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Burroughs Medium Systems
The Burroughs B2500 through Burroughs B4900 was a series of mainframe computers developed and manufactured by Burroughs Corporation in Pasadena, California, United States, from 1966 to 1991. They were aimed at the business world with an instruction set optimized for the COBOL programming language. They were also known as Burroughs Medium Systems, by contrast with the Burroughs Large Systems and Burroughs Small Systems. History and architecture First generation The B2500 and B3500 computers were announced in 1966. They operated directly on COBOL-68's primary decimal data types: strings of up to 100 digits, with one EBCDIC or ASCII digit character or two 4-bit binary-coded decimal BCD digits per byte. Portable COBOL programs did not use binary integers at all, so the B2500 did not either, not even for memory addresses. Memory was addressed down to the 4-bit digit in big-endian style, using 5-digit decimal addresses. Floating point numbers also used base 10 rather than some b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mainframe Computer
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and large-scale transaction processing. A mainframe computer is large but not as large as a supercomputer and has more processing power than some other classes of computers, such as minicomputers, servers, workstations, and personal computers. Most large-scale computer-system architectures were established in the 1960s, but they continue to evolve. Mainframe computers are often used as servers. The term ''mainframe'' was derived from the large cabinet, called a ''main frame'', that housed the central processing unit and main memory of early computers. Later, the term ''mainframe'' was used to distinguish high-end commercial computers from less powerful machines. Design Modern mainframe design is characterized less b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cache Memory
In computing, a cache ( ) is a hardware or software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewhere. A ''cache hit'' occurs when the requested data can be found in a cache, while a ''cache miss'' occurs when it cannot. Cache hits are served by reading data from the cache, which is faster than recomputing a result or reading from a slower data store; thus, the more requests that can be served from the cache, the faster the system performs. To be cost-effective and to enable efficient use of data, caches must be relatively small. Nevertheless, caches have proven themselves in many areas of computing, because typical computer applications access data with a high degree of locality of reference. Such access patterns exhibit temporal locality, where data is requested that has been recently requested already, and spatial locality, where d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Overlay (programming)
In a general computing sense, overlaying means "the process of transferring a block of program code or other data into main memory, replacing what is already stored". Overlaying is a programming method that allows programs to be larger than the computer's main memory. An embedded system would normally use overlays because of the limitation of physical memory, which is internal memory for a system-on-chip, and the lack of virtual memory facilities. Usage Constructing an overlay program involves manually dividing a program into self-contained object code blocks called overlays or links, generally laid out in a tree structure. ''Sibling'' segments, those at the same depth level, share the same memory, called ''overlay region'' or ''destination region''. An overlay manager, either part of the operating system or part of the overlay program, loads the required overlay from external memory into its destination region when it is needed; this may be automatic or via explicit code. Of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Memory Segmentation
Memory segmentation is an operating system memory management technique of division of a computer's primary memory into segments or sections. In a computer system using segmentation, a reference to a memory location includes a value that identifies a segment and an offset (memory location) within that segment. Segments or sections are also used in object files of compiled programs when they are linked together into a program image and when the image is loaded into memory. Segments usually correspond to natural divisions of a program such as individual routines or data tables so segmentation is generally more visible to the programmer than paging alone. Segments may be created for program modules, or for classes of memory usage such as code and data segments. Certain segments may be shared between programs. Segmentation was originally invented as a method by which system software could isolate software processes ( tasks) and data they are using. It was intended to increase relia ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paging
In computer operating systems, memory paging is a memory management scheme by which a computer stores and retrieves data from secondary storage for use in main memory. In this scheme, the operating system retrieves data from secondary storage in same-size blocks called ''pages''. Paging is an important part of virtual memory implementations in modern operating systems, using secondary storage to let programs exceed the size of available physical memory. For simplicity, main memory is called "RAM" (an acronym of random-access memory) and secondary storage is called "disk" (a shorthand for hard disk drive, drum memory or solid-state drive, etc.), but as with many aspects of computing, the concepts are independent of the technology used. Depending on the memory model, paged memory functionality is usually hardwired into a CPU/MCU by using a Memory Management Unit (MMU) or Memory Protection Unit (MPU) and separately enabled by privileged system code in the operating system's ke ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virtual Memory
In computing, virtual memory, or virtual storage is a memory management technique that provides an "idealized abstraction of the storage resources that are actually available on a given machine" which "creates the illusion to users of a very large (main) memory". The computer's operating system, using a combination of hardware and software, maps memory addresses used by a program, called '' virtual addresses'', into ''physical addresses'' in computer memory. Main storage, as seen by a process or task, appears as a contiguous address space or collection of contiguous segments. The operating system manages virtual address spaces and the assignment of real memory to virtual memory. Address translation hardware in the CPU, often referred to as a memory management unit (MMU), automatically translates virtual addresses to physical addresses. Software within the operating system may extend these capabilities, utilizing, e.g., disk storage, to provide a virtual address space that ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Base And Bounds
In computing base and bounds refers to a simple form of virtual memory where access to computer memory is controlled by one or a small number of sets of processor registers called ''base and bounds registers''. In its simplest form each user process is assigned a single contiguous segment of main memory. The operating system loads the physical address of this segment into a ''base register'' and its size into a ''bound register''. ''Virtual'' addresses seen by the program are added to the contents of the base register to generate the ''physical address''. The address is checked against the contents of the bounds register to prevent a process from accessing memory beyond its assigned segment. The operating system is not constrained by the hardware and can access all of physical memory. This technique protects memory used by one process against access or modification by another. By itself it does not protect memory from erroneous access by the owning process. It also allows programs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ALGOL
ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in textbooks and academic sources for more than thirty years. In the sense that the syntax of most modern languages is "Algol-like", it was arguably more influential than three other high-level programming languages among which it was roughly contemporary: FORTRAN, Lisp, and COBOL. It was designed to avoid some of the perceived problems with FORTRAN and eventually gave rise to many other programming languages, including PL/I, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal, and C. ALGOL introduced code blocks and the begin...end pairs for delimiting them. It was also the first language implementing nested function definitions with lexical scope. Moreover, it was the first programming language which gave detail ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Assembly Language
In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language, or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as Assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Assembly language usually has one statement per machine instruction (1:1), but constants, comments, assembler directives, symbolic labels of, e.g., memory locations, registers, and macros are generally also supported. The first assembly code in which a language is used to represent machine code instructions is found in Kathleen and Andrew Donald Booth's 1947 work, ''Coding for A.R.C.''. Assembly code is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an ''assembler''. The term "assembler" is generally attributed to Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill in their 1951 book ''The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Accumulator (computing)
In a computer's central processing unit (CPU), the accumulator is a register in which intermediate arithmetic logic unit results are stored. Without a register like an accumulator, it would be necessary to write the result of each calculation (addition, multiplication, shift, etc.) to main memory, perhaps only to be read right back again for use in the next operation. Access to main memory is slower than access to a register like an accumulator because the technology used for the large main memory is slower (but cheaper) than that used for a register. Early electronic computer systems were often split into two groups, those with accumulators and those without. Modern computer systems often have multiple general-purpose registers that can operate as accumulators, and the term is no longer as common as it once was. However, to simplify their design, a number of special-purpose processors still use a single accumulator. Basic concept Mathematical operations often take place i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Memorex
Memorex Corp. began as a magnetic tape, computer tape producer and expanded to become both a consumer media supplier and a major IBM plug compatible peripheral supplier. It was broken up and ceased to exist after 1996 other than as a consumer electronics brand specializing in disk recordable media for Compact Disc, CD and DVD drives, flash memory, computer accessories and other electronics. History and evolution Established in 1961 in Silicon Valley, Memorex started by selling computer tapes, then added other media such as disk packs. The company then expanded into disk drives and other peripheral equipment for IBM Mainframe computer, mainframes. During the 1970s and into the early 1980s, Memorex was worldwide one of the largest independent suppliers of hard disk drive, disk drives and communications controllers to users of IBM-compatible mainframes, as well as media for computer uses and consumers. The company's name is a portmanteau of "memory excellence". Memorex entered ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hexadecimal
In mathematics and computing, the hexadecimal (also base-16 or simply hex) numeral system is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of 16. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using 10 symbols, hexadecimal uses 16 distinct symbols, most often the symbols "0"–"9" to represent values 0 to 9, and "A"–"F" (or alternatively "a"–"f") to represent values from 10 to 15. Software developers and system designers widely use hexadecimal numbers because they provide a human-friendly representation of binary-coded values. Each hexadecimal digit represents four bits (binary digits), also known as a nibble (or nybble). For example, an 8-bit byte can have values ranging from 00000000 to 11111111 in binary form, which can be conveniently represented as 00 to FF in hexadecimal. In mathematics, a subscript is typically used to specify the base. For example, the decimal value would be expressed in hexadecimal as . In programming, a number of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
