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Boston Computer Society
The Boston Computer Society (BCS) was an organization of personal computer users, based in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S., that ran from 1977 to 1996. At one point, it was the largest such group in the world, with regular user group meetings, many publications, permanent offices in Boston, and hosting major product announcements, including the East Coast release of the Apple Macintosh in 1984. History The organization was co-founded by thirteen-year-old Jonathan Rotenberg in 1977, and grew to become the largest such organization in the world, with over 30,000 members in all 50 U.S. states and 40 other countries. The other co-founder was Richard Gardner. Among the early members were many well-known names in the computer industry, including Stewart Alsop II, Daniel S. Bricklin, Philip D. Estridge, Dan Fylstra, William H. Gates, Wayne Green, Mitchell Kapor, Cary Lu, Mike Markkula, Seymour Papert, Jon Shirley, Clive Sinclair, Benjamin M. Rosen, and Nigel Searle. At its p ...
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Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- most populous city in the country. The city boundaries encompass an area of about and a population of 675,647 as of 2020. It is the seat of Suffolk County (although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999). The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest MSA in the country. A broader combined statistical area (CSA), generally corresponding to the commuting area and including Providence, Rhode Island, is home to approximately 8.2 million people, making it the sixth most populous in the United States. Boston is one of the oldest municip ...
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Jon Shirley
Jon is a shortened form of the common given name Jonathan, derived from "YHWH has given", and an alternate spelling of John, derived from "YHWH has pardoned".Meaning, Origin and History of the Name John
Behind the Name. Retrieved on 2013-09-06. The name is spelled in and on the . In the , it is derived from

Dan Bricklin
Daniel Singer Bricklin (born July 16, 1951) is an American businessman and engineer who is the co-creator, with Bob Frankston, of the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. He also founded Software Garden, Inc., of which he is currently president, and Trellix. which he left in 2004.Daniel Bricklin Bio
CS Dept. NSF-Supported Education Infrastructure Project. Accessed January 3, 2011.
He currently serves as the chief technology officer of Alpha Software. His book, ''Bricklin on Technology'', was published by Wiley in May 2009. For his work with , Bri ...
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Bob Frankston
Robert M. Frankston (born June 14, 1949) is an American software engineer and businessman who co-created, with Dan Bricklin, the VisiCalc spreadsheet program. Frankston is also the co-founder of Software Arts. Early life and education Frankston was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York City in 1966. He earned a S.B degree in computer science and mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed by a Master of Engineering degree computer science, also from MIT. Career Following his work with Dan Bricklin, Frankston later worked at Lotus Development Corporation and Microsoft. Frankston became an outspoken advocate for reducing the role of telecommunications companies in the evolution of the Internet, particularly with respect to broadband and mobile communications. He coined the term "Regulatorium" to describe what he considers collusion between telecommunication companies and their regulators that prevents ch ...
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VisiCalc
VisiCalc (for "visible calculator") is the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for Apple II by VisiCorp on 17 October 1979. It is often considered the application that turned the microcomputer from a hobby for computer enthusiasts into a serious business tool, prompting IBM to introduce the IBM PC two years later. VisiCalc is considered to be Apple II's killer app. It sold over 700,000 copies in six years, and as many as 1 million copies over its history. Initially developed for the Apple II computer using a 6502 assembler running on the Multics time sharing system, VisiCalc was ported to numerous platforms, both 8-bit and some of the early 16-bit systems. In order to do this, the company developed porting platforms that produced bug compatible versions. The company took the same approach when the IBM PC was launched, producing a product that was essentially identical to the original 8-bit Apple II version. Sales were initially brisk, ...
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Commonwealth School
Commonwealth School is a private high school of about 155 students and 35 faculty members located in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. History Charles E. Merrill Jr., son of the founder of Merrill Lynch, and brother of the prominent American poet James Merrill, founded the school in 1957, locating it in Boston's Back Bay to "restore good secondary schooling to the city." He encouraged Commonwealth students to be "decent, socially responsible, generous people," actively engaged in public affairs. For some decades after his retirement, Merrill returned to the school once a year to give a speech on a topic of his choice, and his books are on display in the school library alongside those of Commonwealth alumni. Merrill insisted that the school has only one rule: "No rollerskating in the halls,"—an exhortation that students should not "...act like a damn fool, but think abo ...
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Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing. The origins of the Internet date back to the development of packet switching and research commissioned by the United States Department of Defense in the 1960s to enable time-sharing of computers. The primary precursor network, the ARPANET, initially served as a backbone for interconnection of regional academic and military networks in the 1970s to enable resource shari ...
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Jerry Kaplan
Samuel Jerrold "Jerry" Kaplan (born March 25, 1952) is an American computer scientist, author, futurist, and entrepreneur. He is best known as a pioneer in the field of pen computing and tablet computers. He is the founder of numerous companies, including GO Corporation, whose technology was used to develop the first smartphone and tablet PC. Kaplan is the co-founder of OnSale, the first B2C online auction site launched in 1994, five months prior to eBay. He is a recipient of the 1998 Ernst & Young Emerging Entrepreneur of the Year Award and author of the best-selling book ''Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure.'' He has been featured in major news publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Red Herring, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Kaplan is also the author of the 2015 book ''Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence''. Additional companies he has co-founded include artificial intelligence company Te ...
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PenPoint OS
The PenPoint OS was a product of GO Corporation and was one of the earliest operating systems written specifically for graphical tablets and personal digital assistants. It ran on AT&T Corporation's EO Personal Communicator as well as a number of Intel x86 powered tablet PCs including IBM's ThinkPad 700T series, NCR's 3125, 3130 and some of GRiD Systems' pen-based portables. It was never widely adopted. Developers of the PenPoint OS included Robert Carr, who was involved with the Alto computer at Xerox PARC. He commissioned Dr. Tinker, the naming service company of Mark Beaulieu who generated the name 'PenPoint', using proprietary algorithms. Awards and innovation Byte magazine awarded PenPoint best Operating System in the 1992 Byte Awards. PenPoint won in the Standards and Operating Systems category in PC Magazine's 1991 Technical Excellence awards. The PenPoint operating system had novel early implementations of several computing advances, including: * a large set of ge ...
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GO Corp
GO Corporation was founded in 1987 to create portable computers, an operating system, and software with a pen-based user interface. It was famous not only for its pioneering work in Pen-based computing but as well as being one of the most well-funded start-up companies of its time. Its founders were Jerry Kaplan, Robert Carr, and Kevin Doren. Mr. Kaplan subsequently chronicled the history of the company in his book ''Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure''. Omid Kordestani, former Senior VP of Global Business at Google, began his startup career with GO Corporation. Other notable GO alumni include CEO Bill Campbell (who later became chairman of Intuit), VP Sales Stratton Sclavos (took VeriSign public as its CEO), CFO and VP of Business Operations Randy Komisar (became CEO of LucasArts), and VP Marketing Mike Homer (was VP Marketing at time of Netscape's IPO in 1995). History Though the company enjoyed high levels of public awareness and generally positive attention from industry ...
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Lotus Software
Lotus Software (called Lotus Development Corporation before its acquisition by IBM) was an American software company based in Massachusetts; it was "offloaded" to India's HCL Technologies in 2018. Lotus is most commonly known for the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application, the first feature-heavy, user-friendly, reliable and WYSIWYG-enabled product to become widely available in the early days of the IBM PC, when there was no graphical user interface. Much later, in conjunction with Ray Ozzie's Iris Associates, Lotus also released a groupware and email system, Lotus Notes. IBM purchased the company in 1995 for US$3.5 billion, primarily to acquire Lotus Notes and to establish a presence in the increasingly important client–server computing segment, which was rapidly making host-based products such as IBM's OfficeVision obsolete. On December 6, 2018, IBM announced the sale of Lotus Software/Domino to HCL for $1.8 billion. History Lotus was founded in 1982 by partners Mitch ...
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Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company by market capitalization, the fourth-largest personal computer vendor by unit sales and second-largest mobile phone manufacturer. It is one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. Apple was founded as Apple Computer Company on April 1, 1976, by Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne to develop and sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. It was incorporated by Jobs and Wozniak as Apple Computer, Inc. in 1977 and the company's next computer, the Apple II, became a best seller and one of the first mass-produced microcomputers. Apple went public in 1980 to instant financial success. The company developed computers featuring innovative graphical user interfaces, in ...
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