Computing

Lisa is the first commercial personal computer with a graphical user interface . It was thus an important milestone in computing as soon Microsoft Windows and the Apple Macintosh would soon adopt the GUI as their user interface, making it the new paradigm for personal computing. The Lisa ran on a Motorola microprocessor and came equipped with 1 MB of RAM, a 12-inch black-and-white monitor, dual 5.25-inch floppy disk drives and a 5 MB “Profile” hard drive.

With a screen resolution of up to 400 pixels-per-inch , Retina displays approached the limit of pixel visibility to the human eye. The display also used In Plane Switching technology, which allowed for a wider viewing angle and improved color accuracy. The Retina display became standard on most of the iPad, iPhone, MacBook, and Apple Watch product lines. Named in honor of the space shuttle which broke-up on re-entry, the Columbia supercomputer is an important part of NASA's return to manned spaceflight after the 2003 disaster. Columbia was used in space vehicle analysis, including studying the Columbia disaster, but also in astrophysics, weather and ocean modeling.

It used $120 worth of electronics components, as outlined in the September 1973 issue of hobbyist magazine Radio Electronics. The original design included two memory boards and could generate and store 512 characters as 16 lines of 32 characters. The TV Typewriter was used by many small television stations well in the 1990s. Its large scope intrigued early hackers at MIT, who wrote the first computerized video game, SpaceWar!

Computer Science

Used for science and engineering as well as simple data processing, the LGP-30 was a “bargain” at less than $50,000 and an early example of a ‘personal computer,’ that is, a computer made for a single user. The first practical stored-program computer to provide a regular computing service, EDSAC is built at Cambridge University using vacuum tubes and mercury delay lines for memory. The EDSAC project was led by Cambridge professor and director of the Cambridge Computation Laboratory, Maurice Wilkes. Wilkes' ideas grew out of the Moore School lectures he had attended three years earlier. One major advance in programming was Wilkes' use of a library of short programs, called “subroutines,” stored on punched paper tapes and used for performing common repetitive calculations within a lager program.

The ISA is a logical representative encoding of the basic set of distinct operations that a computer architecture may perform, and by which application programs specify the useful work to be done. At the machine level the hardware system directly interprets and executes a sequence or partially ordered set of these basic operations. This is true for all computer cores, from those few in the smallest mobile phones to potentially millions making up the world's largest supercomputers. High performance computer architecture extends structure to a hierarchy of functional elements, whether small and limited in capability or possibly entire processor cores themselves. In this chapter many different classes of structure are presented, each exploiting concurrency in its own particular way.

What Can Computers Do?

Designed by John V. Blankenbaker using standard medium-- and small-scale integrated circuits, the Kenbak-1 relied on switches for input and lights for output from its 256-byte memory. In 1973, after selling only 40 machines, Kenbak Corporation closed its doors. On April 7, IBM announced five models of System/360, spanning a 50-to-1 performance range. At the same press conference, IBM also announced 40 completely new peripherals for the new family.

What Is A Computer Science Degree?

The laser printer was used with PARC’s Alto computer, and was commercialized as the Xerox 9700. It was developed as a versatile instrument controller for HP's growing family of programmable test and measurement products. It interfaced with a wide number of standard laboratory instruments, allowing customers to computerize their instrument systems. The 2116A also marked HP's first use of integrated circuits in a commercial product. Minuteman missiles use transistorized computers to continuously calculate their position in flight.

Programme Length

The PC Jr. is marketed as a home computer but is too expensive and limited in performance to compete with many of the other machines in that market. It offered increased performance and storage capacity over the original IBM PC and sold for about $4,000. It also included more memory and accommodated high-density 1.2-megabyte 5 1/4-inch floppy disks.

The study of computer science involves systematically studying methodical processes in order to aid the acquisition, representation, processing, storage, communication of, and access to information. This is done by analyzing the feasibility, structure, expression and mechanization of these processes and how they relate to this information. In computer science, the term ‘information’ refers usually to information which is encoded in bits and bytes in computer memory. The 486 chips remained similar in structure to their predecessors, the 386 chips. What set the 486 apart was its optimized instruction set, with an on-chip unified instruction and data cache and an optional on-chip floating-point unit. Combined with an enhanced bus interface unit, the microprocessor doubled the performance of the 386 without increasing the clock rate.

Computer once meant a person who did computations, but now the term almost universally refers to automated electronic machinery. The first section of this article focuses on modern digital electronic computers and their design, constituent parts, and applications. For details on computer architecture, software, and theory, see computer science. Business Computers are best for essential applications such as Microsoft Office. Basic Office products include Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and more.