1.
Berkeley, California
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Berkeley is a city on the east shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley and it borders the cities of Oakland and Emeryville to the south and the city of Albany and the unincorporated community of Kensington to the north. Its eastern border with Contra Costa County generally follows the ridge of the Berkeley Hills, the 2010 census recorded a population of 112,580. It also has the Graduate Theological Union, one of the largest religious studies institutions in the world and it is one of the most politically liberal cities in the United States. The site of todays City of Berkeley was the territory of the Chochenyo/Huchiun band of the Ohlone people when the first Europeans arrived, other artifacts were discovered in the 1950s in the downtown area during remodeling of a commercial building, near the upper course of the creek. The first people of European descent arrived with the De Anza Expedition in 1776, today, this is noted by signage on Interstate 80, which runs along the San Francisco Bay shoreline of Berkeley. The De Anza Expedition led to establishment of the Spanish Presidio of San Francisco at the entrance to San Francisco Bay, luis Peralta was among the soldiers at the Presidio. For his services to the King of Spain, he was granted a vast stretch of land on the east shore of San Francisco Bay for a ranch, luis Peralta named his holding Rancho San Antonio. The primary activity of the ranch was raising cattle for meat and hides, eventually, Peralta gave portions of the ranch to each of his four sons. What is now Berkeley lies mostly in the portion that went to Peraltas son Domingo, with a little in the portion that went to another son, no artifact survives of the Domingo or Vicente ranches, but their names survive in Berkeley street names. However, legal title to all land in the City of Berkeley remains based on the original Peralta land grant, the Peraltas Rancho San Antonio continued after Alta California passed from Spanish to Mexican sovereignty after the Mexican War of Independence. The lands of the brothers Domingo and Vicente were quickly reduced to reservations close to their respective ranch homes, the rest of the land was surveyed and parceled out to various American claimants. Politically, the area that became Berkeley was initially part of a vast Contra Costa County, on March 25,1853, Alameda County was created from a division within Contra Costa County, as well as from a small portion of Santa Clara County. The area of Berkeley was at this period mostly a mix of land, farms and ranches. It was not yet Berkeley, but merely the part of the Oakland Township subdivision of Alameda County. In 1866, Oaklands private College of California looked for a new site, according to the Centennial Record of the University of California, In 1866…at Founders Rock, a group of College of California men watched two ships standing out to sea through the Golden Gate. Although the philosophers name is pronounced bark-lee, the pronunciation of the name has evolved to suit American English as burk-lee. The College of Californias College Homestead Association planned to raise funds for the new campus by selling off adjacent parcels of land, to this end, they laid out a plat and street grid that became the basis of Berkeleys modern street plan
2.
United States
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Forty-eight of the fifty states and the federal district are contiguous and located in North America between Canada and Mexico. The state of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east, the state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U. S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean, the geography, climate and wildlife of the country are extremely diverse. At 3.8 million square miles and with over 324 million people, the United States is the worlds third- or fourth-largest country by area, third-largest by land area. It is one of the worlds most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, paleo-Indians migrated from Asia to the North American mainland at least 15,000 years ago. European colonization began in the 16th century, the United States emerged from 13 British colonies along the East Coast. Numerous disputes between Great Britain and the following the Seven Years War led to the American Revolution. On July 4,1776, during the course of the American Revolutionary War, the war ended in 1783 with recognition of the independence of the United States by Great Britain, representing the first successful war of independence against a European power. The current constitution was adopted in 1788, after the Articles of Confederation, the first ten amendments, collectively named the Bill of Rights, were ratified in 1791 and designed to guarantee many fundamental civil liberties. During the second half of the 19th century, the American Civil War led to the end of slavery in the country. By the end of century, the United States extended into the Pacific Ocean. The Spanish–American War and World War I confirmed the status as a global military power. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 left the United States as the sole superpower. The U. S. is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Organization of American States. The United States is a developed country, with the worlds largest economy by nominal GDP. It ranks highly in several measures of performance, including average wage, human development, per capita GDP. While the U. S. economy is considered post-industrial, characterized by the dominance of services and knowledge economy, the United States is a prominent political and cultural force internationally, and a leader in scientific research and technological innovations. In 1507, the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller produced a map on which he named the lands of the Western Hemisphere America after the Italian explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci
3.
Unix
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Among these is Apples macOS, which is the Unix version with the largest installed base as of 2014. Many Unix-like operating systems have arisen over the years, of which Linux is the most popular, Unix was originally meant to be a convenient platform for programmers developing software to be run on it and on other systems, rather than for non-programmer users. The system grew larger as the system started spreading in academic circles, as users added their own tools to the system. Unix was designed to be portable, multi-tasking and multi-user in a time-sharing configuration and these concepts are collectively known as the Unix philosophy. By the early 1980s users began seeing Unix as a universal operating system. Under Unix, the system consists of many utilities along with the master control program. To mediate such access, the kernel has special rights, reflected in the division between user space and kernel space, the microkernel concept was introduced in an effort to reverse the trend towards larger kernels and return to a system in which most tasks were completed by smaller utilities. In an era when a standard computer consisted of a disk for storage and a data terminal for input and output. However, modern systems include networking and other new devices, as graphical user interfaces developed, the file model proved inadequate to the task of handling asynchronous events such as those generated by a mouse. In the 1980s, non-blocking I/O and the set of inter-process communication mechanisms were augmented with Unix domain sockets, shared memory, message queues, and semaphores. In microkernel implementations, functions such as network protocols could be moved out of the kernel, Multics introduced many innovations, but had many problems. Frustrated by the size and complexity of Multics but not by the aims and their last researchers to leave Multics, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, M. D. McIlroy, and J. F. Ossanna, decided to redo the work on a much smaller scale. The name Unics, a pun on Multics, was suggested for the project in 1970. Peter H. Salus credits Peter Neumann with the pun, while Brian Kernighan claims the coining for himself, in 1972, Unix was rewritten in the C programming language. Bell Labs produced several versions of Unix that are referred to as Research Unix. In 1975, the first source license for UNIX was sold to faculty at the University of Illinois Department of Computer Science, UIUC graduate student Greg Chesson was instrumental in negotiating the terms of this license. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the influence of Unix in academic circles led to adoption of Unix by commercial startups, including Sequent, HP-UX, Solaris, AIX. In the late 1980s, AT&T Unix System Laboratories and Sun Microsystems developed System V Release 4, in the 1990s, Unix-like systems grew in popularity as Linux and BSD distributions were developed through collaboration by a worldwide network of programmers
4.
AT&T Corporation
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Founded in 1885 as the original American Telephone and Telegraph Company, it was at times the worlds largest telephone company, the worlds largest cable television operator, and a regulated monopoly. At its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, it employed one million people, in 2005, AT&T was purchased by Baby Bell and former subsidiary SBC Communications for more than $16 billion. SBC then changed its name to AT&T Inc, AT&T started with Bell Patent Association, a legal entity established in 1874 to protect the patent rights of Alexander Graham Bell after he invented the telephone system. Originally a verbal agreement, it was formalized in writing in 1875 as Bell Telephone Company, in 1880 the management of American Bell had created what would become AT&T Long Lines. The project was the first of its kind to create a nationwide long-distance network with a commercially viable cost-structure, the project was formally incorporated in New York State as a separate company named American Telephone and Telegraph Company on March 3,1885. With this assets transfer, AT&T became the parent of both American Bell and the Bell System. AT&T was involved mainly in the business and, although it was a partner with RCA, was reluctant to see radio grow because such growth might diminish the demand for wired services. It established station WEAF in New York as what was termed a toll station, AT&T could provide no programming, but anyone who wished to broadcast a message could pay a toll to AT&T and then air the message publicly. The original studio was the size of a telephone booth, the idea, however, did not take hold, because people would pay to broadcast messages only if they were sure that someone was listening. As a result, WEAF began broadcasting entertainment material, drawing amateur talent found among its employees, throughout most of the 20th century, AT&T held a monopoly on phone service in the United States and Canada through a network of companies called the Bell System. At this time, the company was nicknamed Ma Bell, on April 30,1907, Theodore Newton Vail became President of AT&T. Vail believed in the superiority of one system and AT&T adopted the slogan One Policy, One System. This would be the philosophy for the next 70 years. Under Vail, AT&T began buying up many of the telephone companies including Western Union telegraph. Anxious to avoid action from government antitrust suits, AT&T and the government entered into an agreement known as the Kingsbury Commitment. These actions brought unwanted attention from antitrust regulators, in the Kingsbury Commitment, AT&T and the government reached an agreement that allowed AT&T to continue operating as a monopoly. While AT&T periodically faced scrutiny from regulators, this state of affairs continued until the breakup in 1984. The United States Justice Department opened the case United States v. AT&T in 1974 and this was prompted by suspicion that AT&T was using monopoly profits from its Western Electric subsidiary to subsidize the cost of its network, a violation of anti-trust law
5.
Western Electric
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Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering and manufacturing company that served as the primary supplier to AT&T from 1881 to 1996. The company was responsible for technological innovations and seminal developments in industrial management. It also served as the agent for the member companies of the Bell System. In 1856, George Shawk purchased an engineering business in Cleveland. On December 31,1869, he partners with Enos M. Barton and, later the same year. In 1872 Barton, and Gray moved the business to Clinton Street, Chicago, Illinois, in 1875, Gray sold his interests to Western Union, including the caveat that he had filed against Alexander Graham Bells patent application for the telephone. Western Electric was the first company to join in a Japanese joint venture with foreign capital, in 1899, it invested in a 54% share of the Nippon Electric Company, Ltd. Western Electrics representative in Japan was Walter Tenney Carleton, in 1901, Western Electric secretly purchased a controlling interest in a principal competitor, the Kellogg Switchboard & Supply Company, but was later forced by a lawsuit to sell. On July 24,1915, employees of the Hawthorne Works boarded the SS Eastland in downtown Chicago for a company picnic, the ship rolled over at the dock and over 800 people died. In 1920, Alice Heacock Seidel was the first of Western Electrics female employees to be given permission to stay on after she had married and this set a precedent in the company, which previously had not allowed married women in their employ. Miss Heacock had worked for Western Electric for sixteen years before her marriage, if the women at the top were permitted to remain after marriage then all women would expect the same privilege. How far and how fast the policy was expanded is shown by the fact that a few years later women were given maternity leaves with no loss of time on their service records. In 1925, ITT purchased the Bell Telephone Manufacturing Company of Brussels, Belgium, the company manufactured rotary system switching equipment under the Western Electric brand. Early on, Western Electric also managed an electrical equipment distribution business, Bell Telephone Laboratories was half-owned by Western Electric, the other half belonging to AT&T. Western Electric used various logos during its existence, starting in 1914 it used an image of AT&Ts statue Spirit of Communication. In 1915, Western Electric Manufacturing was incorporated in New York, New York, as an owned subsidiary of AT&T, under the name Western Electric Company. AT&T and Bell System companies were rumored to employ small armies of inspectors to check household line voltage levels to determine if non-leased phones were in use by consumers. Western Electric telephones were owned not by end customers but by the local Bell System telephone companies—all of which were subsidiaries of AT&T, each phone was leased from the phone company on a monthly basis by customers who generally paid for their phone as part of the recurring lease fees
6.
Tim Berners-Lee
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Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA FBCS, also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, which oversees the development of the Web. He is also the founder of the World Wide Web Foundation and is a researcher and holder of the founders chair at the MIT Computer Science. He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative, in 2011, he was named as a member of the board of trustees of the Ford Foundation. In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work, in April 2009, he was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. Named in Time magazines list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century and he tweeted This is for everyone, which instantly was spelled out in LCD lights attached to the chairs of the 80,000 people in the audience. Berners-Lee was born in London, England, United Kingdom, one of four born to Mary Lee Woods. His parents worked on the first commercially built computer, the Ferranti Mark 1, a keen trainspotter as a child, he learnt about electronics from tinkering with a model railway. He studied at The Queens College, Oxford, from 1973 to 1976, after graduation, Berners-Lee worked as an engineer at the telecommunications company Plessey in Poole, Dorset. In 1978, he joined D. G. Nash in Ferndown, Dorset, Berners-Lee worked as an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980. While in Geneva, he proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to demonstrate it, he built a prototype system named ENQUIRE. After leaving CERN in late 1980, he went to work at John Pooles Image Computer Systems, Ltd, in Bournemouth and he ran the companys technical side for three years. The project he worked on was a remote procedure call which gave him experience in computer networking. In 1984, he returned to CERN as a fellow and it then was accepted by his manager, Mike Sendall. He used similar ideas to those underlying the ENQUIRE system to create the World Wide Web, for which he designed and his software also functioned as an editor, and the first Web server, CERN HTTPd. The first web site was built at CERN, despite this being an international organisation hosted by Switzerland, the office that Berners-Lee used was just across the border in France. It was put online on 6 August 1991 for the first time, It provided an explanation of what the World Wide Web was and we can connect with each other instantly, all over the world. In 1994, Berners-Lee founded the W3C at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and it comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web
7.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum
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Andrew Stuart Andy Tanenbaum is an American computer scientist and professor emeritus of computer science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is best known as the author of MINIX, a free Unix-like operating system for teaching purposes and he regards his teaching job as his most important work. Since 2004 he has operated Electoral-vote. com, a dedicated to analysis of polling data in federal elections in the United States. Tanenbaum was born in New York City and grew up in suburban White Plains and he received his bachelor of Science degree in Physics from MIT in 1965 and his Ph. D. degree in astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. Tanenbaum also served as a lobbyist for the Sierra Club and he moved to the Netherlands to live with his wife, who is Dutch, but he retains his United States citizenship. He teaches courses about Computer Organization and Operating Systems and supervises the work of Ph. D. candidates at the VU University Amsterdam, on 9 July 2014, he announced his retirement. Tanenbaum is well recognized for his textbooks on computer science and they include, Computer Networks, co-authored with David J. In his autobiography Just for Fun, Torvalds describes it as the book that launched me to new heights and they have appeared in over 175 editions and are used at universities around the world. These schools were intended to bring professors and Ph. D. students from different Dutch universities together to help them cooperate, Tanenbaum was one of the cofounders and first Dean of the Advanced School for Computing and Imaging. This school initially consisted of nearly 200 faculty members and Ph. D. students from the Vrije Universiteit, University of Amsterdam, Delft University of Technology and they were especially working on problems in advanced computer systems such as parallel computing and image analysis and processing. ASCI has since grown to include researchers from nearly a dozen universities in The Netherlands, Belgium, ASCI offers Ph. D. level courses, has an annual conference, and runs various workshops every year. The Amsterdam Compiler Kit is a toolkit for producing portable compilers and it was started sometime before 1981 and Andrew Tanenbaum was the architect from the start until version 5.5. In 1987, Tanenbaum wrote a clone of UNIX, called MINIX and it was targeted at students and others who wanted to learn how an operating system worked. Consequently, he wrote a book listed the source code in an appendix. The source code itself was available on a set of floppy disks, within three months, a Usenet newsgroup, comp. os. minix, had sprung up with over 40,000 subscribers discussing and improving the system. One of these subscribers was a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds who began adding new features to MINIX, on October 5,1991, Torvalds announced his own kernel, called Linux, which originally used the MINIX file system, but it is not based on MINIX code. Although MINIX and Linux have diverged, MINIX continues to be developed, the focus is on building a highly modular, reliable, and secure, operating system. The system is based on a microkernel, with only 5000 lines of running in kernel mode
8.
System administrator
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A system administrator, or sysadmin, is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems, especially multi-user computers, such as servers. The system administrator seeks to ensure that the uptime, performance, resources, many organizations staff other jobs related to system administration. In a larger company, these may all be separate positions within a support or Information Services department. In a smaller group they may be shared by a few sysadmins, a database administrator maintains a database system, and is responsible for the integrity of the data and the efficiency and performance of the system. A network administrator maintains network infrastructure such as switches and routers, a security administrator is a specialist in computer and network security, including the administration of security devices such as firewalls, as well as consulting on general security measures. A web administrator maintains web server services that allow for internal or external access to web sites, tasks include managing multiple sites, administering security, and configuring necessary components and software. Responsibilities may also include software change management, a computer operator performs routine maintenance and upkeep, such as changing backup tapes or replacing failed drives in a redundant array of independent disks. There are multiple paths to be part of becoming a system administrator, on top of this, nowadays some companies require an IT certification. Other schools have offshoots of their Computer Science program specifically for system administration, an alternate path to becoming a system administrator is to simply dive in without formal training, learning the systems they need to support, as they do other non-IT work. This is a route for informally trained system administration, and is often the result in small organizations that lack IT departments but have gradually growing needs. These informally trained system administrators could be regarded as hackers, but they do their work in support of the needs of their organization, some schools have started offering undergraduate degrees in System Administration. The first, Rochester Institute of Technology started in 1992, others such as Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of New Hampshire, Marist College, and Drexel University have more recently offered degrees in Information Technology. Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research in Pune, India offers masters degree in Computers Applications with a specialization in System Administration, the University of South Carolina offers an Integrated Information Technology B. S. degree specializing in Microsoft product support. Several U. S. universities, including Rochester Institute of Technology, Tufts, Michigan Tech, in Norway, there is a special English-taught MSc program organized by Oslo University College in cooperation with Oslo University, named Masters programme in Network and System Administration. There is also a BSc in Network and System Administration offered by Gjøvik University College, University of Amsterdam offers a similar program in cooperation with Hogeschool van Amsterdam named Master System and Network Engineering. Many schools in the world offer related graduate degrees in such as network systems. By the time a new textbook has spent years working through approvals and committees, in addition, because of the practical nature of system administration and the easy availability of open-source server software, many system administrators enter the field self-taught. Some learning institutions are reluctant to teach, what is in effect, generally, a prospective will be required to have some experience with the computer system they are expected to manage
9.
Brian Kernighan
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Brian Wilson Kernighan is a Canadian computer scientist who worked at Bell Labs alongside Unix creators Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie and contributed to the development of Unix. He is also coauthor of the AWK and AMPL programming languages, the K of K&R C and the K in AWK both stand for Kernighan. Since 2000 Brian Kernighan has been a Professor at the Computer Science Department of Princeton University, born in Toronto, Kernighan attended the University of Toronto between 1960 and 1964, earning his Bachelors degree in engineering physics. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1969 for research supervised by Peter Weiner, Kernighan has held a professorship in the department of computer science at Princeton since 2000. Each fall he teaches a course called Computers in Our World, kernighans name became widely known through co-authorship of the first book on the C programming language with Dennis Ritchie. Kernighan affirmed that he had no part in the design of the C language and he authored many Unix programs, including ditroff. In collaboration with Shen Lin he devised well-known heuristics for two NP-complete optimization problems, graph partitioning and the travelling salesman problem, in a display of authorial equity, the former is usually called the Kernighan–Lin algorithm, while the latter is known as the Lin–Kernighan heuristic. Kernighan was the editor for Prentice Hall International. His Software Tools series spread the essence of C/Unix thinking with makeovers for BASIC, FORTRAN, and Pascal and he has said that if stranded on an island with only one programming language it would have to be C. Kernighan coined the term Unix and helped popularize Thompsons Unix philosophy, Kernighan is also known as a coiner of the expression What You See Is All You Get, which is a sarcastic variant of the original What You See Is What You Get. Kernighans term is used to indicate that WYSIWYG systems might throw away information in a document that could be useful in other contexts, kernighans original 1978 implementation of Hello, World. Was sold at The Algorithm Auction, the world’s first auction of computer algorithms, in 1996, Kernighan taught CS50 which is the Harvard University introductory course in Computer Science. His students on CS50 include David J. Malan who now runs the course, an Interview with Brian Kernighan — By Mihai Budiu, for PC Report Romania, August 2000 Transcript of an interview with Brian Kernighan. Archived from the original on 2009-04-28, archived from the original on 2009-05-28
10.
X Window System
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The X Window System is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on UNIX-like computer operating systems. X provides the framework for a GUI environment, drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting with a mouse. X does not mandate the user interface – this is handled by individual programs, as such, the visual styling of X-based environments varies greatly, different programs may present radically different interfaces. X originated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1984, the protocol has been version 11 since September 1987. The X. Org Foundation leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X. Org Server, available as free and open source software under the MIT License, X is an architecture-independent system for remote graphical user interfaces and input device capabilities. Each person using a terminal has the ability to interact with the display with any type of user input device. X provides the framework, or primitives, for building such GUI environments, drawing and moving windows on the display and interacting with a mouse. X does not mandate the user interface, individual client programs handle this, programs may use Xs graphical abilities with no user interface. As such, the styling of X-based environments varies greatly. Unlike most earlier display protocols, X was specifically designed to be used over network connections rather than on an integral or attached display device. X features network transparency, which means an X program running on a computer somewhere on a network can display its user interface on an X server running on other computer on the network. The fact that the server is applied to the software in front of the user is often surprising to users accustomed to their programs being clients to services on remote computers. Xs network protocol is based on X command primitives and this approach allows both 2D and 3D operations by an X client application which might be running on a different computer to still be fully accelerated on the X servers display. X provides no support for audio, several projects exist to fill this niche. X uses a model, an X server communicates with various client programs. The server accepts requests for graphical output and sends back user input, a client and server can even communicate securely over the Internet by tunneling the connection over an encrypted network session. An X client itself may emulate an X server by providing services to other clients. This is known as X nesting, open-source clients such as Xnest and Xephyr support such X nesting
11.
Operating system
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An operating system is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources and provides common services for computer programs. All computer programs, excluding firmware, require a system to function. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer – from cellular phones, the dominant desktop operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 83. 3%. MacOS by Apple Inc. is in place, and the varieties of Linux is in third position. Linux distributions are dominant in the server and supercomputing sectors, other specialized classes of operating systems, such as embedded and real-time systems, exist for many applications. A single-tasking system can run one program at a time. Multi-tasking may be characterized in preemptive and co-operative types, in preemptive multitasking, the operating system slices the CPU time and dedicates a slot to each of the programs. Unix-like operating systems, e. g. Solaris, Linux, cooperative multitasking is achieved by relying on each process to provide time to the other processes in a defined manner. 16-bit versions of Microsoft Windows used cooperative multi-tasking, 32-bit versions of both Windows NT and Win9x, used preemptive multi-tasking. Single-user operating systems have no facilities to distinguish users, but may allow multiple programs to run in tandem, a distributed operating system manages a group of distinct computers and makes them appear to be a single computer. The development of networked computers that could be linked and communicate with each other gave rise to distributed computing, distributed computations are carried out on more than one machine. When computers in a work in cooperation, they form a distributed system. The technique is used both in virtualization and cloud computing management, and is common in large server warehouses, embedded operating systems are designed to be used in embedded computer systems. They are designed to operate on small machines like PDAs with less autonomy and they are able to operate with a limited number of resources. They are very compact and extremely efficient by design, Windows CE and Minix 3 are some examples of embedded operating systems. A real-time operating system is a system that guarantees to process events or data by a specific moment in time. A real-time operating system may be single- or multi-tasking, but when multitasking, early computers were built to perform a series of single tasks, like a calculator. Basic operating system features were developed in the 1950s, such as resident monitor functions that could run different programs in succession to speed up processing
12.
Usenet
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Usenet is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP dial-up network architecture, tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more categories, known as newsgroups, Usenet resembles a bulletin board system in many respects and is the precursor to Internet forums that are widely used today. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially, the name comes from the term users network. One notable difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of servers that store, individual users may read messages from and post messages to a local server operated by a commercial usenet provider, their Internet service provider, university, employer, or their own server. Usenet has significant cultural importance in the world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as FAQ, flame. The name Usenet emphasized its creators hope that the USENIX organization would take a role in its operation. The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories called newsgroups, for instance, sci. math and sci. physics are within the sci. * hierarchy, for science. Or, talk. origins and talk. atheism are in the talk. * hierarchy, when a user subscribes to a newsgroup, the news client software keeps track of which articles that user has read. In most newsgroups, the majority of the articles are responses to some other article, the set of articles that can be traced to one single non-reply article is called a thread. Most modern newsreaders display the articles arranged into threads and subthreads, when a user posts an article, it is initially only available on that users news server. Each news server talks to one or more servers and exchanges articles with them. In this fashion, the article is copied from server to server, the later peer-to-peer networks operate on a similar principle, but for Usenet it is normally the sender, rather than the receiver, who initiates transfers. Usenet was designed under conditions when networks were much slower and not always available, many sites on the original Usenet network would connect only once or twice a day to batch-transfer messages in and out. This is largely because the POTS network was used for transfers. The format and transmission of Usenet articles is similar to that of Internet e-mail messages, today, Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to Internet forums, blogs and mailing lists. The groups in alt. binaries are still used for data transfer
