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Intertec Superbrain
The Intertec SuperBrain was an all-in-one commercial microcomputer that was first sold by Intertec Data Systems Corporation of Columbia, South Carolina, USA in 1979. The machine ran the operating system CP/M and was somewhat unusual in that it used dual Z80 CPUs, the second being used as a disk controller. In 1983, the basic machine sold for about . There were several variants, including the SuperBrain II (released in 1982), SuperBrain II Jr., "QD" (quad density disk drives) and "SD" (super density) models. Intertec also released a similar looking dumb terminal, the Intertube, and smart terminal, the Emulator. The SuperBrain is notable for being at the user end of the first Kermit connection in 1981. The machine was practical and useful in the office environment, but somewhat limited until the arrival of the first 5 MB hard drive in one of the floppy drive bays. This was soon replaced by the 10 MB hard drive. Up to 255 CompuStar workstations could be daisy-chained togethe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and borders fourteen countries by land, the most of any country in the world, tied with Russia. Covering an area of approximately , it is the world's third largest country by total land area. The country consists of 22 provinces, five autonomous regions, four municipalities, and two Special Administrative Regions (Hong Kong and Macau). The national capital is Beijing, and the most populous city and financial center is Shanghai. Modern Chinese trace their origins to a cradle of civilization in the fertile basin of the Yellow River in the North China Plain. The semi-legendary Xia dynasty in the 21st century BCE and the well-attested Shang and Zhou dynasties developed a bureaucratic political system to serve hereditary monarchies, or dyna ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DIP Switch
A DIP switch is a manual electric switch that is packaged with others in a group in a standard dual in-line package (DIP). The term may refer to each individual switch, or to the unit as a whole. This type of switch is designed to be used on a printed circuit board along with other electronic components and is commonly used to customize the behavior of an electronic device for specific situations. DIP switches are an alternative to jumper blocks. Their main advantages are that they are quicker to change and there are no parts to lose. History US patent 3,621,157 is the earliest known DIP switch patent. The patent discloses a rotary style DIP switch invented by Pierre P. Schwab. Schwab's patent application was filed on June 1, 1970, and the patent was granted on November 16, 1971. The DIP switch with sliding levers was granted US patent 4012608 in 1976. It was applied for 1974 and was used in 1977 in an ATARI Flipper game. Types The slide, rocker, and piano types, which a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Thing (1982 Film)
''The Thing'' is a 1982 American Science fiction film, science fiction horror film directed by John Carpenter from a screenplay by Bill Lancaster. Based on the 1938 John W. Campbell, John W. Campbell Jr. novella ''Who Goes There?'', it tells the story of a group of American researchers in Antarctica who encounter the eponymous "Thing", a Parasitism, parasitic extraterrestrial life-form that assimilates, then imitates, other organisms. The group is overcome by paranoia and conflict as they learn that they can no longer trust each other and that any of them could be the Thing. The film stars Kurt Russell as the team's helicopter pilot R.J. MacReady, with Wilford Brimley, A. Wilford Brimley, T. K. Carter, David Clennon, Keith David, Richard Dysart, Charles Hallahan, Peter Maloney (actor), Peter Maloney, Richard Masur, Donald Moffat, Joel Polis, and Thomas G. Waites in supporting roles. Production began in the mid-1970s as a faithful adaptation of the novella, following 1951's ''Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Knight Rider (1982 TV Series)
''Knight Rider'' is an American action crime drama television series created and produced by Glen A. Larson. The series was originally broadcast on NBC from September 26, 1982, to April 4, 1986. The show stars David Hasselhoff as Michael Knight, a sleek and modern crime fighter assisted by KITT, an advanced, artificially intelligent, self-aware, and nearly indestructible car. This was the last series Larson devised at Universal Television before he moved to 20th Century Fox Television. Plot Self-made billionaire Wilton Knight rescues police Detective Lieutenant Michael Arthur Long after a near fatal shot to the face, giving him a new identity (by plastic surgery) and a new name: Michael Knight. Wilton selects Michael to be the primary field agent in the pilot program of his public justice organization, the Foundation for Law and Government (FLAG). The other half of this pilot program is the Knight Industries Two Thousand (KITT), a heavily modified, technologically advanced Po ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
APL (programming Language)
APL (named after the book ''A Programming Language'') is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the Array data type#Multi-dimensional arrays, multidimensional array. It uses a large range of APL syntax and symbols, special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages. It has also inspired several other programming languages. History Mathematical notation A mathematical notation for manipulating arrays was developed by Kenneth E. Iverson, starting in 1957 at Harvard University. In 1960, he began work for IBM where he developed this notation with Adin Falkoff and published it in his book ''A Programming Language'' in 1962. The preface states its premise: This notation was used inside IBM for short research reports on computer systems, such as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Microsoft BASIC
Microsoft BASIC is the foundation software product of the Microsoft company and evolved into a line of BASIC interpreters and compiler(s) adapted for many different microcomputers. It first appeared in 1975 as Altair BASIC, which was the first version of BASIC published by Microsoft as well as the first high-level programming language available for the Altair 8800 microcomputer. During the home computer craze during the late-1970s and early-1980s, BASIC was ported to and supplied with many home computer designs. Slight variations to add support for machine-specific functions, especially graphics, led to a profusion of related designs like Commodore BASIC and Atari Microsoft BASIC. As the early home computers gave way to newer designs like the IBM Personal Computer and Macintosh, Apple Macintosh, BASIC was no longer as widely used, although it retained a strong following. The release of Visual Basic (classic), Visual Basic reboosted its popularity and it remains in wide use on Mic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Priam Corporation
Priam Corporation was a company located in San Jose, California, founded in 1978 by William Schroeder and Al Wilson, two former Memorex executives, as a manufacturer of hard disk drives. Originally, they made high-capacity 14-inch drives, developed for mainframe computers, available for minicomputers and high-end workstations, but switched to 8-inch disk drives in 1980. Their 8-inch hard disks could be found in a wide variety of add-on products like the huge Mator Shark box with IEEE-488 interface for Commodore PET/CBM computers or the Priam DataTower series, external storage solutions, combining high-capacity hard disks and streamers in a single case, which could interface to various computers including IBM PCs. While Priam was considered a leader in certain technology segments at one time, they were late catching up in the transition to the 5.25-inch form factor and were ultimately one of the many hard drive manufacturers in the 1980s and 1990s that went out of business, mer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Control Data Corporation
Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywell, RCA, and UNIVAC. CDC was well-known and highly regarded throughout the industry at the time. For most of the 1960s, Seymour Cray worked at CDC and developed a series of machines that were the fastest computers in the world by far, until Cray left the company to found Cray Research (CRI) in the 1970s. After several years of losses in the early 1980s, in 1988 CDC started to leave the computer manufacturing business and sell the related parts of the company, a process that was completed in 1992 with the creation of Control Data Systems, Inc. The remaining businesses of CDC currently operate as Ceridian. Background and origins: World War II–1957 During World War II the U.S. Navy had built up a classified team of engineers to build codeb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daisy Chain (electrical Engineering)
In electrical and electronic engineering, a daisy chain is a wiring scheme in which multiple devices are wired together in sequence or in a ring, similar to a garland of daisy flowers. Daisy chains may be used for power, analog signals, digital data, or a combination thereof. The term ''daisy chain'' may refer either to large scale devices connected in series, such as a series of power strips plugged into each other to form a single long line of strips, or to the wiring patterns embedded inside of devices. Other examples of devices which can be used to form daisy chains are those based on Universal Serial Bus (USB), FireWire, Thunderbolt and Ethernet cables. Signal transmission For analog signals, connections usually consist of a simple electrical bus and, especially in the case of a chain of many devices, may require the use of one or more repeaters or amplifiers within the chain to counteract attenuation (the natural loss of energy in such a system). Digital signal ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Talent Show
A talent show is an event in which participants perform the arts of singing, dancing, lip-syncing, acting, martial arts, playing an instrument, poetry, comedy or other activities to showcase skills. Many talent shows are performances rather than contests, but some are actual contests. In the instance of a contest, participants may be motivated to perform for a reward, trophy, or prize of some kind. For example, a high school might not have many students with any interest in performing in front of the student body for the sole purpose of performing alone and may offer different prizes as an incentive for these students to participate in the contest. Media Since the late 1940s, talent shows have become a notable genre of reality television, such as ''Doorway to Fame'' (1947), ''The Original Amateur Hour'' (1948), ''Hollywood Screen Test'' (1948), '' Opportunity Knocks'' (1949), '' Chance of a Lifetime'' (1952), ''NHK Nodo Jiman'' (1953), ''New Faces'' (1963), ''Notun Kuri'' ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kermit (protocol)
Kermit is a computer file transfer/management protocol and a set of communications software tools primarily used in the early years of personal computing in the 1980s. It provides a consistent approach to file transfer, terminal emulation, script programming, and character set conversion across many different computer hardware and operating system platforms. Technical The Kermit protocol supports text and binary file transfers on both full-duplex and half-duplex 8-bit and 7-bit serial connections in a system- and medium-independent fashion, and is implemented on hundreds of different computer and operating system platforms. On full-duplex connections, a sliding window protocol is used with selective retransmission which provides excellent performance and error recovery characteristics. On 7-bit connections, locking shifts provide efficient transfer of 8-bit data. When properly implemented, as in the Columbia University Kermit Software collection, its authors claim performance i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Columbia, South Carolina
Columbia is the capital of the U.S. state of South Carolina. With a population of 136,632 at the 2020 census, it is the second-largest city in South Carolina. The city serves as the county seat of Richland County, and a portion of the city extends into neighboring Lexington County. It is the center of the Columbia metropolitan statistical area, which had a population of 829,470 in 2020 and is the 72nd-largest metropolitan statistical area in the nation. The name Columbia is a poetic term used for the United States, derived from the name of Christopher Columbus, who explored for the Spanish Crown. Columbia is often abbreviated as Cola, leading to its nickname as "Soda City." The city is located about northwest of the geographic center of South Carolina, and is the primary city of the Midlands region of the state. It lies at the confluence of the Saluda River and the Broad River, which merge at Columbia to form the Congaree River. As the state capital, Columbia is the s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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