X-Nico

unusual facts about computers



36-bit

Prior to the introduction of computers, the state of the art in precision scientific and engineering calculation was the ten-digit, electrically powered, mechanical calculator, such as those manufactured by Friden, Marchant and Monroe.

Ahmed Nazif

During his tenure as the first Minister for Communications and Information Technology he was credited with establishing Egypt's free internet connectivity plan as well as improving public access to computers through low-price computers sold by private producers through the Egyptian Telecommunications Company (Telecom Egypt), which falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry for Communications and Information Technology.

Amdahl

Amdahl Corporation, a manufacturer of IBM-mainframe-compatible computers

App Inventor for Android

As such, it is part of an ongoing movement in computers and education that began with the work of Seymour Papert and the MIT Logo Group in the 1960s and has also manifested itself with Mitchel Resnick's work on Lego Mindstorms and StarLogo.

Applied engineering

Applied Engineering, a hardware vendor for the Apple II series of computers

Bad Influence

Bad Influence!, a British children's television series that reviewed computers and games

Commodore 8280

They used a wide rectangular steel case form similar to that of the Commodore 4040, and used the IEEE-488 interface common to Commodore PET/CBM computers.

David Herlihy

His study of the Florentine and Pistoiese Catasto of 1427 is one of the first statistical surveys to use computers to analyse large amounts of data.

Digital studio

:The five computers in the FSU Digital Studio each have Microsoft Office 2007 and Adobe Design Premium CS5 installed.

Digitek

Anyone interested in computers during the 60's might recall frequent Digitek advertisements in Scientific American and Datamation magazines.

Dreamland Japan: Writings on Modern Manga

The book also includes an extensive chapter on manga "god" Osamu Tezuka and information on developments in manga that took place since the publication of Manga! Manga!, such as the use of manga as propaganda by the Aum Shinrikyo cult, the evolution of "otaku" culture, and the role of computers in manga creation.

Electronic Life

The computer crime entry, for example, is three pages long and contains only four hard facts—specifically, that institutions were then losing $5 billion to $30 billion a year on computer crime, that Citibank processed $30 billion a day in customer transactions using computers, that American banks as a whole were moving $400 billion a year in the U.S., and that the Stanford public key code (not otherwise described) had been broken in 1982.

ESoft

eSoft was founded by Philip L. Becker in 1984 and started out making and selling the TBBS (bulletin board system) initially targeted at RadioShack TRS-80 CP/M machines, but later ported to IBM-PC computers.

FARC files

During the diplomatic crisis caused by the 2008 unrest in Bolivia, the United States government froze the assets of several senior members of the Venezuelan Government: ex-Interior Minister Ramón Rodríguez Chacín, senior DISIP director Henry de Jesús Rangel and military intelligence chief Hugo Armando Carvajal Barrios, accusing them of "arming, supporting and financing" the FARC and their "killing of innocents", according to information discovered on Reyes' computers.

The Colombian Administrative Department of Security (DAS) reported that it had asked for Interpol's technical support in order to decipher the seized FARC computers.

Fieldata

The direct successor to the UNIVAC 1100 is the Unisys 2200 series computers, which use Fieldata to this day (although ASCII is now also common with each character encoded in 1/4 of a word, or 9 bits).

Fortune telling fraud

See Telemarketing fraud for information about a common scam in which fraud artists install malware on victims' computers.

HDOS

HDOS is an early microcomputer operating system, originally written for the Heathkit H8 computer system and later also available for the Heathkit H89 and Zenith Z-89 computers.

Hellenic Naval Academy

Finally, officers ranked Lieutenant Junior Grade and Lieutenant, may be educated abroad (in Europe or in the USA) in schools such as NPS, MIT, the University of Michigan etc., thus becoming further specialized in fields such as electronics, weapon systems, computers, operation research, marine architecture etc.

Hhgregg

Its retail products include video products comprising televisions as well as DVD recorders; home appliances, such as refrigerators, ranges, dishwashers, freezers, washers, and dryers; and other products and services, including audio hardware, mattresses, computers, and other selected consumer electronics and accessories.

History of laptops

Before laptop/notebook computers were technically feasible, similar ideas had been proposed, most notably Alan Kay's Dynabook concept, developed at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s.

IBM System/38

(The earlier Plessey 250 was one of the few other computers with capability architecture ever sold commercially).

InstallFree

InstallFree Management Console (IFMC) is a virtual MMC-based management utility that manages IFV Applications and assigns them to Active Directory objects (OUs, Groups, Users and Computers) read from the Active Directory or LDAP schema.

Jennifer S. Light

An article by Light, When Computers Were Women, discusses an aspect of the history of computers—specifically that women were not credited for their work on the ENIAC computer, which was America's first electronic computer to automate ballistics computations during WWII.

John S. Mayo

Following this, Mayo joined Bell Labs, now Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, (1955) where he first worked on early computers as the Triadic and Leprechaun, the Telstar satellite, ocean sonar systems and various switching systems.

KAFA-FM

In 2004, KAFA was given a grant and updated its studio to current radio broadcasting industry standards with the introduction of Prophet Systems software and Dell computers.

Lehal

Dr. Gurpreet Singh Lehal is a professor at Punjabi University, Patiala, and is credited with designing Punjabi language software that enables users to utilise the language with computers.

Manalapan-Englishtown Middle School

MEMS is noted for its electronic equipment, including smart boards, three to five computers in every room, 20-30 computers in each computer lab, and an electronic account for every lunch-purchasing student.

Mostek

The Z80 eventually became the most popular microcomputer family as it was used in millions of embedded devices as well as in many home computers and computers using the de facto standard CP/M operating system, such as the Osborne, Kaypro, and TRS-80 models.

Motorola 68881

Notable computers including 68881 or 68882 FPUs included the Sun 3 from Sun Microsystems, the Macintosh II family of computers from Apple Computer, the NeXT Computer, parts of the Atari family (Mega STE, TT and Falcon030) and the Commodore Amiga 3000.

MV Seabourn Legend

In the movie, LAPD Police Officer Alex Shaw (Jason Patric) and his girlfriend Annie Porter (Sandra Bullock) are trapped on the ship, where navigation computers have been reprogrammed by a computer hacker, (Willem Dafoe) setting the ship on a collision course with a supertanker.

NEC PC-9801

Despite having hardware specifications far inferior to the Fujitsu FM Towns and Sharp X68000 personal computers, the massive install base and steady flow of game titles (in particular "dōjin" style dating sims and RPGs, as well as early games of the Touhou Project franchise) kept it as the favored platform for PC game developers in Japan until the rise of the DOS/V clones.

Old World ROM

Old World ROM Macintosh computers are the Macintosh models that use a Macintosh Toolbox ROM chip, usually in a socket (but soldered to the motherboard in some models).

Online service provider

As the use of computers that supported color and graphics, such the Atari 800, Commodore 64, Texas Instruments TI-99/4A, the Apple II series and early IBM PC compatibles, increased, online services gradually developed framed or partially graphical information displays.

Redirector

Network redirector, provide access to file systems and printers on other computers on a network, translating between protocols as required

Six-bit character code

IBM applied the terms binary-coded decimal and BCD to the variations of BCD alphamerics used in most early IBM computers, including the IBM 1620, IBM 1400 series, and non-Decimal Architecture members of the IBM 700/7000 series.

Soltis

Frank Soltis (born 1940), an American computer scientist, is IBM's Chief Scientist for the System i computers.

Spam email delivery

Most of the major Windows e-mail viruses of 2003, including the Sobig and Mimail virus families, functioned as spammer viruses: viruses designed expressly to make infected computers available as spamming tools.

The widespread change from Windows 9x to Windows XP for many home computers, which started in early 2002 and was well under way by 2003, greatly accelerated the use of home computers to act as remotely-controlled spam proxies.

Television Interface Adaptor

Development of the TIA was led by Jay Miner who continued at Atari expanding on the design of the TIA for the Atari 400/800 computers with the ANTIC and CTIA/GTIA chips.

Toronto PET User's Group

TPUG supports nearly all Commodore computers, including the PET, SuperPET, CBM, B128/256/1024, VIC-20, C64, C128, Plus/4, C16, C65 and Amiga, and including the COMAL, CP/M and GEOS environments.

Universal binary

A universal binary is, in Apple parlance, an executable file or application bundle that runs natively on either PowerPC or Intel-manufactured IA-32 or Intel 64-based Macintosh computers; it is an implementation of the concept more generally known as a fat binary.

Van Wolverton

While nearly all home computers today have some sort of Graphical User Interface, that was not so back then.

W ABC

W ABC was a program that converted files from Luxor ABC 80 and ABC 800 to PC compatible computers.

Walid bin Attash

In October 2008 Ralph Kohlmann ruled that they be provided with the computers, but not the internet access.

Wallace John Eckert

Nicholas Metropolis and Richard Feynman organized a punched-card solution, proving its effectiveness for physics research and prompting the use of more powerful computers.

Wesley A. Clark

Wesley Allison Clark (born 1927) is a computer scientist and one of the main participants, along with Charles Molnar, in the creation of the LINC laboratory computer, which was the first mini-computer and shares with a number of other computers (such as the PDP-1) the claim to be the inspiration for the personal computer.

WMV HD

These low-complexity codecs make it possible to watch high definition movies in 1280×720 (720p) or 1920×1080 (1080p) resolutions on many modern personal computers running Microsoft Windows XP or Windows Vista, although the hardware requirements are steep.

XOS

Xerox Operating System, an operating system for the XDS Sigma line of computers

Yamaha YM2151

It was also used in arcade games, starting with Atari's Marble Madness, and later being licensed for use by many other companies including Sega, Konami, Capcom, Data East Pinball and Namco, with its heaviest use in the late 1980s, as well as in the Sharp X1 and Sharp X68000 home computers.


see also