Doctor Who
Doctor Who is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC since 1963. The programme depicts the adventures of a Time Lord called "the Doctor", an extraterrestrial being, to all appearances human, from the planet Gallifrey; the Doctor explores the universe in a time-travelling space ship called the TARDIS. Its exterior appears as a blue British police box, a common sight in Britain in 1963 when the series first aired. Accompanied by a number of companions, the Doctor combats a variety of foes while working to save civilisations and help people in need; the show is a significant part of British popular culture, elsewhere it has gained a cult following. It has influenced generations of British television professionals, many of whom grew up watching the series; the programme ran from 1963 to 1989. There was an unsuccessful attempt to revive regular production in 1996 with a backdoor pilot, in the form of a television film titled Doctor Who; the programme was relaunched in 2005, since has been produced in-house by BBC Wales in Cardiff.
Doctor Who has spawned numerous spin-offs, including comic books, novels, audio dramas, the television series Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures, K-9, Class, has been the subject of many parodies and references in popular culture. Thirteen actors have headlined the series as the Doctor; the transition from one actor to another is written into the plot of the show with the concept of regeneration into a new incarnation, a plot device in which a Time Lord "transforms" into a new body when the current one is too badly harmed to heal normally. Each actor's portrayal is unique. Together, they form a single lifetime with a single narrative; the time-travelling feature of the plot means that different incarnations of the Doctor meet. The Doctor is portrayed by Jodie Whittaker, who took on the role after Peter Capaldi's exit in the 2017 Christmas special "Twice Upon a Time". Doctor Who follows the adventures of the title character, a rogue Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey who goes by the name "the Doctor".
The Doctor fled Gallifrey in a stolen TARDIS, a time machine that travels by materialising into and dematerialising out of the time vortex. The TARDIS has a vast interior but appears smaller on the outside, is equipped with a "chameleon circuit" intended to make the machine take on the appearance of local objects as a disguise. Across time and space, the Doctor's many incarnations find events that pique their curiosity and try to prevent evil forces from harming innocent people or changing history, using only ingenuity and minimal resources, such as the versatile sonic screwdriver; the Doctor travels alone and brings one or more companions to share these adventures. These companions are humans, owing to the Doctor's fascination with planet Earth, which leads to frequent collaborations with the international military task force UNIT when the Earth is threatened; the Doctor is centuries old and, as a Time Lord, has the ability to regenerate in case of mortal damage to the body, taking on a new appearance and personality.
The Doctor has gained numerous reoccurring enemies during their travels, including the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Master, another renegade Time Lord. Doctor Who first appeared on BBC TV at 17:16:20 GMT on Saturday, 23 November 1963, it was to be each episode 25 minutes of transmission length. Discussions and plans for the programme had been in progress for a year; the head of drama Sydney Newman was responsible for developing the programme, with the first format document for the series being written by Newman along with the head of the script department Donald Wilson and staff writer C. E. Webber. Writer Anthony Coburn, story editor David Whitaker and initial producer Verity Lambert heavily contributed to the development of the series; the programme was intended to appeal to a family audience as an educational programme using time travel as a means to explore scientific ideas and famous moments in history. On 31 July 1963, Whitaker commissioned Terry Nation to write a story under the title The Mutants.
As written, the Daleks and Thals were the victims of an alien neutron bomb attack but Nation dropped the aliens and made the Daleks the aggressors. When the script was presented to Newman and Wilson it was rejected as the programme was not permitted to contain any "bug-eyed monsters". According to producer Verity Lambert. We had a bit of a crisis of confidence. Had we had anything else ready we would have made that." Nation's script became the second Doctor. The serial introduced the eponymous aliens that would become the series' most popular monsters, was responsible for the BBC's first merchandising boom; the BBC drama department's serials division produced the programme for 26 seasons, broadcast on BBC 1. Falling viewing numbers, a decline in the public perception of the show and a less-prominent transmission slot saw production suspended in 1989 by Jonathan Powell, controller of BBC 1. Although it was cancelled with the decision not to commission a planned 27th season, which would have been broadcast in 1990, the BBC affirmed, over several ye
Frank Welker
Franklin Wendell Welker is an American voice actor best known for his role as Fred Jones from the Scooby-Doo franchise since its inception in 1969 and as the voice of Scooby-Doo since 2002. He is known as the voice of Megatron in the Transformers franchise and as the voice and vocal effects of Nibbler on Futurama. In 2016, Welker was honored with an Emmy Award for his lifetime achievement. Welker was born in Denver, Colorado, on March 12, 1946, he moved to California and attended Santa Monica College in Santa Monica, where he majored in theatrical arts. In 1966, he received honors for his performance as the Cowardly Lion in the college's theater production of The Wizard of Oz. During his transition between college and his voice-acting career, his first voice-over role was in a commercial for Friskies dog food; the producer's girlfriend informed him of auditioning for Hanna-Barbera during the casting of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, where he auditioned for the title character but instead won the role of Fred Jones.
Welker's first voice role came as Fred Jones in the Scooby-Doo franchise. Welker has voiced Fred in every series and incarnation of the Scooby-Doo animated franchise and has provided the voice of Scooby-Doo since 2002; as of 2019, Welker is the only remaining original voice actor still involved in the series. His next major character voice was for Marvin White on the 1973 series Super Friends; that same year, he played Pudge and Gabby on DePatie-Freleng Enterprises' animated series Bailey's Comets. Welker continued to provide voices for many characters for Hanna-Barbera for several years, which include Jabberjaw, Dog Wonder, the Shmoo in The New Fred and Barney Show and its spin-off, The Flintstones Comedy Show. Frank Welker described the voice he used for the Shmoo as "a bubble voice". In 1978, he played the title character on Fangface and in its spin-off and Fangpuss, voiced Heckle and Jeckle and Quackula on The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle, Tom Cat, Jerry Mouse, Tyke, Slick Wolf and Barney Bear on The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show.
During the 1980s and 1990s, Welker became a busy actor, providing the voice for many popular cartoon characters in multiple series, including Brain, Doctor Claw, M. A. D. Cat on Inspector Gadget. I. Joe heroes and villains, he voiced various characters on The Simpsons, such as Santa's Little Helper, Snowball II, various other animals from 1991 to his departure from the show in 2002. Welker provided both the speaking animal sounds for Nibbler on Matt Groening's Futurama, he provided the voices for Mr. Plotz, Ralph the Guard and other characters on Animaniacs, Gogo Dodo, Furball and others on Tiny Toon Adventures, Pepé Le Pew on The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries, McWolf the main antagonist to Droopy and his nephew Dripple on Tom and Jerry Kids Show and Droopy, Master Detective. Welker has created the vocal effects for many animals and creatures in films, including Abu the monkey, Rajah the tiger, the Cave of Wonders in Aladdin, its two sequels, the television series, Arnold the Pig in the television film Return to Green Acres, the Martians in Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!, the penguins in Mr. Popper's Penguins.
He performed Spock's screams in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and voiced The Thing in The Golden Child, Jinx the robot in SpaceCamp, Totoro in the 2005 English version of Studio Ghibli's film My Neighbor Totoro, Alien Sil in Species, Malebolgia in Spawn, Gargamel's cat Azrael in Sony Pictures Animation's live action/animated film versions of The Smurfs. In 2006, he began voicing George in the popular children's series Curious George, he voiced George in the animated film of the same name that same year. In 2007, Welker became the new voice of Garfield, succeeding the original actor Lorenzo Music, who died in 2001. Welker voiced Garfield in Garfield Gets Real, Garfield's Fun Fest, Garfield's Pet Force, on the series The Garfield Show, which ran from 2008 to 2016. In 2011, he provided the voice of Batman in a Scooby-Doo crossover segment of the Batman: The Brave and the Bold episode, "Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Cases!". In the same episode, he voiced Batboy, the classic Mad Magazine Batman spoof created by Wally Wood.
Welker has provided voices for many video game characters, most notably Disney's Oswald the Lucky Rabbit and The Shadow Blot in Epic Mickey and its sequel Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two, as well as Zurvan called the Ancient One, on StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm. He provided the voice of the mad mage Xzar for the Baldur's Gate video game series, reprised his role from Avengers Assemble as Odin for Lego Marvel's Avengers. Welker's first on-camera film role was as a college kid from Rutgers University who
Jim Cummings
James Jonah Cummings is an American voice actor and singer, who has appeared in 400 roles. He is known for voicing the title character from Darkwing Duck, Dr. Robotnik from Sonic the Hedgehog, Winnie the Pooh, Bonkers D. Bobcat and the Tasmanian Devil, he has performed in numerous Disney animations including Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas and The Princess and the Frog, others from third-parties such as Universal/DreamWorks, MGM and Fox including The Pagemaster, All Dogs Go to Heaven 2, The Road to El Dorado, Titan A. E. and Shrek. He has provided voice-over work for video games, such as Icewind Dale, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Baldur's Gate, Mass Effect 2, Star Wars: The Old Republic, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft: Legion, Splatterhouse; some of Cummings' earliest vocal work was at Disney, where he replaced Hal Smith as the voice of Winnie-the-Pooh in 1988. He began replacing Paul Winchell as Tigger, before replacing him as the character in 2000's The Tigger Movie.
In 1991, he ventured to Warner Bros. Animation and began voicing Tasmanian Devil on the animated series Taz-Mania; when actor Jeremy Irons, the voice of Scar in The Lion King, developed vocal problems during recording of the song "Be Prepared", Cummings was chosen to replace him for the rest of the song. Cummings would be hired as the singing double for Russell Means in Pocahontas and Christopher Lloyd in Anastasia. In 2018, he became the first voice performer of animation to reprise his role for a live-action Disney film, reprising the roles of Pooh and Tigger for Christopher Robin, his performance as Pooh was praised by Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair, calling it "Oscar-worthy" and saying in detail, "As Winnie the Pooh, the veteran voice actor gives such sweet, affable life to the wistful bear of literary renown that it breaks the heart. Cummings's performance understands something more keenly than the movie around it, his Pooh is an agreeable nuisance and an accidental philosopher, delivering nonsensical adages in a friendly, deliberate murmur ringed faintly with sadness.
I wanted to yank him from the screen and take him home with me, his fuzzy little paw in mine as we ambled to the subway, the summer sun fading behind us. He's a good bear, this Pooh." Born in Youngstown, Cummings relocated to New Orleans, where he designed and painted Mardi Gras floats, worked as a river boat deck hand and sang and played drums in the regionally successful rock band, "FUSION". He attended Immaculate Conception and St. Columba grade schools as well as Ursuline High School and graduated from there in 1970, he married and moved to Anaheim, where he managed a video store in the early 1980s, before launching his voice-acting career in late 1984. Cummings has two daughters with Stephanie Cummings, as well as two older children from a previous marriage. Terminator 2: 3-D Battle Across Time in Universal Studios Theme Parks: Opening Sequence Narrator IllumiNations: Reflections of Earth at EPCOT in Walt Disney World: Narrator Roger Rabbit's Car Toon Spin at Mickey's Toontown in Disneyland: Baby Herman Jim Cummings on IMDb Jim Cummings at Voice Chasers Jim Cummings Interview at Toon Zone Jim Cummings at Anime News Network's encyclopedia Jim Cummings feature article and photos at Voice Actors in the News Jim Cummings' Imaginography at Imagine Casting Jim Cummings on Wowpedia, a Warcraft wiki
Ben Stein
Benjamin Jeremy Stein is a conservative American writer, lawyer and commentator on political and economic issues. A graduate of Columbia University, Stein began his career in law, graduating as valedictorian from Yale Law School, he attained early success as a speechwriter for U. S. presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. He entered the entertainment field and became an actor and Emmy Award-winning game show host, he is most well-known on screen as the economics teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and as Dr. Arthur Neuman in The Mask and Son of the Mask. Stein is a filmmaker, he co-wrote and starred in the 2008 documentary Expelled, which portrays intelligent design as a scientifically valid alternative to Darwinian evolution and alleges a scientific conspiracy against those promoting intelligent design in laboratories and classrooms. Stein said that his aim was to expose "people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can’t touch God."Stein has written commentaries on economic and social issues, along with financial advice to individual investors.
He is the son of economist and writer Herbert Stein, who worked at the White House under President Nixon. His sister, Rachel, is a writer. While as a character actor he is well known for his droning, monotonous delivery, in real life he is a public speaker on a wide range of economic and social issues. In comedy, he is known for his deadpan delivery. Stein was born in Washington, D. C. the son of Mildred, a homemaker, Herbert Stein, a writer and presidential adviser. He grew up in the Woodside Forest neighborhood of Silver Spring, Maryland. Stein graduated from Montgomery Blair High School in 1962 along with classmate journalist Carl Bernstein. Actor Sylvester Stallone was a schoolmate at Montgomery Hills Junior High School, he went on to major in economics at Columbia University's Columbia College, where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi and the Philolexian Society. After graduating with honors from Columbia in 1966, Stein went to Yale Law School, graduating as valedictorian in June 1970, he was first a poverty lawyer in New Haven and Washington, D.
C. before becoming a trial lawyer for the Federal Trade Commission. Stein's first teaching stint was as an adjunct professor, teaching about the political and social content of mass culture at American University in Washington, D. C, he subsequently taught classes at University of California, Santa Cruz on political and civil rights under the United States Constitution. At Pepperdine University in Malibu, CA, Stein taught libel law and United States securities law and its ethical aspects, he was a professor of law at Pepperdine University Law School, from about 1990 to 1997. Stein writes on a variety of topics, including politics and economics, he writes a regular column in the conservative magazines The American Newsmax. He has written for numerous publications including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, New York Magazine, Los Angeles Magazine, Barron's Magazine, where his discussion of the Michael Milken Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond situation, as well as the ethical dimensions of management buyouts, attracted heavy US national attention in the 1980s and 1990s.
He wrote a regular biweekly column for Yahoo! Finance online, with his last article dated August 7, 2009, his bestselling books include Yes, You Can Retire Comfortably, Can America Survive?, Yes, You Can Time the Market. In 2009, he published a collection of The Real Stars. Stein was fired from his position as a Sunday Business columnist at The New York Times in August 2009, due to a policy prohibiting writers from performing product endorsements or advertising. Stein had become an advertising spokesman for credit information company Freescore.com, according to a Times statement, had assumed there would be no conflict provided that he did not discuss credit scoring in general or FreeScore.com itself in his column. However, the publication felt that it would be inappropriate for him to write for them while he was involved in advertising, terminated his contract. Writing in The Spectator, Stein states his belief that the real reasons for his firing were budget cuts at the Times, his criticism of President Obama, pressure from those critical of Expelled, who "bamboozled some of the high pooh-bahs at the Times into thinking there was a conflict of interest".
Stein is an in-house journalist at Newsmax Magazine, a magazine by the conservative media group Newsmax Media. Stein began his political career as a speechwriter and lawyer for President Richard Nixon, for President Gerald Ford. On May 3, 1976, Time magazine speculated on the possibility of Stein having been Deep Throat. Stein responded over the years by not only denying he was Deep Throat, but by going further and accusing journalist Bob Woodward of falsifying the famous secret source. In the May 14–21, 1998 edition of the Philadelphia City Paper, Stein is quoted saying, "Oh, I don't think there was a Deep Throat; that was a fake. I think there were several different sources and some they just made up." After Mark Felt's identity as Deep Throat was revealed, Stein stated that Richard Nixon would have prevented the rise to power of the Khmer Rouge if he had not been forced to resign. For his actions leading to that resignation, Stein said: If there is such a thing as karma, if there is such a thing as justice in this life or the next, Mark Felt has bought himself the worst future of any man on this earth.
And Bob Woodward
Tim Curry
Timothy James Curry is an English actor and singer. He is best known for working in a diverse range of theatre and television, most portraying villainous characters. Curry rose to prominence with his portrayal of Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, reprising the role he had originated in the 1973 London and 1974 Los Angeles stage productions of The Rocky Horror Show, his other stage work includes various roles in the original West End production of Hair, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the 1980 Broadway production of Amadeus, the Pirate King in the 1982 West End production of The Pirates of Penzance, Alan Swann in the Broadway production of My Favourite Year, King Arthur in Broadway and West End productions of Spamalot from 2005 to 2007. Curry received further acclaim for his film and television roles, including as Rooster Hannigan in the film adaptation of Annie, as Darkness in the fantasy film Legend, as Wadsworth in the mystery comedy film Clue, as Pennywise the Dancing Clown in the horror miniseries It and Long John Silver in Muppet Treasure Island.
Curry has gained acclaim as a voice actor. His roles in animation include Captain Hook on the Fox series Peter Pan & the Pirates, Hexxus in the fantasy film FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Sir Nigel Thornberry on the Nickelodeon series The Wild Thornberrys and Palpatine on Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Curry was born in Cheshire, his father, James Curry, a chaplain in the Royal Navy, died. Curry's mother, Patricia, a school secretary, died in June 1999 after living with cancer for two years, his older sister, was a concert pianist who died of a brain tumour in 2001. Curry spent most of his childhood in Devon. After his father's death from pneumonia in 1958, his family moved to South London. Curry attended Kingswood School in Bath, Somerset, he developed into a talented boy soprano. Deciding to concentrate on acting, Curry graduated from the University of Birmingham with a combined degree in English and Drama. Curry's first full-time role was as part of the original London cast of the musical Hair in 1968, where he met Richard O'Brien who went on to write Curry's next full-time role, that of Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Show.
Curry recalled his first encounter with the project: I'd heard about the play because I lived on Paddington Street, off Baker Street, there was an old gym a few doors away. I saw Richard O'Brien in the street, he said he'd just been to the gym to see if he could find a muscleman who could sing. I said, "Why do you need him to sing?" And he told me that his musical was going to be done, I should talk to Jim Sharman. He gave me the script, I thought, "Boy, if this works, it's going to be a smash." Curry rehearsed the character with a German accent and peroxide blond hair, with an American accent. In March 2005, in an interview with Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air, he explains that he decided to play Dr. Frank-N-Furter with an English accent after listening to an English woman say, "Do you have a house in town or a house in the country", decided, "Yes, should sound like the Queen". Curry thought the character was a laboratory doctor dressed in a white lab coat. However, at the suggestion of director Sharman, the character evolved into the diabolical mad scientist and transvestite with an upper-class Belgravia accent that carried over to The Rocky Horror Picture Show and made Curry a household name and gave him a cult following.
He continued to play the character in London, Los Angeles, New York City until 1975. In an interview with NPR, Curry called Rocky Horror a "rite of passage", added that the film is "a guaranteed weekend party to which you can go with or without a date and find one if you don't have one, it's a chance for people to try on a few roles for size, you know? Figure out, help them maybe figure out their own sexuality". In 2016, Curry played The Criminologist in the television film remake of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Shortly after the end of Rocky Horror's run on Broadway, Curry returned to the stage with Tom Stoppard's Travesties, which ran in London and New York from 1975 to 1976. Travesties was a Broadway hit, it won two Tony Awards, as well as the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, Curry's performance as the famous dadaist Tristan Tzara received good reviews. In 1981, Curry formed part of the original cast in the Broadway show Amadeus, playing the title character, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, he was nominated for his first Tony Award for this role but lost out to his co-star Ian McKellen, who played Antonio Salieri.
In 1982, Curry took the part of the Pirate King in the Drury Lane production of Joe Papp's version of The Pirates of Penzance opposite George Cole, earning enthusiastic reviews. In the mid-1980s, Curry performed in The Rivals and in several plays with the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain, including The Threepenny Opera and Love For Love. In 1988, Curry did the national tour of Me and My Girl as the lead role of Bill Snibson, a role originated on Broadway by Robert Lindsay and followed by Jim Dale. In 1989-90, Tim Curry returned once again to the New York stage in The Art of Success. In 1993, Curry played Alan Swann in the Broadway musical version of My Favourite Year, earning him his second Tony Award nomination, this time for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical. In 2001, Curry appeared as Scrooge in the musical version of A Christmas
DOS
DOS is a family of disk operating systems, hence the name. DOS consists of MS-DOS and a rebranded version under the name IBM PC DOS, both of which were introduced in 1981. Other compatible systems from other manufacturers include DR-DOS, ROM-DOS, PTS-DOS, FreeDOS. MS-DOS dominated the x86-based IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995. Dozens of other operating systems use the acronym "DOS", including the mainframe DOS/360 from 1966. Others are Apple DOS, Apple ProDOS, Atari DOS, Commodore DOS, TRSDOS, AmigaDOS. Fictional operating systems have used this acronym as well, such as GLaDOS from the video game Portal. IBM PC DOS and its predecessor, 86-DOS, resembled Digital Research's CP/M—the dominant disk operating system for 8-bit Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 microcomputers—but instead ran on Intel 8086 16-bit processors; when IBM introduced the IBM PC, built with the Intel 8088 microprocessor, they needed an operating system. Seeking an 8088-compatible build of CP/M, IBM approached Microsoft CEO Bill Gates.
IBM was sent to Digital Research, a meeting was set up. However, the initial negotiations for the use of CP/M broke down. Digital Research founder Gary Kildall refused, IBM withdrew. IBM again approached Bill Gates. Gates in turn approached Seattle Computer Products. There, programmer Tim Paterson had developed a variant of CP/M-80, intended as an internal product for testing SCP's new 16-bit Intel 8086 CPU card for the S-100 bus; the system was named QDOS, before being made commercially available as 86-DOS. Microsoft purchased 86-DOS for $50,000; this became Microsoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS, introduced in 1981. Within a year Microsoft licensed MS-DOS to over 70 other companies, which supplied the operating system for their own hardware, sometimes under their own names. Microsoft required the use of the MS-DOS name, with the exception of the IBM variant. IBM continued to develop their version, PC DOS, for the IBM PC. Digital Research became aware that an operating system similar to CP/M was being sold by IBM, threatened legal action.
IBM responded by offering an agreement: they would give PC consumers a choice of PC DOS or CP/M-86, Kildall's 8086 version. Side-by-side, CP/M cost $200 more than PC DOS, sales were low. CP/M faded, with MS-DOS and PC DOS becoming the marketed operating system for PCs and PC compatibles. Microsoft sold MS-DOS only to original equipment manufacturers. One major reason for this was. DOS was structured such that there was a separation between the system specific device driver code and the DOS kernel. Microsoft provided an OEM Adaptation Kit which allowed OEMs to customize the device driver code to their particular system. By the early 1990s, most PCs adhered to IBM PC standards so Microsoft began selling MS-DOS in retail with MS-DOS 5.0. In the mid-1980s Microsoft developed a multitasking version of DOS; this version of DOS is referred to as "European MS-DOS 4" because it was developed for ICL and licensed to several European companies. This version of DOS supports preemptive multitasking, shared memory, device helper services and New Executable format executables.
None of these features were used in versions of DOS, but they were used to form the basis of the OS/2 1.0 kernel. This version of DOS is distinct from the released PC DOS 4.0, developed by IBM and based upon DOS 3.3. Digital Research attempted to regain the market lost from CP/M-86 with Concurrent DOS, FlexOS and DOS Plus with Multiuser DOS and DR DOS. Digital Research was bought by Novell, DR DOS became Novell DOS 7. Gordon Letwin wrote in 1995 that "DOS was, when we first wrote it, a one-time throw-away product intended to keep IBM happy so that they'd buy our languages". Microsoft expected; the company planned to over time improve MS-DOS so it would be indistinguishable from single-user Xenix, or XEDOS, which would run on the Motorola 68000, Zilog Z-8000, LSI-11. IBM, did not want to replace DOS. After AT&T began selling Unix, Microsoft and IBM began developing OS/2 as an alternative; the two companies had a series of disagreements over two successor operating systems to DOS, OS/2 and Windows.
They split development of their DOS systems as a result. The last retail version of MS-DOS was MS-DOS 6.22. The last retail version of PC DOS was PC DOS 2000, though IBM did develop PC DOS 7.10 for OEMs and internal use. The FreeDOS project began on 26 June 1994, when Microsoft announced it would no longer sell or support MS-DOS. Jim Hall posted a manifesto proposing the development of an open-source replacement. Within a few weeks, other programmers including Pat Villani and Tim Norman joined the project. A kernel, the COMMAND. COM command line interpreter, core utilities were created by pooling code they had wri
Computing platform
A computing platform or digital platform is the environment in which a piece of software is executed. It may be the hardware or the operating system a web browser and associated application programming interfaces, or other underlying software, as long as the program code is executed with it. Computing platforms have different abstraction levels, including a computer architecture, an OS, or runtime libraries. A computing platform is the stage. A platform can be seen both as a constraint on the software development process, in that different platforms provide different functionality and restrictions. For example, an OS may be a platform that abstracts the underlying differences in hardware and provides a generic command for saving files or accessing the network. Platforms may include: Hardware alone, in the case of small embedded systems. Embedded systems can access hardware directly, without an OS. A browser in the case of web-based software; the browser itself runs on a hardware+OS platform, but this is not relevant to software running within the browser.
An application, such as a spreadsheet or word processor, which hosts software written in an application-specific scripting language, such as an Excel macro. This can be extended to writing fully-fledged applications with the Microsoft Office suite as a platform. Software frameworks. Cloud computing and Platform as a Service. Extending the idea of a software framework, these allow application developers to build software out of components that are hosted not by the developer, but by the provider, with internet communication linking them together; the social networking sites Twitter and Facebook are considered development platforms. A virtual machine such as the Java virtual machine or. NET CLR. Applications are compiled into a format similar to machine code, known as bytecode, executed by the VM. A virtualized version of a complete system, including virtualized hardware, OS, storage; these allow, for instance, a typical Windows program to run on. Some architectures have multiple layers, with each layer acting as a platform to the one above it.
In general, a component only has to be adapted to the layer beneath it. For instance, a Java program has to be written to use the Java virtual machine and associated libraries as a platform but does not have to be adapted to run for the Windows, Linux or Macintosh OS platforms. However, the JVM, the layer beneath the application, does have to be built separately for each OS. AmigaOS, AmigaOS 4 FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD IBM i Linux Microsoft Windows OpenVMS Classic Mac OS macOS OS/2 Solaris Tru64 UNIX VM QNX z/OS Android Bada BlackBerry OS Firefox OS iOS Embedded Linux Palm OS Symbian Tizen WebOS LuneOS Windows Mobile Windows Phone Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless Cocoa Cocoa Touch Common Language Infrastructure Mono. NET Framework Silverlight Flash AIR GNU Java platform Java ME Java SE Java EE JavaFX JavaFX Mobile LiveCode Microsoft XNA Mozilla Prism, XUL and XULRunner Open Web Platform Oracle Database Qt SAP NetWeaver Shockwave Smartface Universal Windows Platform Windows Runtime Vexi Ordered from more common types to less common types: Commodity computing platforms Wintel, that is, Intel x86 or compatible personal computer hardware with Windows operating system Macintosh, custom Apple Inc. hardware and Classic Mac OS and macOS operating systems 68k-based PowerPC-based, now migrated to x86 ARM architecture based mobile devices iPhone smartphones and iPad tablet computers devices running iOS from Apple Gumstix or Raspberry Pi full function miniature computers with Linux Newton devices running the Newton OS from Apple x86 with Unix-like systems such as Linux or BSD variants CP/M computers based on the S-100 bus, maybe the earliest microcomputer platform Video game consoles, any variety 3DO Interactive Multiplayer, licensed to manufacturers Apple Pippin, a multimedia player platform for video game console development RISC processor based machines running Unix variants SPARC architecture computers running Solaris or illumos operating systems DEC Alpha cluster running OpenVMS or Tru64 UNIX Midrange computers with their custom operating systems, such as IBM OS/400 Mainframe computers with their custom operating systems, such as IBM z/OS Supercomputer architectures Cross-platform Platform virtualization Third platform Ryan Sarver: What is a platform
