Computers, Laptops And Gaming Desktops

Started by a group of engineers that left Digital Equipment Corporation , Data General designs the Nova minicomputer. Ed de Castro, its main designer and co-founder of Data General, had earlier led the team that created the DEC PDP-8. The Nova line of computers continued through the 1970s, and influenced later systems like the Xerox Alto and Apple 1. Astronauts communicated with the computer by punching two-digit codes into the display and keyboard unit .

Computer Classification: By Size And Power

The project became the One Laptop per Child Consortium founded by Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT's Media Lab. The first offering to the public required the buyer to purchase one to be given to a child in the developing world as a condition of acquiring a machine for themselves. Developed by the Japanese government to create global climate models, the Earth Simulator is a massively parallel, vector-based system that costs nearly 60 billion yen (roughly $600 million at the time). A consortium of aerospace, energy, and marine science agencies undertook the project, and the system was built by NEC around their SX-6 architecture. To protect it from earthquakes, the building housing it was built using a seismic isolation system that used rubber supports.

The Connection Machine Is Unveiled

Based on the Intel 8008 microprocessor, the Micral is one of the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computers. Designer Thi Truong developed the computer while Philippe Kahn wrote the software. Truong, founder and president of the French company R2E, created the Micral as a replacement for minicomputers in situations that did not require high performance, such as process control and highway toll collection.

Wearable Computing

The tapping on the keyboard, the clacking of the printers, the rumble of whirling disk drives, the changing flashes of color on a computer screen-these are the attention-getters. However, it is really the software- the planned, step-by-step instructions required to turn data into information-that makes a computer useful. The processor, more formally known as the central processing unit , has the electronic circuitry that manipulates input data into the information people want. The central processing unit executes computer instructions that are specified in the program. The processing of input to output is directed by the software but performed by the hardware. In contrast to analog computers, digital computers represent information in discrete form, generally as sequences of 0s and 1s .

Ibm Introduces Its Personal System

The Treo sold well, and the line continued until Handspring was purchased by Palm in 2003. VTech, founded in Hong Kong, had been a manufacturer of Pong-like games and educational toys when they introduce the Laser 128 computer. The success of the Portable inspired many other early IBM-compatible computers. Compaq licensed the MS-DOS operating system from Microsoft and legally reverse-engineered IBM’s BIOS software.

Other companies began creating similar computers, which were called IBM PC Compatible . Today, this is the most common type of personal computer, and it typically includes the Microsoft Windows operating system. A server is a computer that serves up information to other computers on a network.