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DDP-516
The Honeywell 316 was a popular 16-bit minicomputer built by Honeywell starting in 1969. It is part of the Series 16, which includes the Models 116 (1965, discrete), 316 (1969), 416 (1966), 516 (1966) and DDP-716 (1969). They were commonly used for data acquisition and control, remote message concentration, clinical laboratory systems, Remote Job Entry and time-sharing. The Series-16 computers are all based on the DDP-116 designed by Gardner Hendrie at Computer Control Company, Inc. (3C) in 1964. The 516 and later the 316 were used as Interface Message Processors (IMP) for the American ARPANET and the British NPL Network. History Computer Control Company developed a computer series named Digital Data Processor, of which it built two models: * DDP-116 - the first of the Series 16 * DDP-124 - part of a trio of 24-bit systems: DDP-24, 124, 224. Honeywell bought the company after the 24 trio, and built the balance of the Series 16. The H-316 was used by Charles H. Moore to deve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense. Building on the ideas of J. C. R. Licklider, Bob Taylor initiated the ARPANET project in 1966 to enable access to remote computers. Taylor appointed Larry Roberts as program manager. Roberts made the key decisions about the network design. He incorporated Donald Davies' concepts and designs for packet switching, and sought input from Paul Baran. ARPA awarded the contract to build the network to Bolt Beranek & Newman who developed the first protocol for the network. Roberts engaged Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA to develop mathematical methods for analyzing the packet network technology. The first ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Interface Message Processor
The Interface Message Processor (IMP) was the packet switching node used to interconnect participant networks to the ARPANET from the late 1960s to 1989. It was the first generation of gateways, which are known today as routers. An IMP was a ruggedized Honeywell DDP-516 minicomputer with special-purpose interfaces and software. In later years the IMPs were made from the non-ruggedized Honeywell 316 which could handle two-thirds of the communication traffic at approximately one-half the cost. An IMP requires the connection to a host computer via a special bit- serial interface, defined in ''BBN Report 1822''. The IMP software and the ARPA network communications protocol running on the IMPs was discussed in , the first of a series of standardization documents published by what later became the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). History The concept of an "Interface computer" was first proposed in 1966 by Donald Davies for the NPL network in England. The same idea was inde ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bradwell Nuclear Power Station
Bradwell nuclear power station is a decommissioned Magnox-design nuclear power station located on the Dengie peninsula at the mouth of the River Blackwater, Essex. In 2019, it was the first nuclear power station in the UK to be placed into long-term decommissioned management. , China General Nuclear Power Group and China National Nuclear Corporation are considering Bradwell for the site of a new nuclear power station, named Bradwell B. History Construction of the power station by a consortium involving Clarke Chapman, Head Wrightson, C. A. Parsons & Co., A. Reyrolle & Co., Strachan & Henshaw and Whessoe and known as the Nuclear Power Plant Company (NPPC) began in December 1957, and electricity generation started in 1962. Bradwell had two Magnox-design reactors with a design output of 300 MW of net electrical output, although this was reduced to 242MW net electrical in total as a result of the discovery of breakaway oxidation of mild-steel components inside the reactor vess ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paper Tape
Five- and eight-hole punched paper tape Paper tape reader on the Harwell computer with a small piece of five-hole tape connected in a circle – creating a physical program loop Punched tape or perforated paper tape is a form of data storage that consists of a long strip of paper in which holes are punched. It developed from and was subsequently used alongside punched cards, differing in that the tape is continuous. Punched cards, and chains of punched cards, were used for control of looms in the 18th century. Use for telegraphy systems started in 1842. Punched tape was used throughout the 19th and for much of the 20th centuries for programmable looms, teleprinter communication, for input to computers of the 1950s and 1960s, and later as a storage medium for minicomputers and CNC machine tools. During the Second World War, high-speed punched tape systems using optical readout methods were used in code breaking systems. Punched tape was used to transmit data for manufacture o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teletype Model 33
The Teletype Model 33 is an electromechanical teleprinter designed for light-duty office use. It is less rugged and cost less than earlier Teletype machines. The Teletype Corporation introduced the Model 33 as a commercial product in 1963 after being originally designed for the United States Navy. There are three versions of the Model 33: * Model 33 ASR, (Automatic Send and Receive), which has a built-in eight-hole punched tape reader and tape punch; * Model 33 KSR (Keyboard Send and Receive), which lacks the paper tape reader and punch; * Model 33 RO (Receive Only) which has neither a keyboard nor a reader/punch. The Model 33 was one of the first products to employ the newly-standardized ASCII code, which was first published in 1963. A companion Model 32 used the older, more-established five-bit Baudot code. Because of its low price and ASCII-compatibility, the Model 33 was widely used with early minicomputers, and the large numbers of the teleprinter which were sold strongly i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Front Panel
A front panel was used on early electronic computers to display and allow the alteration of the state of the machine's internal registers and memory. The front panel usually consisted of arrays of indicator lamps, digit and symbol displays, toggle switches, dials, and push buttons mounted on a sheet metal face plate. In early machines, CRTs might also be present (as an oscilloscope, or, for example, to mirror the contents of Williams–Kilburn tube memory). Prior to the development of CRT system consoles, many computers such as the IBM 1620 had console typewriters. Usually the contents of one or more hardware registers would be represented by a row of lights, allowing the contents to be read directly when the machine was stopped. The switches allowed direct entry of data and address values into registers or memory. Details On some machines, certain lights and switches were reserved for use under program control. These were often referred to as ''sense indicators'', ''se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Floating-point
In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be represented as a base-ten floating-point number: 12.345 = \underbrace_\text \times \underbrace_\text\!\!\!\!\!\!^ In practice, most floating-point systems use base two, though base ten (decimal floating point) is also common. The term ''floating point'' refers to the fact that the number's radix point can "float" anywhere to the left, right, or between the significant digits of the number. This position is indicated by the exponent, so floating point can be considered a form of scientific notation. A floating-point system can be used to represent, with a fixed number of digits, numbers of very different orders of magnitude — such as the number of meters between galaxies or between protons in an atom. For this reason, floating-poi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Instruction Set
In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA), also called computer architecture, is an abstract model of a computer. A device that executes instructions described by that ISA, such as a central processing unit (CPU), is called an ''implementation''. In general, an ISA defines the supported instructions, data types, registers, the hardware support for managing main memory, fundamental features (such as the memory consistency, addressing modes, virtual memory), and the input/output model of a family of implementations of the ISA. An ISA specifies the behavior of machine code running on implementations of that ISA in a fashion that does not depend on the characteristics of that implementation, providing binary compatibility between implementations. This enables multiple implementations of an ISA that differ in characteristics such as performance, physical size, and monetary cost (among other things), but that are capable of running the same machine code, so that ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Word (data Type)
In computing, a word is the natural unit of data used by a particular processor design. A word is a fixed-sized datum handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor. The number of bits or digits in a word (the ''word size'', ''word width'', or ''word length'') is an important characteristic of any specific processor design or computer architecture. The size of a word is reflected in many aspects of a computer's structure and operation; the majority of the registers in a processor are usually word-sized and the largest datum that can be transferred to and from the working memory in a single operation is a word in many (not all) architectures. The largest possible address size, used to designate a location in memory, is typically a hardware word (here, "hardware word" means the full-sized natural word of the processor, as opposed to any other definition used). Documentation for older computers with fixed word size commonly states memory sizes in words ra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Two's Complement
Two's complement is a mathematical operation to reversibly convert a positive binary number into a negative binary number with equivalent (but negative) value, using the binary digit with the greatest place value (the leftmost bit in big- endian numbers, rightmost bit in little-endian numbers) to indicate whether the binary number is positive or negative (the sign). It is used in computer science as the most common method of representing signed (positive, negative, and zero) integers on computers, and more generally, fixed point binary values. When the most significant bit is a one, the number is signed as negative. . Two's complement is executed by 1) inverting (i.e. flipping) all bits, then 2) adding a place value of 1 to the inverted number. For example, say the number −6 is of interest. +6 in binary is 0110 (the leftmost most significant bit is needed for the sign; positive 6 is not 110 because it would be interpreted as -2). Step one is to flip all bits, yielding 1001. St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
