An application, such as a spreadsheet or word processor, which hosts software written in a scripting language. This can be extended to writing fully-fledged applications with the Microsoft Office suite as a platform, software frameworks that provide ready-made functionality. Cloud computing and Platform as a Service, the social networking sites Twitter and facebook are also considered development platforms. A virtual machine such as the Java virtual machine, applications are compiled into a format similar to machine code, known as bytecode, which is then executed by the VM. A virtualized version of a system, including virtualized hardware, OS, software. These allow, for instance, a typical Windows program to run on what is physically a Mac, some architectures have multiple layers, with each layer acting as a platform to the one above it. In general, a component only has to be adapted to the layer immediately beneath it, however, the JVM, the layer beneath the application, does have to be built separately for each OS
4.
Arcade game
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An arcade game or coin-op is a coin-operated entertainment machine typically installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games. While exact dates are debated, the age of arcade video games is usually defined as a period beginning sometime in the late 1970s. The old Midways of 1920s-era amusement parks provided the inspiration and atmosphere for later arcade games, in the 1930s the first coin-operated pinball machines emerged. These early amusement machines differed from their later electronic cousins in that they were made of wood and they lacked plungers or lit-up bonus surfaces on the playing field, and used mechanical instead of electronic scoring-readouts. By around 1977 most pinball machines in production switched to using solid-state electronics both for operation and for scoring, another Sega 1969 release, Missile, a shooter and vehicle-combat simulation, featured electronic sound and a moving film strip to represent the targets on a projection screen. In 1970 Midway released the game in North America as S. A. M. I, in the course of the 1970s, following the release of Pong in 1972, electronic video-games gradually replaced electro-mechanical arcade games. In 1972, Sega released a game called Killer Shark. In 1974, Nintendo released Wild Gunman, a shooter that used full-motion video-projection from 16 mm film to display live-action cowboy opponents on the screen. The 1978 video game Space Invaders, however, dealt a yet more powerful blow to the popularity of electro-mechanical games, in 1971 students at Stanford University set up the Galaxy Game, a coin-operated version of the Spacewar video game. This ranks as the earliest known instance of a video game. Later in the year, Nolan Bushnell created the first mass-manufactured game, Computer Space. In 1972, Atari was formed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, Atari essentially created the coin-operated video game industry with the game Pong, the first successful electronic ping pong video game. Pong proved to be popular, but imitators helped keep Atari from dominating the fledgling coin-operated video game market, taitos Space Invaders, in 1978, proved to be the first blockbuster arcade video game. Its success marked the beginning of the age of arcade video games. Space Invaders, Galaxian, Pac-Man, Battlezone, Defender, by 1981, the arcade video game industry was worth $8 billion. By the late 1980s, the video game craze was beginning to fade due to advances in home video game console technology. By 1991, US arcade video game revenues had fallen to $2.1 billion, the pseudo-3D sprite/tile scaling was handled in a similar manner to textures in later texture-mapped polygonal 3D games of the 1990s
5.
Sports game
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A sports game is a video game that simulates the practice of sports. Most sports have been recreated with a game, including sports, track and field, extreme sports. Some games emphasize playing the sport, whilst others emphasize strategy. Some, such as Need for Speed, Arch Rivals and Punch-Out, satirize the sport for comic effect. This genre has been throughout the history of video games and is competitive. A number of game series feature the names and characteristics of real teams and players, Sports games involve physical and tactical challenges, and test the players precision and accuracy. Most sports games attempt to model the athletic characteristics required by that sport, including speed, strength, acceleration, accuracy, as with their respective sports, these games take place in a stadium or arena with clear boundaries. Sports games often provide play-by-play and color commentary through the use of recorded audio, Sports games sometimes make use of different modes for different parts of the game. This is especially true in games about American football such as the Madden NFL series, sometimes, other sports games offer a menu where players may select a strategy while play is temporarily suspended. Some sports games also require players to shift roles between the athletes and the coach or manager and these mode switches are more intuitive than other game genres because they reflect actual sports. Older 2D sports games sometimes used a graphical scale, where athletes appeared to be quite large in order to be visible to the player. As sports games have evolved, players have come to expect a realistic graphical scale with a degree of verisimilitude. Sports games often simplify the game physics for ease of play, Games typically take place with a highly accurate time-scale, although they usually allow players to play quick sessions with shorter game quarters or periods. Sports games sometimes treat button-pushes as continuous signals rather than discrete moves, in order to initiate, for example, football games may distinguish between short and the long passes based on how long the player holds a button. Golf games often initiate the backswing with one button-push, and the swing itself is initiated by a subsequent push. ″also can customize person and can make own team″ In 1958, William Higinbotham created a game called Tennis for Two, the players would select the angle at which to put their racket, and pressed a button to return it. Although this game was simple, it demonstrated how an action game could be played on a computer. Video games prior to the late 1970s were primarily played on university mainframe computers under timesharing systems that supported multiple computer terminals on school campuses, the two dominant systems in this era were Digital Equipment Corporations PDP-10 and Control Data Corporations PLATO
6.
Arcade cabinet
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A video game arcade cabinet, also known as a video arcade machine or video coin-op, is the housing within which a video arcade games hardware resides. Most cabinets designed since the mid-1980s conform to the JAMMA wiring standard, some include additional connectors for features not included in the standard. Note, Because arcade cabinets vary according to the games they were built for or contain, they may not possess all of the parts listed below, A monitor. They may display either raster or vector graphics, raster being most common, standard resolution is between 262.5 and 315 vertical lines, depending on the refresh rate. Slower refresh rates allow for better vertical resolution, monitors may be oriented horizontally or vertically, depending on the game. Some games use more than one monitor, some newer cabinets have monitors that can display high-definition video. Printed circuit boards or arcade system boards, the actual hardware upon which the game runs, some systems, such as the SNK Neo-Geo MVS, use a main board with game carts. Some main boards may hold multiple game carts as well, a power supply to provide DC power to the arcade system boards and low voltage lighting for the coin slots and lighted buttons. A marquee, a sign above the monitor displaying the games title and they are often brightly colored and backlit. A bezel, which is the border around the monitor and it may contain instructions or artwork. A control panel, a surface near the monitor, upon which the games controls are arranged. Control panels sometimes have playing instructions, players often pile their coins or tokens on the control panels of upright and cocktail cabinets. Coin slots, coin returns and the box, which allow for the exchange of money or tokens. They are usually below the control panel, very often, translucent red plastic buttons are placed in between the coin return and the coin slot. When they are pressed, a coin or token that has become jammed in the mechanism is returned to the player. Early coin slots could be defeated using a gas fire or gas oven igniter held against the steel bodywork of the cabinet. In some arcades, the slot is replaced with a card reader that reads data from a game card bought from the arcade operator. The sides of the cabinet are usually decorated with brightly coloured stickers or paint
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.
Electronic component
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An electronic component is any basic discrete device or physical entity in an electronic system used to affect electrons or their associated fields. Electronic components have a number of electrical terminals or leads and these leads connect to create an electronic circuit with a particular function. The following list of electronic components focuses on the version of these components. Components can be classified as passive, active, or electromechanic, the strict physics definition treats passive components as ones that cannot supply energy themselves, whereas a battery would be seen as an active component since it truly acts as a source of energy. However, electronic engineers who perform circuit analysis use a more restrictive definition of passivity, then, the analysis only concerns the AC circuit, an abstraction that ignores DC voltages and currents present in the real-life circuit. This fiction, for instance, lets us view an oscillator as producing energy even though in reality the oscillator consumes even more energy from a DC power supply, active components include amplifying components such as transistors, triode vacuum tubes, and tunnel diodes. Passive components cant introduce net energy into the circuit and they also cant rely on a source of power, except for what is available from the circuit they are connected to. As a consequence they cant amplify, although they may increase a voltage or current, passive components include two-terminal components such as resistors, capacitors, inductors, and transformers. In contrast, active components generally lack that property, conduct electricity easily in one direction, among more specific behaviors. A transistor is a device used to amplify and switch electronic signals. Resistors, capacitors, inductors, and transformers are all considered passive devices, pass current in proportion to voltage and oppose current. They are used for filtering power supply lines, tuning resonant circuits, transducers generate physical effects when driven by an electrical signal, or vice versa. Sensors are transducers that react to environmental conditions by changing their electrical properties or generating an electrical signal, the transducers listed here are single electronic components, and are passive. Only the most common ones are listed here, reference designators are applied to the symbols to identify the component
9.
Monaural
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Monaural or monophonic sound reproduction is intended to be heard as if it were a single channel of sound perceived as coming from one position. Monaural recordings, like stereo, customarily use multiple microphones, fed into multiple channels on a recording console, in some cases the multitrack source is mixed down to a one track tape becoming one signal. However, today monaural recordings are usually mastered to be played on stereo and multi-track formats, monaural sound has been replaced by stereo sound in most entertainment applications. However, it remains the standard for communications, telephone networks. A few FM radio stations, particularly talk radio shows, choose to broadcast in monaural, as a monaural signal has a slight advantage in signal strength over a stereophonic signal of the same power. Monaural sound is normal on, Phonograph cylinders Disc records made before 1958, such as made for playing at a speed of 78 rpm and earlier 16 2⁄3, 33 1⁄3. Some FM radio stations that broadcast only spoken word or talk radio content in order to maximize their coverage area, examples of this would be the CBC Radio One stations on the FM dial. Sometimes listeners will not be convinced that the signal is strong since there is no ST or STEREO LED lit, subcarrier signals for FM radio, which carry leased content such as background music for businesses or a radio reading service for the blind. Background music services such as Seeburg 1000, satellite broadcasts by Muzak as well as the public systems such services are intended to be used with. At various times artists have preferred to work in mono, either in recognition of the limitations of the equipment of the era or because of simple preference. Many of Stanley Kubrick and Woody Allens movies were recorded in mono because of their directors preferences, monaural LP records were eventually phased out and no longer manufactured after the early 1970s, with a few exceptions. For example, Decca UK had a few double issues until the end of 1970-the last one being Tom Joness I Who Have Nothing, during the 1960s it was common for albums to be released as both monaural LPs and stereo LPs, occasionally with slight differences between the two. This was because many people owned mono record players that were incapable of playing stereo records, on 9 September 2009, The Beatles re-released a remastered box set of their mono output spanning the Please Please Me album to The Beatles. The set, simply called The Beatles in Mono, also includes a summary of the mono singles, B-sides. Also included were five tracks originally mixed for an unissued mono Yellow Submarine EP, Bob Dylan followed suit on October 19,2010 with The Original Mono Recordings, a box set featuring the mono releases from Bob Dylan to John Wesley Harding. When the initial run of the box set sold out, no more were pressed, unlike the Beatles, sometimes mono sound or monaural can simply refer to a merged pair of stereo channels - also known as collapsed stereo or folded-down stereo. Over time some devices have used mono sound amplification circuitry with two or more speakers since it can cut the cost of the hardware, some consumer electronics with stereo RCA outputs have a microswitch in the red RCA output that disables merging of stereo sound into the white RCA output. Common devices with this are VCRs, DVD/Blu-ray players, information appliances, set-top boxes, video game consoles sometimes have male RCA ends of cables with a proprietary multi-A/V plug on the other end, which prevents automatic stereo merging unless adapters are used
10.
Black and white
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Black and white, often abbreviated B/W or B&W, and hyphenated black-and-white when used as an adjective, is any of several monochrome forms in visual arts. Black-and-white images are not usually starkly contrasted black and white and they combine black and white in a continuum producing a range of shades of gray. Even when most studios had the capability to make color films they were not heavily utilized as using the Technicolor process was expensive, for the years 1940–1966, a separate Academy Award for Best Art Direction was given for black-and-white movies along with one for color. Television, Television program was first transmitted in black-and-white, scottish inventor John Logie Baird demonstrated the worlds first color television transmission on July 3,1928 using a mechanical process. Some color broadcasts in the US began in the 1950s, with color becoming common in industrialized nations during the late 1960s. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission settled on a color NTSC standard in 1953, color television became more widespread in the U. S. between 1963 and 1967, when the CBS and ABC networks joined NBC in broadcasting full color schedules. Canada began airing color television in 1966 while the United Kingdom began to use a different color system from July 1967 known as PAL. The Republic Of Ireland followed in 1970, in China, black and white television sets were the norm until as late as the 1990s, color TVs not outselling them until about 1989. While seldom used now, many consumer camcorders have the ability to record in black-and-white. Photography, Photographs were either black-and-white or shades of sepia, color photography was originally rare and expensive and again often containing inaccurate hues. Color photography became more common from the mid-20th century, Today, black-and-white is a niche market for photographers who use the medium for artistic purposes. This can take the form of film or digital conversion to grayscale. For amateur use certain companies such as Kodak manufactured black-and-white disposable cameras until 2009, also, certain films are produced today which give black-and-white images using the ubiquitous C41 color process. Printing press, Most American newspapers were black-and-white until the early 1980s, The New York Times, some claim that USA Today was the major impetus for the change to color. In the UK, color was only introduced from the mid-1980s. Even today, many newspapers restrict color photographs to the front, similarly, daily comic strips in newspapers were traditionally black-and-white with color reserved for Sunday strips. Sometimes color is reserved for the cover, magazines such as Jet magazine were either all or mostly black-and-white until the end of the 2000s when it became all-color. Manga are typically published in black-and-white although now it is part of its image, many school yearbooks are still entirely or mostly in black-and-white
11.
Raster graphics
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Raster images are stored in image files with varying formats. A raster is technically characterized by the width and height of the image in pixels, the printing and prepress industries know raster graphics as contones. The opposite to contones is line work, usually implemented as vector graphics in digital systems, the word raster has its origins in the Latin rastrum, which is derived from radere. It originates from the scan of cathode ray tube video monitors. By association, it can refer to a rectangular grid of pixels. The word rastrum is now used to refer to a device for drawing musical staff lines, most modern computers have bitmapped displays, where each on-screen pixel directly corresponds to a small number of bits in memory. The screen is refreshed simply by scanning through pixels and coloring them according to set of bits. The refresh procedure, being speed critical, is implemented by dedicated circuitry. Most computer images are stored in raster graphics formats or compressed variations, including GIF, JPEG, and PNG, three-dimensional voxel raster graphics are employed in video games and are also used in medical imaging such as MRI scanners. GIS programs commonly use rasters that encode geographic data in the values as well as the pixel locations. Raster graphics are resolution dependent, meaning they cannot scale up to a resolution without loss of apparent quality. This property contrasts with the capabilities of graphics, which easily scale up to the quality of the device rendering them. Raster graphics deal more practically than vector graphics with photographs and photo-realistic images, typically, a resolution of 150 to 300 PPI works well for 4-color process printing. However, for printing technologies that perform color mixing through dithering rather than through overprinting, printer DPI and image PPI have a different meaning. Thus, for instance, printing an image at 250 PPI may actually require a printer setting of 1200 DPI, when an image is rendered in a raster-based image editor, the image is composed of millions of pixels. At its core, an image editor works by manipulating each individual pixel. Most pixel-based image editors work using the RGB color model, 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
12.
Video game
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A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device such as a TV screen or computer monitor. The word video in video game referred to a raster display device. Some theorists categorize video games as an art form, but this designation is controversial, the electronic systems used to play video games are known as platforms, examples of these are personal computers and video game consoles. These platforms range from large mainframe computers to small handheld computing devices, the input device used for games, the game controller, varies across platforms. Common controllers include gamepads, joysticks, mouse devices, keyboards, the touchscreens of mobile devices, and buttons, or even, with the Kinect sensor, a persons hands and body. Players typically view the game on a screen or television or computer monitor, or sometimes on virtual reality head-mounted display goggles. There are often game sound effects, music and, in the 2010s, some games in the 2000s include haptic, vibration-creating effects, force feedback peripherals and virtual reality headsets. In the 2010s, the game industry is of increasing commercial importance, with growth driven particularly by the emerging Asian markets and mobile games. As of 2015, video games generated sales of USD74 billion annually worldwide, early games used interactive electronic devices with various display formats. The earliest example is from 1947—a Cathode ray tube Amusement Device was filed for a patent on 25 January 1947, by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann, and issued on 14 December 1948, as U. S. Written by MIT students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanens on a DEC PDP-1 computer in 1961, and the hit ping pong-style Pong, used the DEC PDP-1s vector display to have two spaceships battle each other. In 1971, Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, was the first commercially sold and it used a black-and-white television for its display, and the computer system was made of 74 series TTL chips. The game was featured in the 1973 science fiction film Soylent Green, Computer Space was followed in 1972 by the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console. Modeled after a late 1960s prototype console developed by Ralph H. Baer called the Brown Box and these were followed by two versions of Ataris Pong, an arcade version in 1972 and a home version in 1975 that dramatically increased video game popularity. The commercial success of Pong led numerous other companies to develop Pong clones and their own systems, the game inspired arcade machines to become prevalent in mainstream locations such as shopping malls, traditional storefronts, restaurants, and convenience stores. The game also became the subject of articles and stories on television and in newspapers and magazines. Space Invaders was soon licensed for the Atari VCS, becoming the first killer app, the term platform refers to the specific combination of electronic components or computer hardware which, in conjunction with software, allows a video game to operate. The term system is commonly used
13.
Table tennis
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Table tennis, also known as ping pong, is a sport in which two or four players hit a lightweight ball back and forth across a table using a small bat. The game takes place on a hard table divided by a net, a point is scored when a player fails to return the ball within the rules. Play is fast and demands quick reactions, spinning the ball alters its trajectory and limits an opponents options, giving the hitter a great advantage. Table tennis is governed by the worldwide organization International Table Tennis Federation, ITTF currently includes 220 member associations. The table tennis rules are specified in the ITTF handbook. Table tennis has been an Olympic sport since 1988, with several event categories, from 1988 until 2004, these were mens singles, womens singles, mens doubles and womens doubles. Since 2008, an event has been played instead of the doubles. The sport originated in Victorian England, where it was played among the upper-class as a parlour game. It has been suggested that makeshift versions of the game were developed by British military officers in India in around 1860s or 1870s, who brought it back with them. A row of books stood up along the center of the table as a net and it had several different names, including whiff-whaff. The name ping-pong was in use before British manufacturer J. Jaques & Son Ltd trademarked it in 1901. The name ping-pong then came to describe the game played using the rather expensive Jaquess equipment, a similar situation arose in the United States, where Jaques sold the rights to the ping-pong name to Parker Brothers. Parker Brothers then enforced its trademark for the term in the 1920s making the various associations change their names to table tennis instead of the more common, but trademarked, term. The next major innovation was by James W. Gibb, a British enthusiast of table tennis, who discovered novelty celluloid balls on a trip to the US in 1901 and found them to be ideal for the game. This was followed by E. C. Goode who, in 1901, invented the modern version of the racket by fixing a sheet of pimpled, or stippled, rubber to the wooden blade. Table tennis was growing in popularity by 1901 to the extent that tournaments were being organized, books being written on the subject, in 1921, the Table Tennis Association was founded in Britain, and the International Table Tennis Federation followed in 1926. London hosted the first official World Championships in 1926, in 1933, the United States Table Tennis Association, now called USA Table Tennis, was formed. In the 1930s, Edgar Snow commented in Red Star Over China that the Communist forces in the Chinese Civil War had a passion for the English game of table tennis which he found bizarre
14.
2D computer graphics
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2D computer graphics is the computer-based generation of digital images—mostly from two-dimensional models and by techniques specific to them. The word may stand for the branch of science that comprises such techniques. This representation is more flexible since it can be rendered at different resolutions to suit different output devices. For these reasons, documents and illustrations are often stored or transmitted as 2D graphic files, 2D computer graphics started in the 1950s, based on vector graphics devices. These were largely supplanted by raster-based devices in the following decades, the PostScript language and the X Window System protocol were landmark developments in the field. 2D graphics models may combine geometric models, digital images, text to be typeset, mathematical functions and equations and these components can be modified and manipulated by two-dimensional geometric transformations such as translation, rotation, scaling. In object-oriented graphics, the image is described indirectly by an object endowed with a self-rendering method—a procedure which assigns colors to the pixels by an arbitrary algorithm. Complex models can be built by combining simpler objects, in the paradigms of object-oriented programming, in Euclidean geometry, a translation moves every point a constant distance in a specified direction. A translation can be described as a motion, other rigid motions include rotations and reflections. A translation can also be interpreted as the addition of a constant vector to every point, a translation operator is an operator T δ such that T δ f = f. If v is a vector, then the translation Tv will work as Tv = p + v. If T is a translation, then the image of a subset A under the function T is the translate of A by T, the translate of A by Tv is often written A + v. In a Euclidean space, any translation is an isometry, the set of all translations forms the translation group T, which is isomorphic to the space itself, and a normal subgroup of Euclidean group E. The quotient group of E by T is isomorphic to the orthogonal group O, E / T ≅ O, thus we write the 3-dimensional vector w = using 4 homogeneous coordinates as w =. Similarly, the product of matrices is given by adding the vectors. Because addition of vectors is commutative, multiplication of matrices is therefore also commutative. In linear algebra, a matrix is a matrix that is used to perform a rotation in Euclidean space. R = rotates points in the xy-Cartesian plane counterclockwise through an angle θ about the origin of the Cartesian coordinate system
15.
Nolan Bushnell
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Nolan Kay Bushnell is an American electrical engineer and businessman. He established Atari, Inc. and the Chuck E. Cheeses Pizza Time Theatre chain, Bushnell has started more than twenty companies and is one of the founding fathers of the video game industry. Nolan, who is co-founder and chairman of Brainrush, believes that Brainrush will be his biggest success, Nolan is credited with Bushnells Law, an aphorism about games easy to learn and difficult to master being rewarding. He was one of computer science students of the 1960s who played the historic Spacewar. The University of Utah was heavily involved in computer graphics research, Bushnell worked at Lagoon Amusement Park for many years in high school and college while living in his hometown of Ogden, Utah. He was particularly interested in the arcade games, where theme park customers would have to use skill and luck to ultimately achieve the goal. He liked the concept of getting people curious about the game and he would use his love for games and theme parks to help launch both Atari and Chuck E. Cheeses Pizza-Time Theaters. Bushnells first marriage was to Paula Rochelle Nielson with whom he has 2 children, Bushnells oldest child, Alissa, worked with him at uWink. His second marriage was to Nancy with whom he has 6 children, Bushnell was raised in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but is no longer an active member. A1999 Time article described him as a lapsed Mormon and described him smoking a pipe, the Bushnells now live in Southern California. In June 2008 it was announced that Leonardo DiCaprio would portray Bushnell in the film Atari, Bushnell was featured in the documentary film Something Ventured as well as Atari, Game Over. In 1969, Bushnell and colleague Ted Dabney formed Syzygy with the intention of producing a Spacewar clone known as Computer Space, in order to keep the company alive while the machine was being prototyped, the two took on a route servicing broken pinball machines. Dabney built the prototype and Bushnell shopped it around, looking for a manufacturer and they made an agreement with Nutting Associates, a maker of coin-op trivia and shooting games, who produced a fiberglass cabinet for the unit that included a coin-slot mechanism. Computer Space was a failure, though sales exceeded $3 million. Bushnell felt that Nutting Associates had not marketed the game well and they instead incorporated under the name Atari, a reference to a check-like position in the game Go. They rented their first office on Scott Boulevard in Sunnyvale, California, contracted with Bally Manufacturing to create a driving game, Bushnell later bought out Dabney, who was forced out after Nolan told him he would transfer all the assets to another corporation and leave Ted with nothing. After Bushnell attended a Burlingame, California demonstration of the Magnavox Odyssey, Alcorn incorporated many of his own improvements into the game design, such as scoring and sound, and Pong was born. Pong proved to be popular, Atari released a large number of Pong-based arcade games over the next few years as the mainstay of the company
16.
Magnavox Odyssey
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The Magnavox Odyssey is the first commercial home video game console. It was developed by a team led by Ralph H. Baer at Sanders Associates and released by Magnavox in the United States in September 1972. The Odyssey consists of a white, black, and brown box which connects to a television set and two rectangular controllers attached by wires. It is capable of displaying three square dots on the screen in black and white, with differing behavior for the dots depending on the game played. The idea for a game console was thought up by Baer in August 1966. The seventh, known as the Brown Box, was shown to several manufacturers before Magnavox agreed to produce it in January 1971, the console spawned the Magnavox Odyssey series of dedicated consoles, as well as the 1978 Magnavox Odyssey². One of the 28 games made for the system, a ping pong game, was an inspiration for Ataris successful Pong arcade game, in turn driving sales of the console. The release of the Odyssey marked the end of the history of video games. The Odyssey consists of a black, white, and brown oblong box connected by wires to two rectangular controllers. The reset button does not reset the game, but instead is used by different games to reset individual elements, the system can be powered by six C batteries, which were included. An optional AC power supply was sold separately, the Odyssey lacks sound capability and can only display monochrome white shapes on a blank black screen. Internally, the Odyssey architecture is composed of digital computing parts, the circuitry is implemented in diode–transistor logic using discrete transistors and diodes, rather than the newly emerging transistor–transistor logic integrated circuits, due to cost concerns. The games themselves do not use cartridges like later consoles, and these cards modify the internal circuitry like a set of switches or jumpers, causing the Odyssey to display different components and react to inputs differently. Multiple games use the cards, with different instructions given to the player to change the style of game. The Odyssey is capable of displaying three square dots and a line on the screen. Two of the dots are controlled by the two players, and the third by the system itself, the main console has two dials, one of which moves the vertical line across the screen, and one which adjusts the speed of the computer-controlled dot. Different games direct the player to adjust the dials to different positions, the games include plastic overlays which stick to the television via static cling, to create visuals for the game. Different games that use the game card can have different overlays, which can change a game with the same controls from, for example
17.
Video game industry
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The video game industry is the economic sector involved in the development, marketing and Monetizing of video games. It encompasses dozens of job disciplines and employs thousands of people worldwide, the computer and video game industry has grown from focused markets to mainstream. They took in about US$9.5 billion in the US in 2007,11.7 billion in 2008, sound cards were developed for addition of digital-quality sound to games and only later improved for music and audiophiles. Early on, graphics cards were developed for more colors, later, graphic cards were developed for graphical user interfaces and games, GUIs drove the need for high resolution, and games began using 3D acceleration. They also are one of the pieces of hardware to allow multiple hookups. Product and talent layer, includes developers, designers and artists, production and tools layer, generates content production tools, game development middleware, customizable game engines, and production management tools. Distribution layer, or the industry, involved in generating and marketing catalogs of games for retail. Hardware layer, or the providers of the platform, which may be console-based, accessed through online media. This layer now includes network infrastructure and non-hardware platforms such as machines, or software platforms such as browsers or even further Facebook. End-users layer, or the users/players of the games, the game industry employs those experienced in other traditional businesses, but some have experience tailored to the game industry. Some of the specific to the game industry include, game programmer, game designer, level designer, game producer, game artist. Most of these professionals are employed by video game developers or video game publishers, however, many hobbyists also produce computer games and sell them commercially. Recently, game developers have begun to employ those with extensive or long-term experience within the modding communities, prior to the 1970s, there was no significant commercial aspect of the video game industry, but many advances in computing would set the stage for the birth of the industry. In 1947 Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent for a cathode ray tube amusement device and their game, which uses a cathode ray tube hooked to an oscilloscope display, challenges players to fire a gun at target. One of the first known examples is Spacewar, developed by Harvard and MIT employees Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. The introduction of easy-to-program languages like BASIC for mainframes allowed for more games to be developed. In 1971 the arcade game, Computer Space was released, the following year, Atari, Inc. released the first commercially successful video game, Pong, the original arcade version of which sold over 19,000 arcade cabinets. That same year saw the introduction of video games to the market with the release of the early video game console
18.
Smithsonian Institution
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The Smithsonian Institution, established in 1846 for the increase and diffusion of knowledge, is a group of museums and research centers administered by the Government of the United States. Originally organized as the United States National Museum, that ceased to exist as an administrative entity in 1967. Additional facilities are located in Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York City, Texas, Virginia, more than 200 institutions and museums in 45 states, Puerto Rico, and Panama are Smithsonian Affiliates. The Institutions thirty million annual visitors are admitted without charge and its annual budget is around $1.2 billion with 2/3 coming from annual federal appropriations. Other funding comes from the Institutions endowment, private and corporate contributions, membership dues, and earned retail, concession, Institution publications include Smithsonian and Air & Space magazines. The British scientist James Smithson left most of his wealth to his nephew Henry James Hungerford, Congress officially accepted the legacy bequeathed to the nation, and pledged the faith of the United States to the charitable trust on July 1,1836. The American diplomat Richard Rush was dispatched to England by President Andrew Jackson to collect the bequest, Rush returned in August 1838 with 105 sacks containing 104,960 gold sovereigns. Once the money was in hand, eight years of Congressional haggling ensued over how to interpret Smithsons rather vague mandate for the increase, unfortunately, the money was invested by the US Treasury in bonds issued by the state of Arkansas which soon defaulted. The United States Exploring Expedition by the U. S. Navy circumnavigated the globe between 1838 and 1842, in 1846, the regents developed a plan for weather observation, in 1847, money was appropriated for meteorological research. The Institution became a magnet for young scientists from 1857 to 1866, the Smithsonian played a critical role as the U. S. partner institution in early bilateral scientific exchanges with the Academy of Sciences of Cuba. The Smithsonian Institution Building began construction in 1849, designed by architect James Renwick Jr. its interiors were completed by general contract Gilbert Cameron and the building opened in 1855. The Smithsonians first expansion came with construction of the Arts and Industries Building in 1881, Congress had promised to build a new structure for the museum if the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition generated enough income. It did, and the building was designed by architects Adolf Cluss and Paul Schulze, meigs of the United States Army Corps of Engineers. The National Zoological Park opened in 1889 to accommodate the Smithsonians Department of Living Animals and this structure was designed by the D. C. architectural firm of Hornblower & Marshall. More than 40 years would pass before the museum, the Museum of History. It was designed by the firm of McKim, Mead & White. That same year, the Smithsonian signed an agreement to take over the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened in the Old Patent Office Building on October 7,1968. The first new building to open since the National Museum of Natural History was the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
19.
Computer Space
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Computer Space is a space combat arcade game developed in 1971 as one of the last games created in the early history of video games. Created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney in partnership as Syzygy Engineering, Computer Space is a derivative of the 1962 computer game Spacewar. Possibly the first video game to spread to multiple computer installations and it features a rocket, controlled by the player, engaged in a missile battle with a pair of flying saucers set against a background starfield. The goal is to more hits than the enemy spaceships within a set time period. The game is enclosed in a fiberglass cabinet in one of four colors. The game was designed by Bushnell and Dabney during 1970–71 to be a version of Spacewar. After they built an early proof of concept and founded Syzygy Engineering, working in partnership with Nutting, the pair ran their first location test in August 1971, one month prior to the display of a similar prototype called Galaxy Game, also based on Spacewar. After encouraging initial results, though mixed responses from distributors, Nutting ordered a production run of 1,500 units with the anticipation of a hit game. The game spawned one clone game, Star Trek, and Nutting produced a version of Computer Space in 1973 without involvement from Syzygy before closing in 1976. Syzygy went on to be incorporated as Atari, with their arcade game the successful Pong. Although not as influential as Pong, Computer Spaces release marked the start of the commercial video game industry. One of these games was Spacewar, created in 1962 for the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-1 minicomputer by Steve Russell and others in the programming community at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The two-player game has the players engage in a dogfight between two spaceships, set against the backdrop of a starfield, with a central star exerting gravitational force upon the ships. The original developers of Spacewar considered ways to monetize the game, the first commercial video game based on Spacewar would not be released until Computer Space in 1971. In Computer Space, the controls a rocket as it attempts to shoot a pair of flying saucers while avoiding enemy fire. The monochrome game has the three ships flying on a plane, set against the backdrop of a starfield. Missiles are fired one at a time, and there is a period between launches. The players rocket follows Newtonian physics, remaining in motion even when the player is not accelerating, the flying saucers stay in place or glide in a zig-zag pattern around the screen in tandem, with one staying a constant distance directly below the other
20.
Bally Manufacturing
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For the fitness chain, see Bally Total Fitness. It was acquired by Hilton Hotels in 1995 and its brand name is still used by several businesses previously linked to Bally Manufacturing, most notably Bally Technologies. The Bally Manufacturing Corporation was founded by Raymond Moloney on January 10,1932, the company took its name from its first game, Ballyhoo. The company, based in Chicago, quickly became a maker of the games. In the late 1930s, Moloney began making gambling equipment, and had success developing and improving the mechanical slot machines that were the core of the nascent gaming industry. The company made a venture into the music business with their own record label. Ray Moloney died in 1958, and the company floundered briefly, with the financial failure of its parent company, Bally was bought out by a group of investors in 1963. Throughout the 1960s, Bally continued to dominate the slot machine industry, in 1964, Bally introduced the first electromechanical slot machine, called the Money Honey. In the late 1970s, Bally entered the business when New Jersey legalized gambling in Atlantic City. This effort moved forward even though the company was unable to attain a permanent license for the completed casino. During this period, company head William T. ODonnell was forced to resign because of alleged links to organized crime, prior to this, Mr ODonnell strenuously denied any such links. He also denied knowing Chicago mobster, Joseph Dan Testa, even though Australian Police described Testa as a representative of Bally who visited Australia, the company opened the Park Place Casino & Hotel on December 29,1979. Also in the late 1970s, Bally made an entry into the market for home computer games. The Bally Professional Arcade, as the machine was called, had advanced features for the time and these included a palette of 256 colors and the ability to play 4-voice music. The machine also shipped with a cartridge that allowed users to do an amount of programming on the machine themselves. The machines price point was above the Atari 2600, and it had a more limited set of available games. Despite a loyal following, it failed to compete successfully, the health club division, under Bally Total Fitness, grew during the 1980s and 1990s. This expansion quickly took its toll on the finances, and Bally was soon forced to sell off several divisions, including Six Flags
21.
Ampex
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Ampex is an American electronics company founded in 1944 by Alexander M. Poniatoff. The name AMPEX is an acronym, created by its founder, at one time public, the remaining ongoing business unit was acquired by Delta Information Systems in October 2014, with the original parent, Ampex Corporation, ceasing operations in October 2014. Ampexs first great success was a line of tape recorders developed from the German wartime Magnetophon system at the behest of Bing Crosby. Ampex quickly became a leader in audio technology, developing many of the analog recording formats for both music and movies that remained in use into the 1990s. They also introduced multi-track recording, slow-motion and instant playback television, Ampexs tape business was rendered obsolete during the 1990s, and the company turned to digital storage products. They never managed to become a player in this field, russian inventor Alexander Matthew Poniatoff established the company in San Carlos, California, in 1944 as the Ampex Electric and Manufacturing Company. The name came from his initials plus ex to avoid using the name AMP already in use, during World War II, Ampex was a small manufacturer of high quality electric motors and generators for radars that used alnico 5 magnets from General Electric. Ampexs first offices were at 1313 Laurel St. San Carlos California, near the end of the war, while serving in the U. S. Army Signal Corps, Major Jack Mullin was assigned to investigate German radio and electronics experiments. He discovered the Magnetophons with AC biasing on a trip to Radio Frankfurt, the device produced much better fidelity than shellac records. Mullin acquired two Magnetophon recorders and 50 reels of BASF Type L tape, and brought them to America and he demonstrated them to the Institute of Radio Engineers in San Francisco on May 16,1946. Bing Crosby, a big star on radio at the time, was receptive to the idea of pre-recording his radio programs and he disliked the regimentation of live broadcasts, and much preferred the relaxed atmosphere of the recording studio. This may have been what Crosby was hoping to avoid, as that was the argument Crosby used with the network when he asked to use transcription disc recordings of his show. Those recordings were made directly from the live east coast show, in June 1947, Mullin, who was pitching the technology to the major Hollywood movie studios, got the chance to demonstrate his modified tape recorders to Crosby. When Crosby heard a demonstration of Mullins tape recorders, he saw the potential of the new technology. Ampex was finishing its prototype of the Model 200 tape recorder, after a successful test broadcast, ABC agreed to allow Crosby to pre-record his shows on tape. Crosby immediately appointed Mullin as his engineer and placed an order for $50,000 worth of the new recorders so that Ampex could develop a commercial production model from the prototypes. Crosby Enterprises was Ampexs West Coast representative until 1957, the companys first tape recorder, the Ampex Model 200A, was first shipped in April 1948. The first two units, serial numbers 1 and 2, were used to record the Bing Crosby Show
22.
General Electric
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General Electric, often abbreviated as GE, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation incorporated in New York and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. In 2011, GE ranked among the Fortune 500 as the 68th-largest firm in the U. S. by gross revenue, as of 2012, the company was listed the fourth-largest in the world among the Forbes Global 2000, further metrics being taken into account. The Nobel Prize has twice been awarded to employees of General Electric, Irving Langmuir in 1932, on January 13,2016, it was announced that GE will be moving its corporate headquarters from Fairfield, Connecticut to the South Boston Waterfront neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. The first group of workers arrived in the summer of 2016, morgan and the Vanderbilt family for Edisons lighting experiments. The new company also acquired Sprague Electric Railway & Motor Company in the same year, both plants continue to operate under the GE banner to this day. The company was incorporated in New York, with the Schenectady plant used as headquarters for years thereafter. Around the same time, General Electrics Canadian counterpart, Canadian General Electric, was formed, in 1896, General Electric was one of the original 12 companies listed on the newly formed Dow Jones Industrial Average. After 120 years, it is the one of the original companies still listed on the Dow index. In 1911, General Electric absorbed the National Electric Lamp Association into its lighting business, GE established its lighting division headquarters at Nela Park in East Cleveland, Ohio. Nela Park is still the headquarters for GEs lighting business, owen D. Young, through GE, founded the Radio Corporation of America in 1919 to further international radio. GE used RCA as its retail arm for radio sales from 1919, in 1927, Ernst Alexanderson of GE made the first demonstration of his television broadcasts at his General Electric Realty Plot home at 1132 Adams Rd, Schenectady, NY. The sound was broadcast on GEs WGY, experimental television station W2XAD evolved into station WRGB which—along with WGY and WGFM —was owned and operated by General Electric until 1983. GEs history of working with turbines in the field gave them the engineering know-how to move into the new field of aircraft turbosuperchargers. Led by Sanford Alexander Moss, GE introduced the first superchargers during World War I, superchargers became indispensable in the years immediately prior to World War II, and GE was the world leader in exhaust-driven supercharging when the war started. This experience, in turn, made GE a natural selection to develop the Whittle W.1 jet engine that was demonstrated in the United States in 1941, GE ranked ninth among United States corporations in the value of wartime production contracts. In 2002, GE acquired the assets of Enron during its bankruptcy proceedings. Some consumers boycotted GE light bulbs, refrigerators and other products in the 1980s and 1990s to protest GEs role in weapons production. With IBM, Burroughs, NCR, Control Data Corporation, Honeywell, RCA and UNIVAC, GE had a line of general purpose and special purpose computers
23.
PDP-1
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The PDP-1 was the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporations PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of culture at MIT, BBN. The PDP-1 was also the hardware for playing historys first game on a minicomputer. The PDP-1 used an 18-bit word size and had 4096 words as standard main memory, signed numbers were represented in ones complement. The PDP-1 had computing power roughly equivalent to a 1996 pocket organizer, the PDP-1 used 2,700 transistors and 3,000 diodes. It was built mostly of DEC 1000-series System Building Blocks, using micro-alloy and micro-alloy diffused transistors with a rated switching speed of 5 MHz, the System Building Blocks were packaged into several 19-inch racks. The racks were themselves packaged into a large mainframe case, with a hexagonal control panel containing switches. Above the control panel was the systems standard input/output solution, a tape reader and writer. The design of the PDP-1 was based on the pioneering TX-0 computer, designed, benjamin Gurley was the lead engineer on the project. After building prototype models in December 1959, DEC delivered the first PDP-1 to Bolt, Beranek and Newman in November 1960, and it was formally accepted the next April. In 1961, DEC donated the engineering prototype PDP-1 to MIT, where it was placed in the next to its ancestor, the TX-0 computer. In this setting, the PDP-1 quickly replaced the TX-0 as the favorite machine among the hacker culture. Perhaps best known among these is one of the first computerized video games, but among the list are the first text editor, word processor, interactive debugger, the first credible computer chess program, and some of the earliest computerized music. The PDP-1 sold in form for US$120,000. BBNs system was followed by orders from Lawrence Livermore and Atomic Energy of Canada. All of these machines were still being used in 1970. MITs example was donated to The Computer Museum, Boston, on paper tape was still tucked into the case. AECLs computer was sent to Science North, but was later scrapped, the PDP-1 used punched paper tape as its primary storage medium
24.
Magnavox
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Magnavox, is an American electronics company founded in the United States. Today it is a subsidiary of electronics corporation Philips, six decades later, Magnavox produced the Odyssey, the worlds first home video game console toy. Magnavox is the brand name worn by a line of products made by Funai under license from trademark owner Philips. Jensen and Pridham founded the Commercial Wireless and Development Company in 1911, moved from Napa to San Francisco then Oakland in 1916, Jensen moved on to the Jensen Radio Manufacturing Company, Chicago, in the late 1920s. Pridham stayed on with Magnavox, which moved manufacturing to Fort Wayne by the 1940s, the term Commercial Wireless had a different meaning in the early days of radio and telephone. Magnavox manufactured radios, TVs, and record players, in the 1960s Magnavox manufactured the first plasma panels for the military and for computer applications. In 1972, Magnavox introduced the Odyssey, which was the worlds first home game console toy. The introduction of the toy triggered the beginning of the video game toys market. In the late 1970s, Philips developed LaserDisc technology, producing an optically read,12 inch disc that would contain recorded video material, in the early 1980s, Philips worked with Sony to invent a standard for optical audio discs, using the technology developed for the LaserDisc. Philips acquired Magnavoxs consumer electronics division in 1974, to nationwide distribution for their VLP Videodisc technology. During the late 1970s the company released the Odyssey², also known as the Philips Videopac, in the early 1980s, Philips merged Sylvania, Philco and Magnavox into one division headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, with a manufacturing plant in Greeneville, Tennessee. The Sylvania plant in Batavia, New York was closed and all moved to Greeneville. Philips also abandoned the Sylvania trademark which is owned by Osram, in the late 1980s, Magnavox sold the Magnavox/Philips VideoWriter with some success. Released in 1985, the VideoWriter was a standalone word processing machine. Starting in the early 1990s, some Philips electronics were marketed under the brand name Philips Magnavox, the three areas of business of the MESC operation during the late 1980s and early 1990s were C-Cubed, Electronic Warfare, and sonobuoys. When Hughes Electronics sold its aerospace and defense operations to Raytheon, shortly thereafter, Raytheon spun off the sonobuoy operation to form Under Sea Systems Inc, in Columbia City, Indiana. In 1998, Raytheon sold USSI to a British defense consortium named Ultra Electronics, the company is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Ultra, manufacturing water and acoustic sensing and communications devices for military and civil defense. The brand also has worked with Funai with their televisions after the Philips Magnavox name was popular
25.
Burlingame, California
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Burlingame is a city in San Mateo County, California. It is located on the San Francisco Peninsula and has a significant shoreline on San Francisco Bay, the city is named after diplomat Anson Burlingame and is often referred to as the City of Trees due to the number of trees within the city and its numerous eucalyptus groves. Burlingame is known for its high quality of life with a walkable downtown area. The current median value in Burlingame is $1. 8M+ and as of the 2010 U. S. Census. Burlingame is situated on land owned by San Francisco-based merchant William Davis Merry Howard. Howard planted many trees on his property and retired to live on the land. Howard died in 1856 and the land was sold to William C, in 1868, Ralston named the land after his friend, Anson Burlingame, the United States Ambassador to China. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, hundreds of lots in Burlingame were sold to people looking to new homes. In 1910, the town of Easton was annexed and this area is now known as the Easton Addition neighborhood of Burlingame. City of Trees Burlingame is known as the City of Trees due to the number of trees within the city, in 1908, the Burlingame board of trustees passed an ordinance prohibiting cutting, injuring, or destroying trees. The city also has parks and Eucalyptus groves that add to the overall tree numbers. There are four highways passing through Burlingame, highway 101 runs near the bay running from San Jose to San Francisco. Highway 82, also known as El Camino Real, follows a parallel course, highway 35 connects with Interstate 280. Caltrain has been serving Burlingame since 1985 when it bought out Southern Pacific and it used the same depot that was used in the early 20th century. Bay Area Rapid Transit has its stop in Millbrae, just north of Burlingame. BARTs tracks are within Burlingame city limits, according to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 6.1 square miles. 4.4 square miles of it is land and 1.7 square miles of it is water and this region experiences warm and dry summers, with no average monthly temperatures above 71.6 °F. According to the Köppen Climate Classification system, Burlingame has a warm-summer Mediterranean climate, the 2010 United States Census reported that Burlingame had a population of 28,806
26.
Digital electronics
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Digital electronics or digital circuits are electronics that handle digital signals rather than by continuous ranges as used in analog electronics. All levels within a band of values represent the information state. In most cases, the number of states is two, and they are represented by two voltage bands, one near a reference value, and the other a value near the supply voltage. These correspond to the false and true values of the Boolean domain respectively, Digital techniques are useful because it is easier to get an electronic device to switch into one of a number of known states than to accurately reproduce a continuous range of values. Digital electronic circuits are made from large assemblies of logic gates. The binary number system was refined by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and he established that by using the binary system. Digital logic as we know it was the brain-child of George Boole, Boole died young, but his ideas lived on. In an 1886 letter, Charles Sanders Peirce described how logical operations could be carried out by electrical switching circuits, eventually, vacuum tubes replaced relays for logic operations. Lee De Forests modification, in 1907, of the Fleming valve can be used as an AND logic gate, ludwig Wittgenstein introduced a version of the 16-row truth table as proposition 5.101 of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Walther Bothe, inventor of the circuit, got part of the 1954 Nobel Prize in physics. Mechanical analog computers started appearing in the first century and were used in the medieval era for astronomical calculations. In World War II, mechanical computers were used for specialized military applications such as calculating torpedo aiming. During this time the first electronic computers were developed. Originally they were the size of a room, consuming as much power as several hundred modern personal computers. The Z3 was a computer designed by Konrad Zuse, finished in 1941. It was the worlds first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer and its operation was facilitated by the invention of the vacuum tube in 1904 by John Ambrose Fleming. Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and electromechanical equivalents, the bipolar junction transistor was invented in 1947. From 1955 onwards transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to the generation of computers
27.
Hitachi
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Hitachi, Ltd. is a Japanese multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is the parent company of the Hitachi Group and forms part of the DKB Group of companies, Hitachi is listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the Nikkei 225 and TOPIX indices. It is ranked 38th in the 2012 Fortune Global 500 and 129th in the 2012 Forbes Global 2000, Hitachi was founded in 1910 by electrical engineer Namihei Odaira in Ibaraki Prefecture. The companys first product was Japans first 5-horsepower induction motor, initially developed for use in copper mining, odairas company soon became the domestic leader in electric motors and electric power industry infrastructure. The company began as a venture of Fusanosuke Kuharas mining company in Hitachi. Odaira moved headquarters to Tokyo in 1918, long before that, he coined the company’s toponymic name by superimposing two kanji characters, hi meaning “sun” and tachi meaning “rise”. The young companys national aspirations were conveyed by its original brand mark, world War II and its aftermath devastated the company. Many of its factories were destroyed by Allied bombing raids, and after the war, founder Odaira was removed from the company. Nevertheless, as a result of three years of negotiations, Hitachi was permitted to all but 19 of its manufacturing plants. The cost of such a production shutdown, though, compounded by a labor strike in 1950. Only the Korean War saved the company from complete collapse, Hitachi and many other struggling Japanese industrial firms benefited from defense contracts offered by the American military. Meanwhile, Hitachi went public in 1949, Hitachi America, Ltd. was established in 1959. Hitachi Europe, Ltd. was established in 1982, in March 2011, Hitachi agreed to sell its hard disk drive subsidiary, HGST, to Western Digital for a combination of cash and shares worth US$4.3 billion. Due to concerns of a duopoly of WD and Seagate Technology by the EU Commission, the transaction was completed in March 2012. The talks subsequently broke down and were suspended, the joint venture began operations in February 2014. It is a high density information storage medium utilizing laser etched/readable Fused quartz, Hitachi is taking for 2016 an estimated ¥65 billion write-off in value of a SILEX technology laser uranium enrichment joint venture with General Electric. Hitachi Consulting is a management and technology consulting firm with headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Hitachi Data Systems is an owned subsidiary of Hitachi which provides hardware, software
28.
Midway Games
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Midway Games, Inc. was an American video game company dedicated to the developing and publishing of video games. Midways franchises included known as Spy Hunter, Rampage, Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Cruisn, and NFL Blitz. Midway also acquired the rights to games that were originally developed by Williams Electronics and Atari Games, such as Defender, Joust, Robotron 2084, Gauntlet. The companys predecessor Midway Manufacturing was founded in 1958, as an amusement game manufacturer, in 1973 it moved into the interactive entertainment industry, developing and publishing arcade video games. The company scored its first mainstream hit with the U. S. distribution of Space Invaders in 1978, Midway was purchased and re-incorporated in 1988 by WMS Industries Inc. After years as a leader in the segment, Midway moved into the growing home video game market beginning in 1996. In 1998 WMS spun off its shares of Midway. Midway was ranked the fourth largest-selling video game publisher in 2000, Sumner Redstone, the head of Viacom/CBS Corporation, increased his stake in Midway from about 15%, in 1998, to about 87% by the end of 2007. In December 2008, Redstone sold all his stock and $70 million of Midway debt to Mark Thomas, in February 2009, Midway Games filed in Delaware for bankruptcy. Warner Bros. purchased most of Midways assets, and Midway settled with Mark Thomas to relinquish his Midway stock, the U. S. District Court in Chicago dismissed a lawsuit alleging that former officers of Midway misled shareholders while selling their own stock. In 2010, the court dismissed claims against Redstone concerning his sale of the company to Thomas. Midway terminated the public registration of its securities in June 2010, Midway Mfg. Co. began in 1958 as an independent manufacturer of amusement equipment. It was purchased by Bally in 1969, Bally, at that time, was a leader in the manufacture of slot machines. After some years making mechanical arcade games such as bowling and simulated western shoot-out. Midway entered the market in 1977 by releasing the Bally Home Library Computer. This was the home game system ever to be developed by the company and was discontinued in 1985. Meanwhile, Midways breakthrough success came in 1978, with the licensing and this was followed by Midways licensing and distributing the hit U. S. version of Namcos Pac-Man in 1980, and its unauthorized sequel, Ms. Pac-Man, in 1981. Also in 1982, Bally merged its pinball division with Midway to form the Bally/Midway Manufacturing division, three games released that year, including Satans Hollow, were the first to feature the Bally/Midway brand
29.
Line of credit
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A line of credit is credit source extended to a government, business or individual by a bank or other financial institution. It is effectively a source of funds that can readily be tapped at the borrowers discretion, interest is paid only on money actually withdrawn. Lines of credit can be secured by collateral, or may be unsecured, the term is also used to mean the credit limit of a customer, that is, the maximum amount of credit a customer is allowed. A cash credit is a cash loan to a company. A bank provides this type of funding, but only after the security is given to secure the loan. Once a security for repayment has been given, the business receives the loan can continuously draw from the bank up to a certain specified amount. In India, banks offer cash credit accounts to businesses to finance their working capital requirements, the cash credit account is similar to current accounts as it is a running account with cheque book facility. But unlike ordinary current accounts, which are supposed to be only occasionally. The extent of overdrawing is limited to the credit limit that the bank sanctioned. This sanction is based on an assessment of the working capital requirement of the organization minus the margin. The organization finances the margin amount from its own funds, generally, a cash credit account is secured by a charge on the current assets of the organization. The kind of charge created can be either pledge or hypothecation, a business line of credit is quite similar to personal lines of credit. The financial institution grants access to an amount of financing. However, no interest is incurred until the funds are tapped into, a business line of credit can be unsecured or secured. Lines of credit are often referred to as revolving and can be tapped into repeatedly, for instance, if there is access to a $60,000 line of credit and $30,000 is taken out, access to the remaining $30,000, if necessary, remains. If all $30,000 is paid back, there is access to the entire $60,000 without having to reapply, one of the biggest benefits of a line of credit
30.
Wells Fargo
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Wells Fargo & Company is an American international banking and financial services holding company headquartered in San Francisco, California, with hubquarters throughout the country. It is the worlds second-largest bank by market capitalization and the third largest bank in the U. S. by assets, Wells Fargo surpassed Citigroup Inc. to become the third-largest U. S. bank by assets at the end of 2015. Wells Fargo is the second-largest bank in deposits, home mortgage servicing, the firms primary U. S. operating subsidiary is national bank Wells Fargo Bank, N. A. which designates its main office as Sioux Falls, South Dakota. In 2016, Wells Fargo ranked 7th on the Forbes Magazine Global 2000 list of largest public companies in the world, in 2015, the company was ranked the 22nd most admired company in the world, and the 7th most respected company in the world. As of October 2015, the company had a rating of AA−. However, for a period in 2007, the company was the only AAA-rated bank. Along with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup, as of December 31,2015, it had 8,700 retail branches and 13,000 automated teller machines. The company operates across 35 countries and has over 70 million customers globally, in February 2014, Wells Fargo was named the worlds most valuable bank brand for the second year running in The Banker and Brand Finance study of the top 500 banking brands. In December 2016, following the scandal, the company amended its by-laws to separate the roles of chairman, in January 2017, it emerged that Wells Fargo had kept its talks with the U. S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau about the fake account investigation silent from shareholders for up to six months beginning as early as March 2016. A regulatory filing by Wells Fargo revealed in November 2016 that it was under investigation by the U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission in relation to its accounts sales practices. Also in November 2016, three U. S. senators alleged that Wells Fargos sales scandal had extended from retail bankers to its employees. Wells Fargo delineates three different business segments when reporting results, Community Banking, Wholesale Banking, and Wealth, Brokerage, the Community Banking segment includes Regional Banking, Diversified Products, and the Consumer Deposits groups, as well as Wells Fargo Customer Connection. Wells Fargo also has around 2,000 stand-alone mortgage branches throughout the country, in March 2017, Wells Fargo announced a plan to offer smartphone-based transactions with mobile wallets including Wells Fargo Wallet, Android Pay and Samsung Pay. Wells Fargo Home Mortgage is the largest retail mortgage lender in the United States, as of Q32011, originating one out of every four home loans. Wells Fargo services $1.8 trillion in home mortgages, the 2nd largest servicing portfolio in the U. S. Now, in 2013 its share is closer to 22%, of which eight percentage points is aggregation. Wells Fargo private student loans are available to students to pay for college expenses, such as, tuition, books, computers. Loans are available for undergraduate, career and community colleges, graduate school, law school, Wells Fargo also provides private student loan consolidation and student loans for parents
31.
Debugging
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Debugging is the process of finding and resolving of defects that prevent correct operation of computer software or a system. The terms bug and debugging are popularly attributed to Admiral Grace Hopper in the 1940s, indeed, in an interview Grace Hopper remarked that she was not coining the term. The moth fit the already existing terminology, so it was saved, a letter from J. Robert Oppenheimer used the term in a letter to Dr. Ernest Lawrence at UC Berkeley, dated October 27,1944, regarding the recruitment of additional technical staff. The Oxford English Dictionary entry for debug quotes the term debugging used in reference to airplane engine testing in a 1945 article in the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, an article in Airforce also refers to debugging, this time of aircraft cameras. Hoppers bug was found on September 9,1947, the term was not adopted by computer programmers until the early 1950s. The seminal article by Gill in 1951 is the earliest in-depth discussion of programming errors, in the ACMs digital library, the term debugging is first used in three papers from 1952 ACM National Meetings. Two of the three use the term in quotation marks, by 1963 debugging was a common enough term to be mentioned in passing without explanation on page 1 of the CTSS manual. Kidwells article Stalking the Elusive Computer Bug discusses the etymology of bug and debug in greater detail. Instead, an assessment can be made to determine if changes to remove an anomaly would be cost-effective for the system. Not all issues are life-critical or mission-critical in a system, also, it is important to avoid the situation where a change might be more upsetting to users, long-term, than living with the known problem. Debugging ranges in complexity from fixing simple errors to performing lengthy and tiresome tasks of data collection, analysis, debuggers are software tools which enable the programmer to monitor the execution of a program, stop it, restart it, set breakpoints, and change values in memory. The term debugger can also refer to the person who is doing the debugging, generally, high-level programming languages, such as Java, make debugging easier, because they have features such as exception handling that make real sources of erratic behaviour easier to spot. In programming languages such as C or assembly, bugs may cause silent problems such as memory corruption, in those cases, memory debugger tools may be needed. In certain situations, general purpose software tools that are specific in nature can be very useful. These take the form of code analysis tools. These tools look for a specific set of known problems, some common and some rare. All such issues detected by these tools would rarely be picked up by a compiler or interpreter, thus they are not syntax checkers, some tools claim to be able to detect 300+ unique problems. Both commercial and free tools exist in various languages and these tools can be extremely useful when checking very large source trees, where it is impractical to do code walkthroughs
32.
Integrated circuit
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An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece of semiconductor material, normally silicon. The ICs mass production capability, reliability and building-block approach to circuit design ensured the rapid adoption of standardized ICs in place of using discrete transistors. ICs are now used in all electronic equipment and have revolutionized the world of electronics. Computers, mobile phones, and other home appliances are now inextricable parts of the structure of modern societies, made possible by the small size. These advances, roughly following Moores law, allow a computer chip of 2016 to have millions of times the capacity, ICs have two main advantages over discrete circuits, cost and performance. Cost is low because the chips, with all their components, are printed as a unit by photolithography rather than being constructed one transistor at a time, furthermore, packaged ICs use much less material than discrete circuits. Performance is high because the ICs components switch quickly and consume little power because of their small size, the main disadvantage of ICs is the high cost to design them and fabricate the required photomasks. This high initial cost means ICs are only practical when high production volumes are anticipated, Circuits meeting this definition can be constructed using many different technologies, including thin-film transistor, thick film technology, or hybrid integrated circuit. However, in general usage integrated circuit has come to refer to the single-piece circuit construction originally known as a integrated circuit. Jacobi disclosed small and cheap hearing aids as typical industrial applications of his patent, an immediate commercial use of his patent has not been reported. The idea of the circuit was conceived by Geoffrey Dummer. Dummer presented the idea to the public at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington and he gave many symposia publicly to propagate his ideas, and unsuccessfully attempted to build such a circuit in 1956. A precursor idea to the IC was to create small ceramic squares, Components could then be integrated and wired into a bidimensional or tridimensional compact grid. This idea, which seemed very promising in 1957, was proposed to the US Army by Jack Kilby, however, as the project was gaining momentum, Kilby came up with a new, revolutionary design, the IC. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as a body of semiconductor material … wherein all the components of the circuit are completely integrated. The first customer for the new invention was the US Air Force, Kilby won the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the integrated circuit. His work was named an IEEE Milestone in 2009, half a year after Kilby, Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor developed his own idea of an integrated circuit that solved many practical problems Kilbys had not. Noyces design was made of silicon, whereas Kilbys chip was made of germanium, Noyce credited Kurt Lehovec of Sprague Electric for the principle of p–n junction isolation, a key concept behind the IC
33.
Trade fair
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A few fairs are hybrids of the two, one example is the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is trade only for its first three days and open to the general public on its final two days. They are held on a basis in virtually all markets. Modern trade fairs follow in the tradition of trade fairs established in late medieval Europe, in this era, produce and craft producers visited towns for trading fairs, to sell and showcase products. From the late century, industrial exhibitions in Europe and North America became more common reflecting the technological dynamism of the Industrial Revolution. In the late 19th century, the concept of annual trade shows gained traction. Trade fairs often involve a considerable marketing investment by participating companies, costs include space rental, booth design and construction of trade show displays, telecommunications and networking, travel, accommodations, and promotional literature and items to give to attendees. In addition, costs are incurred at the show for such as electrical, booth cleaning, internet services. Consequently, cities often promote trade shows as a means of economic development, an increasing number of trade fairs are happening online, and these events are called virtual tradeshows. They are increasing in popularity due to their low cost. Large trade fair grounds, List reviewed on March 12,2014, agricultural show Buyers Market of American Craft County fair Lead retrieval List of worlds fairs Rodeo State fair Worlds fair Media related to Trade fairs at Wikimedia Commons Database
34.
New York City
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The City of New York, often called New York City or simply New York, is the most populous city in the United States. With an estimated 2015 population of 8,550,405 distributed over an area of about 302.6 square miles. Located at the tip of the state of New York. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has described as the cultural and financial capital of the world. Situated on one of the worlds largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, the five boroughs – Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, The Bronx, and Staten Island – were consolidated into a single city in 1898. In 2013, the MSA produced a gross metropolitan product of nearly US$1.39 trillion, in 2012, the CSA generated a GMP of over US$1.55 trillion. NYCs MSA and CSA GDP are higher than all but 11 and 12 countries, New York City traces its origin to its 1624 founding in Lower Manhattan as a trading post by colonists of the Dutch Republic and was named New Amsterdam in 1626. The city and its surroundings came under English control in 1664 and were renamed New York after King Charles II of England granted the lands to his brother, New York served as the capital of the United States from 1785 until 1790. It has been the countrys largest city since 1790, the Statue of Liberty greeted millions of immigrants as they came to the Americas by ship in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is a symbol of the United States and its democracy. In the 21st century, New York has emerged as a node of creativity and entrepreneurship, social tolerance. Several sources have ranked New York the most photographed city in the world, the names of many of the citys bridges, tapered skyscrapers, and parks are known around the world. Manhattans real estate market is among the most expensive in the world, Manhattans Chinatown incorporates the highest concentration of Chinese people in the Western Hemisphere, with multiple signature Chinatowns developing across the city. Providing continuous 24/7 service, the New York City Subway is one of the most extensive metro systems worldwide, with 472 stations in operation. Over 120 colleges and universities are located in New York City, including Columbia University, New York University, and Rockefeller University, during the Wisconsinan glaciation, the New York City region was situated at the edge of a large ice sheet over 1,000 feet in depth. The ice sheet scraped away large amounts of soil, leaving the bedrock that serves as the foundation for much of New York City today. Later on, movement of the ice sheet would contribute to the separation of what are now Long Island and Staten Island. The first documented visit by a European was in 1524 by Giovanni da Verrazzano, a Florentine explorer in the service of the French crown and he claimed the area for France and named it Nouvelle Angoulême. Heavy ice kept him from further exploration, and he returned to Spain in August and he proceeded to sail up what the Dutch would name the North River, named first by Hudson as the Mauritius after Maurice, Prince of Orange
35.
Willis Tower
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The Willis Tower, built as and still commonly referred to as Sears Tower, is a 108-story,1, 450-foot skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois, United States. The building is considered an achievement for its architect Fazlur Kahn. The Willis Tower is the second-tallest building in the United States, more than one million people visit its observation deck each year, making it one of Chicagos most popular tourist destinations. The structure was renamed in 2009 by the Willis Group as part of its lease on a portion of the towers space, the buildings official address is 233 South Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois 60606. In 1969, Sears, Roebuck & Co. was the largest retailer in the world, Sears executives decided to consolidate the thousands of employees in offices distributed throughout the Chicago area into one building on the western edge of Chicagos Loop. Sears asked its counsel, Arnstein, Gluck, Weitzenfeld & Minow to suggest a location. This latter site was decided upon, and preliminary inquiries determined that the necessary permits could be obtained, the next step was to acquire the property, a team of attorneys from the Arnstein law firm, headed by Andrew Adsit, began buying the property parcel by parcel. Sears purchased 15 old buildings from 100 owners and paid $2.7 million to the City of Chicago for the portion of Quincy Street that divided the property. Their team of architect Bruce Graham and structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan designed the building as nine square tubes, all nine tubes would rise up to the 50th floor of the building. At the 50th floor, the northwest and southeast tubes end, at the 66th floor, the northeast and the southwest tubes end. At the 90th floor, the north, east, and south tubes end, the remaining west and center tubes continue up to the 108th floor. The Willis Tower was the first building to use Khans bundled tube structure and this innovative design was structurally efficient and economic, at 1,450 feet, it provided more space and rose higher than the Empire State Building, yet cost much less per unit area. This structural system would prove influential in skyscraper construction. It has been used in most supertall buildings since then, including the worlds tallest building, to honor Khans contributions, the Structural Engineers Association of Illinois commissioned a sculpture of him for the lobby of the Willis Tower. The latter floor areas had to be designed to a plate, with a high window-space to floor-space ratio, to be attractive. Smaller floorplates required a structure to yield sufficient square footage. The height was restricted by a limit imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration to protect air traffic, the financing of the tower was provided by the Sears company. It was topped with two antennas to permit local television and radio broadcasts, Sears and the City of Chicago approved the design, and the first steel was put in place in April 1971
36.
Christmas and holiday season
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It incorporates a period of shopping which comprises a peak season for the retail sector, and a period of sales at the end of the season. Christmas window displays and Christmas tree lighting ceremonies when trees decorated with ornaments, the term Advent calendar survives in secular Western parlance as a term referring to a countdown to Christmas Day from the beginning of December. Saturnalia was an ancient Roman festival in honor of the deity Saturn, held on December 17 of the Julian calendar, the poet Catullus called it the best of days. The tradition of celebrating the birth of Christ on December 25 appears to date from the 4th century when Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire. In the Christian tradition the Christmas season is a beginning on Christmas Day. In some churches the season continues until the day before the Epiphany, If the Epiphany is kept on January 6, the Church of Englands use of the term Christmas season corresponds to the Twelve Days of Christmas, and ends on Twelfth Night. This short Christmas season is preceded by Advent, which begins on the fourth Sunday before Christmas Day, the Anglican Communion and some Protestant churches follow the Christmas season with an Epiphany season which lasts until Shrove Tuesday which is also known as Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday. Other European cultures have their own carnival festivities between new year and Lent, according to Yanovski et al. in the United States the holiday season is generally considered to begin with the day after Thanksgiving and end after New Years Day. According to Axelrad, the season in the United States encompasses at least Christmas and New Years Day, fire Administration defines the Winter Holiday Season as the period from December 1 to January 7. According to Chen et al. in China the Christmas and holiday season is considered to begin with the winter solstice. Some stores and shopping malls advertise their Christmas merchandise beginning after Halloween or even in late October, the precise definition of feasts and festival days that are encompassed by the Christmas and holiday season has become controversial in the United States over recent decades. The exchange of gifts is central to the Christmas and holiday season, and this comprises a peak time for the retail sector at the start of the holiday season and a period of sales at the end of the season, the January sales. Although once dedicated mostly to white sales and clearance sales, the January sales now comprise both winter close-out sales and sales comprising the redemption of gift cards given as presents. Young-Bean Song, director of analytics at the Atlas Institute in Seattle, states that it is a myth that the shopping season starts with Thanksgiving. January is a key part of the holiday season, stating that for the U. S. e-commerce sector January sales volumes matched December sales volumes in the 2004/2005 Christmas and holiday season. Many people find this time particularly stressful, as a remedy, and as a return to what they perceive as the root of Christmas, some practice alternative giving. During the 2014 holiday shopping season, retail sales in the United States are forecast to increase to a total of over $616 billion, the average US holiday shopper is expected to spend over $800, of which close to 73 percent will be in gifts. In 2015, retail sales in the United States increased to a total of over $630 billion, the average US holiday shopper spent on average $805
37.
Venture capital
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Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity–an ownership stake–in the companies they invest in. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky start-ups in the hopes some of the firms they support will become successful. The start-ups are usually based on a technology or business model and they are usually from the high technology industries, such as information technology. The typical venture capital investment occurs after a seed funding round. The first round of venture capital to fund growth is called the Series A round. This institution helps identify promising new firms and provide them with finance, technical expertise, mentoring, marketing know-how, and business models. Once integrated into the network, these firms are more likely to succeed. However, venture capitalists decisions are often biased, exhibiting for instance overconfidence and illusion of control, a venture may be defined as a project prospective converted into a process with an adequate assumed risk and investment. With few exceptions, private equity in the first half of the 20th century was the domain of wealthy individuals, the Wallenbergs, Vanderbilts, Whitneys, Rockefellers, and Warburgs were notable investors in private companies in the first half of the century. In 1938, Laurance S. Rockefeller helped finance the creation of both Eastern Air Lines and Douglas Aircraft, and the Rockefeller family had vast holdings in a variety of companies. Eric M. Warburg founded E. M. Warburg & Co. in 1938, which would ultimately become Warburg Pincus, with investments in both leveraged buyouts and venture capital. The Wallenberg family started Investor AB in 1916 in Sweden and were early investors in several Swedish companies such as ABB, Atlas Copco, Ericsson, before World War II, money orders remained primarily the domain of wealthy individuals and families. Georges Doriot, the father of capitalism, founded INSEAD in 1957. Along with Ralph Flanders and Karl Compton, Doriot founded ARDC in 1946 to encourage investment in businesses run by soldiers returning from World War II. ARDC became the first institutional private-equity investment firm to raise capital from other than wealthy families. ARDC is credited with the first trick when its 1957 investment of $70,000 in Digital Equipment Corporation would be valued at over $355 million after the initial public offering in 1968. Former employees of ARDC went on to several prominent venture-capital firms including Greylock Partners and Morgan, Holland Ventures. ARDC continued investing until 1971, when Doriot retired, in 1972 Doriot merged ARDC with Textron after having invested in over 150 companies
