1.
Computer architecture
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In computer engineering, computer architecture is a set of rules and methods that describe the functionality, organization, and implementation of computer systems. Some definitions of architecture define it as describing the capabilities and programming model of a computer, in other definitions computer architecture involves instruction set architecture design, microarchitecture design, logic design, and implementation. The first documented computer architecture was in the correspondence between Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, describing the analytical engine, johnson had the opportunity to write a proprietary research communication about the Stretch, an IBM-developed supercomputer for Los Alamos National Laboratory. Brooks went on to develop the IBM System/360 line of computers. Later, computer users came to use the term in many less-explicit ways, the earliest computer architectures were designed on paper and then directly built into the final hardware form. The discipline of architecture has three main subcategories, Instruction Set Architecture, or ISA. The ISA defines the code that a processor reads and acts upon as well as the word size, memory address modes, processor registers. Microarchitecture, or computer organization describes how a processor will implement the ISA. The size of a computers CPU cache for instance, is an issue that generally has nothing to do with the ISA, system Design includes all of the other hardware components within a computing system. These include, Data processing other than the CPU, such as memory access Other issues such as virtualization, multiprocessing. There are other types of computer architecture, E. g. the C, C++, or Java standards define different Programmer Visible Macroarchitecture. UISA —a group of machines with different hardware level microarchitectures may share a common microcode architecture, pin Architecture, The hardware functions that a microprocessor should provide to a hardware platform, e. g. the x86 pins A20M, FERR/IGNNE or FLUSH. Also, messages that the processor should emit so that external caches can be invalidated, pin architecture functions are more flexible than ISA functions because external hardware can adapt to new encodings, or change from a pin to a message. The term architecture fits, because the functions must be provided for compatible systems, the purpose is to design a computer that maximizes performance while keeping power consumption in check, costs low relative to the amount of expected performance, and is also very reliable. For this, many aspects are to be considered which includes Instruction Set Design, Functional Organization, Logic Design, the implementation involves Integrated Circuit Design, Packaging, Power, and Cooling. Optimization of the design requires familiarity with Compilers, Operating Systems to Logic Design, an instruction set architecture is the interface between the computers software and hardware and also can be viewed as the programmers view of the machine. Computers do not understand high level languages such as Java, C++, a processor only understands instructions encoded in some numerical fashion, usually as binary numbers. Software tools, such as compilers, translate those high level languages into instructions that the processor can understand, besides instructions, the ISA defines items in the computer that are available to a program—e. g
2.
Reduced instruction set computer
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A computer based on this strategy is a reduced instruction set computer, also called RISC. The opposing architecture is called complex instruction set computing, although a number of systems from the 1960s and 70s have been identified as being forerunners of RISC, the modern version of the design dates to the 1980s. In particular, two projects at Stanford University and University of California, Berkeley are most associated with the popularization of this concept. Stanfords design would go on to be commercialized as the successful MIPS architecture, while Berkeleys RISC gave its name to the entire concept, another success from this era were IBMs efforts that eventually led to the Power Architecture. RISC families include DEC Alpha, AMD Am29000, ARC, ARM, Atmel AVR, Blackfin, Intel i860 and i960, MIPS, Motorola 88000, PA-RISC, Power, RISC-V, SuperH, and SPARC. In the 21st century, the use of ARM architecture processors in smart phones and tablet computers such as the iPad, a number of systems, going back to the 1960s, have been credited as the first RISC architecture, partly based on their use of load/store approach. The term RISC was coined by David Patterson of the Berkeley RISC project, michael J. Flynn views the first RISC system as the IBM801 design which began in 1975 by John Cocke, and completed in 1980. The 801 was eventually produced in a form as the ROMP in 1981. As the name implies, this CPU was designed for tasks, and was also used in the IBM RT-PC in 1986. But the 801 inspired several research projects, including new ones at IBM that would lead to the IBM POWER instruction set architecture. The most public RISC designs, however, were the results of university research programs run with funding from the DARPA VLSI Program, the VLSI Program, practically unknown today, led to a huge number of advances in chip design, fabrication, and even computer graphics. The Berkeley RISC project started in 1980 under the direction of David Patterson, Berkeley RISC was based on gaining performance through the use of pipelining and an aggressive use of a technique known as register windowing. In a traditional CPU, one has a number of registers. In a CPU with register windows, there are a number of registers, e. g.128. The Berkeley RISC project delivered the RISC-I processor in 1982, consisting of only 44,420 transistors RISC-I had only 32 instructions, and yet completely outperformed any other single-chip design. They followed this up with the 40,760 transistor,39 instruction RISC-II in 1983, which ran over three times as fast as RISC-I. The MIPS architecture grew out of a course by John L. Hennessy at Stanford University in 1981, resulted in a functioning system in 1983. The MIPS approach emphasized an aggressive clock cycle and the use of the pipeline, the MIPS system was followed by the MIPS-X and in 1984 Hennessy and his colleagues formed MIPS Computer Systems
3.
Instruction set architecture
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An ISA includes a specification of the set of opcodes, and the native commands implemented by a particular processor. An instruction set architecture is distinguished from a microarchitecture, which is the set of design techniques used, in a particular processor. Processors with different microarchitectures can share a common instruction set, for example, the Intel Pentium and the AMD Athlon implement nearly identical versions of the x86 instruction set, but have radically different internal designs. The concept of an architecture, distinct from the design of a machine, was developed by Fred Brooks at IBM during the design phase of System/360. Prior to NPL, the companys computer designers had been free to honor cost objectives not only by selecting technologies, the SPREAD compatibility objective, in contrast, postulated a single architecture for a series of five processors spanning a wide range of cost and performance. In addition, these virtual machines execute less frequently used code paths by interpretation, transmeta implemented the x86 instruction set atop VLIW processors in this fashion. A complex instruction set computer has many specialized instructions, some of which may only be used in practical programs. Theoretically important types are the instruction set computer and the one instruction set computer. Another variation is the very long instruction word where the processor receives many instructions encoded and retrieved in one instruction word, machine language is built up from discrete statements or instructions. Examples of operations common to many instruction sets include, Set a register to a constant value. Copy data from a location to a register, or vice versa. Used to store the contents of a register, result of a computation, often called load and store operations. Read and write data from hardware devices, add, subtract, multiply, or divide the values of two registers, placing the result in a register, possibly setting one or more condition codes in a status register. Increment, decrement in some ISAs, saving operand fetch in trivial cases, perform bitwise operations, e. g. taking the conjunction and disjunction of corresponding bits in a pair of registers, taking the negation of each bit in a register. Floating-point instructions for arithmetic on floating-point numbers, branch to another location in the program and execute instructions there. Conditionally branch to another if a certain condition holds. Call another block of code, while saving the location of the instruction as a point to return to. Load/store data to and from a coprocessor, or exchanging with CPU registers, processors may include complex instructions in their instruction set
4.
Endianness
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Endianness refers to the sequential order used to numerically interpret a range of bytes in computer memory as a larger, composed word value. It also describes the order of transmission over a digital link. Little-endian format reverses the order of the sequence and stores the least significant byte at the first location with the most significant byte being stored last. The order of bits within a byte can also have endianness, however, both big and little forms of endianness are widely used in digital electronics. As examples, the IBM z/Architecture mainframes use big-endian while the Intel x86 processors use little-endian, the designers chose endianness in the 1960s and 1970s respectively. Big-endian is the most common format in data networking, fields in the protocols of the Internet protocol suite, such as IPv4, IPv6, TCP, for this reason, big-endian byte order is also referred to as network byte order. Little-endian storage is popular for microprocessors, in due to significant influence on microprocessor designs by Intel Corporation. Mixed forms also exist, for instance the ordering of bytes in a 16-bit word may differ from the ordering of 16-bit words within a 32-bit word, such cases are sometimes referred to as mixed-endian or middle-endian. There are also some bi-endian processors that operate in either little-endian or big-endian mode, big-endianness may be demonstrated by writing a decimal number, say one hundred twenty-three, on paper in the usual positional notation understood by a numerate reader,123. The digits are written starting from the left and to the right, with the most significant digit,1 and this is analogous to the lowest address of memory being used first. This is an example of a big-endian convention taken from daily life, the little-endian way of writing the same number, one hundred twenty-three, would place the hundreds-digit 1 in the right-most position,321. A person following conventional big-endian place-value order, who is not aware of this ordering, would read a different number. Endianness in computing is similar, but it applies to the ordering of bytes. The illustrations to the right, where a is a memory address, danny Cohen introduced the terms Little-Endian and Big-Endian for byte ordering in an article from 1980. Computer memory consists of a sequence of storage cells, each cell is identified in hardware and software by its memory address. If the total number of cells in memory is n. Computer programs often use data structures of fields that may consist of data than is stored in one memory cell. For the purpose of this article where its use as an operand of an instruction is relevant, in addition to that, it has to be of numeric type in some positional number system
5.
Backronym
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A backronym or bacronym is a specially constructed phrase that is supposed to be the source of a word that is, or is claimed to be, an acronym. Backronyms may be invented with serious or humorous intent, or may be a type of false or folk etymology, the word is a combination of backward and acronym, and has been defined as a reverse acronym. Its earliest known citation in print is as bacronym in the November 1983 edition of the Washington Post monthly neologism contest. The newspaper quoted winning reader Meredith G. Williams of Potomac, Maryland, defining it as the same as an acronym, except that the words were chosen to fit the letters. An acronym is a derived from the initial letters of the words of a phrase, For example. By contrast, a backronym is constructed by creating a new phrase to fit an existing word, name. Backronyms are also used for comedic effect, as exemplified by NASAs C. O. L. B. E. R. T. NASA named its ISS treadmill the Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistance Treadmill after Stephen Colbert, the backronym was a lighthearted compromise in recognition of the comedians ability to sway NASAs online vote for the naming of an ISS module. Backronyms can be constructed for educational purposes, for example to form mnemonics, an example of such a mnemonic is the Apgar score, used to assess the health of newborn babies. Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step programs use backronyms as teaching tools, similar to such as one day at a time, or Let go, let God. For example, a slip may be expanded as Sobriety Losing Its Priority, backronyms are also created as jokes or as slogans, often expressing consumer loyalties or frustration. For example, the name of the restaurant chain Arbys is a play on the letters RB, referring to the companys founders, an advertising campaign in the 1980s created a backronym with the slogan America’s Roast Beef, Yes Sir. Many companies or products have spawned multiple humorous backronyms, with positive connotations asserted by supporters or negative ones by detractors. For example, the car company Ford was said to stand for First On Race Day, by aficionados, similar backronyms have been directed against many other automakers, such as Fix It Again Tony for Fiat. Backronyms have also coined by military personnel during wartime. The backronym for Spam, Something Posing As Meat, was said to have originated from jaundiced soldiers who were sick of eating canned meat. The British contribution to the 2003 invasion of Iraq was code-named Operation Telic, backronyms are sometimes created to name laws or programs. Commentators have noted a trend among US lawmakers to devise names that form a desired acronym
6.
Apple Inc.
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Apple is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California that designs, develops, and sells consumer electronics, computer software, and online services. Apples consumer software includes the macOS and iOS operating systems, the media player, the Safari web browser. Its online services include the iTunes Store, the iOS App Store and Mac App Store, Apple Music, Apple was founded by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne in April 1976 to develop and sell personal computers. It was incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc. in January 1977, Apple joined the Dow Jones Industrial Average in March 2015. In November 2014, Apple became the first U. S. company to be valued at over US$700 billion in addition to being the largest publicly traded corporation in the world by market capitalization. The company employs 115,000 full-time employees as of July 2015 and it operates the online Apple Store and iTunes Store, the latter of which is the worlds largest music retailer. Consumers use more than one billion Apple products worldwide as of March 2016, Apples worldwide annual revenue totaled $233 billion for the fiscal year ending in September 2015. This revenue accounts for approximately 1. 25% of the total United States GDP.1 billion, the corporation receives significant criticism regarding the labor practices of its contractors and its environmental and business practices, including the origins of source materials. Apple was founded on April 1,1976, by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the Apple I kits were computers single-handedly designed and hand-built by Wozniak and first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. The Apple I was sold as a motherboard, which was less than what is now considered a personal computer. The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 and was market-priced at $666.66, Apple was incorporated January 3,1977, without Wayne, who sold his share of the company back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800. Multimillionaire Mike Markkula provided essential business expertise and funding of $250,000 during the incorporation of Apple, during the first five years of operations revenues grew exponentially, doubling about every four months. Between September 1977 and September 1980 yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118m, the Apple II, also invented by Wozniak, was introduced on April 16,1977, at the first West Coast Computer Faire. It differed from its rivals, the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, because of its character cell-based color graphics. While early Apple II models used ordinary cassette tapes as storage devices, they were superseded by the introduction of a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive and interface called the Disk II. The Apple II was chosen to be the platform for the first killer app of the business world, VisiCalc. VisiCalc created a market for the Apple II and gave home users an additional reason to buy an Apple II. Before VisiCalc, Apple had been a distant third place competitor to Commodore, by the end of the 1970s, Apple had a staff of computer designers and a production line
7.
IBM
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International Business Machines Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States, with operations in over 170 countries. The company originated in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and was renamed International Business Machines in 1924, IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware, middleware and software, and offers hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a research organization, holding the record for most patents generated by a business for 24 consecutive years. IBM has continually shifted its business mix by exiting commoditizing markets and focusing on higher-value, also in 2014, IBM announced that it would go fabless, continuing to design semiconductors, but offloading manufacturing to GlobalFoundries. Nicknamed Big Blue, IBM is one of 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the worlds largest employers, with nearly 380,000 employees. Known as IBMers, IBM employees have been awarded five Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards, ten National Medals of Technology, in the 1880s, technologies emerged that would ultimately form the core of what would become International Business Machines. On June 16,1911, their four companies were amalgamated in New York State by Charles Ranlett Flint forming a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company based in Endicott, New York. The five companies had 1,300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, New York, Dayton, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, Washington, D. C. and Toronto. They manufactured machinery for sale and lease, ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorders, meat and cheese slicers, to tabulators and punched cards. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. fired from the National Cash Register Company by John Henry Patterson, called on Flint and, Watson joined CTR as General Manager then,11 months later, was made President when court cases relating to his time at NCR were resolved. Having learned Pattersons pioneering business practices, Watson proceeded to put the stamp of NCR onto CTRs companies and his favorite slogan, THINK, became a mantra for each companys employees. During Watsons first four years, revenues more than doubled to $9 million, Watson had never liked the clumsy hyphenated title of the CTR and in 1924 chose to replace it with the more expansive title International Business Machines. By 1933 most of the subsidiaries had been merged into one company, in 1937, IBMs tabulating equipment enabled organizations to process unprecedented amounts of data, its clients including the U. S. During the Second World War the company produced small arms for the American war effort, in 1949, Thomas Watson, Sr. created IBM World Trade Corporation, a subsidiary of IBM focused on foreign operations. In 1952, he stepped down after almost 40 years at the company helm, in 1957, the FORTRAN scientific programming language was developed. In 1961, IBM developed the SABRE reservation system for American Airlines, in 1963, IBM employees and computers helped NASA track the orbital flight of the Mercury astronauts. A year later it moved its headquarters from New York City to Armonk. The latter half of the 1960s saw IBM continue its support of space exploration, on April 7,1964, IBM announced the first computer system family, the IBM System/360
8.
Motorola
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Motorola was an American multinational telecommunications company founded on September 25,1928, based in Schaumburg, Illinois. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, Motorola Solutions is generally considered to be the direct successor to Motorola, as the reorganization was structured with Motorola Mobility being spun off. Motorola Mobility was acquired by Lenovo in 2014, Motorola designed and sold wireless network equipment such as cellular transmission base stations and signal amplifiers. Its business and government customers consisted mainly of wireless voice and broadband systems and these businesses are now part of Motorola Solutions. Google sold Motorola Home to the Arris Group in December 2012 for US$2.35 billion, Motorolas wireless telephone handset division was a pioneer in cellular telephones. Also known as the Personal Communication Sector prior to 2004, it pioneered the mobile phone with DynaTAC and it had staged a resurgence by the mid-2000s with the RAZR, but lost market share in the second half of that decade. Later it focused on smartphones using Googles open-source Android mobile operating system, the first phone to use the newest version of Googles open source OS, Android 2.0, was released on November 2,2009 as the Motorola Droid. The handset division was spun off into the independent Motorola Mobility. On May 22,2012, Google CEO Larry Page announced that Google had closed on its deal to acquire Motorola Mobility. On January 29,2014, Page announced that pending closure of the deal, on October 30,2014, Lenovo finalized its purchase of Motorola Mobility from Google. Galvin Manufacturing Corporation set up shop in a section of a rented building. The company had $565 in working capital and five employees, the first weeks payroll was $63. The companys first products were battery-eliminators, devices that enabled battery-powered radios to operate on household electricity, due to advances in radio technology, battery-eliminators soon became obsolete. Paul Galvin learned that some radio technicians were installing sets in cars and his team was successful, and Galvin was able to demonstrate a working model of the radio at the June 1930 Radio Manufacturers Association convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He brought home enough orders to keep the company in business. g, the company sold its first Motorola branded radio on June 23,1930, to H. C. Wall of Fort Wayne, Indiana, for $30, the Motorola brand name became so well-known that Galvin Manufacturing Corporation later changed its name to Motorola, Inc. Galvin Manufacturing Corporation began selling Motorola car-radio receivers to police departments, the companys first public safety customers included the Village of River Forest, Village of Bellwood Police Department, City of Evanston Police, Illinois State Highway Police, and Cook County Police. In the same year, the company built its research and development program with Dan Noble, a pioneer in FM radio and semiconductor technologies, the company produced the hand-held AM SCR-536 radio during World War II, which was vital to Allied communication
9.
Power Architecture
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The governing body is Power. org, comprising over 40 companies and organizations. Power Architecture is a broad term including all products based on newer POWER, PowerPC, Power Architecture is a family name describing processor architecture, software, toolchain, community and end-user appliances and not a strict term describing specific products or technologies. There can be misunderstanding of the meaning of the terms, POWER, PowerPC, the following glossary gives brief descriptions of each term, along with links to articles with details. Power Architecture originated at IBM in the late 1980s when that company wanted a high-performance RISC architecture for their mid-range workstations, the result was the POWER architecture. Its first implementation featured in the RS/6000 computers introduced in 1990 and this was the 10-chip RIOS-1 processor, later called POWER1. The RISC Single Chip processor was developed from RIOS-1, in 1992 Apple, IBM and Motorola formed the AIM alliance to develop a mass-market version of the POWER processor. This resulted in the PowerPC architecture, a version of the POWER architecture. The first PowerPC implementation was the PowerPC601 of 1993, based heavily on RSC, it found its way into Apples Power Mac computers as well as into IBM RS/6000 systems. The differences between the POWER instruction set and PowerPC is outlined in Appendix E of the manual for PowerPC ISA v.2.02. IBM expanded their POWER architecture for their RS/6000 systems, which resulted in the eight-chip POWER2 processor in 1993 and in a version called P2SC, POWER2 Super Chip. In the early 1990s IBM sought to replace its CISC-based AS/400 minicomputers with a RISC architecture and this new architecture, developed under the code name Amazon, came to be referred to as the PowerPC-AS amongst engineers working on the project. PowerPC-AS was to be a server platform based on RSC. It all ended up with the 64-bit A10 and A30 processors introduced in 1995 and with the later RS64 line in 1997, the 602 and 620 never found widespread use, but the 603,604 and their successors became very popular in their respective fields. Motorola and IBM also made the Book E extension of PowerPC, used in embedded implementations, Motorolas PowerQUICC processors, the last effort of the AIM Alliance was the third generation PowerPC750 in 1997. Motorola and IBM went their ways in developing the PowerPC architecture after that. The PowerPC750 processors found widespread use in computer and embedded markets and IBM kept evolving the 750 family in the years to come. Motorola, however, chose to focus on the market with PowerPC SoC designs and the PowerPC7400. This processor incorporated AltiVec, a SIMD unit, the PowerPC7400 came in 1999 and was used by Apple in workstations and laptops and by various companies in the telecom market
10.
Trademark
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The trademark owner can be an individual, business organization, or any legal entity. A trademark may be located on a package, a label, for the sake of corporate identity, trademarks are often displayed on company buildings. A trademark identifies the owner of a particular product or service. The unauthorized usage of trademarks by producing and trading counterfeit consumer goods is known as brand piracy, the owner of a trademark may pursue legal action against trademark infringement. Most countries require formal registration of a trademark as a precondition for pursuing this type of action, the United States, Canada and other countries also recognize common law trademark rights, which means action can be taken to protect an unregistered trademark if it is in use. Still, common law trademarks offer the holder in general less legal protection than registered trademarks. A trademark may be designated by the symbols, ™ ℠ ® A trademark is typically a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image. There is also a range of non-conventional trademarks comprising marks which do not fall into these categories, such as those based on colour, smell. Trademarks which are considered offensive are often rejected according to a nations trademark law, the term trademark is also used informally to refer to any distinguishing attribute by which an individual is readily identified, such as the well-known characteristics of celebrities. When a trademark is used in relation to services rather than products, it may sometimes be called a service mark, in other words, trademarks serve to identify a particular business as the source of goods or services. The use of a trademark in this way is known as trademark use, certain exclusive rights attach to a registered mark. Different goods and services have been classified by the International Classification of Goods, in trademark treatises it is usually reported that blacksmiths who made swords in the Roman Empire are thought of as being the first users of trademarks. Other notable trademarks that have used for a long time include Löwenbräu. The first trademark legislation was passed by the Parliament of England under the reign of King Henry III in 1266, the first modern trademark laws emerged in the late 19th century. In France the first comprehensive system in the world was passed into law in 1857 with the Manufacture. In Britain, the Merchandise Marks Act 1862 made it an offense to imitate anothers trade mark with intent to defraud or to enable another to defraud. In 1875 the Trade Marks Registration Act was passed which allowed formal registration of marks at the UK Patent Office for the first time. Registration was considered to comprise prima facie evidence of ownership of a trade mark, in the United States, Congress first attempted to establish a federal trademark regime in 1870
11.
Personal computer
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A personal computer is a multi-purpose electronic computer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. PCs are intended to be operated directly by a end-user, rather than by an expert or technician. In the 2010s, PCs are typically connected to the Internet, allowing access to the World Wide Web, personal computers may be connected to a local area network, either by a cable or a wireless connection. In the 2010s, a PC may be, a multi-component desktop computer, designed for use in a location a laptop computer, designed for easy portability or a tablet computer. In the 2010s, PCs run using a system, such as Microsoft Windows, Linux. The very earliest microcomputers, equipped with a front panel, required hand-loading of a program to load programs from external storage. Before long, automatic booting from permanent read-only memory became universal, in the 2010s, users have access to a wide range of commercial software, free software and free and open-source software, which are provided in ready-to-run or ready-to-compile form. Since the early 1990s, Microsoft operating systems and Intel hardware have dominated much of the computer market, first with MS-DOS. Alternatives to Microsofts Windows operating systems occupy a minority share of the industry and these include Apples OS X and free open-source Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and Berkeley Software Distribution. Advanced Micro Devices provides the alternative to Intels processors. PC is an initialism for personal computer, some PCs, including the OLPC XOs, are equipped with x86 or x64 processors but not designed to run Microsoft Windows. PC is used in contrast with Mac, an Apple Macintosh computer and this sense of the word is used in the Get a Mac advertisement campaign that ran between 2006 and 2009, as well as its rival, Im a PC campaign, that appeared in 2008. Since Apples transition to Intel processors starting 2005, all Macintosh computers are now PCs, the “brain” may one day come down to our level and help with our income-tax and book-keeping calculations. But this is speculation and there is no sign of it so far, in the history of computing there were many examples of computers designed to be used by one person, as opposed to terminals connected to mainframe computers. Using the narrow definition of operated by one person, the first personal computer was the ENIAC which became operational in 1946 and it did not meet further definitions of affordable or easy to use. An example of an early single-user computer was the LGP-30, created in 1956 by Stan Frankel and used for science and it came with a retail price of $47, 000—equivalent to about $414,000 today. Introduced at the 1965 New York Worlds Fair, the Programma 101 was a programmable calculator described in advertisements as a desktop computer. It was manufactured by the Italian company Olivetti and invented by the Italian engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto, the Soviet MIR series of computers was developed from 1965 to 1969 in a group headed by Victor Glushkov
12.
Power Macintosh
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The first models were the Power Macintosh 6100,7100, and 8100, which offered speeds ranging from 60 to 110 MHz. These machines replaced Apples Quadra series of computers, and were housed in cases very similar to systems sold by Apple up to that point. In August 2006, the Power Macs retirement was announced at Apples Worldwide Developers Conference by Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller, making way for its Intel-based replacement, the Mac Pro. Power Macintosh G3 Power Mac G4 Power Mac G4 Cube Power Mac G5 The Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One was replaced with the iMac series, in April 1996, Apple discontinued the Macintosh LC580, the last remaining desktop model of the 68k-based Macintosh line. The PowerBook 190cs, the last 68k-based PowerBook, was discontinued in October 1996, all subsequent Macintosh computers would be based on PowerPC processors until January 2006, when Apple switched to Intel processors. All Power Macs prior to 1997 used PowerPC 60x-series processors, in 1997 the first third-generation Power Macintosh was introduced, using the PowerPC750 processor. From this model onward, Apple no longer used a scheme to identify their Power Mac models. Later models based on the generation of PowerPC processor relied on descriptive characteristics to differentiate them. This same identification scheme was used in the iMac, PowerBook, not all Apple documentation follows this rule, but the vast majority does. They were usually equipped with Apples newest technologies, and commanded the highest prices among Apple desktop models, some Power Mac G4 and G5 models were offered in dual-processor configurations. The Intel-based successor of the Power Mac is the Mac Pro, in line with the renaming of Apples professional notebooks from PowerBook to MacBook Pro
13.
PowerBook
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The PowerBook was a line of Macintosh laptop computers that was designed, manufactured and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1991 to 2006. During its lifetime, the PowerBook went through major revisions and redesigns. In 1999, the line was supplemented by the consumer iBook range, the PowerBook and iBook lines were discontinued and replaced by the MacBook Pro and MacBook families respectively by 2006. In September 1989, Apple Inc. released the Macintosh Portable, however, its price, size, and weight made actual portability difficult. Because of this, the demand for a true portable Macintosh was not met, in October 1991 Apple released the first three PowerBooks, the low-end PowerBook 100, the more powerful PowerBook 140, and the high end PowerBook 170, the only one with an active matrix display. In the early days of Microsoft Windows, many notebooks came with a clip on trackball that fit on the edge of the keyboard molding, as usage of DOS gave way to the graphical user interface, the PowerBooks arrangement became the standard layout all future notebook computers would follow. The PowerBook 140 and 170 were the original PowerBook designs, while the PowerBook 100 was the result of Apple having sent the schematics of the Mac Portable to Sony, the PowerBook 100, however, did not sell well until Apple dropped the price substantially. The 100 series PowerBooks were intended to tie into the rest of the Apple desktop products utilizing the corporate Snow White design language incorporated into all product designs since 1986. In addition to adopting the darker colour scheme which co-ordinated with the official corporate look. The innovative look not only unified their entire line. These early series would be the last to utilize the aging Snow White look, the first series of PowerBooks were hugely successful, capturing 40% of all laptop sales. Despite this, the team left to work at Compaq. Apple was unable to ship a 68040-equipped PowerBook until the PowerBook 500 series in 1994, the original PowerBook 100,140, and 170 were replaced by the 145,160, and 180 in 1992. The 160 and 180 having video output allowing them to drive an external monitor, in addition, the PowerBook 180 had a superb-for-the-time active-matrix grayscale display, making it popular with the Mac press. In 1993, the PowerBook 165c was the first PowerBook with a color screen, in 1994, the last true member of the 100-series form factor introduced was the PowerBook 150, targeted at value-minded consumers and students. The PowerBook 190, released in 1995, bears no resemblance to the rest of the PowerBook 100 series, however, like the 190, the 150 also used the 5300 IDE-based logic-board architecture. From the 100s 68000 processor, to the 190s 68LC040 processor, in 1992 Apple released a hybrid portable/desktop computer, the PowerBook Duo, continuing to streamline the subnotebook features introduced with the PowerBook 100. 1994 saw the introduction of the Motorola 68LC040-based PowerBook 500 series and these models of PowerBooks were much sleeker and faster than the 100 series, which they replaced as the mid and high-end models
14.
IMac
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IMac is a range of all-in-one Macintosh desktop computers designed and built by Apple Inc. It has been the part of Apples consumer desktop offerings since its debut in August 1998. The second major revision, iMac G4, moved the design to a base containing all the main components. The fifth major revision shared the same form as the model, but was thinner and used anodized aluminum. The sixth major revision uses a different display unit, omits the SuperDrive and this allows it to be thinner at the edge than older models, with an edge thickness of 5. 9mm. It also includes a dual microphone setup, and includes solid-state drive or hard disk storage, or an Apple Fusion Drive, a hybrid of solid state and hard disk drives. In October 2014, the major revision of the 27-inch iMac was announced. The new model includes a new processor, graphics chip. The seventh major revision of the 21. 5-inch iMac was announced in October 2015 and its main feature is a Retina 4K display at a resolution of 4096 ×2304 pixels. It has the new processor, graphics chip, and IO as the 27-inch iMac. The announcement of iMac in 1998 was a source of controversy and anticipation among commentators, Mac fans, opinions were divided over Apples drastic changes to the Macintosh hardware. At the time, Apple had suffered a series of setbacks as consumers increasingly opted for Wintel machines instead of Apples Performa models. As these stores developed, however, they became a detriment to Apple sales, as CompUSA employees were unfamiliar with the Macintosh, the designer behind iMacs case was Jonathan Ive. Ken Segall was an employee at an L. A. ad agency handling Apples account who came up with the name iMac, Jobs wanted the product to be called MacMan, but eventually warmed to Segalls suggestion. Segall says that the i stands for Internet, but also represents the product as a personal, attention was given to the out-of-box experience, the user needed to go through only two steps to set up and connect to the Internet. Theres no step 3. was the catch-phrase in a popular iMac commercial narrated by actor Jeff Goldblum, johann and Brodie finished in 8 minutes and 15 seconds, whereas Adam was still working on it by the end of the commercial. By 2005, it had more and more apparent that IBMs development for the desktop implementation of PowerPC was grinding to a halt. Apple announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference that it would be switching the Macintosh to the x86 architecture, the first Intel-equipped Macs were unveiled on January 10,2006, the Intel iMac and the introductory MacBook Pro
15.
IBook
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The iBook was a line of laptop computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. from 1999 to 2006. The line targeted entry-level, consumer and education markets, with specifications and prices than the PowerBook. It was the first mass consumer product to offer Wi-Fi network connectivity, the iBook had three different designs during its lifetime. The first, known as the Clamshell, was inspired by the design of Apples popular iMac line at the time, two years later, the second generation abandoned the original form factor in favor of a more conventional, rectangular design. In October 2003, a third iteration was released that added a PowerPC G4 chip, Apple replaced the iBook line with the MacBook in May 2006 during Apples transition to Intel processors. The MacBook has also evolved into different models, such as the MacBook Pro targeting high performance and they were also a major name for education, with Henrico County Public Schools being the first of many school systems in the United States to distribute one to every student. This left only the consumer portable space empty, leading to much rumor on the Internet of potential designs and features. Putting an end to speculation, on June 21,1999, Steve Jobs unveiled the iBook G3 during the keynote presentation of Macworld Conference & Expo. Like the iMac, the iBook G3 had a PowerPC G3 CPU, USB, Ethernet, modem ports and an optical drive were standard. The ports were left uncovered along the side, as a cover was thought to be fragile and unnecessary with the iBooks new interfaces. When the lid was closed, the hinge kept it firmly shut, the hinge included an integrated carrying handle. Additional power connectors on the surface allowed multiple iBook G3s to be charged on a custom-made rack. The iBook G3 was the first Mac to use Apples new Unified Logic Board Architecture, the iBook was the first mainstream computer designed and sold with integrated wireless networking. The display bezel contained the wireless antenna, which attached to an optional internal wireless card, lucent helped create this wireless capability which established the industry standard. Apple released the AirPort Wireless Base Station at the same time, there was heated debate over many things such as the aesthetics, features, weight, performance and pricing. To provide sufficient impact protection, the iBook was larger and heftier than the PowerBook of the time, standard features like PC card slots were absent, and so were speculated features such as touch screens and an ultra-long battery life. The iBook gained the label Barbies toilet seat, due to the distinctive design, nevertheless, this same design made the iBook G3 unmistakable in movies and television shows. The iBook was a commercial success, the line continually received processor, memory, hard disk upgrades and new colors
16.
Xserve
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Xserve was a line of rack unit computers designed by Apple Inc. for use as servers. When the Xserve was introduced in 2002, it was Apples first designated server hardware design since the Apple Network Server in 1996. and shipped with Mac OS X Server software. On November 5,2010, Apple announced that the Xserve line would be discontinued on January 31,2011 and replaced with the Mac Pro Server, Apple introduced the Xserve on May 14,2002. Initially, two options were available, a single-processor Xserve at US$2999 and a dual-processor Xserve at US$3999. Xserves sold before August 24,2002 shipped with Mac OS X v10.1 Puma Server, on February 10,2003, Apple released an improved and expanded Xserve lineup. Improvements included one or two 1.33 GHz PowerPC G4 processors, faster memory, and higher capacity Ultra ATA/133 hard disk drives, the front plate was redesigned for a slot-loading optical drive. On April 2,2003 the Xserve RAID was introduced, providing a higher capacity. On January 6,2004 Apple introduced the Xserve G5, a redesigned higher-performance Xserve, the 32-bit PowerPC G4s were replaced with one or two 64-bit PowerPC970 processors running at 2 GHz. Ventilation issues restricted it to three SATA hot-swap drive bays, with the space for the fourth drive bay used for air vents. The front plate and slot-loading optical drive were retained from the last Xserve G4, the higher memory capacity and bandwidth as well as the stronger floating-point performance of the PowerPC970 made it more suitable for high-performance computing applications. System X is one such cluster computer built with Xserves, three configuration options were available, a single-processor model at US$2999, a dual-processor model at $3999, and a dual-processor cluster node model at US$2999. On January 3,2005, Apple updated the Xserve G5 with faster processors in the dual-processor configurations,400 GB hard disks were made available for up to 1.2 TB of internal storage. The slot-loading optical drive was upgraded to a combination DVD-ROM/CD-RW standard, soon after, Apple updated the Xserve and Xserve RAID to allow the use of 500 GB Hard Drives. Xserve G5 models before April 2005 shipped with Mac OS X v10.3 Panther, after April 2005 shipped with Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger. The Intel-based Xserves were announced at the Worldwide Developers Conference on August 7,2006, the Intel Xserves now had on board video, freeing up an expansion slot. On January 8,2008 Xserve was updated to use Intel Xeon processors faster memory, the front-mounted FireWire 400 port featured in previous models was also replaced with a USB2.0 port. The Xserve RAID was discontinued on February 19,2008, on April 7,2009 Xserve was updated to use Intel Xeon processors DDR3 memory, and NVIDIA graphics with Mini DisplayPort output. The update also saw an increase to the storage capacity
17.
Apple's transition to Intel processors
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Apples Intel transition was the process of changing the central processing unit of Macintosh computers from PowerPC processors to Intel x86 processors. The transition marked the Macintosh platforms second migration to a new CPU architecture, the first was the switch from the Motorola 68000 series architecture to the PowerPC architecture. Apples initial press release indicated the transition would begin by June 2006, and finish by the end of 2007, the Xserve servers were available in December 2006. Apple released Mac OS X v10.6 Snow Leopard on August 28,2009 as Intel-only, february 28,2006, Jobs announces that the Mac mini now also comes with an Intel Core chip, in either the Solo or Duo varieties. April 5,2006, Apple announced the release of Boot Camp, april 24,2006, Apple announces the 17 MacBook Pro, replacing the 17 PowerBook. April 27,2006, Intel announces that processors with the Core microarchitecture would be released sooner than previously thought. May 16,2006, Apple announces the 13 MacBook, replacing both the line and the 12 PowerBook. June 26,2006, Intel announces the Xeon 5100 series server/workstation CPU, july 5,2006, Apple announces a special educational configuration of the iMac, replacing the old G4 eMac. August 28,2009, Apple ships Mac OS X10.6 Snow Leopard, march 1,2011, The beta version of the then-upcoming Mac OS X Lion drops Rosetta and will not be able to run PowerPC based software. July 20,2011, The release of Mac OS X10.7 Lion formally ends Apples support of PowerPC-based software, August 7,2011, PowerPC hardware reaches vintage status having been discontinued five years earlier, ending most of Apples service and parts support for PowerPC hardware. June 11,2012, Apple releases iTunes 10.6.3, August 7,2013, PowerPC hardware reaches obsolete status having been discontinued seven years prior, ending all of Apples service and parts support for PowerPC hardware. The names of some of Apples desktop and laptop product lines changed between the PowerPC version and the corresponding Intel version, most notably, the word Power was dropped from all product lines. This was in reference to the fact that the previous PowerPC G5 processors were not energy efficient, and therefore used far too much power to be used in any portable Macs. The first known attempt to move to Intel platforms was the Star Trek project from spring 1992 to 1993, the ported System 7.1 ran on top of this environment. While the project was successful with running pre-beta versions it was stopped in 1993 after management, the core system was later released as part of Novell DOS7. Apple later transitioned the Macintosh from the earlier classic Mac OS to Mac OS X and it is not publicly known whether Apple maintains current builds for any other architectures although the related iOS runs on the iPhones ARM architecture. In particular, he cited the performance per watt projections in the roadmap provided by Intel and this is an especially important consideration in laptop design, which affects the hours of use per battery charge. In June 2003, Jobs had introduced Macs based on the PowerPC G5 processor and promised that within a year, two years later,3 GHz G5s were still not available, and rumors continued that IBMs low yields on the POWER4-derived chip were to blame
18.
Embedded system
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An embedded system is a computer system with a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electrical system, often with real-time computing constraints. It is embedded as part of a device often including hardware. Embedded systems control many devices in use today. Ninety-eight percent of all microprocessors are manufactured as components of embedded systems, examples of properties of typically embedded computers when compared with general-purpose counterparts are low power consumption, small size, rugged operating ranges, and low per-unit cost. This comes at the price of limited processing resources, which make them more difficult to program. For example, intelligent techniques can be designed to power consumption of embedded systems. Modern embedded systems are based on microcontrollers, but ordinary microprocessors are also common. In either case, the processor used may be ranging from general purpose to those specialised in certain class of computations. A common standard class of dedicated processors is the signal processor. Since the embedded system is dedicated to tasks, design engineers can optimize it to reduce the size and cost of the product and increase the reliability. Some embedded systems are mass-produced, benefiting from economies of scale, complexity varies from low, with a single microcontroller chip, to very high with multiple units, peripherals and networks mounted inside a large chassis or enclosure. One of the very first recognizably modern embedded systems was the Apollo Guidance Computer, an early mass-produced embedded system was the Autonetics D-17 guidance computer for the Minuteman missile, released in 1961. When the Minuteman II went into production in 1966, the D-17 was replaced with a new computer that was the first high-volume use of integrated circuits. Since these early applications in the 1960s, embedded systems have come down in price and there has been a rise in processing power. An early microprocessor for example, the Intel 4004, was designed for calculators and other systems but still required external memory. By the early 1980s, memory, input and output system components had been integrated into the chip as the processor forming a microcontroller. Microcontrollers find applications where a computer would be too costly. A comparatively low-cost microcontroller may be programmed to fulfill the role as a large number of separate components
19.
AmigaOne
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AmigaOne is a series of computers intended to run AmigaOS4 developed by Hyperion Entertainment, as a successor of the popular Amiga series by Commodore International. Earlier models were produced by Eyetech, and were based on the Teron series of PowerPC POP mainboards, in September 2009, Hyperion Entertainment secured exclusive licence for AmigaOne name and subsequently new AmigaOne computers were released by A-Eon Technology and Acube Systems. Originally in 2000, AmigaOne was the name of a project for new hardware to run Amiga Digital Environment. Initially it was managed by Eyetech and designed by the German company Escena GmbH, the AmigaOne motherboard was to be available in two models, the AmigaOne-1200 and the AmigaOne-4000 as expansion for Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 computers. This would probably not have been actually possible and this AmigaOne project was cancelled in the design stage in 2001, mostly due to the inability to find or design a suitable northbridge chip. Eyetech, who at this point had invested funds into the project, were forced instead to license the Teron CX board from Mai to form the basis of the new AmigaONE computer range, however, no such solution was ever introduced. While the MegArray connector is similar to the Apple Power Mac G4 CPU daughtercard connector. There were G3 and G4 options with a clock frequency of 800 MHz and 933 MHz. The G4 module originally used a Freescale 7451 processor which was changed to a Freescale 7455. The G4 CPU runs hotter and requires a better heatsink than that supplied on some machines, consequently, the G4 was often supplied underclocked to run at 800 MHz. In 2007 Acube offered 1.267 GHz 7457, the Micro-A1 was announced in two configurations, under the Micro-A1 I and Micro-A1 C labels. Only the C configuration was produced, both AmigaOneG3-XE and AmigaOneG4-XE has four 32-bit PCI-slots and one AGP-2x slot. The Micro-A1 has only one 32-bit PCI-slot and an integrated Radeon 7000 via AGP with dedicated 32 MB VRAM, when the AmigaOne boards first became available, AmigaOS4 was not ready, they were supplied with various Linux distributions. From April 2004 onwards, boards were shipped for developers with prerelease version of OS4, the Final Update of OS4 was released in December 2006, for AmigaOne computers only, with the PowerUP version being released in December 2007. AmigaOS4.1 for AmigaOne was released on September 2008, MAI Logic Inc. went bankrupt, and consequently the supply for the Eyetech AmigaOnes dried up. Eyetech Group Ltd retired from the market in 2005, in September 2009, as resolution of dispute over ownership of AmigaOS Hyperion was granted exclusive licence for AmigaOne name. This Settlement Agreement thus created legal basis for new generation of AmigaOne computers, the project was delayed but the new platform was launched in 2012 with AmigaOS4.1.5. In September 2011, Acube Systems introduced AmigaOne 500 based on Sam460ex mainboard, in October 2011, Hyperion Entertainment announced that it was launching an AmigaOne netbook in mid-2012, but it was announced at Amiwest 2013 that the netbook project had been cancelled
20.
AmigaOS 4
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AmigaOS4, is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS3.1 source code developed by Commodore, the Final Update was released on 24 December 2006 after five years of development by the Belgian company Hyperion Entertainment under license from Amiga, Inc. for AmigaOne registered users. During the five years of development, purchasers of AmigaOne machines could download pre-release versions of AmigaOS4.0 from Hyperions repository as long as these were made available. On 20 December 2006, Amiga, Inc abruptly terminated the contract with Hyperion Entertainment to produce or sell AmigaOS4, nevertheless, AmigaOS4.0 was released commercially for Amigas with PowerUP accelerator cards in November 2007. The Italian computer company ACube Systems has announced Sam440ep and Sam440ep-flex motherboards, also, a third party bootloader, known as the Moana, was released by Acube on torrent sites, it allows installation of the Sam440ep version of OS4 to Mac Mini G4s. However this is unofficial and unsupported as of today, and very incomplete, especially regarding drivers. During the judicial procedure, OS4 was still being developed and distributed, Hyperion has assured the Amiga community that it will continue the development and the distribution of AmigaOS4. x, as it has done since November 2001. AmigaOS4 can be divided into two parts, the Workbench and the Kickstart, the Workbench is the GUI of OS4, a graphical interface file manager and application launcher for the Operating System. The Kickstart contains many of the components of the OS. Prior to version 4 of AmigaOS the Kickstart had been released mostly on a ROM, in OS4 the Kickstart is instead stored on the hard disk. It consists mainly of, ExecSG, a multitasking kernel. ExecSG was licensed to Hyperion Entertainment by Thomas and Hans-Jörg Frieden, AmigaDOS and AmigaShell, the AmigaDOS is the disk operating system for the OS, whereas the Shell is the integrated Command Line Interface. The CLI and the GUI complement each other and share the same privileges, Petunia, a Motorola 68020 processor emulator with dynamic recompilation, also called just-in-time compilation, for PowerPC based Amigas. It gives OS4 backward compatibility to some extent, it only run system friendly AmigaOS3. x programs. For the programs that Petunia cant handle, such as most bang the hardware Amiga games and demos, there have been many different versions of the AmigaOS operating system during its three decades of history. The first AmigaOS was introduced in 1985 and developed by Commodore International, the first versions of AmigaOS are here indicated with the name of their original disks to preserve original custom. Workbench 2.0 improvements introduced a lot of major advances to the GUI of Amiga operating system, the blue and orange colour scheme was replaced with a grey and light blue with 3D aspect in the border of the windows. The Workbench was no longer tied to the 640×256 or 640×200 display modes, for the first time, a standardised look and feel was added
21.
IBM POWER Instruction Set Architecture
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POWER is a reduced instruction set computer instruction set architecture developed by IBM. The name is an acronym for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC, the ISA is used as base for high end microprocessors from IBM during the 1990s and were used in many of IBMs servers, minicomputers, workstations, and supercomputers. These processors are called POWER1 and POWER2, the POWER ISA was then abandoned. In 1974, IBM started a project with an objective of creating a large telephone-switching network with a potential capacity to deal with at least 300 calls per second. It was projected that 20,000 machine instructions would be required to each call while maintaining a real-time response. By 1975 the telephone switch project was canceled without a prototype, watson Research Center building #801, on the 801 project. To increase performance, Cheetah had separate branch, fixed-point, many changes were made to the 801 design to allow for multiple-execution-units. In February 1990, the first computers from IBM to incorporate the POWER instruction set were called the RISC System/6000 or RS/6000 and these RS/6000 computers were divided into two classes, workstations and servers, and hence introduced as the POWERstation and POWERserver. The RS/6000 CPU had 2 configurations, called the RIOS-1 and RIOS.9, a single-chip implementation of RIOS, RSC, was developed for lower-end RS/6000s, the first machines using RSC were released in 1992. IBM started the POWER2 processor effort as a successor to the POWER1 two years before the creation of the 1991 Apple/IBM/Motorola alliance in Austin, Texas, despite being impacted by diversion of resources to jump start the Apple/IBM/Motorola effort, the POWER2 took five years from start to system shipment. By adding a second fixed-point unit, a floating point unit, and other performance enhancements to the design. New instructions were added to the instruction set, Quad-word storage instructions. The quad-word load instruction moves two adjacent double-precision values into two adjacent floating-point registers, P2SC combined all of the separate POWER2 instruction cache, fixed point, floating point, storage control, and data cache chips onto one huge die. At the time of its introduction, P2SC was the largest and highest transistor count processor in the industry, P2SC was the processor used in the 1997 IBM Deep Blue chess playing supercomputer which beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov. With its twin sophisticated MAF floating point units and huge wide and low latency memory interfaces, P2SC was primarily targeted at engineering and scientific applications. P2SC was eventually succeeded by the POWER3, which included 64-bit, SMP capability, the POWER design is descended directly from the earlier 801 CPU, widely considered to be the first true RISC processor design. The 801 was used in a number of applications inside IBM hardware, at about the same time the PC/RT was being released, IBM started the America Project, to design the most powerful CPU on the market. They were interested primarily in fixing two problems in the 801 design, The 801 required all instructions to complete in one clock cycle, although the decoder was pipelined as a side effect of these single-cycle operations, they didnt use superscalar effects
22.
Operating system
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An operating system is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs. All computer programs, excluding firmware, require a system to function. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer – from cellular phones, the dominant desktop operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 83. 3%. MacOS by Apple Inc. is in place, and the varieties of Linux is in third position. Linux distributions are dominant in the server and supercomputing sectors, other specialized classes of operating systems, such as embedded and real-time systems, exist for many applications. A single-tasking system can run one program at a time. Multi-tasking may be characterized in preemptive and co-operative types, in preemptive multitasking, the operating system slices the CPU time and dedicates a slot to each of the programs. Unix-like operating systems, e. g. Solaris, Linux, cooperative multitasking is achieved by relying on each process to provide time to the other processes in a defined manner. 16-bit versions of Microsoft Windows used cooperative multi-tasking, 32-bit versions of both Windows NT and Win9x, used preemptive multi-tasking. Single-user operating systems have no facilities to distinguish users, but may allow multiple programs to run in tandem, a distributed operating system manages a group of distinct computers and makes them appear to be a single computer. The development of networked computers that could be linked and communicate with each other gave rise to distributed computing, distributed computations are carried out on more than one machine. When computers in a work in cooperation, they form a distributed system. The technique is used both in virtualization and cloud computing management, and is common in large server warehouses, embedded operating systems are designed to be used in embedded computer systems. They are designed to operate on small machines like PDAs with less autonomy and they are able to operate with a limited number of resources. They are very compact and extremely efficient by design, Windows CE and Minix 3 are some examples of embedded operating systems. A real-time operating system is a system that guarantees to process events or data by a specific moment in time. A real-time operating system may be single- or multi-tasking, but when multitasking, early computers were built to perform a series of single tasks, like a calculator. Basic operating system features were developed in the 1950s, such as resident monitor functions that could run different programs in succession to speed up processing
23.
IBM POWER microprocessors
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IBM has a series of high performance microprocessors called POWER followed by a number designating generation, i. e. POWER1, POWER2, POWER3 and so forth up to the latest POWER9. These processors have used by IBM in their RS/6000, AS/400, pSeries, iSeries, System p, System i. They have also used in data storage devices by IBM and by other server manufacturers like Bull. The POWERn family of processors were developed in the late 1980s and are still in active development nearly 30 years later, in the beginning, they utilized the POWER instruction set architecture, but that evolved into PowerPC in later generations and then to Power Architecture. Today, only the naming scheme remains the same, modern POWER processors do not use the POWER ISA, in 1974 IBM started a project to build a telephone switching computer with, for the time, immense computational power. When the telephone switch project was cancelled IBM kept the design for the general purpose processor, many changes were made to the 801 design to allow for multiple execution units and the Cheetah processor had separate branch prediction, fixed-point, and floating-point execution units. By 1984 CMOS was chosen since it allowed an increase in the level of integration while improving transistor-logic performance. This was to become the first POWER processors using the first POWER ISA, in February 1990, the first computers from IBM to incorporate the POWER ISA were called the RISC System/6000 or RS/6000. These RS/6000 computers were divided into two classes, workstations and servers, and hence introduced as the POWERstation and POWERserver, the RS/6000 CPU had 2 configurations, called the RIOS-1 and RIOS.9. The POWER1 is the first microprocessor that used register renaming and out-of-order execution, a simplified and less powerful version of the 10 chip RIOS-1 was made in 1992 was developed for lower-end RS/6000s. It used only one chip and was called RISC Single Chip or RSC, RIOS-1 – the original 10-chip version RIOS. The POWER2 was a design, but IBM also made a single chip design of it. At the time of its introduction in 1996, the P2SC was the largest processor with the highest transistor count in the industry and was a leader in floating point operations. IBM joined the discussion and the three founded the AIM alliance to build the PowerPC ISA, heavily based on the POWER ISA, but with additions from both Apple and Motorola. It was to be a complete 32/64 bit RISC architecture, with a promise to range from low end embedded microcontrollers to the very high end supercomputer and server applications. After two years of development, the resulting PowerPC ISA was introduced in 1993 and it also added a 64-bit version of the ISA and support for SMP. The POWER3 began its life as PowerPC630, a successor of the commercially unsuccessful PowerPC620 and it used a combination of the POWER2 ISA and the 32/64-bit PowerPC ISA set with support for SMP and single-chip implementation. It was used to great extent in IBMs RS/6000 computers, while the second generation version, the POWER3 was the last processor to use a POWER instruction set, all subsequent models used some version of the PowerPC instruction set
24.
ROMP
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The ROMP or Research OPD Micro Processor was a 10 MHz RISC microprocessor designed by IBM in the early 1980s. It is also known in circles as 032. OPD stands for Office Products Division, the division of IBM which originated the processor, the ROMP was manufactured on a 2 µm process with 45,000 transistors, saw first in silicon in 1981, and was originally developed to be used in office equipment and small computers. It was intended as a follow-on to a mid-1970s processor called the OPD Mini Processor, ROMP originally was shipped in the IBM RT/PC line, announced in 1986, and was later used in an IBM laser printer. For a time the IBM RT/PC was planned to be a personal computer, however, the software was targeted more towards engineering workstations. The original ROMP had a 24-bit Reduced Instruction Set Computer architecture developed by IBM and it was originally implemented in a 2 µm NMOS technology. It had sixteen 32-bit general purpose registers and used 32-bit addresses, the microprocessor was controlled by 118 simple two- and four-byte instructions. Internal processor organization enabled the CPU to execute most register-to-register instructions in a single cycle, an IBM-developed advanced memory management chip provided virtual memory address translation functions and memory control. The architectural work started in spring of 1977, as a spin-off of the T. J. Most of the changes were for cost reductions, such as adding 16-bit instructions for byte-efficiency. The first chips were ready in early 1981 and this delay was caused by overly ambitious software plans for the RT/PC and its operating system. This OS virtualized the hardware and could host multiple other operating systems and this technology, called virtualization, while commonplace in mainframe systems, only began to gain traction in smaller systems in the 21st century. The IBM RT/PC consequently fell behind competitors such as Sun Microsystems, the IBM RT PC ROMP processor and memory management unit architecture VLSI RISC Architecture and Organization, Stephen Bo Furber
25.
RS/6000
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RISC System/6000, or RS/6000 for short, is a family of RISC-based UNIX servers, workstations and supercomputers made by IBM in the 1990s. The RS/6000 family replaced the IBM RT computer platform in February 1990 and was the first computer line to see the use of IBMs POWER, RS/6000 was renamed eServer pSeries in October 2000. The first generations of RS/6000 systems used the Micro Channel bus technology, some later models used the standardized PReP and CHRP platforms, co-developed with Apple and Motorola, with Open Firmware. Linux is widely used on CHRP based RS/6000s, but support was added after the RS/6000 name was changed to eServer pSeries in 2000, RS/6000 types of computers are the POWERserver servers, POWERstation workstations and Scalable POWERparallel supercomputer platform. While most machines were desktops, desksides, or rack mounted, there was a laptop model too, some models were marketed under the RS/6000 POWERstation and POWERserver names. The Model N40 was PowerPC-based notebook developed and manufactured by Tadpole Technology for IBM and it became available on 25 March 1994, priced at US$12,000. The internal batteries could power the system for 45 minutes only and these workstations were marketed under the PowerStation name. This type was for Xstations, IBMs line of X terminal, the 380,390, and 39H servers correspond to the 3AT, 3BT, and 3CT workstations. Many RS/6000 and subsequent pSeries machines came with a service processor, the service processor could call a phone number in case of serious failure with the machine. Late in the RS/6000 cycle, the processor was converged with the one used on the AS/400 machines. IBM POWER microprocessors IBM AIX IBM Scalable POWERparallel IBM pSeries IBM System p General 27 years of IBM RISC IBM Archives, A Brief History of RISC, the IBM RS/6000 and the IBM eServer pSeries
26.
POWER1
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The POWER1 is a multi-chip CPU developed and fabricated by IBM that implemented the POWER instruction set architecture. The POWER1 was introduced in 1990, with the introduction of the IBM RS/6000 POWERserver servers and POWERstation workstations, the POWER1 received two upgrades, one in 1991, with the introduction of the POWER1+ and in 1992, with the introduction of POWER1++. These upgraded versions were clocked higher than the original POWER1, made possible by improved semiconductor processes, in September 1993, the POWER1 and its variants was succeeded by the POWER2, an evolution of the POWER1 microarchitecture. An indirect derivative of the POWER1 is the PowerPC601, a variant of the RSC intended for consumer applications. The POWER1 is notable as it represented a number firsts for IBM and it was IBMs first RISC processor intended for high-end applications, it was the first to implement the then new POWER instruction set architecture and it was IBMs first successful RISC processor. The POWER1 was also the origin for the highly successful families of POWER, PowerPC and Power Architecture processors that followed it, the open source GCC compiler removed support for POWER1 and POWER2 in the 4.5 release. The POWER1 is a 32-bit two-way superscalar CPU and it contains three major execution units, a fixed-point unit, a branch unit and a floating point unit. Although the POWER1 is a 32-bit CPU with a 32-bit physical address, the larger virtual address space was chosen because it was beneficial for the performance of applications, allowing each one to have a large 4 GB address range. The POWER1 is a big-endian CPU that uses a Harvard style cache hierarchy with separate instruction, the instruction cache, referred to as the I-cache by IBM, is 8 KB in size and is two-way set associative with a line size of 64 bytes. The I-cache is located on the ICU chip, the data cache, referred to as the D-cache by IBM, is 32 KB in size for RIOS.9 configurations and 64 KB in size for RIOS-1 configurations. The D-cache is four-way set associative with a size of 128 bytes. The D-cache employs a scheme, where data that is to be stored is written to the cache instead of the memory in order to reduce the number of writes destined for the memory. The store-back scheme is used to prevent the CPU from monopolizing access to the memory, as the POWER1 was the basis of the POWER2 and P2SC microprocessors, the lack of multiprocessing was passed on to these later POWER processors. Multiprocessing was not supported until the introduction of the POWER3 in 1998, the POWER1 is a multi-chip CPU built from separate chips that are connected to each other by buses. The POWER1 consists of a unit, a fixed-point unit, a floating point unit, a number of data-cache units, a storage-control unit. Due to its design, IBM was able to create two configurations by simply varying the number of DCUs, RIOS-1 and a RIOS.9. The RIOS-1 configuration has four DCUs, the amount, and was clocked at up to 40 MHz. The chips are mounted on the “CPU planar”, a circuit board
27.
Superscalar processor
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A superscalar processor is a CPU that implements a form of parallelism called instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. It therefore allows for more throughput than would otherwise be possible at a clock rate. A superscalar processor can execute more than one instruction during a cycle by simultaneously dispatching multiple instructions to different execution units on the processor. Each execution unit is not a processor, but an execution resource within a single CPU such as an arithmetic logic unit. In Flynns taxonomy, a superscalar processor is classified as an SISD processor, though many superscalar processors support short vector operations. A multi-core superscalar processor is classified as an MIMD processor, while a superscalar CPU is typically also pipelined, pipelining and superscalar execution are considered different performance enhancement techniques. The Motorola MC88100, the Intel i960CA and the AMD 29000-series 29050 microprocessors were the first commercial single-chip superscalar microprocessors, RISC microprocessors like these were the first to have superscalar execution, because RISC architectures frees transistors and die area which could be used to include multiple execution units. Except for CPUs used in applications, embedded systems, and battery-powered devices. The simplest processors are scalar processors, each instruction executed by a scalar processor typically manipulates one or two data items at a time. By contrast, each executed by a vector processor operates simultaneously on many data items. An analogy is the difference between scalar and vector arithmetic, a superscalar processor is a mixture of the two. Each instruction processes one data item, but there are multiple execution units within each CPU thus multiple instructions can be processing separate data items concurrently, superscalar CPU design emphasizes improving the instruction dispatcher accuracy, and allowing it to keep the multiple execution units in use at all times. This has become important as the number of units has increased. While early superscalar CPUs would have two ALUs and a single FPU, a modern design such as the PowerPC970 includes four ALUs, two FPUs, and two SIMD units. If the dispatcher is ineffective at keeping all of these units fed with instructions, a superscalar processor usually sustains an execution rate in excess of one instruction per machine cycle. In a superscalar CPU the dispatcher reads instructions from memory and decides which ones can be run in parallel, therefore, a superscalar processor can be envisioned having multiple parallel pipelines, each of which is processing instructions simultaneously from a single instruction thread. Available performance improvement from superscalar techniques is limited by three key areas, The degree of parallelism in the instruction stream. The complexity and time cost of dependency checking logic and register renaming circuitry The branch instruction processing, existing binary executable programs have varying degrees of intrinsic parallelism
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RISC Single Chip
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The RISC Single Chip, or RSC, is a single-chip microprocessor developed and fabricated by International Business Machines. The RSC was a feature-reduced single-chip implementation of the POWER1, a central processing unit which implemented the POWER instruction set architecture. It was used in entry-level workstation models of the IBM RS/6000 family, the RSC operated at frequencies of 33 and 45 MHz. It has three units, a fixed point unit, floating point unit and branch processor. The fixed point unit executes integer instructions, generates addresses in load store operations and it has a three-stage pipeline consisting of decode, execute and writeback stages. Some instructions require several cycles in the stage before they are completed. The floating point unit executes floating point instructions, unlike the POWER1, the RSC does not have register renaming capability due to a limited die area in which the unit must fit in. To further save die area, the floating point multiply-add array is 32 bits wide, to perform 64-bit operations, the operands are broken into two, and the instruction passes twice through the multiply-add array. The floating point pipeline consists of four stages, decode, multiply, add, the RSC has an 8 KB unified cache instead of the separate instruction and large data caches like the POWER1. The unified cache is two-way set associative and uses a policy with no reload on a store miss. It has a line size of 64 bytes, and each cache line is sectored into four quadwords. During each cycle, four words can be read from it, the memory data bus is 72 bits wide, with a 64 bits used for the data path and 8 bits used for error correcting code. The memory interface unit manages the bus and performs ECC checks on data coming into the processor, the ECC logic is capable of correcting single-bit errors. Compared to the POWER1, the RSC memory data bus is narrower and it is packaged in a 36 mm by 36 mm ceramic pin grid array module which had 201 signal pins. It required a 3.6 volt power supply and consumed 4 watts during operation at 33 MHz, PowerPC601 which essentially was a cheaper and less powerful version of RSC with some PowerPC instructions added. RAD6000 which is a radiation hardened version of RSC, moore, C. R. Balser, D. M. Muhich, J. S. and East, R. E. Proceedings of the 1991 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design on VLSI in Computer & Processors, archived from the original on 2013-10-04. CS1 maint, Multiple names, authors list
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P5 (microarchitecture)
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The first Pentium microprocessor was introduced by Intel on March 22,1993. Dubbed P5, its microarchitecture was the fifth generation for Intel, in 1996, the Pentium with MMX Technology was introduced with the same basic microarchitecture complemented with an MMX instruction set, larger caches, and some other enhancements. Intels Larrabee multicore architecture project uses a processor core derived from a P5 core, augmented by multithreading, 64-bit instructions, Intels low-powered Bonnell microarchitecture employed in early Atom processor cores also uses an in-order dual pipeline similar to P5. The P5 microarchitecture was designed by the same Santa Clara team which designed the 386 and 486, design work started in 1989, the team decided to use a superscalar architecture, with on-chip cache, floating-point, and branch prediction. The preliminary design was first successfully simulated in 1990, followed by the laying-out of the design, by this time, the team had several dozen engineers. The design was taped out, or transferred to silicon, in April 1992, by mid-1992, the P5 team had 200 engineers. John H. Crawford, chief architect of the original 386, co-managed the design of the P5, along with Donald Alpert, dror Avnon managed the design of the FPU. Vinod K. Dham was general manager of the P5 group, the P5 microarchitecture brings several important advancements over the preceding i486 architecture. Performance, Superscalar architecture — The Pentium has two datapaths that allow it to two instructions per clock cycle in many cases. The main pipe can handle any instruction, while the other can handle the most common simple instructions, some RISC proponents had argued that the complicated x86 instruction set would probably never be implemented by a tightly pipelined microarchitecture, much less by a dual pipeline design. The 486 and the Pentium demonstrated that this was indeed possible and feasible, separation of code and data caches lessens the fetch and operand read/write conflicts compared to the 486. To reduce access time and implementation cost, both of them are 2-way associative, instead of the single 4-way cache of the 486. A related enhancement in the Pentium is the ability to read a block from the code cache even when it is split between two cache lines. Some instructions showed an improvement, most notably FMUL, with up to 15 times higher throughput than in the 80486 FPU. The Pentium is also able to execute a FXCH ST instruction in parallel with an ordinary FPU instruction, four-input address-adders enables the Pentium to further reduce the address calculation latency compared to the 80486. The microcode can employ both pipelines to enable auto-repeating instructions such as rep movsw perform one iteration every clock cycle, while the 80486 needed three clocks per iteration, some examples are, CALL, RET, shifts/rotates, etc. Virtualized interrupt to speed up virtual 8086 mode, other features, Enhanced debug features with the introduction of the Processor-based debug port. Enhanced self test features like the L1 cache parity check, new instructions, CPUID, CMPXCHG8B, RDTSC, RDMSR, WRMSR, RSM
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Motorola 88000
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The 88000 is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Motorola. The 88000 was Motorolas attempt at a home-grown RISC architecture, started in the 1980s, the 88000 arrived on the market some two years after the competing SPARC and MIPS. Due to the start and extensive delays releasing the second-generation MC88110. Originally called the 78000 as a homage to their famed 68000 series and this initial version generally required a separate MMU, and saw little use. A follow-on version combining the CPU and MMU was planned, there was an attempt to popularize the system with the 88open group, similar to what Sun Microsystems was attempting with their SPARC design. It appears to have failed in any practical sense, in the early 1990s Motorola joined the AIM effort to create a new RISC architecture based on the IBM POWER architecture. They worked a few features of the 88000 into the new PowerPC architecture to offer their customer base some sort of upgrade path, at that point the 88000 was dumped as soon as possible. Like the 68000 before it, the 88000 was considered to be a clean design. It was a pure 32-bit load/store architecture, using separate instruction and data caches and it had a small but powerful command set, and, like all Motorola CPUs, did not use memory segmentation. A major architectural mistake was that both integer instructions and floating-point instructions used the register file. This required the single file to have sufficient read and write ports to support both the integer execution unit and the floating-point unit. The connections for each port is a capacitive load that must be driven by register memory cell. This made it difficult to build high frequency superscalar implementations. The first implementation of the 88000 ISA was the MC88100 microprocessor, mated to this was the MC88200 MMU and cache controller. The idea behind this splitting of duties was to allow systems to be built more easily. However, this meant that building the most basic system, with a single processor. This is likely another reason for the 88000s limited success. This was later addressed by the superscalar MC88110, which combined the CPU, FPU, MMU, an additional modification, made at the behest of MITs *T project, resulted in the MC88110MP, including on-chip communications for use in multi-processor systems
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Motorola 68000
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The Motorola 68000 is a 32-bit CISC microprocessor with a 16-bit external data bus, designed and marketed by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector. After 38 years in production, the 68000 architecture is still in use, the 68000 grew out of the MACSS project, begun in 1976 to develop an entirely new architecture without backward compatibility. It would be a higher-power sibling complementing the existing 8-bit 6800 line rather than a compatible successor, in the end, the 68000 did retain a bus protocol compatibility mode for existing 6800 peripheral devices, and a version with an 8-bit data bus was produced. However, the designers focused on the future, or forward compatibility. For instance, the CPU registers are 32 bits wide, though few self-contained structures in the processor itself operate on 32 bits at a time. The MACSS team drew heavily on the influence of minicomputer processor design, such as the PDP-11 and VAX systems, in the mid 1970s, the 8-bit microprocessor manufacturers raced to introduce the 16-bit generation. National Semiconductor had been first with its IMP-16 and PACE processors in 1973–1975, Intel had worked on their advanced 16/32-bit Intel iAPX432 since 1975 and their Intel 8086 since 1976. Arriving late to the 16-bit arena afforded the new processor more transistors, 32-bit macroinstructions, the original MC68000 was fabricated using an HMOS process with a 3.5 µm feature size. Formally introduced in September 1979, Initial samples were released in February 1980, Initial speed grades were 4,6, and 8 MHz.10 MHz chips became available during 1981, and 12.5 MHz chips by June 1982. The 16.67 MHz 12F version of the MC68000, the fastest version of the original HMOS chip, was not produced until the late 1980s, tom Gunter, retired Corporate Vice President at Motorola, is known as the Father of the 68000. The 68000 was used in Microsoft Xenix systems as well as an early NetWare Unix-based Server, the 68000 was used in the first generation of desktop laser printers including the original Apple Inc. In 1982, the 68000 received an update to its ISA allowing it to virtual memory and to conform to the Popek. The updated chip was called the 68010, a further extended version which exposed 31 bits of the address bus was also produced, in small quantities, as the 68012. To support lower-cost systems and control applications with smaller sizes, Motorola introduced the 8-bit compatible MC68008. This was a 68000 with an 8-bit data bus and an address bus. After 1982, Motorola devoted more attention to the 68020 and 88000 projects, several other companies were second-source manufacturers of the HMOS68000. These included Hitachi, who shrank the size to 2.7 µm for their 12.5 MHz version, Mostek, Rockwell, Signetics, Thomson/SGS-Thomson. Toshiba was also a maker of the CMOS 68HC000
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Data General
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Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms from the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation and their first product, the Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicomputer. The Nova was followed by the Supernova and Eclipse product lines, the company employed an original equipment manufacturer sales strategy to sell to third parties who incorporated Data General computers into the OEMs specific product lines. The company did continue into the 1990s, however, and was acquired by EMC Corporation in 2002. Data General was founded by engineers from Digital Equipment Corporation who were frustrated with DECs management. The chief founders were Edson de Castro, Henry Burkhardt III, and Richard Sogge of Digital Equipment, the company was founded in Hudson, Massachusetts in 1968. Edson de Castro was the engineer in charge of the PDP-8. It was designed specifically to be used in laboratory equipment settings, as the technology improved, many PDP-8s still operated decades later. De Castro, convinced he could do one better, began work on his new 16-bit design, the result was released in 1969 as the Nova. Designed to be rack-mounted similarly to the later PDP-8 machines, it was smaller in height, with the initial success of the Nova, Data General went public in the fall of 1969. The Nova, like the PDP-8, used a simple accumulator-based architecture, the original Nova was soon followed by the faster SuperNova, then later by several minor versions based on the SuperNova core. The last major version, the Nova 4, was released in 1978, during this period the Nova generated 20% annual growth rates for the company, becoming a star in the business community and generating US$100 million in sales in 1975. In 1977, DG launched a 16-bit microcomputer called the microNOVA to poor commercial success, the Nova series plays a very important role as instruction-set inspiration to Charles P. Thacker and others at Xerox PARC during their construction of the Xerox Alto. In 1974, the Nova was supplanted by their upscale 16-bit machine, based on many of the same concepts as the Nova, it included support for virtual memory and multitasking more suitable to the small office environment. For this reason, the Eclipse was packaged differently, in a case resembling a small refrigerator. Production problems with the Eclipse led to a rash of lawsuits in the late 1970s, newer versions of the machine were pre-ordered by many of DGs customers, which were never delivered. Many customers sued Data General after more than a year of waiting, charging the company with breach of contract, while others simply canceled their orders and went elsewhere. Strong demand continued for the Nova series, resulting in the Nova 4, in 1976, Digital announced the VAX series, their first 32-bit minicomputer line, described as super-minis
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Microsoft
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Its best known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, Microsoft Office office suite, and Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface tablet lineup, as of 2016, it was the worlds largest software maker by revenue, and one of the worlds most valuable companies. Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4,1975, to develop and it rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows. The companys 1986 initial public offering, and subsequent rise in its share price, since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market and has made a number of corporate acquisitions. In May 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype Technologies for $8.5 billion, in June 2012, Microsoft entered the personal computer production market for the first time, with the launch of the Microsoft Surface, a line of tablet computers. The word Microsoft is a portmanteau of microcomputer and software, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, childhood friends with a passion for computer programming, sought to make a successful business utilizing their shared skills. In 1972 they founded their first company, named Traf-O-Data, which offered a computer that tracked and analyzed automobile traffic data. Allen went on to pursue a degree in science at Washington State University. The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics featured Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systemss Altair 8800 microcomputer, Allen suggested that they could program a BASIC interpreter for the device, after a call from Gates claiming to have a working interpreter, MITS requested a demonstration. Since they didnt actually have one, Allen worked on a simulator for the Altair while Gates developed the interpreter and they officially established Microsoft on April 4,1975, with Gates as the CEO. Allen came up with the name of Micro-Soft, as recounted in a 1995 Fortune magazine article. In August 1977 the company formed an agreement with ASCII Magazine in Japan, resulting in its first international office, the company moved to a new home in Bellevue, Washington in January 1979. Microsoft entered the OS business in 1980 with its own version of Unix, however, it was MS-DOS that solidified the companys dominance. For this deal, Microsoft purchased a CP/M clone called 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, branding it as MS-DOS, following the release of the IBM PC in August 1981, Microsoft retained ownership of MS-DOS. Since IBM copyrighted the IBM PC BIOS, other companies had to engineer it in order for non-IBM hardware to run as IBM PC compatibles. Due to various factors, such as MS-DOSs available software selection, the company expanded into new markets with the release of the Microsoft Mouse in 1983, as well as with a publishing division named Microsoft Press. Paul Allen resigned from Microsoft in 1983 after developing Hodgkins disease, while jointly developing a new OS with IBM in 1984, OS/2, Microsoft released Microsoft Windows, a graphical extension for MS-DOS, on November 20,1985. Once Microsoft informed IBM of NT, the OS/2 partnership deteriorated, in 1990, Microsoft introduced its office suite, Microsoft Office
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Windows NT 3.51
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Windows NT3.51 is the third release of Microsofts Windows NT line of operating systems. It was released on May 30,1995, nine months after Windows NT3.5, the release provided two notable feature improvements, firstly NT3.51 was the first of a short-lived outing of Microsoft Windows on the PowerPC architecture. The second most significant enhancement offered through the release was that it provides support for interoperating with Windows 95. Windows NT4.0 became its successor a year later, the release of Windows NT3.51 was dubbed the PowerPC release at Microsoft. Editions of NT3.51 were also released for the x86, MIPS, new features introduced in Windows NT3. In view of the significant difference in the base, Windows NT3.51 is readily able to run a large number of Win32 applications designed for Windows 95.51 interface. This is probably because 32-bit versions of Internet Explorer 4.0 and later integrated with the Windows 95 desktop, thereafter, up to IE5.0, but no later 5. x versions, were offered. However, the open-source SeaMonkey internet suite does support this flavor of Windows, version 1.1.17 may work out of the box, while version 1.1.19 from 16 March 2010 requires a few manual file updates to work without compromising browsing security. On 26 May 1995, Microsoft released a test version of a refresh, named the Shell Technology Preview. This was the first incarnation of the modern Windows GUI with the Taskbar and it was designed to replace the Windows 3. x Program Manager/File Manager based shell with Windows Explorer-based graphical user interface. The release provided capabilities quite similar to that of the Windows Chicago shell during its late beta phases, however, there was a second public release of the Shell Technology Preview, called Shell Technology Preview Update made available to MSDN and CompuServe users on 8 August 1995. Both releases held Windows Explorer builds of 3.51.1053.1, the Shell Technology Preview program never saw a final release under NT3.51. The entire program was moved across to the Cairo development group who finally integrated the new design into the NT code with the release of NT4.0 in July 1996. Five Service Packs were released for NT3.51, which introduced both bug fixes and new features, Service Pack 5, for example, fixed issues related to the Year 2000 problem. NT3.51 was the last of the series to run on an Intel 80386 processor. This, its ability to use HPFS partitions, and its ability to run at least some of the common control API, means that it still finds a place for occasional use on older machines. Windows NT3.51, like versions of Windows NT3. x, has some compatibility with OS/21. x Applications, however. Supported EIDE addressing schemes include logical block addressing, ONTrack Disk Manager, EZDrive, HPC, Factor Windows NT3.51 Patches & Updates Guide More Information Shell Update Release Shell Update Release
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Sun Microsystems
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Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24,1982, at its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center. On January 27,2010, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun by for US$7.4 billion, other technologies include the Java platform, MySQL, and NFS. Sun was a proponent of open systems in general and Unix in particular, the initial design for what became Suns first Unix workstation, the Sun-1, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Bechtolsheim originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation and it was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced memory management unit to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanfords Department of Computer Science, on February 24,1982, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution. The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network, Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982. By 1983 Sun was known for producing 68000-based systems with high-quality graphics that were the only computers other than DECs VAX to run 4. 2BSD and it licensed the computer design to other manufacturers, which typically used it to build Multibus-based systems running Unix from UniSoft. Suns initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW, the symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA, Sun stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented the companys current strategy. Suns logo, which features four interleaved copies of the sun in the form of a rotationally symmetric ambigram, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was rotated to stand on one corner and re-colored purple. In the dot-com bubble, Sun began making more money. It also began spending more, hiring workers and building itself out. Some of this was because of demand, but much was from web start-up companies anticipating business that would never happen. Sales in Suns important hardware division went into free-fall as customers closed shop, several quarters of steep losses led to executive departures, rounds of layoffs, and other cost cutting. In December 2001, the fell to the 1998, pre-bubble level of about $100. But it kept falling, faster than many other tech companies, a year later it had dipped below $10 but bounced back to $20
