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Dataproducts
Dataproducts Corporation was an early manufacturer of computer peripheral equipment. Overview Initially known as Data Products, the company was founded by Erwin Tomash in 1962 in order to take controlling interest of Telex's Data Systems Division.f The division was behind on a contract to deliver disk drives to General Electric. Dataproducts was able to complete the product and deliver to GE and later Ferranti, ICL and RCA. Sustained by the disk drive business and Informatics, Data Products began development of their first line printer. Introduced in 1963, the 3300 was a 300 line per minute drum printer that used a moving coil actuator for the print hammer. In 1966, core memory was added to the product line. With heightened sales and earnings, Data Products moved to a new site in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California in 1968. They started acquiring other businesses, including Staff Dynamics, a personnel agency and Uptime, a manufacturer of card readers. Graham Tyson replaced To ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Erwin Tomash
Erwin Tomash (November 17, 1921 – December 10, 2012) was an American engineer who co-founded Dataproducts Corporation, which specialized in computer technology, specifically printers and core memory units. He is recognized for his early pioneering work with computer equipment peripherals. Tomash led the creation of the Charles Babbage Institute and is responsible for The Adelle and Erwin Tomash Fellowship in the History of Information Technology and The Erwin Tomash Library. He died at age 91 in his home in Soquel, California due to complications from Alzheimer's disease. Education Born and raised in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Erwin Tomash graduated from the University of Minnesota with his electrical engineering degree in 1943.Oral-History:Erwin Tomash [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Solid Ink
Solid ink (also referred to as hot melt ink) is a type of ink used in printing. Solid ink is a waxy resin-based polymer that must be melted prior to usage unlike conventional liquid inks. The technology is used most in graphics and large format printing environments where color vividness and cost efficiency are important. History Solid ink, Hot-Melt or Phase change ink was introduced in 1962 at Teletype Corporation in the Project 176. Solid ink is the name for ink that is solid at room temperature. Wax was formally introduced in the first Solid ink product introduced with Continuous Inkjets in the Teletype Inktronic Terminal in 1966 but the patent for Hot-melt wax did not issue until Patent US3653932 April 4, 1972. In 1971, a patent, US3596285 was issued for a Liquid Metal Recorder, a printer process that fabricated metal models of symbols, patterns and characters. Liquid metal was referred to as Hot-Melt "type" ink in this patent and it was introduced before the term 3D p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Line Printer
A line printer prints one entire line of text before advancing to another line. Most early line printers were impact printers. Line printers are mostly associated with unit record equipment and the early days of digital computing, but the technology is still in use. Print speeds of 600 lines per minute (approximately 10 pages per minute) were achieved in the 1950s, later increasing to as much as 1200 lpm. Line printers print a complete line at a time and have speeds in the range of 150 to 2500 lines per minute. The types of line printers are drum printers, band-printers, and chain printers. Other non-impact technologies have also been used, as thermal line printers were popular in the 1970s and 1980s, and some inkjet and laser printers produce output a line or a page at a time. Designs Many impact printers, such as the daisywheel printer and dot matrix printer, used a print head that printed a character then moved on until an entire line was printed. Line printers we ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Informatics General Corporation
Informatics General Corporation, earlier Informatics, Inc., was an American computer software company in existence from 1962 through 1985 and based in Los Angeles, California. It made a variety of software products, and was especially known for its Mark IV file management and report generation product for IBM mainframes, which became the best-selling corporate packaged software product of its time. It also ran computer service bureaus and sold turnkey systems to specific industries. By the mid-1980s Informatics had revenues of near $200 million and over 2,500 employees. Computer historian Martin Campbell-Kelly, in his 2003 volume ''From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry'', considers Informatics to be an exemplar of the independent, middle-sized software development firms of its era, and the Computer History Museum as well as the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota have conducted a number of oral histories of the c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
MARK IV (software)
MARK IV is a fourth-generation programming language that was created by Informatics, Inc. in the 1960s. Informatics took advantage of IBM's decision to unbundle their software; MARK IV was the first "software product to have cumulative sales of $10 million". MARK IV was developed for IBM Systems (360 and 370) and for the RCA Spectra 70. Its main benefit was allowing faster application development on the order of 6 to 10 times faster than doing a system using a 3GL, such as COBOL. MARK IV, being an early 4GL, allowed user development of systems related to business. In a 1971 ad by Informatics, there are several quotes from customers, such as: :We conservatively estimate that the benefits derived from the MARK IV System have completely returned the cost of our investment in a period of less than 3 months. :MARK IV runs ... handle Accounts Receivable, Inventory, Sales Analyses, etc. on about 26 different factories. MARK IV went to Sterling Software in 1985 as part of that company ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peripheral Equipment
A peripheral or peripheral device is an auxiliary device used to put information into and get information out of a computer. The term ''peripheral device'' refers to all hardware components that are attached to a computer and are controlled by the computer system, but they are not the core components of the computer, such as the CPU or power supply unit. In other words, peripherals can also be defined as devices that can be easily removed and plugged into a computer system. Several categories of peripheral devices may be identified, based on their relationship with the computer: *An ''input device'' sends data or instructions to the computer, such as a mouse, keyboard, graphics tablet, image scanner, barcode reader, game controller, light pen, light gun, microphone and webcam; *An ''output device'' provides output data from the computer, such as a computer monitor, projector, printer, headphones and computer speaker; *An ''input/output device'' performs both input and output func ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tektronix
Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent company, it is now a subsidiary of Fortive, a spinoff from Danaher Corporation. Several charities are, or were, associated with Tektronix, including the Tektronix Foundation and the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust in Vancouver, Washington. History 1946–1954 The company traces its roots to the electronics revolution that immediately followed World War II. It was founded in December 1945 as Tekrad. The name was similar to that of a California company, Techrad, so in 1946, the four partners, Howard Vollum, Jack Murdock and Miles Tippery, who had both served in the Coast Guard, and accountant Glenn McDowell, formed Tektronix, Inc. Each contributed an initial $2,600 for equal shares. Howard Vollum had graduated in 1936 from Reed Coll ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Telex
The telex network is a station-to-station switched network of teleprinters similar to a Public switched telephone network, telephone network, using telegraph-grade connecting circuits for two-way text-based messages. Telex was a major method of sending written messages electronically between businesses in the post–World War II period. Its usage went into decline as the fax machine grew in popularity in the 1980s. The term "telex" refers to the network, and sometimes the teleprinters (as "telex machines"), although point-to-point teleprinter systems had been in use long before telex exchanges were built in the 1930s. Teleprinters evolved from telegraph systems, and, like the telegraph, use binary signals, with mark and space logic represented by the presence or absence of a certain level of electric current. This differs from the analog telephone system, which used varying voltage to represent sound. For this reason, telex exchanges were entirely separate from the telephone sys ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Babbage Institute
The IT History Society (ITHS) is an organization that supports the history and scholarship of information technology by encouraging, fostering, and facilitating archival and historical research. Formerly known as the Charles Babbage Foundation, it advises historians, promotes collaboration among academic organizations and museums, and assists IT corporations in preparing and archiving their histories for future studies. Activities The IT History Society provides background information to those with an interest in the history of Information Technology, including papers that provide advice on how to perform historical work and how historical activities can benefit private sector organizations. It tracks historical projects seeking funding as well as projects underway and completed. It maintains online, publicly available, lists of events pertaining to IT history, IT history resources, an IT Honor Roll acknowledging more than 700 individuals who have made a noteworthy contribution ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sterling Software
Sterling Software was an American software company founded in Dallas, Texas in 1981 by Sterling Williams and brothers Sam and Charles Wyly. The company was acquired by Computer Associates International in 2000 in a stock-for-stock transaction worth $3.3 billion. Computer Associates sold Sterling Software's Federal Systems Group to Northrop Grumman in 2000. It was known for its aggressive acquisitions, most notably the hostile take-over of Informatics General Corporation in 1985. Informatics was one of the first established software and services companies. It developed the MARK-IV Fourth-generation programming language in the 1960s. MARK-IV became the first software package exceeding $1 million in revenue, after IBM was forced in 1969 to unbundle software from their hardware. Helped by financing and counseled by Werner Frank, one of Informatics' founders who had left this company a year before, Sterling Software started the hostile take over by offering to shareholders an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fourth-generation Programming Language
A fourth-generation programming language (4GL) is any computer programming language that belongs to a class of languages envisioned as an advancement upon third-generation programming languages (3GL). Each of the programming language generations aims to provide a higher level of abstraction of the internal computer hardware details, making the language more programmer-friendly, powerful, and versatile. While the definition of 4GL has changed over time, it can be typified by operating more with large collections of information at once rather than focusing on just bits and bytes. Languages claimed to be 4GL may include support for database management, report generation, mathematical optimization, GUI development, or web development. Some researchers state that 4GLs are a subset of domain-specific languages. The concept of 4GL was developed from the 1970s through the 1990s, overlapping most of the development of 3GL, with 4GLs identified as "non-procedural" or "program-generating" l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
LaserWriter Pro 810
The LaserWriter is a laser printer with built-in PostScript interpreter sold by Apple, Inc. from 1985 to 1988. It was one of the first laser printers available to the mass market. In combination with WYSIWYG publishing software like PageMaker, that operated on top of the graphical user interface of Macintosh computers, the LaserWriter was a key component at the beginning of the desktop publishing revolution.H. A. Tucker: Desktop Publishing.'' In: Maurice M. de Ruiter: ''Advances in Computer Graphics III.'' Springer, 1988, , P. 296.Michael B. Spring: Electronic printing and publishing: the document processing revolution.'' CRC Press, 1991, , Page 46. History Development of laser printing Laser printing traces its history to efforts by Gary Starkweather at Xerox in 1969, which resulted in a commercial system called the Xerox 9700. IBM followed this with the IBM 3800 system in 1976. Both machines were large, room-filling devices handling the combined output of many users.Benji E ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
