The BBC Micro, affectionately known as the Beeb, was an early home computer. It was designed and built by Acorn Computers Ltd for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
In the early 1980s, the BBC started what became known as the BBC Computer Literacy Project. The project was initiated largely in response to an extremely influential BBC documentary The Mighty Micro, in which Dr. Christopher Evans from the National Physical Laboratory predicted the coming (micro)computer revolution and its impact on the ...
Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc., also known as Bell Labs and AT&T Bell Laboratories, was the research and development arm of the US Bell System. It was the premier facility of its type, developing a range of revolutionary technologies including the transistor, Laser, and the UNIX operating system. There have been 6 Nobel Prizes awarded for work done at Bell Labs [1].
Bell Labs - History.
In 1925, Walter Gifford, then president of AT&T, established Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc as a ...
In MS-DOS and compatible DOSes, and in 8-bit CP/M, a COM file is a simple type of executable file. The name of the file format is derived from the file name extension .com (not to be confused with the .com top-level domain), which was originally the extension used for such files. However there is no actual association between the file format and the file name extension in any but CP/M and very early versions of MS-DOS.
COM file - Platform support.
The format is still executable on many modern Windows ...
The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was commercially popular from 1985 to the early 1990s. It was released by Atari in 1985. The "ST" allegedly stood for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals.
Atari ST - Overview.
The Atari ST was a notable home computer, based on the Motorola 68000 CPU, with 512 KB of RAM or more, and 3½" floppy disks as storage. It was similar to other contemporary machines which used the Motorola 68000, the A ...
The Amiga CD32 was the first 32-bit CD-ROM based game console. It was launched at the Science Museum in London, United Kingdom on 16 July 1993. The CD32 was based on Commodore's Amiga A1200 computer. It was essentially an A1200 without a keyboard, floppy drive, mouse, or monitor, that was housed in a different enclosure.
Amiga CD32 - Technical specifications.
Motorola 68020 (68EC020RC16) at 14.3 MHz
2MB Chip RAM
1MB ROM with Kickstart ROM 3.1 and integrated cdfs.filesystem
1 ...
The Acorn Archimedes was Acorn Computers Ltd's first general purpose home computer based on their own 32-bit ARM RISC CPU, and spawned a family of very capable machines with various options.
Acorn Archimedes - Description; Early models.
The first models were released in June 1987, as the 300 and 400 series. The machines differed primarily in that the 400 series included more expansion slots (four instead of two) and a ST506 controller for an internal hard drive. Both models included the Arthur OS (later ver ...
Acorn Computers was a British computer company established in Cambridge, England, in 1978. The company produced a number of computers which were especially popular in the UK. These included the Acorn Electron, the BBC Micro and the Acorn Archimedes. Acorn's BBC Micro computer dominated the UK educational computer market during the 1980s and early 1990s, drawing many comparisons with Apple in the U.S.
Though the company was broken up into several independent operations in 2000, it leaves an impressive legacy, particularly in the ...
Motion is a software application produced by Apple Computer for their Mac OS X operating system. It is used to create and edit motion graphics and titling for video production.
Apple Motion - Market Position.
Motion competes with compositing applications such as Adobe After Effects and Discreet Combustion. It does not have the ultimate power of those older and more complex programs, but it is both less expensive and more accessible to the beginner.
Unlike the competition, Motion will perform many eff ...
The C programming language is a standardized imperative computer programming language developed in the early 1970s by Dennis Ritchie for use on the Unix operating system. It has since spread to many other operating systems, and is one of the most widely used programming languages. C is prized for its efficiency, and is the most popular programming language for writing system software, though it is also used for writing applications. It is also commonly used in computer science education, despite not being designed for novices.
Including:
VAX is a 32-bit computing architecture that supports an orthogonal instruction set (machine language) and virtual addressing (i.e. demand paged virtual memory). It was developed in the mid-1970s by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). DEC was later purchased by Compaq, which in turn was purchased by Hewlett-Packard.
The VAX has been perceived as the quintessential CISC processing architecture, with its very large number of addressing modes and machine instructions, including instructions for such complex operations as queue ins ...
A microcontroller is a computer-on-a-chip used to control electronic devices. It is a type of microprocessor emphasizing self-sufficiency and cost-effectiveness, in contrast to a general-purpose microprocessor, the kind used in a PC. A typical microcontroller contains all the memory and I/O interfaces needed, whereas a general purpose microprocessor requires additional chips to provide these necessary functions.
Microcontrollers are a component in many kinds of electronic equipment (see embedded system). They are the vast major ...
Data General was one of the first minicomputer firms from the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation. Their first product, the Nova, was a 16-bit minicomputer which was an advance in technology in the era of 8-bit machines. The Nova, followed by the Supernova, and the Eclipse product lines, were used in many applications for the next two decades. The company employed an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) sales stratey to sell to third parties who incorporated the Data General c ...
In computer architecture, 64-bit is an adjective used to describe integers, memory addresses or other data units that are at most 64 bits (8 octets) wide, or to describe CPU and ALU architectures based on registers, address buses, or data buses of that size.
As of 2004, 64-bit CPUs are common in servers, and have recently been introduced to the (previously 32-bit) mainstream personal computer arena in the form of the AMD64, EM64T, and P ...
Windows 95 (codename Chicago) is a hybrid 16-bit/32-bit graphical user interface-based operating system released on August 24, 1995 by the Microsoft Corporation.
Windows 95 is a direct result of combining Microsoft's formerly separate MS-DOS and Windows products. Windows 95 is the first in that line without support for older, 16-bit x86 processors, thus requiring an Intel 80386 (or compatible) processor running in protected mode. It featured significant improvements to the graphical user interface (GUI) and underlying wo ...
The Windows API is the name given by Microsoft to the core set of application programming interfaces available in the Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is designed for usage by C/C++ programs and is the most direct way to interact with a Windows system for software applications. Lower level access to a Windows system, mostly required for device drivers, is provided by the Windows Driver Model in current versions of Windows.
A software development kit (SDK) is available for Windows, which provides documentation and tools t ...
The ARM architecture (originally the Acorn RISC Machine) is a 32-bit RISC processor architecture that is widely used in a number of applications. ARM variants are in widespread use in embedded and low-power applications due to their power saving design features.
ARM architecture - History.
The ARM design was started in 1983 as a development project at Acorn Computers Ltd.
The team, led by Roger Wilson and Steve Furber, started development of what in some ways represents an advanced MOS Technol ...
In computing, the year 2038 problem may cause some computer software to fail in or about the year 2038. The problem affects programs that use the POSIX time representation, which represents time as the number of seconds (ignoring leap seconds) since January 1, 1970. This representation is standard in Unix-like operating systems and also affects software written for most other operating systems because of the broad deployment of C. On most 32-bit systems, the time_t data type used to store this second count is a signed 32-bit ...
A computer workstation, often colloquially referred to as workstation, is a high-end general-purpose microcomputer designed to be used by one person at a time and which offers higher performance than normally found in a personal computer, especially with respect to graphics, processing power and the ability to carry out several tasks at the same time. When comparing with some of the old definitions of computing power, some people may consider a workstation to be the equivalent of a one-person minicomputer. Today the average per ...
FALSE is an esoteric programming language designed by Wouter van Oortmerssen in 1993, named after his favourite boolean value. It is a small Forth-like stack-oriented language, with syntax designed to make the code inherently obfuscated, confusing, and unreadable. It is also noteworthy for having a compiler of only 1024 bytes (written in 68000 assembly). According to van Oortmerssen, FALSE provided the inspiration for various well known esoteric ...
The Motorola 680x0/0x0/m68k/68k/68K family of CISC microprocessor CPU chips were 32-bit from the start, and were the primary competition for the Intel x86 family of chips.
68k - The 68k family members.
Generation one
Motorola 68000 a hybrid 16/32 bit chip (16-bit bus)
Motorola 68EC000
Motorola 68HC000
Motorola 68008 a hybrid 8/16/32 bit chip (8-bit bus)
Motorola 68010
Motorola 68012
Generation two (f ...
