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1980 In Science
The year 1980 in science and technology involved some significant events, listed below. Astronomy and space exploration * February 16 – A total solar eclipse is seen in North Africa and West Asia. * March 1 – The ''Voyager 1'' probe confirms the existence of Janus, a moon of Saturn. * October 3 – The main-belt asteroid 2404 Antarctica is discovered by Czech astronomer Antonín Mrkos. * November 12 – Voyager program: The NASA space probe '' Voyager I'' makes its closest approach to Saturn when it flies within of the planet's cloud-tops and sends the first high resolution images of the world back to scientists on Earth. Chemistry * John B. Goodenough, working with colleagues at the University of Oxford Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, identifies the cathode material that enables development of the rechargeable lithium-ion battery. * Royal Society of Chemistry formed by merger of the Royal Institute of Chemistry, the Chemical Society, the Faraday Society and the Society ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Total Solar Eclipse
A solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby obscuring the view of the Sun from a small part of the Earth, totally or partially. Such an alignment occurs during an eclipse season, approximately every six months, during the new moon phase, when the Moon's orbital plane is closest to the plane of the Earth's orbit. In a total eclipse, the disk of the Sun is fully obscured by the Moon. In partial and annular eclipses, only part of the Sun is obscured. Unlike a lunar eclipse, which may be viewed from anywhere on the night side of Earth, a solar eclipse can only be viewed from a relatively small area of the world. As such, although total solar eclipses occur somewhere on Earth every 18 months on average, they recur at any given place only once every 360 to 410 years. If the Moon were in a perfectly circular orbit and in the same orbital plane as Earth, there would be total solar eclipses once a month, at every new moon. Instead, because the Moo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chemical Society
The Chemical Society was a scientific society formed in 1841 (then named the Chemical Society of London) by 77 scientists as a result of increased interest in scientific matters. Chemist Robert Warington was the driving force behind its creation. History One of the aims of the Chemical Society was to hold meetings for "the communication and discussion of discoveries and observations, an account of which shall be published by the Society". In 1847, its importance was recognised by a Royal Charter, which added to its role in the advancement of science, the development of chemical applications in industry. Its members included eminent chemists from overseas including August Wilhelm von Hofmann, who became its president in 1861. Membership was open to all those interested in chemistry, but fellowship was for long restricted to men. In 1904, Edith Humphrey, thought to be the first British woman to gain a doctorate in chemistry (at the University of Zurich), was one of nineteen women ch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Philip Don Estridge
Philip Donald Estridge (June 23, 1937 – August 2, 1985), known as Don Estridge, was an American computer engineer who led development of the original IBM Personal Computer (PC), and thus is known as the "father of the IBM PC". His decisions dramatically changed the computer industry, resulting in a vast increase in sales of personal computers, thus creating an entire industry of hardware manufacturers of IBM PCs. Early life Estridge was born in Jacksonville, Florida. His father was a professional photographer. He graduated from Bishop Kenny High School in 1955, and from the University of Florida in 1959. He married Mary Ann Hellier in September, 1958, and they had three children: Patricia Ann, Mary Evelyn and Sandra Marie. He completed a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Florida and worked at the Army, designing a radar system using computers, IBM and finally NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center until he moved to Boca Raton, Florida, in 1969. IBM B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Bradley (engineer)
David J. Bradley (born 4 January 1949) is one of the twelve engineers who worked on the original IBM PC, developing the computer's ROM BIOS code. Bradley is credited for implementing the "Control-Alt-Delete" (Ctrl-Alt-Del) key combination that was used to reboot the computer. Bradley joined IBM in 1975 after earning his doctorate in electrical engineering from Purdue University with a dissertation on computer architectures. Education Bachelors, Electrical Engineering, University of Dayton (Ohio), 1971. Master of Science, Electrical Engineering, Purdue University, 1972. PhD, Electrical Engineering, Purdue University, 1975. Control-Alt-Delete According to Bradley, Control-Alt-Delete was not intended to be used by end users, originally—it was meant to be used by people writing programs or documentation, so that they could reboot their computers without powering them down. This was useful since after a computer was powered down, it was necessary to wait a few seconds before p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IBM Personal Computer
The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team of engineers and designers directed by Don Estridge in Boca Raton, Florida. The machine was based on open architecture and third-party peripherals. Over time, expansion cards and software technology increased to support it. The PC had a influence of the IBM PC on the personal computer market, substantial influence on the personal computer market. The specifications of the IBM PC became one of the most popular computer design standards in the world. The only significant competition it faced from a non-compatible platform throughout the 1980s was from the Apple Macintosh product line. The majority of modern personal computers are distant descendants of the IBM PC. History Prior to the 1980s, IBM had largely been known as a provider of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Operating System
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of processor time, mass storage, printing, and other resources. For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between programs and the computer hardware, although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and frequently makes system calls to an OS function or is interrupted by it. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computer from cellular phones and video game consoles to web servers and supercomputers. The dominant general-purpose personal computer operating system is Microsoft Windows with a market share of around 74.99%. macOS by Apple Inc. is in second place (14.84%), and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions of chairman, chief executive officer (CEO), President (corporate title), president and software architect, chief software architect, while also being the largest individual shareholder until May 2014. He was a major entrepreneur of the Home computer, microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Gates was born and raised in Seattle. In 1975, he and Allen founded Microsoft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It became the world's largest personal computer software company. Gates led the company as chairman and CEO until stepping down as CEO in January 2000, succeeded by Steve Ballmer, but he remained chairman of the board of directors and became chief software architect. During the late 1990s, he was Criticism of Microsoft, criticized for his bu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washington, United States. Its best-known software products are the Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 21 in the 2020 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2019. It is one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta. Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to do ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers. Servers and resources on the World Wide Web are identified and located through character strings called uniform resource locators (URLs). The original and still very common document type is a web page formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This markup language supports plain text, images, embedded video and audio contents, and scripts (short programs) that implement complex user interaction. The HTML language also supports hyperlinks (embedded URLs) which provide immediate access to other web resources. Web navigation, or web surfing, is the common practice of following such hyperlinks across multiple websites. Web applications are web pages that function as application s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ENQUIRE
ENQUIRE was a software project written in 1980 by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN, which was the predecessor to the World Wide Web. It was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web but was different in several important ways. According to Berners-Lee, the name was inspired by the title of an old how-to book, '' Enquire Within Upon Everything''. The conditions Around 1980, approximately 10,000 people were working at CERN with different hardware, software and individual requirements. Much work was done by email and file exchange. The scientists needed to keep track of different things and different projects became involved with each other. Berners-Lee started to work for 6 months on 23 June 1980 at CERN while he developed ENQUIRE. The requirements for setting up a new system were compatibility with different networks, disk formats, data formats, and character encoding schemes, which made any attempt to transfer information between dissi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Berners-Lee proposed an information management system on 12 March 1989, then implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in mid-November. Berners-Lee is the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web. He co-founded (with his then wife-to-be Rosemary Leith) the World Wide Web Foundation. He is a senior researcher and holder of the 3Com founder's chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He is a director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) and a member of the advisory board of the MIT Center for Co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pac-Man
originally called ''Puck Man'' in Japan, is a 1980 maze action video game developed and released by Namco for arcades. In North America, the game was released by Midway Manufacturing as part of its licensing agreement with Namco America. The player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots called "Power Pellets" causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points. Game development began in early 1979, directed by Toru Iwatani with a nine-man team. Iwatani wanted to create a game that could appeal to women as well as men, because most video games of the time had themes of war or sports. Although the inspiration for the Pac-Man character was the image of a pizza with a slice removed, Iwatani has said he also rounded out the Japanese character for mouth, kuchi ( ja, 口). The in-game characters were made to be cute and colorful to appeal to younger p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
