1.
Magic word
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Magic words or words of power are words which have a specific, and sometimes unintended, effect. They are often nonsense phrases used in fiction or by stage prestidigitators. Frequently such words are presented as being part of a divine, adamic, certain comic book heroes use magic words to activate their super powers. Magic words are used as Easter eggs or cheats in computer games, other software. Examples of traditional magic words include, Aajaye – used often by the clowns in Jayes magic circus, abracadabra – prototypical magic word used by magicians. Ajji Majji la Tarajji – Iranian Magic Word, alla Peanut Butter Sandwiches – used by The Amazing Mumford on Sesame Street. Alakazam – a phrase used by magicians, bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo – used by Cinderellas Fairy Godmother. By the Power of Grayskull, I HAVE THE POWER – used by the Prince Adam, of He-Man, cei-u – used by the DC Comics superhero, Johnny Thunder, to summon his magical genie-like Thunderbolt. Hocus pocus – a phrase used by magicians, izzy wizzy, lets get busy – Used on The Sooty Show when using Sootys magic wand. Jantar Mantar Jadu Mantar – a phrase used by magicians in India, joshikazam – used by Josh Nichols, a character from the popular Nickelodeon show Drake & Josh. Klaatu barada nikto – A phrase used in the 1951 movie The Day The Earth Stood Still, while not intended as magical words in that movie, they were used as such in the spoof horror movie Army of Darkness. Mecca lecca hi, mecca hiney ho – Jambi on Pee Wees Playhouse Meeska, Mooska, open sesame – used by the character Ali Baba in the English version of a tale from the collection popularly known as 1001 Arabian Nights. Presto chango or Hey Presto – used by magicians, Sim Sala Bim – a phrase used by Harry August Jansen. Sim Sim Sala Bim are the words said by Hadji on the shows The Adventures of Jonny Quest. The line was used by Oscar Oz Diggs in Oz the Great, shazam – used by the comic book hero Captain Marvel. Shemhamforash – used by Satanists in rituals of Modern Satanism as outlined in The Satanic Bible, supercalifragilisticexpialidocious – from the song in the movie Mary Poppins. The television game show You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx in the 1950s, used the secret word. Software like MediaWiki uses magic words to make information available to templates and editors, such as
2.
Colossal Cave Adventure
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Colossal Cave Adventure is a text adventure game, developed originally in 1976, by Will Crowther for the PDP-10 mainframe. The game was expanded upon in 1977, with help from Don Woods, in the game, the player controls a character through simple text commands to explore a cave rumored to be filled with wealth. Players earn predetermined points for acquiring treasure and escaping the cave alive, the concept bore out from Crowthers background as a caving enthusiast, with the games cave structured loosely around the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky. Colossal Cave Adventure is the first known work of fiction and. Colossal Cave Adventure also contributed towards the playing and roguelike genres. Adventure has the players explore a mysterious cave that is rumored to be filled with treasure. YOU ARE STANDING AT THE END OF A ROAD BEFORE A SMALL BRICK BUILDING, a SMALL STREAM FLOWS OUT OF THE BUILDING AND DOWN A GULLY. Go south YOU ARE IN A VALLEY IN THE FOREST BESIDE A STREAM TUMBLING ALONG A ROCKY BED, programs replies are typically in a humorous, conversational tone, much as a dungeon master would use in leading players in a tabletop role-playing game. A notable example is when the player dies after falling into a pit, go west YOU FELL INTO A PIT AND BROKE EVERY BONE IN YOUR BODY. YOU DONT EXPECT ME TO DO A DECENT REINCARNATION WITHOUT ANY ORANGE SMOKE, DO YOU. yes OKAY, IF YOURE SO SMART, certain actions may cause the death of the character, requiring the player to start again. The game has a point system, whereby completing certain goals earns a number of predetermined points, the ultimate goal is to earn the maximum amount of points, which partially correlates to finding all the treasures in the game and safely leaving the cave. Will Crowther was a programmer at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Crowther and his wife Pat were experienced cavers, having previously helped to create vector map surveys of the Mammoth Cave in Kentucky in the early 1970s for the Cave Research Foundation. In addition, Crowther enjoyed playing the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons with a group which included Eric S. Roberts and Dave Lebling. Developed over 1975 and 1976, Crowthers original game consisted of about 700 lines of FORTRAN code, with about another 700 lines of data, the data included text for 78 map locations,193 vocabulary words, travel tables, and miscellaneous messages. On the PDP-10, the loads and executes with all its game data in memory. It required about 60k words of memory, which was a significant amount for PDP-10/KA systems running with only 128k words. Crowthers original version did not include any scorekeeping, during that time, others had found the game and it was distributed widely across the network, which had surprised Crowther on his return. Though titled in-game as Colossal Cave Adventure, its executable file was simply named ADVENT, one of those that had discovered the game was Don Woods, a graduate student at Stanford University in 1976
3.
Computing
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Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating a mathematical sequence of steps known as an algorithm — e. g. through computers. The field of computing includes computer engineering, software engineering, computer science, information systems, the ACM Computing Curricula 2005 defined computing as follows, In a general way, we can define computing to mean any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computers. For example, an information systems specialist will view computing somewhat differently from a software engineer, regardless of the context, doing computing well can be complicated and difficult. Because society needs people to do computing well, we must think of computing not only as a profession, the fundamental question underlying all computing is What can be automated. The term computing is also synonymous with counting and calculating, in earlier times, it was used in reference to the action performed by mechanical computing machines, and before that, to human computers. Computing is intimately tied to the representation of numbers, but long before abstractions like the number arose, there were mathematical concepts to serve the purposes of civilization. These concepts include one-to-one correspondence, comparison to a standard, the earliest known tool for use in computation was the abacus, and it was thought to have been invented in Babylon circa 2400 BC. Its original style of usage was by lines drawn in sand with pebbles, abaci, of a more modern design, are still used as calculation tools today. This was the first known computer and most advanced system of calculation known to date - preceding Greek methods by 2,000 years. The first recorded idea of using electronics for computing was the 1931 paper The Use of Thyratrons for High Speed Automatic Counting of Physical Phenomena by C. E. Wynn-Williams. Claude Shannons 1938 paper A Symbolic Analysis of Relay and Switching Circuits then introduced the idea of using electronics for Boolean algebraic operations, a computer is a machine that manipulates data according to a set of instructions called a computer program. The program has a form that the computer can use directly to execute the instructions. The same program in its source code form, enables a programmer to study. Because the instructions can be carried out in different types of computers, the execution process carries out the instructions in a computer program. Instructions express the computations performed by the computer and they trigger sequences of simple actions on the executing machine. Those actions produce effects according to the semantics of the instructions, computer software or just software, is a collection of computer programs and related data that provides the instructions for telling a computer what to do and how to do it. Software refers to one or more programs and data held in the storage of the computer for some purposes. In other words, software is a set of programs, procedures, algorithms, program software performs the function of the program it implements, either by directly providing instructions to the computer hardware or by serving as input to another piece of software
4.
Video game
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A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device such as a TV screen or computer monitor. The word video in video game referred to a raster display device. Some theorists categorize video games as an art form, but this designation is controversial, the electronic systems used to play video games are known as platforms, examples of these are personal computers and video game consoles. These platforms range from large mainframe computers to small handheld computing devices, the input device used for games, the game controller, varies across platforms. Common controllers include gamepads, joysticks, mouse devices, keyboards, the touchscreens of mobile devices, and buttons, or even, with the Kinect sensor, a persons hands and body. Players typically view the game on a screen or television or computer monitor, or sometimes on virtual reality head-mounted display goggles. There are often game sound effects, music and, in the 2010s, some games in the 2000s include haptic, vibration-creating effects, force feedback peripherals and virtual reality headsets. In the 2010s, the game industry is of increasing commercial importance, with growth driven particularly by the emerging Asian markets and mobile games. As of 2015, video games generated sales of USD74 billion annually worldwide, early games used interactive electronic devices with various display formats. The earliest example is from 1947—a Cathode ray tube Amusement Device was filed for a patent on 25 January 1947, by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann, and issued on 14 December 1948, as U. S. Written by MIT students Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanens on a DEC PDP-1 computer in 1961, and the hit ping pong-style Pong, used the DEC PDP-1s vector display to have two spaceships battle each other. In 1971, Computer Space, created by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, was the first commercially sold and it used a black-and-white television for its display, and the computer system was made of 74 series TTL chips. The game was featured in the 1973 science fiction film Soylent Green, Computer Space was followed in 1972 by the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console. Modeled after a late 1960s prototype console developed by Ralph H. Baer called the Brown Box and these were followed by two versions of Ataris Pong, an arcade version in 1972 and a home version in 1975 that dramatically increased video game popularity. The commercial success of Pong led numerous other companies to develop Pong clones and their own systems, the game inspired arcade machines to become prevalent in mainstream locations such as shopping malls, traditional storefronts, restaurants, and convenience stores. The game also became the subject of articles and stories on television and in newspapers and magazines. Space Invaders was soon licensed for the Atari VCS, becoming the first killer app, the term platform refers to the specific combination of electronic components or computer hardware which, in conjunction with software, allows a video game to operate. The term system is commonly used
5.
Cheating in video games
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Cheating in video games involves a video game player using non-standard methods to create an advantage or disadvantage beyond normal gameplay, in order to make the game easier or harder. Cheats may be activated from within the game itself, or created by third-party software or hardware and they can also be realized by exploiting software bugs, this may or may not be considered cheating based on whether the bug is considered common knowledge. Software bugs are often considered software features and as long as they are common knowledge. Cheating in video games has existed for almost their entire history, the first cheat codes were put in place for play testing purposes. Playtesters had to rigorously test the mechanics of a game and introduced cheat codes to make this process easier, an early cheat code can be found in Manic Miner, where typing 6031769 enables the cheat mode. Within months of Wizardry, Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlords 1981 release,1983 advertisements for The Great Escape Utility, a similar product for Castle Wolfenstein, promised that the $15 product remodels every feature of the game. Stop startup delays, crashes and chest waiting, get any item, in any quantity. Start in any room, at any rank, in a computer game, all numerical values are stored as is in memory. Gamers could reprogram a small part of the game before launching it, such modifications were performed through POKE statements. The Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC range and ZX Spectrum also allowed players with the proper cartridges or Multiface add-on to freeze the running program, enter POKEs, some games tried to detect the Multiface, and refused to load if it was present. The earliest models had no ability to hide, later revisions either included a switch, hid if been opened and closed the menu before loading the game, or automatically hid. For instance, with POKE47196,201 in Knight Lore for the ZX Spectrum, magazines such as Crash regularly featured lists of such POKE instructions for games. In order to them a hacker had to interpret the machine code and locate the critical point where the number of lives is decreased, impacts detected. Sometimes the term POKE was used with specific meaning. Cheating was exploited by technology-oriented players due to the difficulty of early cheats, however, a cheat industry emerged as gaming systems evolved, through the packaging and selling of cheating as a product. Cheat-enablers such as books, game guides, cheat cartridges helped form a cheat industry. However, cheating was not universally accepted in early gaming, gaming magazine Amiga Power condemned cheaters and they also applied this in reverse, games should also not be allowed to cheat the player. Guides, walkthroughs and tutorials are sometimes used to complete games, later, cheating grew more popular with magazines, websites, and even a television show, Cheat
6.
Adventure game
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An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving. The genres focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, many adventure games are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multi-player design difficult. Initial adventure games developed in the 1970s and early 1980s were text-based, within the Asian markets, adventure games continue to be popular in the form of visual novels, which make up nearly 70% of PC games released in Japan. The Asian markets have found markets for adventure games for portable and mobile gaming devices. The video game genre is defined by its gameplay, unlike the literary genre, which is defined by the subject it addresses. Essential elements of the genre include storytelling, exploration, and puzzle solving, Adventure games have been described as puzzles embedded in a narrative framework, where games involve narrative content that a player unlocks piece by piece over time. While the puzzles that players encounter through the story can be arbitrary, combat and action challenges are limited or absent in adventure games, thus distinguishing them from action games. In the book Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design, only that combat is not the primary activity. Some adventure games include a minigame from another video game genre. Hybrid action-adventure games blend action and adventure games throughout the experience, incorporating more physical challenges than pure adventure games. This definition is hard to apply, however, with debate among designers about which games are action games. Adventure games are distinct from role-playing video games that involve action, team-building. Adventure games lack the numeric rules or relationships seen in role-playing games and these games lack any skill system, combat, or an opponent to be defeated through strategy and tactics. However, some hybrid games exist here, where role-playing games with strong narrative, finally, adventure games are classified separately from puzzle video games. Although an adventure game may involve puzzle-solving, they involve a player-controlled avatar in an interactive story. Adventure games contain a variety of puzzles, decoding messages, finding and using items, opening locked doors, solving a puzzle will unlock access to new areas in the game world, and reveal more of the game story. Logic puzzles, where mechanical devices are designed with interfaces to test a players deductive reasoning skills, are common. Others have been criticized for requiring players to guess, either by clicking on the right pixel
7.
Interactive fiction
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Interactive fiction, often abbreviated IF, is software simulating environments in which players use text commands to control characters and influence the environment. Works in this form can be understood as literary narratives, either in the form of Interactive narratives or Interactive narrations and these works can also be understood as a form of video game, either in the form of an adventure game or role-playing game. Some users of the term distinguish between interactive fiction, known as Puzzle-free, that focuses on narrative, and text adventures that focus on puzzles. As a commercial product, interactive fiction reached its peak in popularity from 1979 to 1986, due to their text-only nature, they sidestepped the problem of writing for widely divergent graphics architectures. This feature meant that interactive fiction games were ported across all the popular platforms at the time. Today, a stream of new works are produced by an online interactive fiction community. The most famous example of form of printed fiction is the Choose Your Own Adventure book series. The term Interactive fiction is sometimes used wrongly as a synonym for interactive movies or visual novels which are forms of interactive narrative. Text adventures are one of the oldest types of computer games, the player uses text input to control the game, and the game state is relayed to the player via text output. Input is usually provided by the player in the form of sentences such as get key or go east. Parsers may vary in sophistication, the first text adventure parsers could only handle two-word sentences in the form of verb-noun pairs, later parsers, such as those built on Infocoms ZIL, could understand complete sentences. Later parsers could handle increasing levels of complexity parsing sentences such as open the red box with the key then go north. This level of complexity is the standard for works of interactive fiction today, despite their lack of graphics, text adventures include a physical dimension where players move between rooms. Many text adventure games boasted their total number of rooms to indicate how much gameplay they offered. These games are unique in that they may create a space, where going north from area A takes you to area B. This can create mazes that do not behave as players expect, Interactive fiction shares much in common with Multi-User Dungeons. Interactive fiction features two modes of writing, the player input and the game output. As described above, player input is expected to be in command form
8.
Cross product
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In mathematics and vector algebra, the cross product or vector product is a binary operation on two vectors in three-dimensional space and is denoted by the symbol ×. Given two linearly independent vectors a and b, the product, a × b, is a vector that is perpendicular to both a and b and therefore normal to the plane containing them. It has many applications in mathematics, physics, engineering, and it should not be confused with dot product. If two vectors have the direction or if either one has zero length, then their cross product is zero. The cross product is anticommutative and is distributive over addition, the space R3 together with the cross product is an algebra over the real numbers, which is neither commutative nor associative, but is a Lie algebra with the cross product being the Lie bracket. Like the dot product, it depends on the metric of Euclidean space, but if the product is limited to non-trivial binary products with vector results, it exists only in three and seven dimensions. If one adds the further requirement that the product be uniquely defined, the cross product of two vectors a and b is defined only in three-dimensional space and is denoted by a × b. In physics, sometimes the notation a ∧ b is used, if the vectors a and b are parallel, by the above formula, the cross product of a and b is the zero vector 0. Then, the n is coming out of the thumb. Using this rule implies that the cross-product is anti-commutative, i. e. b × a = −. By pointing the forefinger toward b first, and then pointing the finger toward a. Using the cross product requires the handedness of the system to be taken into account. If a left-handed coordinate system is used, the direction of the n is given by the left-hand rule. This, however, creates a problem because transforming from one arbitrary reference system to another, the problem is clarified by realizing that the cross product of two vectors is not a vector, but rather a pseudovector. See cross product and handedness for more detail, in 1881, Josiah Willard Gibbs, and independently Oliver Heaviside, introduced both the dot product and the cross product using a period and an x, respectively, to denote them. These alternative names are widely used in the literature. Both the cross notation and the cross product were possibly inspired by the fact that each scalar component of a × b is computed by multiplying non-corresponding components of a and b. Conversely, a dot product a ⋅ b involves multiplications between corresponding components of a and b, as explained below, the cross product can be expressed in the form of a determinant of a special 3 ×3 matrix
9.
Will Crowther
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William Crowther is a computer programmer and caver. He is best known as the co-creator of Colossal Cave Adventure, during the early 1970s Crowther worked at defense contractor and internet pioneer Bolt Beranek and Newman, where he was part of the original small ARPAnet development team. His implementation of a distance vector routing system for the ARPAnet was an important step in the evolution of the Internet. Crowther met and married Pat Crowther while at MIT, following his divorce from his wife, Crowther used his spare time to develop a simple text-based adventure game in Fortran on BBNs PDP-10. He created it as a diversion his daughters Sandy and Laura could enjoy when they came to visit, suddenly, I got involved in a divorce, and that left me a bit pulled apart in various ways. In particular I was missing my kids and my kids thought it was a lot of fun. In Colossal Cave, or more simply called Adventure, the player moves around a cave system by entering simple, two-word commands. In 1975 Crowther released the game on the early ARPAnet system, in the spring of 1976, he was contacted by Stanford researcher Don Woods, seeking his permission to enhance the game. Crowther agreed, and Woods developed several enhanced versions on a PDP-10 housed in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory where he worked, over the following decade the game gained in popularity, being ported to many operating systems, including personal-computer platform CP/M. The basic game structure invented by Crowther was carried forward by the designers of later adventure games, marc Blank and the team that created the Zork adventures cite Adventure as the title that inspired them to create their game. They later founded Infocom and published a series of text adventures. The location of the game in Colossal Cave was not a coincidence, Crowther and his first wife Pat were active and dedicated cavers in the 1960s and early 1970s—both were part of many expeditions to connect the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems. Pat played a key role in the September 9,1972 expedition that made the connection. Indeed, even during his working at BBN, his colleagues noticed that Crowther spent a fair amount of time doing chin-ups in doorframes. As a member of the MIT Outing Club during the late 1950s and early 1960s and he began climbing there in the 1950s and continues to climb today. He made the first ascent of several routes including Arrow, Hawk, Moonlight. Some of these routes sparked controversy because protection bolts were placed on rappel, the community reaction to this technique was an important part of the evolution of climbing ethics in the Shawangunks and beyond. Crowther worked at Xerox PARC from 1976 to 1983, during this period he met and married Nancy Sanders Burnes in 1980 in Palo Alto, California
10.
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
11.
Sun Microsystems
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Sun contributed significantly to the evolution of several key computing technologies, among them Unix, RISC processors, thin client computing, and virtualized computing. Sun was founded on February 24,1982, at its height, the Sun headquarters were in Santa Clara, California, on the former west campus of the Agnews Developmental Center. On January 27,2010, Oracle Corporation acquired Sun by for US$7.4 billion, other technologies include the Java platform, MySQL, and NFS. Sun was a proponent of open systems in general and Unix in particular, the initial design for what became Suns first Unix workstation, the Sun-1, was conceived by Andy Bechtolsheim when he was a graduate student at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. Bechtolsheim originally designed the SUN workstation for the Stanford University Network communications project as a personal CAD workstation and it was designed around the Motorola 68000 processor with an advanced memory management unit to support the Unix operating system with virtual memory support. He built the first ones from spare parts obtained from Stanfords Department of Computer Science, on February 24,1982, Vinod Khosla, Andy Bechtolsheim, and Scott McNealy, all Stanford graduate students, founded Sun Microsystems. Bill Joy of Berkeley, a developer of the Berkeley Software Distribution. The Sun name is derived from the initials of the Stanford University Network, Sun was profitable from its first quarter in July 1982. By 1983 Sun was known for producing 68000-based systems with high-quality graphics that were the only computers other than DECs VAX to run 4. 2BSD and it licensed the computer design to other manufacturers, which typically used it to build Multibus-based systems running Unix from UniSoft. Suns initial public offering was in 1986 under the stock symbol SUNW, the symbol was changed in 2007 to JAVA, Sun stated that the brand awareness associated with its Java platform better represented the companys current strategy. Suns logo, which features four interleaved copies of the sun in the form of a rotationally symmetric ambigram, was designed by professor Vaughan Pratt. The initial version of the logo was orange and had the sides oriented horizontally and vertically, but it was rotated to stand on one corner and re-colored purple. In the dot-com bubble, Sun began making more money. It also began spending more, hiring workers and building itself out. Some of this was because of demand, but much was from web start-up companies anticipating business that would never happen. Sales in Suns important hardware division went into free-fall as customers closed shop, several quarters of steep losses led to executive departures, rounds of layoffs, and other cost cutting. In December 2001, the fell to the 1998, pre-bubble level of about $100. But it kept falling, faster than many other tech companies, a year later it had dipped below $10 but bounced back to $20
12.
Das U-Boot
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Das U-Boot is an open source, primary boot loader used in embedded devices to package the instructions to boot the devices operating system kernel. It is available for a number of architectures, including 68k, ARM, AVR32, Blackfin, MicroBlaze, MIPS, Nios, SuperH, PPC, RISC-V. U-Boot is both a first-stage and second-stage bootloader and it is loaded by the systems ROM or BIOS from a supported boot device, such as an SD card, SATA drive, NOR flash, or NAND flash. If there are constraints, U-Boot may be split into stages, the platform would load a small SPL. Regardless of whether the SPL is used, U-Boot performs both first-stage and second-stage booting, U-Boot runs a command-line interface on a serial port. Using the console, users can load and boot a kernel, there are also commands to read device information, read and write flash memory, download files from the serial port or network, manipulate device trees, and work with environment variables. Its even possible to upgrade U-Boot using U-Boot, simply by reading the new bootloader from somewhere into memory, and writing that data to persistent storage where the bootloader belongs. U-Boot has support for USB, so it can use a USB keyboard to operate the console, U-Boot boots a kernel by reading the kernel and any other required data into memory, and then executing the kernel with the appropriate arguments. U-Boots commands are actually generalized commands which can be used to read or write any arbitrary data, however, U-Boot can also read from filesystems. U-Boot includes support for these filesystems, Squashfs Cramfs ext2 ext3 ext4 FAT FDOS JFFS2 ReiserFS UBIFS ZFS Device tree is a structure for describing hardware layout. Using Device tree, a vendor might be able to use an unmodified mainline U-Boot on otherwise special purpose hardware, as also adopted by the Linux kernel, Device tree is intended to ameliorate the situation in the embedded industry, where a vast number of product specific forks exist. The ability to run mainline software practically gives customers indemnity against lack of vendor updates, the projects origin is a 8xx PowerPC bootloader called 8xxROM written by Magnus Damm. In October 1999 Wolfgang Denk moved the project to SourceForge. net and renamed it to PPCBoot, version 0.4.1 of PPCBoot was first publicly released July 19,2000. In 2002 a previous version of the code was briefly forked into a product called ARMBoot. On October 31,2002 PPCBoot−2.0.0 was released and this marked the last release under the PPCBoot name, as it was renamed to reflect its ability to work on other architectures besides the PPC ISA. PPCBoot−2.0.0 became U−Boot−0.1.0 in November 2002, additional architecture capabilities were added in the following months, MIPS32 in March 2003, MIPS64 in April, Altera NIOS−32 in October, Coldfire in December, and Microblaze in April 2004. The May 2004 release of U-Boot-1.1.2 worked on the products of 216 board manufacturers across the various architectures, the current name Das U-Boot adds a German definite article, to create a bilingual pun on the German word for submarine. It is free software released under the terms of the GNU General Public License and it can be built on an x86 PC for any of its intended architectures using a cross development GNU toolchain, for example crosstool, the Embedded Linux Development Kit or OSELAS. Toolchain
13.
Booting
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In computing, booting is the initialization of a computerized system. The system can be a computer or a computer appliance, the booting process can be hard, e. g. after electrical power to the CPU is switched from off to on, or soft, when those power-on self-tests can be avoided. On some systems a soft boot may optionally clear RAM to zero, both hard and soft booting can be initiated by hardware such as a button press, or by software command. Booting is complete when the normal, operative, runtime environment is attained, within the hard reboot process, it runs after completion of the self-tests, then loads and runs the software. A boot loader is loaded into memory from persistent memory, such as a hard disk drive or, in some older computers, from a medium such as punched cards, punched tape. The boot loader then loads and executes the processes that finalize the boot, the process of hibernating or sleeping does not involve booting. Minimally, some embedded systems do not require a noticeable sequence to begin functioning. All computing systems are state machines, and a reboot may be the method to return to a designated zero-state from an unintended, locked state. In addition to loading an operating system or stand-alone utility, the process can also load a storage dump program for diagnosing problems in an operating system. Boot is short for bootstrap or bootstrap load and derives from the phrase to pull oneself up by ones bootstraps, early computers used a variety of ad-hoc methods to get a small program into memory to solve this problem. The invention of read-only memory of various types solved this paradox by allowing computers to be shipped with a start up program that could not be erased, growth in the capacity of ROM has allowed ever more elaborate start up procedures to be implemented. There are many different methods available to load a short initial program into a computer and these methods reach from simple, physical input to removable media that can hold more complex programs. Early computers in the 1940s and 1950s were one-of-a-kind engineering efforts that could take weeks to program and program loading was one of problems that had to be solved. An early computer, ENIAC, had no program stored in memory, bootstrapping did not apply to ENIAC, whose hardware configuration was ready for solving problems as soon as power was applied. The program was stored as a bit image on a continuously running magnetic drum, core memory was probably cleared manually via the maintenance console, and startup from when power was fully up was very fast, only a few seconds. In its general design, the DIP compared roughly with a DEC PDP-8, thus, it was not the kind of single-button-pressure bootstrap that came later, nor a read-only memory in strict terms, since the magnetic drum involved could be written to. The first programmable computers for commercial sale, such as the UNIVAC I and they typically included instructions that performed a complete input or output operation. The left 18-bit half-word was then executed as an instruction, which usually read additional words into memory, the loaded boot program was then executed, which, in turn, loaded a larger program from that medium into memory without further help from the human operator
14.
MS-DOS
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MS-DOS is a discontinued operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. MS-DOS resulted from a request in 1981 by IBM for a system to use in its IBM PC range of personal computers. Microsoft quickly bought the rights to 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products, IBM licensed and released it in August 1981 as PC DOS1.0 for use in their PCs. During its life, several competing products were released for the x86 platform and it was also the underlying basic operating system on which early versions of Windows ran as a GUI. It is a operating system, and consumes negligible installation space. MS-DOS was a form of 86-DOS – owned by Seattle Computer Products. This first version was shipped in August 1980, Microsoft, which needed an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer hired Tim Paterson in May 1981 and bought 86-DOS1.10 for $75,000 in July of the same year. Microsoft kept the number, but renamed it MS-DOS. They also licensed MS-DOS1. 10/1.14 to IBM, within a year Microsoft licensed MS-DOS to over 70 other companies. It was designed to be an OS that could run on any 8086-family computer, thus, there were many different versions of MS-DOS for different hardware, and there is a major distinction between an IBM-compatible machine and an MS-DOS machine. This design would have worked well for compatibility, if application programs had only used MS-DOS services to perform device I/O, Microsoft omitted multi-user support from MS-DOS because Microsofts Unix-based operating system, Xenix, was fully multi-user. After the breakup of the Bell System, however, AT&T Computer Systems started selling UNIX System V, believing that it could not compete with AT&T in the Unix market, Microsoft abandoned Xenix, and in 1987 transferred ownership of Xenix to the Santa Cruz Operation. On 25 March 2014, Microsoft made the code to SCP MS-DOS1.25, as an April Fools joke in 2015, Microsoft Mobile launched a Windows Phone application called MS-DOS Mobile which was presented as a new mobile operating system and worked similar to MS-DOS. Version 3.1 – Support for Microsoft Networks Version 3.2 – First version to support 3.5 inch,720 kB floppy drives and diskettes. Version 3.21 Version 3.22 – Version 3.25 Version 3.3 – First version to support 3.5 inch,1.44 MB floppy drives and diskettes, Version 3. 3a Version 3.31 – supports FAT16B and larger drives. MS-DOS4.0 and MS-DOS4.1 – A separate branch of development with additional multitasking features and it is unrelated to any later versions, including versions 4.00 and 4.01 listed below MS-DOS4. x – includes a graphical/mouse interface. It had many bugs and compatibility issues. Version 4.00 – First version to support a hard disk partition that is greater than 32 MiB. Version 4.01 – Microsoft rewritten Version 4.00 released under MS-DOS label, First version to introduce volume serial number when formatting hard disks and floppy disks
15.
Chromebook
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A Chromebook is a laptop running the Linux-based Chrome OS as its operating system. The devices were designed to be used primarily while connected to the Internet, with most applications. The original Chromebook was an example of a thin client, the first Chromebooks for sale, by Acer Inc. and Samsung, began shipping on June 15,2011. In addition to models, a desktop version, called a Chromebox, was introduced in May 2012. Chromebooks are primarily sold directly from Google and from the companys retail partners. By 2012, schools had become the largest category of customer and that October, Google broadened its marketing strategy to include first-time computer users and households seeking an additional computer. In October 2012, Simon Phipps, writing in InfoWorld, said, from January to November 2013,1.76 million Chromebooks were sold in US business-to-business channels. ABI Research have shown them most popular in the US K–12 education market, at Google I/O2016, it was announced that Android applications would be available to run on supported Chromebooks, via the Google Play Store, that will result in having two app stores in Chrome OS. The first Chromebooks for sale, by Acer Inc. and Samsung, were announced at the Google I/O conference in May 2011, Lenovo, Hewlett Packard and Google itself entered the market in early 2013. In December 2013, Samsung launched a Samsung Chromebook specifically for the Indian market that employed the companys Exynos 5 Dual core processor. In addition to models, a desktop version, called a Chromebox, was introduced in May 2012. The all-in-one is named the Chromebase and that complaint dissipated later in reviews of machines from Acer and Samsung that were priced lower. In February 2013, Google announced and began shipping the Chromebook Pixel, the Pixel C is based on Android. Initial hardware partners for Chromebook development included Acer, Adobe, Asus, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, Toshiba, Intel, Samsung, and Dell. Chromebooks ship with Google Chrome OS, a system that uses the Linux kernel. Enabling developer mode allows the installation of Linux distributions on Chromebooks, crouton is a script that allows the installation of Linux distributions from Chrome OS, and running both operating systems simultaneously. Some Chromebooks include SeaBIOS, which can be turned on to install, with limited offline capability and a fast boot-time, Chromebooks are primarily designed for use while connected to the Internet. Instead of installing traditional applications such as processing and instant messaging
16.
Blue Screen of Death
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BSoDs have been present in Windows NT3.1 and all Windows operating systems released afterwards. In the Windows 9x era, incompatible DLLs or bugs in the system kernel could also cause BSoDs. Because of the instability and lack of protection in Windows 9x. The article was about the creation of the first rudimentary task manager in Windows 3. x, engadget later updated its article to correct the mistake. Until Windows Server 2012, BSoDs showed silver text on a blue background with information about current memory values. Windows Server 2012, Windows 8 and Windows 10 use a background instead. Windows 95,98 and ME BSoDs use 80×25 text mode, BSoDs in the Windows NT family use 80×50 text mode on a 720×400 screen. Windows XP BSoDs use the Lucida Console font while the Windows Vista and 7 BSoD uses the Consolas font, Windows 8, Windows Server 2012 use Segoe UI and attempt to render the BSoD at native resolution, otherwise defaulting to 640x480. Windows 10 uses the format as Windows 8 and up. In Windows NT family of operating systems, the screen of death occurs when the kernel or a driver running in kernel mode encounters an error from which it cannot recover. This is usually caused by an illegal operation being performed, the only safe action the operating system can take in this situation is to restart the computer. As a result, data may be lost, as users are not given an opportunity to save data that has not yet been saved to the hard drive. Depending on the code, it may display the address where the problem occurred. Under Windows NT, the second and third sections of the screen may contain information on all loaded drivers and a stack dump, respectively. The driver information is in three columns, the first lists the address of the driver, the second lists the drivers creation date. By default, Windows will create a dump file when a stop error occurs. Depending on the OS version, there may be several formats this can be saved in, the resulting memory dump file may be debugged later, using a kernel debugger. For Windows WinDBG or KD debuggers from Debugging Tools for Windows are used, by default, Windows XP is configured to save only a 64kB minidump when it encounters a stop error, and to then automatically reboot the computer
17.
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
18.
Internet Relay Chat
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Internet Relay Chat is an application layer protocol that facilitates communication in the form of text. The chat process works on a client/server networking model, IRC clients are computer programs that a user can install on their system. These clients communicate with chat servers to transfer messages to other clients, client software is available for every major operating system that supports Internet access. IRC usage has been declining steadily since 2003, losing 60% of its users, Jarkko intended to extend the BBS software he administered, to allow news in the Usenet style, real time discussions and similar BBS features. The first part he implemented was the part, which he did with borrowed parts written by his friends Jyrki Kuoppala. The first IRC network was running on a server named tolsun. oulu. fi. Oikarinen found inspiration in a system known as Bitnet Relay. This was the first irc network, Jarkko got some friends at the Helsinki University and Tampere University to start running IRC servers when his number of users increased and other universities soon followed. At this time Jarkko realized that the rest of the BBS features probably wouldnt fit in his program, Jarkko got in touch with people at the University of Denver and Oregon State University. They had their own IRC network running and wanted to connect to the Finnish network and they had gotten the program from one of Jarkkos friends, Vijay Subramaniam—the first non-Finnish person to use IRC. IRC then grew larger and got used on the entire Finnish national network—Funet—and then connected to Nordunet, in November 1988, IRC had spread across the Internet and in the middle of 1989, there were some 40 servers worldwide. In August 1990 the first major disagreement took place in the IRC world, the A-net included a server named eris. berkeley. edu. It was all open, required no passwords and had no limit on the number of connects, as Greg wumpus Lindahl explains, it had a wildcard server line, so people were hooking up servers and nick-colliding everyone. The Eris Free Network, EFnet, made the machine the first to be Q-lined from IRC. In wumpus words again, Eris refused to remove that line and it wasnt much of a fight, I got all the hubs to join, and almost everyone else got carried along. A-net was formed with the servers, EFnet was formed with the non-eris servers. History showed most servers and users went with EFnet, once ANet disbanded, the name EFnet became meaningless, and once again it was the one and only IRC network. It is around that time that IRC was used to report on the 1991 Soviet coup détat attempt throughout a media blackout and it was previously used in a similar fashion during the Gulf War
19.
MIRC
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MIRC is an Internet Relay Chat client for Windows, created in 1995 and developed by Khaled Mardam-Bey. It is a fully functional chat utility, and its integrated scripting language makes it extensible and versatile, MIRC has been described as one of the most popular IRC clients available for Windows. It has been downloaded over 40 million times from CNETs Download. com service, in 2003, Nielsen/NetRatings ranked mIRC among the top ten most popular Internet applications. MIRC was created by Khaled Mardam-Bey, a British programmer of Palestinian and Syrian origin and he began developing the software in late 1994, and released its first version on February 28,1995. Mardam-Bey states that he decided to create mIRC because he felt the first IRC clients for Windows lacked some basic IRC features and he then continued developing it due to the challenge and the fact that people appreciated his work. The author states that its subsequent popularity allowed him to make an out of mIRC. mIRC is shareware. The developer states that version 5.91 is the one to support 16-bit Windows,6.35 is the last to support Windows 95, NT4.0,98. The current version supports Windows XP and later, MIRC has a number of distinguishing features. One is its scripting language which is developed with each version. The scripting language can be used to minor changes to the program like custom commands. Another claimed feature is mIRCs file sharing abilities, via the DCC protocol, starting with mIRC7.1, released on July 30,2010, Unicode and IPv6 are supported. MIRCs abilities and behaviors can be altered and extended using the embedded mIRC scripting language, MIRC includes its own GUI scripting editor, with help that has been described as extremely detailed. MIRC scripting is not limited to IRC related events and commands, there is also support for COM objects, calling DLLs, sockets and dialog boxes, among other things. This allows the client to be used in a variety of ways beyond chatting, for example as an IRC bot, a media player, a web HTML parser, or for other entertainment purposes such as mIRC games. Due to the level of access the language has to a users computer — for example, being able to rename, one example of abuse was that executed with the $decode identifier which decodes a given encoded string. This led to changes being made in mIRC version 6.17, according to the author, $decode is now disabled by default, and various other features which can be considered dangerous are now lockable
20.
Pidgin (software)
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The number of Pidgin users was estimated to be over three million in 2007. Pidgin is widely used for its Off-the-Record Messaging plugin, which offers end-to-end encryption, for this reason it is included in the privacy- and anonymity-focused operating system Tails. The program was written by Mark Spencer, an Auburn University sophomore. The earliest archived release was on December 31,1998, the emulation was not based on reverse engineering, but instead relied on information about the protocol that AOL had published on the web. Development was assisted by some of AOLs technical staff, support for other IM protocols was added soon thereafter. As of 6 July 2015, Pidgin scored seven out of seven points on the Electronic Frontier Foundations secure messaging scorecard, in response to pressure from AOL, the program was renamed to the acronymous-but-lowercase gaim. As AOL Instant Messenger gained popularity, AOL trademarked its acronym, AIM, leading to a legal struggle with the creators of GAIM. The name Pidgin was chosen in reference to the term pidgin, the name purple refers to prpl, the internal libgaim name for an IM protocol plugin. Due to the issues, version 2.0 of the software was frozen in beta stages. Following the settlement, it was announced that the first official release of Pidgin 2.0.0 was hoped to occur during the two weeks from April 8,2007. However, Pidgin 2.0 was not released as scheduled, Pidgin 2.0.0 was released on May 3,2007. Other visual changes were made to the interface in this version, Pidgin provides a graphical front-end for libpurple using GTK+. Pidgin supports multiple operating systems, including Windows and many Unix-like systems such as Linux, the BSDs and it is included by default in the operating systems Tails and Xubuntu. The program is designed to be extended with plugins, plugins are often written by third-party developers. They can be used to add support for protocols, which is useful for such as Skype which have licensing issues. They can also add significant features. For example, the Off-the-Record Messaging plugin provides end-to-end encryption, the TLS encryption system is pluggable, allowing different TLS libraries to be easily substituted. GnuTLS is the default, and NSS is also supported, some operating systems ports, such as OpenBSDs, choose to use OpenSSL or LibreSSL by default instead
21.
Digital Equipment Corporation
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Digital Equipment Corporation, also known as DEC and using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1950s to the 1990s. DEC was a vendor of computer systems, including computers, software. Their PDP and successor VAX products were the most successful of all minicomputers in terms of sales, DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. At the time, Compaq was focused on the market and had recently purchased several other large vendors. DEC was a major player overseas where Compaq had less presence, however, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, and soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own. The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002, as of 2007 some of DECs product lines were still produced under the HP name. From 1957 until 1992, DECs headquarters were located in a wool mill in Maynard. DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, which merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002. Some parts of DEC, notably the business and the Hudson. Initially focusing on the end of the computer market allowed DEC to grow without its potential competitors making serious efforts to compete with them. Their PDP series of machines became popular in the 1960s, especially the PDP-8, looking to simplify and update their line, DEC replaced most of their smaller machines with the PDP-11 in 1970, eventually selling over 600,000 units and cementing DECs position in the industry. Originally designed as a follow-on to the PDP-11, DECs VAX-11 series was the first widely used 32-bit minicomputer and these systems were able to compete in many roles with larger mainframe computers, such as the IBM System/370. The VAX was a best-seller, with over 400,000 sold, at its peak, DEC was the second largest employer in Massachusetts, second only to the Massachusetts State Government. The rapid rise of the business microcomputer in the late 1980s, DECs last major attempt to find a space in the rapidly changing market was the DEC Alpha 64-bit RISC instruction set architecture. DEC initially started work on Alpha as a way to re-implement their VAX series, DEC was acquired in June 1998 by Compaq, in what was at that time the largest merger in the history of the computer industry. At the time, Compaq was focused on the market and had recently purchased several other large vendors. DEC was a major player overseas where Compaq had less presence, however, Compaq had little idea what to do with its acquisitions, and soon found itself in financial difficulty of its own. The company subsequently merged with Hewlett-Packard in May 2002, as of 2007 some of DECs product lines were still produced under the HP name
22.
OpenVMS
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OpenVMS is a computer operating system for use in general-purpose computing. It is the successor to the VMS Operating System, that was produced by Digital Equipment Corporation, in the 1990s, it was used for the successor series of DEC Alpha systems. OpenVMS also runs on the HP Itanium-based families of computers, as of 2015, a port to the X86-64 architecture is underway. The name VMS is derived from virtual memory system, according to one of its architectural features. OpenVMS is a operating system, but source code listings are available for purchase. OpenVMS is a multi-user, multiprocessing virtual memory-based operating system designed for use in time sharing, batch processing, when process priorities are suitably adjusted, it may approach real-time operating system characteristics. The system offers high availability through clustering and the ability to distribute the system over multiple physical machines and this allows the system to be tolerant against disasters that may disable individual data-processing facilities. OpenVMS contains a user interface, a feature that was not available on the original VAX-11/VMS system. Versions of VMS running on DEC Alpha workstations in the 1990s supported OpenGL, customers using OpenVMS include banks and financial services, hospitals and healthcare, network information services, and large-scale industrial manufacturers of various products. As of mid-2014, Hewlett Packard licensed the development of OpenVMS exclusively to VMS Software Inc, VMS Software will be responsible for developing OpenVMS, supporting existing hardware and providing roadmap to clients. The company has a team of developers that originally developed the software during DECs ownership. In April 1975, Digital Equipment Corporation embarked on a project, code named Star. A companion software project, code named Starlet, was started in June 1975 to develop a new operating system, based on RSX-11M. These two projects were integrated from the beginning. Gordon Bell was the VP lead on the VAX hardware and its architecture, the Star and Starlet projects culminated in the VAX 11/780 computer and the VAX-11/VMS operating system. The Starlet name survived in VMS as a name of several of the system libraries, including STARLET. OLB. Over the years the name of the product has changed, in 1980 it was renamed, with version 2.0 release, to VAX/VMS. g. The smallest MicroVAX2000 had a 40MB RD32 hard disk and a maximum of 6MB of RAM, microVMS kits were released for VAX/VMS4.4 to 4.7 on TK50 tapes and RX50 floppy disks, but discontinued with VAX/VMS5.0
23.
IBM
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International Business Machines Corporation is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States, with operations in over 170 countries. The company originated in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company and was renamed International Business Machines in 1924, IBM manufactures and markets computer hardware, middleware and software, and offers hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. IBM is also a research organization, holding the record for most patents generated by a business for 24 consecutive years. IBM has continually shifted its business mix by exiting commoditizing markets and focusing on higher-value, also in 2014, IBM announced that it would go fabless, continuing to design semiconductors, but offloading manufacturing to GlobalFoundries. Nicknamed Big Blue, IBM is one of 30 companies included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the worlds largest employers, with nearly 380,000 employees. Known as IBMers, IBM employees have been awarded five Nobel Prizes, six Turing Awards, ten National Medals of Technology, in the 1880s, technologies emerged that would ultimately form the core of what would become International Business Machines. On June 16,1911, their four companies were amalgamated in New York State by Charles Ranlett Flint forming a fifth company, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company based in Endicott, New York. The five companies had 1,300 employees and offices and plants in Endicott and Binghamton, New York, Dayton, Ohio, Detroit, Michigan, Washington, D. C. and Toronto. They manufactured machinery for sale and lease, ranging from commercial scales and industrial time recorders, meat and cheese slicers, to tabulators and punched cards. Thomas J. Watson, Sr. fired from the National Cash Register Company by John Henry Patterson, called on Flint and, Watson joined CTR as General Manager then,11 months later, was made President when court cases relating to his time at NCR were resolved. Having learned Pattersons pioneering business practices, Watson proceeded to put the stamp of NCR onto CTRs companies and his favorite slogan, THINK, became a mantra for each companys employees. During Watsons first four years, revenues more than doubled to $9 million, Watson had never liked the clumsy hyphenated title of the CTR and in 1924 chose to replace it with the more expansive title International Business Machines. By 1933 most of the subsidiaries had been merged into one company, in 1937, IBMs tabulating equipment enabled organizations to process unprecedented amounts of data, its clients including the U. S. During the Second World War the company produced small arms for the American war effort, in 1949, Thomas Watson, Sr. created IBM World Trade Corporation, a subsidiary of IBM focused on foreign operations. In 1952, he stepped down after almost 40 years at the company helm, in 1957, the FORTRAN scientific programming language was developed. In 1961, IBM developed the SABRE reservation system for American Airlines, in 1963, IBM employees and computers helped NASA track the orbital flight of the Mercury astronauts. A year later it moved its headquarters from New York City to Armonk. The latter half of the 1960s saw IBM continue its support of space exploration, on April 7,1964, IBM announced the first computer system family, the IBM System/360
24.
VM (operating system)
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VM is a family of IBM virtual machine operating systems used on IBM mainframes System/370, System/390, zSeries, System z and compatible systems, including the Hercules emulator for personal computers. The first version, released in 1972, was VM/370, or officially Virtual Machine Facility/370 and this was a System/370 reimplementation of earlier CP/CMS operating system. The current version, z/VM, is widely used as one of the main full virtualization solutions for the mainframe market. The heart of the VM architecture is a program or hypervisor called VM-CP. It runs on the hardware, and creates the virtual machine environment. VM-CP provides full virtualization of the physical machine – including all I/O and it performs the systems resource-sharing, including device management, dispatching, virtual storage management, and other traditional operating system tasks. Each VM user is provided with a virtual machine having its own address space, virtual devices, etc. A given VM mainframe typically runs hundreds or thousands of virtual machine instances, VM-CP began life as CP-370, a reimplementation of CP-67, itself a reimplementation of CP-40. Running within each virtual machine is another, guest operating system, most virtual machines run CMS, a lightweight, single-user operating system. Its interactive environment is comparable to that of a single-user PC, including a system, programming services, device access. IBMs mainstream operating systems can be loaded and run without modification, most mainframe operating systems terminate a normal application which tries to usurp the operating systems privileges. A second level instance of VM can be fully virtualized inside a virtual machine and this is how VM development and testing is done. (A second-level VM can potentially implement a different virtualization of the hardware and this technique was used to develop S/370 software before S/370 hardware was available, and it has continued to play a role in new hardware development at IBM. The literature cites practical examples of five levels deep. Levels of VM below the top are also treated as applications, a copy of the mainframe version of AIX or Linux. In the mainframe environment, these systems often run under VM. Several non-CMS systems run within VM-CP virtual machines, providing services to CMS users such as spooling, interprocess communications and they operate behind the scenes, extending the services available to CMS without adding to the VM-CP control program. By running in virtual machines, they receive the same security and reliability protections as other VM users
25.
Perl
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Perl is a family of high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. The languages in this family include Perl 5 and Perl 6, though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, the best-known being Practical Extraction and Reporting Language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier, since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions. Perl 6, which began as a redesign of Perl 5 in 2000, both languages continue to be developed independently by different development teams and liberally borrow ideas from one another. The Perl languages borrow features from other programming languages including C, shell script, AWK and they provide powerful text processing facilities without the arbitrary data-length limits of many contemporary Unix commandline tools, facilitating easy manipulation of text files. Perl 5 gained widespread popularity in the late 1990s as a CGI scripting language, in due to its unsurpassed regular expression. In addition to CGI, Perl 5 is used for administration, network programming, finance, bioinformatics. It has been nicknamed the Swiss Army chainsaw of scripting languages because of its flexibility and power, in 1998, it was also referred to as the duct tape that holds the Internet together, in reference to both its ubiquitous use as a glue language and its perceived inelegance. Larry Wall began work on Perl in 1987, while working as a programmer at Unisys, the language expanded rapidly over the next few years. Perl 2, released in 1988, featured a regular expression engine. Perl 3, released in 1989, added support for data streams. Originally, the documentation for Perl was a single man page. In 1991, Programming Perl, known to many Perl programmers as the Camel Book because of its cover, was published and became the de facto reference for the language. At the same time, the Perl version number was bumped to 4, not to mark a change in the language. Perl 4 went through a series of releases, culminating in Perl 4.036 in 1993. At that point, Wall abandoned Perl 4 to begin work on Perl 5, initial design of Perl 5 continued into 1994. The perl5-porters mailing list was established in May 1994 to coordinate work on porting Perl 5 to different platforms and it remains the primary forum for development, maintenance, and porting of Perl 5. Perl 5.000 was released on October 17,1994 and it was a nearly complete rewrite of the interpreter, and it added many new features to the language, including objects, references, lexical variables, and modules
26.
Gmail
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Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service developed by Google. Users can access Gmail on the web and through the apps for Android and iOS. Gmail started as a beta release on April 1,2004. It exited beta status on July 7,2009, Gmail at launch had an initial storage capacity offer of 1 gigabyte per user, a significantly higher number than the 2 megabytes of storage its competitors such as Hotmail offered at that time. Today, the service comes with 15 gigabytes of free storage, users can receive emails up to 50 megabytes in size, including attachments, while they can send emails up to 25 megabytes. In order to send files, users can insert files from Google Drive into the message. Gmail has an interface and a conversation view similar to an Internet forum. Gmail is noted by web developers for its use of Ajax. Googles mail servers automatically scan emails for multiple purposes, including to add context-sensitive advertisements next to emails, Google has been the subject of lawsuits concerning the issues, both from Gmail users and from non-Gmail users. Google also claims that Gmail refrains from displaying ads next to potentially sensitive messages, such as those that mention race, religion, sexual orientation, health, or financial statements. As of February 2016, Gmail has one billion active users worldwide, according to a 2014 estimate, 60% of mid-sized US companies, and 92% of startups, were using Gmail. On April 1,2004, Gmail was launched with 1 gigabyte of storage space, on April 1,2005, the first anniversary of Gmail, the limit was doubled to 2 gigabytes of storage. Georges Harik, the product management director for Gmail, stated that Google would keep giving people more space forever, on April 24,2012, Google announced the increase of free storage in Gmail from 7.5 to 10 gigabytes as part of the launch of Google Drive. On May 13,2013, Google announced the merge of storage across Gmail, Google Drive. Users can buy additional storage, shared among Gmail, Google Drive and Google Photos, as of 2017, storage of up to 15 gigabytes is free, and paid plans are available for up to 30 terabytes for personal use. There are also limits to individual Gmail messages. One message, including all attachments, cannot be larger than 25 megabytes and this was changed in March 2017, to allow receiving of email up to 50 megabytes, with the limit for sending email staying at 25 megabytes. In order to send files, users can insert files from Google Drive into the message
27.
IEEE-488
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IEEE488 is a short-range digital communications 8-bit parallel multi-master interface bus specification. IEEE488 was created as HP-IB and is commonly called GPIB and it has been the subject of several standards. Newer standards have largely replaced IEEE488 for computer use, in the late 1960s, Hewlett-Packard manufactured various automated test and measurement instruments, such as digital multimeters and logic analyzers. They developed the HP Interface Bus to enable easier interconnection between instruments and controllers, the bus was relatively easy to implement using the technology at the time, using a simple parallel bus and several individual control lines. For example, the HP59501 Power Supply Programmer and HP 59306A Relay Actuator were both relatively simple HP-IB peripherals implemented only in TTL, using no microprocessor, HP licensed the HP-IB patents for a nominal fee to other manufacturers. It became known as the General Purpose Interface Bus, and became a de facto standard for automated, as GPIB became popular, it was formalized by various standards organizations. In 1975, the IEEE standardized the bus as Standard Digital Interface for Programmable Instrumentation, IEEE488, the standard was revised in 1987, and redesignated as IEEE488.1. These standards formalized the mechanical, electrical, and basic protocol parameters of GPIB, in 1987, IEEE introduced Standard Codes, Formats, Protocols, and Common Commands, IEEE488.2. IEEE488.2 provided for basic syntax and format conventions, as well as device-independent commands, data structures, error protocols, and the like. IEEE488.2 built on IEEE488.1 without superseding it, while IEEE488.1 defined the hardware and IEEE488.2 defined the protocol, there was still no standard for instrument-specific commands. Commands to control the same class of instrument, e. g. multimeters, the United States Air Force, and later Hewlett-Packard, recognized this problem. In 1989, HP developed their TML language which was the forerunner to Standard Commands for Programmable Instrumentation, SCPI was introduced as an industry standard in 1990. SCPI added standard generic commands, and a series of instrument classes with corresponding class-specific commands, SCPI mandated the IEEE488.2 syntax, but allowed other physical transports. The IEC developed their own standards in parallel with the IEEE, with IEC 60625-1 and IEC 60625-2, national Instruments introduced a backward-compatible extension to IEEE488.1, originally known as HS-488. It increased the maximum rate to 8 Mbyte/s, although the rate decreases as more devices are connected to the bus. This was incorporated into the standard in 2003, over HPs objections. 1/IEC 60625-1, IEEE488 is an 8-bit, electrically parallel bus. The bus employs sixteen signal lines — eight used for data transfer. Every device on the bus has a unique 5-bit primary address, the standard allows up to 15 devices to share a single physical bus of up to 20 meters total cable length
28.
Ingres (database)
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Ingres Database is a commercially supported, open-source SQL relational database management system intended to support large commercial and government applications. Ingres Database is fully open source with a community of contributors. However, Actian Corporation controls the development of Ingres and makes certified binaries available for download, Ingres began as a research project at the University of California, Berkeley, starting in the early 1970s and ending in 1985. The original code, like that from other projects at Berkeley, was available at minimal cost under a version of the BSD license, Ingres spawned a number of commercial database applications, including Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, NonStop SQL and a number of others. Postgres, a project started in the mid-1980s, later evolved into PostgreSQL. It is ACID compatible and is fully transactional and is part of the Lisog open-source stack initiative, in 1973 when the System R project was getting started at IBM, the research team released a series of papers describing the system they were building. They had already raised money for researching a geographic database system for Berkeleys economics group and they decided to use this money to fund their relational project instead, and used this as a seed for a new and much larger project. Thus funded, Ingres was developed during the mid-1970s by a team of students. Ingres went through a similar to that of System R. Ingres was then disseminated to a user community, and project members rewrote the prototype repeatedly to incorporate accumulated experience, feedback from users. The research projected ended in 1985, Ingres remained largely similar to IBMs System R in concept, but it was based on low-end systems, namely Unix on DEC machines. Unlike System R, the Ingres source code was available for a modest fee, by 1980 some 1,000 copies had been distributed, primarily to universities. Berkeley and other universities who used the Ingres source code, worked on various commercial database software systems, Berkeley students Jerry Held and later Karel Youseffi moved to Tandem Computers, where they built a system that evolved into NonStop SQL. The Tandem database system was a re-implementation of the Ingres technology and it evolved into a system that ran effectively on parallel computers, that is, it included functionality for distributed data, distributed execution, and distributed transactions. Components of the system were first released in the late 1970s, Tandem was later purchased by Compaq, which started a re-write in 2000, and now the product is at Hewlett-Packard. In the early 1980s, Ingres competed head-to-head with Oracle, from around 1985, however, Ingres steadily lost market share. One reason was Oracles aggressive marketing, another was the recognition of SQL as the preferred relational query language. Ingres originally had provided a different language, Quel, and the conversion to SQL took about three years, losing time in the race
29.
Easter egg (media)
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An Easter egg is an intentional inside joke, a hidden message, or a secret feature of an interactive work. The name is used to evoke the idea of a traditional Easter egg hunt, while not the first use of an hidden message in a work, the origin of the term Easter egg to describe these originated from the 1979 video game, Adventure for the Atari 2600. The game was programmed by Atari employee Warren Robinett, at the time, Atari would not include programmers names in the games credits, fearing that competitors would attempt to steal away their employees. Robinett had not told anyone at Atari about this by the time he left the company, shortly after his departure, the Gray Dot and his message was discovered by a player, who wrote their discovery into Atari. Ataris management initially wanted to reprogram and rerelease the game to remove the message, Robinetts addition of his name to Adventure is recognized as the first well-known Easter egg, as well as the origin of the term. However, Robinetts Easter egg is not the first to be implemented, in 2004, an earlier Easter egg was found in Video Whizball, a 1978 game for the Fairchild Channel F system, displaying programmer Bradley Reid-Selths surname. According to research by Ed Fries, the first known Easter egg in arcade games came from Starship 1, programmed by Ron Milner and released in 1977, by triggering the cabinets controls in the right order, the player could get the message Hi Ron. Displayed to them on the screen, since Adventure, there has been a long history of video game developers including Easter eggs in their games. Sometimes the intent was to communicate with the player, sometimes it was a way of getting even with management for a slight, for example, Robinetts first egg was included because he wanted credit for programming the game, which was not customarily included at the time. Video game cheat codes, such as the Konami Code, are a type of Easter egg. More elaborate Easter eggs include secret levels and developers rooms, fully functional yet hidden areas of the game, developers rooms often include inside jokes from the fandom or development team, and differ from a debug room in that they are specifically intended for the player to find. Some games even include hidden sub-games as Easter eggs, in 1993s acclaimed LucasArts video game Day of the Tentacle, the original game Maniac Mansion from 1987 can be played in its full version by using a home computer in one characters room. In computer software, Easter eggs are secret responses that occur as a result of a set of commands. The results can vary from a printed message or image. This same behavior occurred on the RSTS/E operating system, where TECO will provide this response, other Unix operating systems respond to why with why not. Many personal computers have more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers names, political exhortations, snatches of music. Easter eggs in the 1997 version of Microsoft Office include a flight simulator in Microsoft Excel. The Debian operating systems package tool apt-get has an Easter egg involving an ASCII cow when variants on apt-get moo are typed into the shell, an Easter egg is found on all Microsoft Windows operating systems before XP
30.
Microsoft Minesweeper
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Microsoft Minesweeper is a minesweeper computer game created by Curt Johnson, originally for OS/2, and ported to Microsoft Windows by Robert Donner, both Microsoft employees at the time. First officially released as part of the Microsoft Entertainment Pack 1 in 1990, it was included in the install of Windows 3.1 in 1992. Microsoft Minesweeper has been included in all subsequent Windows releases until Windows 8, an updated version included in Windows Vista and Windows 7 was developed by Oberon Media. In Windows 8 and later the game is not included, but a free equivalent developed by Arkadium it is available from the Windows Store. The goal of the game is to all the squares that do not contain mines without being blown up by clicking on a square with a mine underneath. The location of the mines is discovered by a process of logic, clicking on the game board will reveal what is hidden underneath the chosen square or squares. Some squares are blank but some numbers, each number being the number of mines adjacent to the uncovered square. To help avoid hitting a mine, the location of a mine can be marked by flagging it with the right mouse button. The game is won once all blank squares have been uncovered without hitting a mine, any remaining mines not identified by flags being automatically flagged by the computer. However, in the event that a game is lost and the player mistakenly flags a safe square, the game board comes in three set sizes, beginner, intermediate, and expert, though a custom option is available as well. In early versions of the game, a cheat code let players peek beneath the tiles, in 2003, Microsoft created a variation called Minesweeper Flags in MSN Messenger, which is played against an opponent with the objective to find the mines rather than the surrounding squares. The games color scheme changed with the release of Vista, the icons were updated to match the Aero look. It also came with a more peaceful flower motif to replace the landmines and this iteration of Minesweeper was created by Oberon Media. Microsoft removed Minesweeper from Windows 8 and instead published a free equivalent on its Windows Store, the new version is developed by Arkadium and is ad-supported. The initial release was supported by 30 second video ads, later releases had monthly and annual subscription options to remove the ads. Multiple news outlets criticized the change as greedy, daily challenges and an adventure mode were also added. Business Insider called the game a part of the Windows operating system
31.
Microsoft Windows
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Microsoft Windows is a metafamily of graphical operating systems developed, marketed, and sold by Microsoft. It consists of families of operating systems, each of which cater to a certain sector of the computing industry with the OS typically associated with IBM PC compatible architecture. Active Windows families include Windows NT, Windows Embedded and Windows Phone, defunct Windows families include Windows 9x, Windows 10 Mobile is an active product, unrelated to the defunct family Windows Mobile. Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20,1985, Microsoft Windows came to dominate the worlds personal computer market with over 90% market share, overtaking Mac OS, which had been introduced in 1984. Apple came to see Windows as an encroachment on their innovation in GUI development as implemented on products such as the Lisa. On PCs, Windows is still the most popular operating system, however, in 2014, Microsoft admitted losing the majority of the overall operating system market to Android, because of the massive growth in sales of Android smartphones. In 2014, the number of Windows devices sold was less than 25% that of Android devices sold and this comparison however may not be fully relevant, as the two operating systems traditionally target different platforms. As of September 2016, the most recent version of Windows for PCs, tablets, smartphones, the most recent versions for server computers is Windows Server 2016. A specialized version of Windows runs on the Xbox One game console, Microsoft, the developer of Windows, has registered several trademarks each of which denote a family of Windows operating systems that target a specific sector of the computing industry. It now consists of three operating system subfamilies that are released almost at the time and share the same kernel. Windows, The operating system for personal computers, tablets. The latest version is Windows 10, the main competitor of this family is macOS by Apple Inc. for personal computers and Android for mobile devices. Windows Server, The operating system for server computers, the latest version is Windows Server 2016. Unlike its clients sibling, it has adopted a strong naming scheme, the main competitor of this family is Linux. Windows PE, A lightweight version of its Windows sibling meant to operate as an operating system, used for installing Windows on bare-metal computers. The latest version is Windows PE10.0.10586.0, Windows Embedded, Initially, Microsoft developed Windows CE as a general-purpose operating system for every device that was too resource-limited to be called a full-fledged computer. The following Windows families are no longer being developed, Windows 9x, Microsoft now caters to the consumers market with Windows NT. Windows Mobile, The predecessor to Windows Phone, it was a mobile operating system
32.
Shift key
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The shift key is a modifier key on a keyboard, used to type capital letters and other alternate upper characters. There are typically two shift keys, on the left and right sides of the row below the home row,2 Type-Writer of 1878, the No.1 model was capital-only. On the US layout and similar layouts, characters that typically require the use of the shift key include the parentheses, the question mark, the exclamation point. When the caps lock key is engaged, the key can be used to type lowercase letters on many operating systems. The keyboard symbol for the Shift key is given in ISO/IEC 9995-7 as symbol 1, in Unicode 6.1, the character approximating this symbol best is U+21E7 upwards white arrow. This symbol is used to denote the Shift key on modern keyboards. This symbol also is used in texts to denote the shift key, on computer keyboards, as opposed to typewriter keyboards, the shift key can have many more uses, It is sometimes used to modify the function keys. Modern Microsoft Windows keyboards typically have only 12 function keys, Shift+F1 must be used to type F13, Shift+F2 for F14 and it can modify various control and alt keys. For example, if Alt-Tab is used to cycle through open windows, holding shift while in a word processor will anchor the insertion point, such that moving the pointer and clicking the mouse to a new point will select the range of text in between. The shift key can also be used to modify the behavior on a computer. For example, holding shift while clicking on a link in a web browser might cause the page to open in a new window, in some web browsers, holding shift while scrolling will scan through previously viewed web pages. In macOS, holding shift while performing actions, such as minimising a window or enabling/disabling Dashboard or Mission Control. For some animations, holding control will make the move just slightly slower. On some keyboards, if both shift keys are held down only some letters can be typed. For example, on the Dell keyboard Model RT7D20 only 16 letters can be typed and this phenomenon is known as masking and is a fundamental limitation of the way the keyboard electronics are designed. The following is a list of actions involving the shift key for the Microsoft Windows operating system, altGr key Command key Option key StickyKeys
33.
Enter key
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On computer keyboards, the enter key in most cases causes a command line, window form, or dialog box to operate its default function. This is typically to finish an entry and begin the desired process and it normally has an arrow pointing down and left, which is the symbol for carriage return. In contrast, the Enter key is commonly labelled with its name in plain text on generic PC keyboards, the return/enter key can have various physical shapes. On some keyboard layouts, the return and enter key are two different keys, an artifact of the handling of newlines by different operating systems. As an example, on the Macintosh, the key is the usual key. While using the tool in Adobe Photoshop, the return key produces a new line while the enter key ends editing mode. On IBMs 3270 and 5250 line of terminals, the Enter key was located to the right of the bar and was used to send the contents of the terminals buffer to the host computer. The Return key was located in a standard location and was used to generate a new line. In technical terms, the Macintosh keyboard maps the return key to a carriage return, historically, many computer models did not have a separate keypad, and only had one button to function as Enter or Return. For example, the Commodore 64 had only the Return key, in Mathematica, the Return key creates a new line, whereas the Enter key submits the current command for execution. In pocket calculator-like programs, the key of the numeric keypad acts like the equal to button to obtain the result of the previously entered operations. In graphical computer applications, the enter or return key is used to close. In modern word processing applications, pressing the return key ends a paragraph, spacing between the paragraphs can be defined through paragraph styles. Before computers, on electric typewriters the “Return” key was kept comparatively large and this is due to the frequency of usage, and therefore, is kept large to reduce the likelihood of finger slips
34.
Zork
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Zork is one of the earliest interactive fiction computer games, with roots drawn from the original genre game, Colossal Cave Adventure. The first version of Zork was written between 1977 and 1979 using the MDL programming language on a DEC PDP-10 computer, the authors—Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling—were members of the MIT Dynamic Modelling Group. When Zork was published commercially, it was split up into three games, Zork, The Great Underground Empire - Part I, Zork II, The Wizard of Frobozz, Zork is set in the ruins of an ancient empire lying far underground. The player is an adventurer who is venturing into this dangerous land in search of wealth. The goal is to return from exploring the Great Underground Empire alive and with all treasures needed to complete each adventure, FrobozzCo International is a fictional monopolous conglomerate from the game. FrobozzCo products are littered throughout all Zork games, often to humorous effect, several treasures and locations in Zork suggest that there used to be a large aristocratic family called the Flatheads, which had twelve kings who reigned supreme over the GUE. Some Flatheads are named after figures, for example, in Zork II. The exception to this occurs when the player must use a spray can of grue repellent to navigate dark areas requiring an empty inventory in order to traverse. The original MIT version of Zork combines plot elements from all three of the games, which were made available for commercial sale. The game takes place in the Zork calendar year 948 GUE, the player steps into the deliberately vague role of an adventurer. The game begins near a house in a small, self-contained area. Although the player is given little instruction, the house provides a point of interest. When the player enters the house, it yields a number of intriguing objects, including a brass, battery-powered lantern, an empty case. Beneath the rug a trap door leads down into a dark cellar, the ultimate goal of Zork I is to collect the Twenty Treasures of Zork and install them in the trophy case. Finding the treasures requires solving a variety of such as the navigation of two complex mazes and some intricate manipulations at Flood Control Dam #3. Placing all of the treasures into the trophy case scores the player 350 points and grants the rank of Master Adventurer, an ancient map with further instructions then magically appears in the trophy case. These instructions provide access to a stone barrow, the entrance to the barrow is the end of Zork I and the beginning of Zork II. There are 28 ways for the player to die and it is possible to score all 350 points in 223 moves by exploiting a bug
35.
Infocom
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Infocom was a software company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that produced numerous works of interactive fiction. They also produced one notable business application, a database called Cornerstone. Activision finally shut down the Infocom division in 1989, although they released some titles in the 1990s under the Infocom Zork brand, Activision abandoned the Infocom trademark in 2002. The name was registered by Oliver Klaeffling of Germany in 2007. The Infocom trademark is held by Pete Hottelets Omni Consumer Products. Infocom games are text adventures where users direct the action by entering short strings of words to give commands when prompted, generally the program will respond by describing the results of the action, often the contents of a room if the player has moved within the virtual world. The user reads this information, decides what to do, examples include go west or take flashlight. Infocom games were using a roughly LISP-like programming language called ZIL that compiled into a byte code able to run on a standardized virtual machine called the Z-machine. As the games were based and used variants of the same Z-machine interpreter. Each game file included a sophisticated parser which allowed the user to type complex instructions to the game, unlike earlier works of interactive fiction which only understood commands of the form verb noun, Infocoms parser could understand a wider variety of sentences. For instance one might type open the door, then go west. The company was known for shipping creative props, or feelies. Inspired by Colossal Cave, Marc Blank and Dave Lebling created what was to become the first Infocom game, Zork, Zork I was released originally for the TRS-80 in 1980 and eventually sold more than a million copies across several platforms. Lebling and Blank each authored several games and additional game writers were hired. Other popular and inventive titles included a number of sequels and spinoff games in the Zork series, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, in its first few years of operation, text adventures proved to be a huge revenue stream for the company. Whereas most computer games of the era would achieve success and then suffer a significant drop-off in sales. Employee Tim Anderson said of their situation, It was phenomenal — we had a basement that just printed money. In late 1984, management declined an offer by publisher Simon & Schuster to acquire Infocom for $28 million, in 1993 Computer Gaming World described this era as the Cambridge Camelot, where the Great Underground Empire was formed
36.
Dungeons & Dragons Online
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The game is set on the unexplored continent of Xendrik within the Eberron campaign setting, and in the Kingdom of Cormyr within the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Centered in the city of Stormreach, DDO is set on the continent of Xendrik, in the world of Eberron. Xendrik is a vastly unexplored locale, once the center of the Advanced Giant Civilization, Stormreach is a giant-scaled city, recently settled by humans. Areas in Stormreach are the Harbor, the Marketplace, and five Dragonmarked Houses, Cannith, Deneith, Jorasco, Kundarak, adventures and quests are available beyond the city walls, across the continent. Players create their characters following the revised edition of D&D3.5 rule-set fashion, the game has some differences from the D&D3.5 rule set, some of which are due to differences in the dynamics of video game combat versus tabletop gaming. For example, Turbine wanted DDO to use a real-time combat engine, after creating a player character, a player begins shipwrecked on the shores of Korthos Island. The character is helped by a band of citizens who want to end the rule of the Sahuagin on Korthos Island, the White dragon Aussircaex is being controlled by a Mindflayer Creature through the use of a Mindsunder Artifact, and is plaguing the island. Once the PC destroys the Mindsunder Artifact, Aussircaex destroys the Mindflayer and frees Korthos Island, after achieving success in Korthos Island, the player is sent to Stormreach. From that point on, events in the game revolve around Stormreach, the player has to save the city from many threats, including, Giants attempt to regain mastery over the city of Stormreach and the continent of Xendrik. The reopening of the gate to Xoriat, the Black Abbot and his minions of Khyber and other undead attempt to gain power over Xendrik. Devils from Shavarath attempt to invade and conquer Eberron, pirates attempt to gain a foothold in House Deneith before conquering Stormreach. Droaam attempt to play war games with the lords of Stormreach, Quori, from the Plane of Nightmares, invades peoples minds and uses them as hosts on the material plane. The Lord of Blades takes over a Quori creation forge under Stormreach, the Master Artificer Toven tries to destroy the souls of all warforged in Xendrik. DDO is an Action role-playing game with real-time combat, the camera follows behind the player and can be adjusted to view surroundings, or can be changed to a first-person perspective. The game can be controlled either by keyboard or gamepad, with the ability to remap actions to suit the player, items and action abilities may be placed and activated within a toolbar on screen. Characters move in 3D via directional keys and may dodge long range attacks, a party system emphasizes multiple players forming groups, by accessing by the grouping panel. Players interact via screen chat windows, or by voice chat among party members, progress is defined by completing quests and leveling up. After creating a character, players are required to go through a tutorial, after accumulating enough experience points through quests, the character gains a level, which grants access to feats, spells, and skills
