CompuServe was founded in 1969 in Columbus, Ohio as a subsidiary of Golden United Investment Company. Its first president, Jeffrey Wilkins, was the son-in-law of Golden United chief Harry Gard. CompuServe started as a computer time-sharing service, originally as a way to generate income from Golden United's PDP-10 mainframe computers outside business hours. It was spun off as a separate company in 1975 before be ...
Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley starting in the 1970s. The name is also used collectively for the modern descendants of these distributions.
BSD was widely identified with the versions of Unix available for workstation-class systems. This can be attributed to the ease with which it could be licensed and the familiarity it found among the founders of many technology companies during the 1980s. This fami ...
In computing, binary translation is the emulation of one instruction set by another through translation of code. Sequences of instructions are translated from the source to the target instruction set.
There is static binary translation, where an entire executable file is translated into an executable of the target architecture. This is very difficult to do correctly, since not all the code can be discovered by the translator. For example, some parts of the executable may be reachable only through ...
B was the name of a programming language developed at Bell Labs. It is almost extinct, as it was replaced by the C language. It was mostly the work of Ken Thompson with contributions from Dennis Ritchie, and first appeared in 1969 or thereabouts.
It was essentially the BCPL system stripped of any component that Thompson felt he could do without, in order to make it fit within the memory capacity of the minicomputers of the time. The language also included some changes made to suit Thompson's preferences (mostly along the lines of reducing t ...
BASIC (Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code[1]) is a family of high-level programming languages. Originally invented in 1964 by John George Kemeny and Thomas Eugene Kurtz at Dartmouth College, it was designed to allow students not in science fields to use computers. At the time all computer use required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to do. I ...
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is the co-founder, chairman, and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, the world's largest computer software company. According to Forbes magazine, Gates is the world's wealthiest person, with a net worth of approximately US $51 billion, as of September 2005[3].
Gates is one of the best-known entrepreneurs of the personal computer revolution and has become an iconic figure ...
Artificial life, also known as alife or a-life, is the study of life through the use of human-made analogs of living systems. Computer scientist Christopher Langton coined the term in the late 1980s when he held the first "International Conference on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems" (otherwise known as Artificial Life I) at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1987.
Artificial life - Nature of the field.
Although the study of artificial life does have some significant overlap w ...
Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) NYSE: AMD is a manufacturer of integrated circuits based in Sunnyvale, California. It is the second-largest supplier of x86-compatible processors, and a leading supplier of non-volatile flash memory. It was founded in 1969 by a group of defectors from Fairchild Semiconductor, including Jerry Sanders. AMD's current president and CEO is Dr. Héctor Ruiz.
AMD is best known for the Athlon, Opteron, Turion64, Sempron and Duron lines of x86-compatible processors. Their more general com ...
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) developed by ARPA of the U.S. Department of Defense was the world's first operational packet switching network, and the progenitor of the global Internet.
Packet switching, now the dominant basis for both data and voice communication worldwide, was a new and important concept in data communications. Previously, data communications was based on the idea of circuit switching, as in the old typical telephone circuit, where a dedicated circuit is tied up for the duration of the call and communication is only possible with the ...
Bracknell is a town of about 50,000 people (1991) in Bracknell Forest borough, in the English county of Berkshire. It lies about 6 miles (10 kilometres) to the east of Reading. It is about 9 miles south west of Windsor, with Windsor Great Park in between. It is between the M3 and M4 motorways, and the town has two train stations (Bracknell and Martins Heron) on the Reading to London Waterloo line, operated by South West Trains. The town has four ...
Atex is a technology firm that helped pioneer the switch of newspaper and magazine publishing from "hot lead" to "cold type", and in the process developed networked machines with communication capability ("Atex messaging") credited as a major predecessor of e-mail and instant messaging.
Atex - History.
Atex was founded in Massachusetts in 1973 by engineer brothers Richard and Charlie Ying. Atex publishing systems were based on highly modified DEC PDP-11 minicomputers, designed to produce news sectio ...
CompuServe, (CompuServe Information Services, or CIS for short), was the first major commercial online service in the US, dominating the field during the 1980s and remaining a major player through the mid-1990s when it was sidelined by the rise of GUI-based services such as America Online (AOL). Today the company operates as an internet service provider (ISP), owned by AOL.
CompuServe - History.
CompuServe was founded in 1969 in Columbus, Ohio as a subsidiary of Golden United Investment Company. Its ...
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system.
Computer terminal - Historical.
Early user terminals connected to computers were generally electromechanical teleprinters (TTYs), such as the model 33 Teletype. However these were too slow for most production uses. By the early 1970s, many in the computer industry realized that an affordable video data entry terminal could supplant the then ubiqui ...
Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. Today's Unix systems are split into various branches, developed over time by AT&T, several other commercial vendors, as well as several non-profit organizations.
Unix was designed to be portable, multi-tasking and multi-user. The Unix systems are characterized by various concepts: plain text files, command line interpreter, hier ...
Ungermann-Bass, also known as UB, was a computer networking company in the 1980s to 1990s. Located in Santa Clara, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, UB was the first large networking company independent of any computer manufacturer.
UB was founded by Ralph Ungermann and Charlie Bass. Another leader in the company was John Davidson, vice president of engineering, who was one of the creators of ...
The acronym DOS stands for disk operating system, an operating system component for computers that provides the abstraction of a file system resident on hard disk or floppy disk secondary storage. In some cases, the disk operating system was called DOS, and on the PC compatible platform, an entire family of operating systems was called DOS.
DOS - DOS for IBM PC compatibles.
In particular, DOS refers to the family of closely related operating systems which dominated the IBM PC compatible ...
The console is the text output device for system administration messages, particularly those from the BIOS or boot loader, the kernel, from the init system and from the system logger.
On traditional minicomputers, the console was an RS-232 serial link to a terminal such as a DEC VT100. This terminal was usually kept in a secured room since it could be used for certain privileged functions such as halting the system or selecting which media to boot from. Large midrange systems, e.g. those from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard a ...
In computer architecture, a bus is a subsystem that transfers data or power between computer components inside a computer or between computers. Unlike a point-to-point connection, a bus can logically connect several peripherals over the same set of wires. Each bus defines its set of connectors to physically plug devices, cards or cables together.
Early computer buses were literally parallel electrical buses with multiple connections, but the term is now used for any physical arrangement that provides the same logical functional ...
Zork universe
Zork games
Zork trilogy
Zork I
Zork II
Zork III
Enchanter trilogy
Enchanter
Sorcerer
Spellbreaker
Wishbringer
Beyond Zork
Zork Zero
Return to Zork
Zork: Nemesis
Zork Grand Inquisitor
Encyclopedia
A command line interface or CLI is a method of interacting with a computer. Commands are entered as lines of text (that is, sequences of typed characters) from a keyboard, and output is also received as text. CLIs originated when teletype machines were connected to computers in the 1950s. In terms of immediate interaction and feedback, they represented an advance over the use of punch cards.
With the use of CRTs as interface devices, CLIs began evolving toward graphical user interfaces (GUIs) like Microsoft Windows, Mac ...
