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Cyclone (computer)
The Cyclone, was a vacuum tube computer, built by Iowa State College (later University) at Ames, Iowa. The computer was commissioned in July 1959. It was based on the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann. The prototype was ILLIAC, the University of Illinois Automatic Computer. The Cyclone used 40-bit words, used two 20-bit instructions per word, and each instruction had an eight-bit op-code and a 12-bit operand or address field. In general IAS-based computers were not code compatible with each other, although originally math routines which ran on the ILLIAC would also run on the Cyclone. The Cyclone was completed just as the transistor was replacing the vacuum tube as an active computing element. The Cyclone had about 2,500 vacuum tubes, 1,521 of which were type 5844. (The IBM 1401 computer, announced the same year, was fully transistorized. About 15,000 IBM 1401 machines were produced.) The supervisor of the Cyclone computer construction was Dr. R. M. Stewart, a profe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Iowa State University
Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the nation's first designated land-grant institution when the Iowa Legislature accepted the provisions of the 1862 Morrill Act on September 11, 1862, making Iowa the first state in the nation to do so. On July 4, 1959, the college was officially renamed Iowa State University of Science and Technology. Iowa State is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity". The university is home to the Ames Laboratory, one of ten national U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science research laboratories, the Biorenewables Research Laboratory, the Plant Sciences Institute, and various other research institutes. Iowa State is the second-largest university in the State of Iowa by undergraduate enrollment. The university's ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teleprinter
A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Initially they were used in telegraphy, which developed in the late 1830s and 1840s as the first use of electrical engineering, though teleprinters were not used for telegraphy until 1887 at the earliest. The machines were adapted to provide a user interface to early mainframe computers and minicomputers, sending typed data to the computer and printing the response. Some models could also be used to create punched tape for data storage (either from typed input or from data received from a remote source) and to read back such tape for local printing or transmission. Teleprinters could use a variety of different communication media. These included a simple pair of wires; dedicated non-switched telephone circuits (leased lines); switched network ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
LaFarr Stuart
LaFarr Stuart (born July 6, 1934 in Clarkston, Utah), was an early computer music pioneer, computer engineer and member of the Homebrew Computer Club. Career In 1961, Stuart programmed Iowa State University's Cyclone computer, a derivative of the ILLIAC, to play simple, recognizable tunes through an amplified speaker that had been attached to the system originally for administrative and diagnostic purposes. A recording of an interview with Stuart and his computer music was broadcast nationally on the National Broadcasting Company's NBC Radio Network program Monitor on February 10, 1962. In a subsequent interview with the ''Harold Journal'', Navel Hunsaker, head of the Utah State University mathematics department, said of Stuart, "He always was a whiz with calculators." From the late 1970s, Stuart mentored John Carlsen, who later contributed to the rapid growth of personal computer (PC) sound-card maker Media Vision and to SigmaTel. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Stuart wo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clifford Berry
Clifford Edward Berry (April 19, 1918 – October 30, 1963) helped John Vincent Atanasoff create the first digital electronic computer in 1939, the Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC). Biography Clifford Berry was born April 19, 1918, in Gladbrook, Iowa, to Fred and Grace Berry. His father owned an appliance repair shop, where he was able to learn about radios. He graduated from Marengo High School in Marengo, Iowa, in 1934 as the class valedictorian at age 16. He went on to study at Iowa State College Iowa State University of Science and Technology (Iowa State University, Iowa State, or ISU) is a public land-grant research university in Ames, Iowa. Founded in 1858 as the Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm, Iowa State became one of the n ... (now known as Iowa State University), eventually earning a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1939 and followed by his master's degree in physics in 1941. In 1942, he married an ISU classmate and Atanasoff's secretary, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Vincent Atanasoff
John Vincent Atanasoff, , (October 4, 1903 – June 15, 1995) was an American physicist and inventor from mixed Bulgarian-Irish origin, best known for being credited with inventing the first electronic digital computer. Atanasoff invented the first electronic digital computer in the 1930s at Iowa State College (now known as Iowa State University). Challenges to his claim were resolved in 1973 when the '' Honeywell v. Sperry Rand'' lawsuit ruled that Atanasoff was the inventor of the computer. His special-purpose machine has come to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer. Early life and education Atanasoff was born on October 4, 1903, in Hamilton, New York to an electrical engineer and a school teacher. Atanasoff's father, Ivan Atanasov, was of Bulgarian origin, born in 1876 in the village of Boyadzhik, close to Yambol, then in the Ottoman Empire. While Atanasov was still an infant, his own father was killed by Ottoman soldiers after the Bulgarian April Uprising. In 1889, A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asynchronous CPU
Asynchronous circuit (clockless or self-timed circuit) is a sequential digital logic circuit that does not use a global clock circuit or signal generator to synchronize its components. Instead, the components are driven by a handshaking circuit which indicates a completion of a set of instructions. Handshaking works by simple data transfer protocols. Many synchronous circuits were developed in early 1950s as part of bigger asynchronous systems (e.g. ORDVAC). Asynchronous circuits and theory surrounding is a part of several steps in integrated circuit design, a field of digital electronics engineering. Asynchronous circuits are contrasted with synchronous circuits, in which changes to the signal values in the circuit are triggered by repetitive pulses called a clock signal. Most digital devices today use synchronous circuits. However asynchronous circuits have a potential to be much faster, have a lower level of power consumption, electromagnetic interference, and better mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magnetic-core Memory
Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random access, random-access computer memory for 20 years between about 1955 and 1975. Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, core. Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magnetic material (usually a Ferrite (magnet)#Semi-hard ferrites, semi-hard ferrite) as transformer cores, where each wire threaded through the core serves as a transformer winding. Two or more wires pass through each core. Magnetic Magnetic hysteresis, hysteresis allows each of the cores to "remember", or store a state. Each core stores one bit of information. A core can be magnetized in either the clockwise or counter-clockwise direction. The value of the bit stored in a core is zero or one according to the direction of that core's magnetization. Electric current pulses in some of the wires through a core allow the direction of the magnetization in that core to be set in either direction, thus storing a one or a zero. Another wire ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Friden Flexowriter
The Friden Flexowriter produced by the Friden Calculating Machine Company, was a teleprinter, a heavy-duty electric typewriter capable of being driven not only by a human typing, but also automatically by several methods, including direct attachment to a computer and by use of paper tape. Elements of the design date to the 1920s, and variants of the machine were produced until the early 1970s; the machines found a variety of uses during the evolution of office equipment in the 20th century, including being among the first electric typewriters, computer input and output devices, forerunners of modern word processing, and also having roles in the machine tool and printing industries. History Origins and early history The Flexowriter can trace its roots to some of the earliest electric typewriters. In 1925, the Remington Typewriter Company wanted to expand their offerings to include electric typewriters. Having little expertise or manufacturing ability with electrical appliance ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Williams Tube
The Williams tube, or the Williams–Kilburn tube named after inventors Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, is an early form of computer memory. It was the first random-access digital storage device, and was used successfully in several early computers. The Williams tube works by displaying a grid of dots on a cathode-ray tube (CRT). Due to the way CRTs work, this creates a small charge of static electricity over each dot. The charge at the location of each of the dots is read by a thin metal sheet just in front of the display. Since the display faded over time, it was periodically refreshed. It operates faster than earlier acoustic delay-line memory, at the speed of the electrons inside the vacuum tube, rather than at the speed of sound. The system was adversely affected by nearby electrical fields, and required frequent adjustment to remain operational. Williams–Kilburn tubes were used primarily on high-speed computer designs. Williams and Kilburn applied for British patents ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IAS Machine
The IAS machine was the first electronic computer built at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey. It is sometimes called the von Neumann machine, since the paper describing its design was edited by John von Neumann, a mathematics professor at both Princeton University and IAS. The computer was built from late 1945 until 1951 under his direction. The general organization is called von Neumann architecture, even though it was both conceived and implemented by others. The computer is in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History but is not currently on display. History Julian Bigelow was hired as chief engineer in May 1946. Hewitt Crane, Herman Goldstine, Gerald Estrin, Arthur Burks, George W. Brown and Willis Ware also worked on the project. The machine was in limited operation in the summer of 1951 and fully operational on June 10, 1952. It was in operation until July 15, 1958. Description The IAS machine was a binary compu ... [...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] |
