TX-2
The MIT Lincoln Laboratory TX-2 computer was the successor to the Lincoln TX-0 and was known for its role in advancing both artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction. Wesley A. Clark was the chief architect of the TX-2; the TX-2 was a transistor-based computer using the then-huge amount of 64K 36-bit words of core memory. The TX-2 became operational in 1958; because of its powerful capabilities Ivan Sutherland's revolutionary Sketchpad program was developed for and ran on the TX-2. One of its key features was its possibility to directly interact with the computer through screen. Digital Equipment Corporation was a spin-off of the TX-2 projects. A TX-1 was planned as the successor for the TX-0, but the project was deemed too ambitious and was scaled back to the TX-2; the TX-2 Tape System was a block addressable 1/2" tape developed for the TX-2 by Tom Stockebrand which evolved into LINCtape and DECtape. Dr. Leonard Kleinrock developed the mathematical theory of packet networks which he simulated on the TX-2 computer at Lincoln Lab.
TX-2 documentation at bitsavers.org Interview with UCLA's Dr. Leonard Kleinrock
Handwriting recognition
Handwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, touch-screens and other devices. The image of the written text may be sensed "off line" from a piece of paper by optical scanning or intelligent word recognition. Alternatively, the movements of the pen tip may be sensed "on line", for example by a pen-based computer screen surface, a easier task as there are more clues available. Handwriting recognition principally entails optical character recognition. However, a complete handwriting recognition system handles formatting, performs correct segmentation into characters and finds the most plausible words. Off-line handwriting recognition involves the automatic conversion of text in an image into letter codes which are usable within computer and text-processing applications; the data obtained by this form is regarded as a static representation of handwriting. Off-line handwriting recognition is comparatively difficult, as different people have different handwriting styles.
And, as of today, OCR engines are focused on machine printed text and ICR for hand "printed" text. Narrowing the problem domain helps increase the accuracy of handwriting recognition systems. A form field for a U. S. ZIP code, for example, would contain only the characters 0-9; this fact would reduce the number of possible identifications. Primary techniques: Specifying specific character ranges Utilization of specialized forms Off-line character recognition involves scanning a form or document written sometime in the past; this means. Tools exist. However, there are several common imperfections in this step; the most common is when characters that are connected are returned as a single sub-image containing both characters. This causes a major problem in the recognition stage, yet many algorithms are available. After the extraction of individual characters occurs, a recognition engine is used to identify the corresponding computer character. Several different recognition techniques are available. Feature extraction works in a similar fashion to neural network recognizers.
However, programmers must manually determine the properties. Some example properties might be: Aspect Ratio. Percent of pixels above horizontal half point Percent of pixels to right of vertical half point Number of strokes Average distance from image center Is reflected y axis Is reflected x axisThis approach gives the recognizer more control over the properties used in identification, yet any system using this approach requires more development time than a neural network because the properties are not learned automatically. Where traditional techniques focus on segmenting individual characters for recognition, modern techniques focus on recognizing all the characters in a segmented line of text, they focus on machine learning techniques which are able to learn visual features, avoiding the limiting feature engineering used. State-of-the-art methods use convolutional networks to extract visual features over several overlapping windows of a text line image which an RNN uses to produce character probabilities.
On-line handwriting recognition involves the automatic conversion of text as it is written on a special digitizer or PDA, where a sensor picks up the pen-tip movements as well as pen-up/pen-down switching. This kind of data is known as digital ink and can be regarded as a digital representation of handwriting; the obtained signal is converted into letter codes which are usable within computer and text-processing applications. The elements of an on-line handwriting recognition interface include: a pen or stylus for the user to write with. A touch sensitive surface, which may be integrated with, or adjacent to, an output display. A software application which interprets the movements of the stylus across the writing surface, translating the resulting strokes into digital text, and an off-line recognition is the problem. The process of online handwriting recognition can be broken down into a few general steps: preprocessing, feature extraction and classificationThe purpose of preprocessing is to discard irrelevant information in the input data, that can negatively affect the recognition.
This concerns accuracy. Preprocessing consists of binarization, sampling and denoising; the second step is feature extraction. Out of the two- or more-dimensional vector field received from the preprocessing algorithms, higher-dimensional data is extracted; the purpose of this step is to highlight important information for the recognition model. This data may include information like velocity or the changes of writing direction; the last big step is classification. In this step various models are used to map the extracted features to different classes and thus identifying the characters or words the features represent. Commercial products incorporating handwriting recognition as a replacement for keyboard input were introduced in the early 1980s. Examples include handwriting terminals such as the Pencept Penpad and the Inforite point-of-sale terminal. With the advent of the large consumer market for personal computers, several commercial products were introduced to replace the keyboard and mouse on a personal computer with a single pointing/handwriting system, such as those from PenCept, CIC and others.
The first commercially available tablet-type portable computer was the GRiDPad from GRiD Systems, released in September 1989. Its operating system was based
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, MIT adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering; the Institute is a land-grant, sea-grant, space-grant university, with a campus that extends more than a mile alongside the Charles River. Its influence in the physical sciences and architecture, more in biology, linguistics and social science and art, has made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world. MIT is ranked among the world's top universities; as of March 2019, 93 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 73 Marshall Scholars, 45 Rhodes Scholars, 41 astronauts, 16 Chief Scientists of the US Air Force have been affiliated with MIT.
The school has a strong entrepreneurial culture, the aggregated annual revenues of companies founded by MIT alumni would rank as the tenth-largest economy in the world. MIT is a member of the Association of American Universities. In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a "Conservatory of Art and Science", but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by the governor of Massachusetts on April 10, 1861. Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia, wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances, he did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that: The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.
The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories. Two days after MIT was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT's first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865; the new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions "to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes" and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay. MIT was informally called "Boston Tech"; the institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker.
Programs in electrical, chemical and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand. The curriculum drifted with less focus on theoretical science; the fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these "Boston Tech" years, MIT faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president Charles W. Eliot's repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College's Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding; the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court put an end to the merger scheme. In 1916, the MIT administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT's move to a spacious new campus consisting of filled land on a mile-long tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River.
The neoclassical "New Technology" campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded by anonymous donations from a mysterious "Mr. Smith", starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million in cash and Kodak stock to MIT. In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios; the Compton reforms "renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering". Unlike Ivy League schools, MIT catered more to middle-class families, depended more on tuition than on endow
Vector monitor
A vector monitor or vector display is a display device used for computer graphics up through the 1970s. It is a type of CRT, similar to that of an early oscilloscope. In a vector display, the image is composed of drawn lines rather than a grid of glowing pixels as in raster graphics; the electron beam follows an arbitrary path tracing the connected sloped lines, rather than following the same horizontal raster path for all images. The beam skips over dark areas of the image without visiting their points. In 1970, at the UK Farnborough Air show, Sperry Gyroscope exhibited the first vector graphic video display from a UK company, it featured an analogue monochrome display with special electronics, designed by Sperry's John Atkins, allowing it to draw vectors on screen between two pairs of coordinates. In the USA at MIT in 1963 Dr Ivan Sutherland had used similar techniques for his Sketchpad program. At Farnborough the display was used to demonstrate the capabilities of the new Sperry 1412 military computer - it was shown running software that drew, in real time, a wire-frame rotating cube that could be speed-controlled in any of its three dimensions.
That demonstration created significant interest in the Sperry 1412 computer, which went on to be at the heart of a number of major projects for the French Navy and the Royal Navy during the period 1972 to 1992. Some refresh vector displays use a normal phosphor that fades and needs constant refreshing 30-40 times per second to show a stable image; these displays such as the Imlac PDS-1 require some local refresh memory to hold the vector endpoint data. Other storage tube displays such as the popular Tektronix 4010 use a special phosphor that continues glowing for many minutes. Storage displays do not require any local memory. In the 1970s, both types of vector displays were much more affordable than bitmap raster graphics displays when megapixel computer memory was still expensive. Today, raster displays have replaced nearly all uses of vector displays. Vector displays do not suffer from the display artifacts of pixelation, but they are limited in. Text is crudely drawn from short strokes. Refresh vector displays are limited in how many lines or how much text can be shown without refresh flicker.
Irregular beam motion is slower than steady beam motion of raster displays. Beam deflections are driven by magnetic coils, those coils resist rapid changes to their current. Notable among vector displays are Tektronix large-screen computer terminals that use direct-view storage CRTs. Storage means, but that permanent image cannot be changed. Like an Etch-a-Sketch, any deletion or movement requires erasing the entire screen with a bright green flash, slowly redrawing the entire image. Animation with this type of monitor is not practical. Vector displays were used for head-up displays in fighter aircraft because of the brighter displays that can be achieved by moving the electron beam more across the phosphors. Brightness is critical in this application because the display must be visible to the pilot in direct sunlight. Vector monitors were used by some late-1970s to mid-1980s arcade games such as Asteroids and Star Wars. Atari used the term Quadrascan to describe the technology. Hewlett-Packard made a large-screen fast vector monitor.
It uses a wide-angle electrostatically-deflected CRT, about as compact as a magnetic-deflection CRT. Instead of the deflection plates of a typical CRT, it has a unique structure called an electrostatic deflection yoke, with metallized electrodes inside a glass cylinder; some vector monitors are capable of displaying multiple colors, using either a typical shadow mask RGB CRT, or two phosphor layers. Atari used the term color quadrascan to describe the shadow mask version when used in their video arcade games. In the penetration tubes, by controlling the strength of the electron beam, electrons can be made to reach either or both phosphor layers producing a choice of green, orange, or red. Tektronix made color oscilloscopes for a few years using penetration CRTs, but they weren't in great demand. Vector graphics Vectrex Raster scan
Computer Chronicles
Computer Chronicles was an American half-hour television series, broadcast from 1983 to 2002 on Public Broadcasting Service public television, which documented the rise of the personal computer from its infancy to the immense market at the turn of the 21st century. The series was created in 1983 by Stewart Cheifet, the station manager of the College of San Mateo's KCSM-TV; the show was broadcast as a local weekly series. The show was co-produced by WITF-TV in Pennsylvania, it became a national series on PBS from fall 1983. Jim Warren was the show's founding host for the 1981–1982 season, it aired continuously from 1981 to 2002, with Cheifet co-hosting most of the seasons. Gary Kildall served as co-host from 1983 to 1990, providing insights and commentary on products, as well as discussions on the future of the ever-expanding personal computer sphere. During the 1980s, the show had many supporting presenters, including: George Morrow: Presenter and commentator who for a time headed the Morrow Design company, Morrow was a well-known face on the Chronicles until the 1990s.
Morrow died in 2003. Paul Schindler: Featured predominantly in software reviews, Schindler contributed to the series until the early 1990s. Wendy Woods: Provided reports for many software and hardware products, as well as talking with the main presenters in the studio about specific topics. Janelle Stelson: reviews segment; the Computer Chronicles format remained unchanged throughout its run, except with the noticeable difference in presenting style. From 1984 onward the last five minutes or so featured Random Access, a segment that gave the viewer the latest computer news from the home and business markets. Stewart Cheifet, Janelle Stelson, Maria Gabriel and various other individuals presented the segment. Random Access was discontinued in 1997; the Online Minute, introduced in 1995 and lasting until 1997, gave the viewers certain Web sites that dealt with the episode's topic. It featured Giles Bateman, who designed the show's "Web page" opening sequence, used from that period up until the show's end.
The graphics were changed in 1989, the show was renamed "Computer Chronicles", omitting the word "The". The graphics were redesigned again in 1995, with the "Web page" graphics designed by Giles Bateman, redesigned again in 1998 to show clips from the show in a "multiple window" format. Another feature on the show was Stewart's "Pick of the Week", in which he detailed a popular piece of software or gadget on the market that appealed to him and might appeal to the home audience. Computer Bowl, cast the East Coast against the West Coast, with Bill Gates, John Doerr, Stewart Alsop, Mitch Kapor, Bob Frankston and Bill Joy. From 1994 to 1997, the show was produced by PCTV, based in New Hampshire in cooperation with KCSM-TV. Starting in the Fall of 1997 and continuing to its end, the show was produced by KTEH San Jose and Stewart Cheifet Productions. Despite receiving adequate ratings in the United States and being broadcast throughout the world, Computer Chronicles was cancelled in 2002. All episodes of Computer Chronicles have been made available for free download at the Internet Archive.
Many episodes of the show have been dubbed into other languages, including Arabic and Spanish. WDR Computerclub - similar show in German TV Computer Chronicles at the Internet Archive archive.org - Computer Bowl archives Computer Chronicles history and information Computer Chronicles on IMDb
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation, using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1950s to the 1990s. DEC was a leading vendor of computer systems, including computers and peripherals, their PDP and successor VAX products were the most successful of all minicomputers in terms of sales. DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. At the time, Compaq was focused on the enterprise market and had purchased several other large vendors. DEC was a major player overseas. However, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own; the company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002. As of 2007, PDP-11, VAX, AlphaServer systems were still produced under the HP name. From 1957 until 1992, DEC's headquarters were located in a former wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts. DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, which subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002.
Some parts of DEC, notably the compiler business and the Hudson, Massachusetts facility, were sold to Intel. Focusing on the small end of the computer market allowed DEC to grow without its potential competitors making serious efforts to compete with them, their PDP series of machines became popular in the 1960s the PDP-8 considered to be the first successful minicomputer. Looking to simplify and update their line, DEC replaced most of their smaller machines with the PDP-11 in 1970 selling over 600,000 units and cementing DEC's position in the industry. Designed as a follow-on to the PDP-11, DEC's VAX-11 series was the first used 32-bit minicomputer, sometimes referred to as "superminis"; these systems were able to compete in many roles with larger mainframe computers, such as the IBM System/370. The VAX was a best-seller, with over 400,000 sold, its sales through the 1980s propelled the company into the second largest computer company in the industry. At its peak, DEC was the second largest employer in Massachusetts, second only to the Massachusetts State Government.
The rapid rise of the business microcomputer in the late 1980s, the introduction of powerful 32-bit systems in the 1990s eroded the value of DEC's systems. DEC's last major attempt to find a space in the changing market was the DEC Alpha 64-bit RISC instruction set architecture. DEC started work on Alpha as a way to re-implement their VAX series, but employed it in a range of high-performance workstations. Although the Alpha processor family met both of these goals, for most of its lifetime, was the fastest processor family on the market high asking prices were outsold by lower priced x86 chips from Intel and clones such as AMD. DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. At the time, Compaq was focused on the enterprise market and had purchased several other large vendors. DEC was a major player overseas. However, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own.
The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002. As of 2007, some of DEC's product lines were still produced under the HP name. Beyond DECsystem-10/20, PDP, VAX and Alpha, DEC was well respected for its communication subsystem designs, such as Ethernet, DNA, DSA, its "dumb terminal" subsystems including VT100 and DECserver products. DEC's Research Laboratories conducted DEC's corporate research; some of them are still operated by Hewlett-Packard. The laboratories were: Western Research Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, US Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, California, US Network Systems Laboratory in Palo Alto, California, US Cambridge Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US Paris Research Laboratory in Paris, France MetroWest Technology Campus in Maynard, Massachusetts, USSome of the former employees of DEC's Research Labs or DEC's R&D in general include: Gordon Bell: technical visionary, VP Engineering 1972–83. DEC supported the ANSI standards the ASCII character set, which survives in Unicode and the ISO 8859 character set family.
DEC's own Multinational Character Set had a large influence on ISO 8859-1 and, by extension, Unicode. The first versions of the C language and the Unix operating system ran on DEC's PDP series of computers, which were among the first commercially viable minicomputers, although for several years DEC itself did not encourage the use of Unix. DEC produced used and influential interactive ope
Text editor
A text editor is a type of computer program that edits plain text. Such programs are sometimes known following the naming of Microsoft Notepad. Text editors are provided with operating systems and software development packages, can be used to change files such as configuration files, documentation files and programming language source code. There are important differences between rich text. Plain text consists of character representation; each character is represented by a fixed-length sequence of one, two, or four bytes, or as a variable-length sequence of one to four bytes, in accordance to specific character encoding conventions, such as ASCII, ISO/IEC 2022, UTF-8, or Unicode. These conventions define many printable characters, but non-printing characters that control the flow of the text, such space, line break, page break. Plain text contains no other information about the text itself, not the character encoding convention employed. Plain text is stored in text files, although text files do not store plain text.
In the early days of computers, plain text was displayed using a monospace font, such that horizontal alignment and columnar formatting were sometimes done using whitespace characters. For compatibility reasons, this tradition has not changed. Rich text, on the other hand, may contain metadata, character formatting data, paragraph formatting data, page specification data. Rich text can be complex. Rich text can be saved in binary format, text files adhering to a markup language, or in a hybrid form of both. Text editors are intended to open and save text files containing either plain text or anything that can be interpreted as plain text, including the markup for rich text or the markup for something else. Before text editors existed, computer text was punched into cards with keypunch machines. Physical boxes of these thin cardboard cards were inserted into a card-reader. Magnetic tape and disk "card-image" files created from such card decks had no line-separation characters at all, assumed fixed-length 80-character records.
An alternative to cards was punched paper tape. It could be created by some teleprinters; the first text editors were "line editors" oriented to teleprinter- or typewriter-style terminals without displays. Commands effected edits to a file at an imaginary insertion point called the "cursor". Edits were verified by typing a command to print a small section of the file, periodically by printing the entire file. In some line editors, the cursor could be moved by commands that specified the line number in the file, text strings for which to search, regular expressions. Line editors were major improvements over keypunching; some line editors could be used by keypunch. Some common line editors supported a "verify" mode in which change commands displayed the altered lines; when computer terminals with video screens became available, screen-based text editors became common. One of the earliest full-screen editors was O26, written for the operator console of the CDC 6000 series computers in 1967. Another early full-screen editor was vi.
Written in the 1970s, it is still a standard editor on Linux operating systems. Written in the 1970s was the UCSD Pascal Screen Oriented Editor, optimized both for indented source code as well as general text. Emacs, one of the first free and open source software projects, is another early full-screen or real-time editor, one, ported to many systems. A full-screen editor's ease-of-use and speed motivated many early purchases of video terminals; the core data structure in a text editor is the one that manages the string or list of records that represents the current state of the file being edited. While the former could be stored in a single long consecutive array of characters, the desire for text editors that could more insert text, delete text, undo/redo previous edits led to the development of more complicated sequence data structures. A typical text editor uses a gap buffer, a linked list of lines, a piece table, or a rope, as its sequence data structure; some text editors are simple, while others offer broad and complex functions.
For example and Unix-like operating systems have the pico editor, but many include the vi and Emacs editors. Microsoft Windows systems come with the simple Notepad, though many people—especially programmers—prefer other editors with more features. Under Apple Macintosh's classic Mac OS there was the native SimpleText, replaced in Mac OS X by TextEdit, which combines features of a text editor with those typical of a word processor such as rulers and multiple font selection; these features are not available but must be switched by user command, or through the program automatically determining the file type. Most word processors can read and write files in plain text format, allowing them to open files saved from text editors. Saving these files from a word processor, requires ensuring the file is written in plain text format, that any text encoding or BOM settings won'
