1.
Computer graphics
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Computer graphics are pictures and films created using computers. Usually, the term refers to computer-generated image data created with help from specialized hardware and software. It is a vast and recent area in computer science, the phrase was coined in 1960, by computer graphics researchers Verne Hudson and William Fetter of Boeing. It is often abbreviated as CG, though sometimes referred to as CGI. The overall methodology depends heavily on the sciences of geometry, optics. Computer graphics is responsible for displaying art and image data effectively and meaningfully to the user and it is also used for processing image data received from the physical world. Computer graphic development has had a significant impact on many types of media and has revolutionized animation, movies, advertising, video games, the term computer graphics has been used a broad sense to describe almost everything on computers that is not text or sound. Such imagery is found in and on television, newspapers, weather reports, a well-constructed graph can present complex statistics in a form that is easier to understand and interpret. In the media such graphs are used to illustrate papers, reports, thesis, many tools have been developed to visualize data. Computer generated imagery can be categorized into different types, two dimensional, three dimensional, and animated graphics. As technology has improved, 3D computer graphics have become more common, Computer graphics has emerged as a sub-field of computer science which studies methods for digitally synthesizing and manipulating visual content. Screens could display art since the Lumiere brothers use of mattes to create effects for the earliest films dating from 1895. New kinds of displays were needed to process the wealth of information resulting from such projects, early projects like the Whirlwind and SAGE Projects introduced the CRT as a viable display and interaction interface and introduced the light pen as an input device. Douglas T. Ross of the Whirlwind SAGE system performed an experiment in 1954 in which a small program he wrote captured the movement of his finger. Electronics pioneer Hewlett-Packard went public in 1957 after incorporating the decade prior, and established ties with Stanford University through its founders. This began the transformation of the southern San Francisco Bay Area into the worlds leading computer technology hub - now known as Silicon Valley. The field of computer graphics developed with the emergence of computer graphics hardware, further advances in computing led to greater advancements in interactive computer graphics. In 1959, the TX-2 computer was developed at MITs Lincoln Laboratory, the TX-2 integrated a number of new man-machine interfaces
2.
Computer mouse
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A computer mouse is a pointing device that detects two-dimensional motion relative to a surface. This motion is typically translated into the motion of a pointer on a display, physically, a mouse consists of an object held in ones hand, with one or more buttons. Mice often also other elements, such as touch surfaces and wheels. The earliest known publication of the mouse as referring to a computer pointing device is in Bill Englishs July 1965 publication. The plural for the rodent is always mice in modern usage. The plural of a mouse is mouses and mice according to most dictionaries. The first recorded usage is mice, the online Oxford Dictionaries cites a 1984 use. The trackball, a pointing device, was invented in 1944 by Ralph Benjamin as part of a World War II-era fire-control radar plotting system called Comprehensive Display System. Benjamin was then working for the British Royal Navy Scientific Service, Benjamins project used analog computers to calculate the future position of target aircraft based on several initial input points provided by a user with a joystick. Benjamin felt that a more elegant input device was needed and invented what they called a ball for this purpose. The device was patented in 1947, but only a prototype using a ball rolling on two rubber-coated wheels was ever built, and the device was kept as a military secret. Another early trackball was built by British electrical engineer Kenyon Taylor in collaboration with Tom Cranston, Taylor was part of the original Ferranti Canada, working on the Royal Canadian Navys DATAR system in 1952. DATAR was similar in concept to Benjamins display, the trackball used four disks to pick up motion, two each for the X and Y directions. When the ball was rolled, the pickup discs spun and contacts on their outer rim made periodic contact with wires, by counting the pulses, the physical movement of the ball could be determined. A digital computer calculated the tracks and sent the data to other ships in a task force using pulse-code modulation radio signals. This trackball used a standard Canadian five-pin bowling ball and it was not patented, since it was a secret military project. Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute has been credited in published books by Thierry Bardini, Paul Ceruzzi, Howard Rheingold, Engelbart was also recognized as such in various obituary titles after his death in July 2013. That November, while attending a conference on computer graphics in Reno, Nevada, Engelbart began to ponder how to adapt the underlying principles of the planimeter to X-Y coordinate input
3.
Video card
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A video card is an expansion card which generates a feed of output images to a display. Frequently, these are advertised as discrete or dedicated graphics cards, Standards such as MDA, CGA, HGC, Tandy, PGC, EGA, VGA, MCGA,8514 or XGA were introduced from 1982 to 1990 and supported by a variety of hardware manufacturers. The majority of video cards are built with either AMD-sourced or Nvidia-sourced graphics chips. Until 2000, 3dfx Interactive was also an important, and often groundbreaking, most video cards offer various functions such as accelerated rendering of 3D scenes and 2D graphics, MPEG-2/MPEG-4 decoding, TV output, or the ability to connect multiple monitors. Video cards also have sound capabilities to output sound – along with the video for connected TVs or monitors with integrated speakers. Graphics cards werent very useful for computers, since they didnt have the capability to run graphic-based games or high-resolution videos as modern computers do now. Within the industry, video cards are sometimes called graphics add-in-boards, abbreviated as AIBs, as an alternative to the use of a video card, video hardware can be integrated into the motherboard or the CPU. Both approaches can be called integrated graphics, motherboard-based implementations are sometimes called on-board video while CPU-based implementations are known as accelerated processing units. The ability to disable the integrated graphics sometimes also allows the use of a motherboard on which the on-board video has failed. Sometimes both the graphics and a dedicated graphics card can be used simultaneously to feed separate displays. The main advantages of integrated graphics include cost, compactness, simplicity, the performance disadvantage of integrated graphics arises because the graphics processor shares system resources with the CPU. A dedicated graphics card has its own random access memory, its own cooling system, upgrading to a dedicated graphics card offloads work from the CPU and system RAM, so not only will graphics processing be faster, but the computers overall performance may also improve. Both of the dominant CPU makers, AMD and Intel, are moving to APUs, as of late 2013, the best APUs provide graphics processing approaching mid-range mobile video cards and are adequate for casual gaming. Users seeking the highest video performance for gaming or other graphics-intensive uses should still choose computers with dedicated graphics cards. Beyond the enthusiast segment is the market for video cards for workstations used in the special effects industry. Nvidia is a player in the professional segment. As the processing power of cards has increased, so has their demand for electrical power. Current high-performance video cards tend to consume a great deal of power, for example, the thermal design power for the GeForce GTX TITAN is 250 Watts
4.
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
5.
Computer terminal
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A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system. The function of a terminal is confined to display and input of data, a terminal that depends on the host computer for its processing power is called a dumb terminal or thin client. A personal computer can run terminal emulator software that replicates the function of a terminal, sometimes allowing concurrent use of local programs and access to a distant terminal host system. The terminal of the first working programmable, fully automatic digital Turing-complete computer, the Z3, had a keyboard, early user terminals connected to computers were electromechanical teleprinters/teletypewriters, such as the Teletype Model 33 ASR, originally used for telegraphy or the Friden Flexowriter. Later printing terminals such as the DECwriter LA30 were developed, however printing terminals were limited by the speed at which paper could be printed, and for interactive use the paper record was unnecessary. The problem was that the amount of memory needed to store the information on a page of text was comparable to the memory in low end minicomputers then in use. Displaying the information at video speeds was also a challenge and the control logic took up a rack worth of pre-integrated circuit electronics. Another approach involved the use of the tube, a specialized CRT developed by Tektronix that retained information written on it without the need to refresh. The Datapoint 3300 from Computer Terminal Corporation was announced in 1967 and shipped in 1969 and it solved the memory space issue mentioned above by using a digital shift-register design, and using only 72 columns rather than the later more common choice of 80. Some type of blinking cursor that can be positioned, the term intelligent in this context dates from 1969. Notable examples include the IBM2250 and IBM2260, predecessors to the IBM3270, providing even more processing possibilities, workstations like the Televideo TS-800 could run CP/M-86, blurring the distinction between terminal and Personal Computer. Most terminals were connected to minicomputers or mainframe computers and often had a green or amber screen, typically terminals communicate with the computer via a serial port via a null modem cable, often using an EIA RS-232 or RS-422 or RS-423 or a current loop serial interface. In fact, the design for the Intel 8008 was originally conceived at Computer Terminal Corporation as the processor for the Datapoint 2200. While early IBM PCs had single color green screens, these screens were not terminals. The screen of a PC did not contain any character generation hardware, all signals and video formatting were generated by the video display card in the PC, or by the CPU. An IBM PC monitor, whether it was the monochrome display or the 16-color display, was technically much more similar to an analog TV set than to a terminal. With suitable software a PC could, however, emulate a terminal, the Data General One could be booted into terminal emulator mode from its ROM. Since the advent and subsequent popularization of the computer, few genuine hardware terminals are used to interface with computers today
6.
Serial port
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In computing, a serial port is a serial communication interface through which information transfers in or out one bit at a time. Throughout most of the history of computers, data was transferred through serial ports to devices such as modems, terminals. Modern computers without serial ports may require serial-to-USB converters to allow compatibility with RS-232 serial devices, serial ports are still used in applications such as industrial automation systems, scientific instruments, point of sale systems and some industrial and consumer products. Server computers may use a port as a control console for diagnostics. Network equipment often use serial console for configuration, serial ports are still used in these areas as they are simple, cheap and their console functions are highly standardized and widespread. A serial port requires very little supporting software from the host system, some computers, such as the IBM PC, use an integrated circuit called a UART. This IC converts characters to and from asynchronous serial form, implementing the timing and framing of data in hardware, very low-cost systems, such as some early home computers, would instead use the CPU to send the data through an output pin, using the bit-banging technique. Early home computers often had proprietary serial ports with pinouts and voltage levels incompatible with RS-232, low-cost processors now allow higher-speed, but more complex, serial communication standards such as USB and FireWire to replace RS-232. These make it possible to connect devices that would not have operated feasibly over slower serial connections, such as storage, sound. Many personal computer motherboards still have at least one serial port, small-form-factor systems and laptops may omit RS-232 connector ports to conserve space, but the electronics are still there. RS-232 has been standard for so long that the circuits needed to control a serial port became very cheap and often exist on a single chip, sometimes also with circuitry for a parallel port. The individual signals on a serial port are unidirectional and when connecting two devices the outputs of one device must be connected to the inputs of the other, devices are divided into two categories data terminal equipment and data circuit-terminating equipment. A line that is an output on a DTE device is an input on a DCE device and vice versa so a DCE device can be connected to a DTE device with a straight wired cable, conventionally, computers and terminals are DTE while modems and peripherals are DCE. If it is necessary to connect two DTE devices a cross-over null modem, in the form of either an adapter or a cable, generally, serial port connectors are gendered, only allowing connectors to mate with a connector of the opposite gender. With D-subminiature connectors, the male connectors have protruding pins, either type of connector can be mounted on equipment or a panel, or terminate a cable. Connectors mounted on DTE are likely to be male, and those mounted on DCE are likely to be female, however, this is far from universal, for instance, most serial printers have a female DB25 connector, but they are DTEs. The desire to supply serial interface cards with two ports required that IBM reduce the size of the connector to fit onto a single card back panel, a DE-9 connector also fits onto a card with a second DB-25 connector. Starting around the time of the introduction of the IBM PC-AT, serial ports were built with a 9-pin connector to save cost
7.
IBM Personal Computer
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The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12,1981 and it was created by a team of engineers and designers under the direction of Don Estridge of the IBM Entry Systems Division in Boca Raton, Florida. IBM compatible became an important criterion for sales growth, only the Apple Macintosh family kept significant market share without compatibility with the IBM personal computer, International Business Machines, one of the worlds largest companies, had a 62% share of the mainframe computer market in 1981. Its share of the computer market, however, had declined from 60% in 1970 to 32% in 1980. In 1979 BusinessWeek asked, Is IBM just another stodgy, mature company, by 1981 its stock price had declined by 22%. IBMs earnings for the first half the year grew by 5. 3%—one third of the inflation rate—while those of minicomputer maker Digital Equipment Corporation grew by more than 35%. B. M, No longer dominates the computer business. IBM wished to avoid the outcome with the new personal computer industry, dominated by the Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, Tandy Corporations TRS-80. With $150 million in sales by 1979 and projected growth of more than 40% in the early 1980s. The Japanese project, codenamed Go, ended before the 1981 release of the American-designed IBM PC codenamed Chess, whether IBM had waited too long to enter an industry in which Apple and others were already successful was unclear. An observer stated that IBM bringing out a computer would be like teaching an elephant to tap dance. Successful microcomputer company Vector Graphics fiscal 1980 revenue was $12 million, the company only sold through its internal sales force, had no experience with resellers or retail stores, and did not introduce the first product designed to work with non-IBM equipment until 1980. Another observer claimed that IBM made decisions so slowly that, when tested, as with other large computer companies, its new products typically required about four to five years for development. IBM had to learn how to develop, mass-produce. The potential importance to microcomputers of a company so prestigious, that a saying in American companies stated No one ever got fired for buying IBM, was nonetheless clear. InfoWorld, which described itself as The Newsweekly for Microcomputer Users, stated that for my grandmother, is far and away the media star, not because of its features, but because it exists at all. When the number eight company in the Fortune 500 enters the field, the influence of a personal computer made by a company whose name has literally come to mean computer to most of the world is hard to contemplate. The editorial acknowledged that some factions in our industry have looked upon IBM as the enemy, desktop sized programmable calculators by Hewlett Packard had evolved into the HP9830 BASIC language computer by 1972. In 1972–1973 a team led by Dr. SCAMP emulated an IBM1130 minicomputer to run APL\1130, in 1973 APL was generally available only on mainframe computers, and most desktop sized microcomputers such as the Wang 2200 or HP9800 offered only BASIC
8.
Linux kernel
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The Linux kernel is a monolithic Unix-like computer operating system kernel. The Android operating system for computers, smartphones and smartwatches is also based atop the Linux kernel. While the adoption on desktop computers is low, Linux-based operating systems dominate nearly every segment of computing. As of November 2016, all but two of the worlds 500 most powerful supercomputers run Linux, Linux rapidly attracted developers and users who adopted it as the kernel for other free software projects, notably the GNU Operating System. The Linux kernel has received contributions from nearly 12,000 programmers from more than 1,200 companies, the Linux kernel API, the application programming interface through which user programs interact with the kernel, is meant to be very stable and to not break userspace programs. As part of the functionality, device drivers control the hardware. However, the interface between the kernel and loadable kernel modules, unlike in many other kernels and operating systems, is not meant to be stable by design. The Linux kernel, developed by contributors worldwide, is a prominent example of free, day-to-day development discussions take place on the Linux kernel mailing list. The Linux kernel is released under the GNU General Public License version 2, in April 1991, Linus Torvalds, at the time a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Helsinki, Finland, started working on some simple ideas for an operating system. He started with a task switcher in Intel 80386 assembly language, on 25 August 1991, Torvalds posted the following to comp. os. minix, a newsgroup on Usenet, Im doing a operating system for 386 AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready, id like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat. Ive currently ported bash and gcc, and things seem to work and this implies that Ill get something practical within a few months Yes - its free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT portable, and it never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as thats all I have. Its mostly in C, but most people wouldnt call what I write C and it uses every conceivable feature of the 386 I could find, as it was also a project to teach me about the 386. As already mentioned, it uses a MMU, for both paging and segmentation and its the segmentation that makes it REALLY386 dependent. Some of my C-files are almost as much assembler as C, unlike minix, I also happen to LIKE interrupts, so interrupts are handled without trying to hide the reason behind them. After that, many people contributed code to the project, early on, the MINIX community contributed code and ideas to the Linux kernel. At the time, the GNU Project had created many of the components required for an operating system
9.
BIOS
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The BIOS is a type of firmware used to perform hardware initialization during the booting process on IBM PC compatible computers, and to provide runtime services for operating systems and programs. The BIOS firmware is built into personal computers, and it is the first software they run when powered on, the name itself originates from the Basic Input/Output System used in the CP/M operating system in 1975. Originally proprietary to the IBM PC, the BIOS has been engineered by companies looking to create compatible systems. The fundamental purposes of the BIOS in modern PCs are to initialize and test the hardware components. Variations in the hardware are hidden by the BIOS from programs that use BIOS services instead of directly accessing the hardware. MS-DOS, which was the dominant PC operating system from the early 1980s until the mid-1990s, relied on BIOS services for disk, keyboard, and text display functions. Most BIOS implementations are specifically designed to work with a computer or motherboard model. This allows easy updates to the BIOS firmware so new features can be added or bugs can be fixed, unified Extensible Firmware Interface was designed as a successor to BIOS, aiming to address its technical shortcomings. As of 2014, new PC hardware predominantly ships with UEFI firmware, together with the underlying hardware-specific, but operating system-independent System BIOS, which resides in ROM, it represents the analogous to the CP/M BIOS. With the introduction of PS/2 machines, IBM divided the System BIOS into real-mode, the BIOS of the original IBM PC XT had no interactive user interface. Options on the IBM PC and XT were set by switches and jumpers on the main board, starting around the mid-1990s, it became typical for the BIOS ROM to include a BIOS configuration utility or BIOS setup utility, accessed at system power-up by a particular key sequence. This program allowed the user to set configuration options, of the type formerly set using DIP switches. The disk was supplied with the computer, and if it was lost the settings could not be changed. Instead of battery-backed RAM, the modern Wintel machine may store the BIOS configuration settings in flash ROM, early Intel processors started at physical address 000FFFF0h. When a modern x86 microprocessor is reset, it starts in pseudo 16-bit real mode, the code segment register is initialized with selector F000h, base FFFF0000h, and limit FFFFh, so that execution starts at 4 GB minus 16 bytes. The platform logic maps this address into the system ROM, mirroring address 000FFFF0h, if the system has just been powered up or the reset button was pressed, the full power-on self-test is run. This saves the time used to detect and test all memory. If the download was apparently successful, the BIOS would verify a checksum on it and then run it
10.
IBM PC compatible
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IBM PC compatible computers are those similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, able to run the same software and support the same expansion cards as those. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones, Columbia Data Products built the first clone of the IBM personal computer by a clean room implementation of its BIOS. Early IBM PC compatibles used the computer bus as the original PC. The IBM AT compatible bus was named the Industry Standard Architecture bus by manufacturers of compatible computers. The term IBM PC compatible is now a historical description only, only the Apple Macintosh classic Mac OS and macOS kept significant market share without compatibility with the IBM personal computer, so consumers are typically identified as being a PC or Mac user. IBM decided in 1980 to market a low-cost single-user computer as quickly as possible in response to Apple Computers success in the microcomputer market. On 12 August 1981, the first IBM PC went on sale, there were three operating systems available for it. The least expensive and most popular was PC DOS made by Microsoft, in a crucial concession, IBMs agreement allowed Microsoft to sell its own version, MS-DOS, for non-IBM computers. The only component of the original PC architecture exclusive to IBM was the BIOS and this software would run on any machine using MS-DOS or PC-DOS. Software that directly addressed the hardware instead of making standard calls was faster, however, software addressing IBM PC hardware in this way would not run on MS-DOS machines with different hardware. The 808x computer marketplace rapidly excluded all machines which were not hardware-, the 640 KB barrier on conventional system memory available to MS-DOS is a legacy of that period, other non-clone machines, while subject to a limit, could exceed 640 kB. Rumors of lookalike, compatible computers, created without IBMs approval, by June 1983 PC Magazine defined PC clone as a computer accommodate the user who takes a disk home from an IBM PC, walks across the room, and plugs it into the foreign machine. Because of a shortage of IBM PCs that year, many customers purchased clones instead, Columbia Data Products produced the first computer more or less compatible to the IBM PC standard during June 1982, soon followed by Eagle Computer. Compaq announced its first IBM PC compatible in November 1982, the Compaq Portable, the Compaq was the first sewing machine-sized portable computer that was essentially 100% PC-compatible. The company could not copy the BIOS directly as a result of the decision in Apple v. Franklin. Each computer would have its own Original Equipment Manufacturer version of MS-DOS, any software written for MS-DOS would operate on any MS-DOS computer, despite variations in hardware design. This expectation seemed reasonable in the marketplace of the time. Until then Microsoft was based primarily on computer languages such as BASIC, the established small system operating software was CP/M from Digital Research which was in use both at the hobbyist level and by the more professional of those using microcomputers
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