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Jazz (computer)
The Jazz computer architecture is a motherboard and chipset design originally developed by Microsoft for use in developing Windows NT. The design was eventually used as the basis for most MIPS-based Windows NT systems. In part because Microsoft intended NT to be portable between various microprocessor architectures, the MIPS RISC architecture was chosen for one of the first development platforms for the NT project in the late 1980s/early 1990s. However, around 1990, the existing MIPS-based systems (such as the TURBOchannel-equipped DECstation or the SGI Indigo) varied drastically from standard Intel personal computers such as the IBM AT—for example, neither used the ISA bus so common in Intel 386-class machines. For those and other reasons, Microsoft decided to design their own MIPS-based hardware platform on which to develop NT, which resulted in the Jazz architecture. Later, Microsoft sold this architecture design to the MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. where it became the ... [...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] |
Extended Industry Standard Architecture
The Extended Industry Standard Architecture (in practice almost always shortened to EISA and frequently pronounced "eee-suh") is a bus standard for IBM PC compatible computers. It was announced in September 1988 by a consortium of PC clone vendors (the Gang of Nine) as an alternative to IBM's proprietary Micro Channel architecture (MCA) in its PS/2 series.Compaq Leads 'Gang of Nine' In Offering Alternative to MCA, ''InfoWorld'', Sep 19, 1988. In comparison with the AT bus, which the Gang of Nine retroactively renamed to the ISA bus to avoid infringing IBM's trademark on its PC/AT computer, EISA is extended to 32 bits and allows more than one CPU to share the bus. The bus mastering support is also enhanced to provide access to 4 GB of memory. Unlike MCA, EISA can accept older XT and ISA boards — the lines and slots for EISA are a superset of ISA. EISA was much favoured by manufacturers due to the proprietary nature of MCA, and even IBM produced some machines ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Olivetti
Olivetti S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of computers, tablets, smartphones, printers and other such business products as calculators and fax machines. Headquartered in Ivrea, in the Metropolitan City of Turin, the company has been part of the TIM Group since 2003. One of the first commercial programmable desktop calculators, the Programma 101, was produced by Olivetti in 1964 and was a commercial success. History Founding The company was founded as a typewriter manufacturer by Camillo Olivetti in 1908 in the Turin commune of Ivrea, Italy. The firm was mainly developed by his son Adriano Olivetti, whose utopian vision led not only the company's worldwide expansion and commercial sucess, but also influenced business practice, politics, and culture. Olivetti opened its first overseas manufacturing plant in 1930, and its Divisumma electric calculator was launched in 1948. Olivetti produced Italy's first electronic computer, the transistorised Elea 9003, in 1959, and p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
S3 Graphics
S3 Graphics, Ltd (commonly referred to as S3) was an American computer graphics company. The company sold the Trio, ViRGE, Savage 3D, and Chrome series of graphics processors. Struggling against competition from 3dfx Interactive, ATI and Nvidia, it merged with hardware manufacturer Diamond Multimedia in 1999. The resulting company renamed itself to SONICblue Incorporated, and, two years later, the graphics portion was spun off into a new joint effort with VIA Technologies. The new company focused on the mobile graphics market. VIA Technologies' stake in S3 Graphics was purchased by HTC in 2011. History S3 was founded and incorporated in January 1989 by Dado Banatao and Ronald Yara. It was named S3 as it was Banatao's third startup company. The company's first products were among the earliest graphical user interface (GUI) accelerators. These chips were popular with video card manufacturers, and their followup designs, including the Trio64, made strong inroads with OEMs. S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acer PICA
The M6100 PICA is a system logic chipset designed by Acer Laboratories introduced in 1993. ''PICA'' stands for ''Performance-enhanced Input-output and CPU Architecture''. It was based on the Jazz architecture developed by Microsoft and supported the MIPS Technologies R4000 or R4400 microprocessors. The chipset was designed for computers that run Windows NT, and therefore used ARC firmware to boot Windows NT. The chipset consisted of six chips: a CPU and secondary cache controller, a buffer, a I/O cache and bus controller, a memory controller The memory controller is a digital circuit that manages the flow of data going to and from the computer's main memory. A memory controller can be a separate chip or integrated into another chip, such as being placed on the same die or as an int ..., and two data buffers. PICA was used by Acer in its Formula 4000 personal workstation, which NEC sold under the OEM name RISCstation Image. References * "Acer Launches Set For Building R4400 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parallel Port
In computing, a parallel port is a type of interface found on early computers (personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals. The name refers to the way the data is sent; parallel ports send multiple bits of data at once ( parallel communication), as opposed to serial communication, in which bits are sent one at a time. To do this, parallel ports require multiple data lines in their cables and port connectors and tend to be larger than contemporary serial ports, which only require one data line. There are many types of parallel ports, but the term has become most closely associated with the printer port or Centronics port found on most personal computers from the 1970s through the 2000s. It was an industry ''de facto'' standard for many years, and was finally standardized as IEEE 1284 in the late 1990s, which defined the Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP) and Extended Capability Port (ECP) bi-directional versions. Today, the parallel port interface is virtually non-exis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Serial Port
In computing, a serial port is a serial communication interface through which information transfers in or out sequentially one bit at a time. This is in contrast to a parallel port, which communicates multiple bits simultaneously in parallel. Throughout most of the history of personal computers, data has been transferred through serial ports to devices such as modems, terminals, various peripherals, and directly between computers. While interfaces such as Ethernet, FireWire, and USB also send data as a serial stream, the term ''serial port'' usually denotes hardware compliant with RS-232 or a related standard, such as RS-485 or RS-422. Modern consumer personal computers (PCs) have largely replaced serial ports with higher-speed standards, primarily USB. However, serial ports are still frequently used in applications demanding simple, low-speed interfaces, such as industrial automation systems, scientific instruments, point of sale systems and some industrial and consumer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data (such as software or digital video) is only usable on a computer (such as ISO 9660 format PC CD-ROMs). During the 1990s and early 2000s, CD-ROMs were popularly used to distribute software and data for computers and fifth generation video game consoles. DVD started to replace it in these roles starting in the early 2000s. History The earliest theoretical work on optical disc storage was done by independent researchers in the United States including David Paul Gregg (1958) and James Russel (1965–1975). In particular, Gregg's patents were used as the basis of the LaserDisc specification that was co-developed between MCA and Philips after MCA purchased ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hard Disk
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small rectangular box. Introduced by IBM in 1956, HDDs were the dominant secondary storage device for general-purpose computers beginning in the early 1960s. HDDs maintained this position into the modern era of servers and personal computers, though personal computing devices produced in large volume, like cell phones and tablets, rely on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
NCR 53C9x
The NCR 53C9x is a family of application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) produced by the former NCR Corporation and others for implementing the SCSI (small computer standard interface) bus protocol in hardware and relieving the host system of the work required to sequence the SCSI bus. The 53C9x was a low-cost solution and was therefore widely adopted by OEMs in various motherboard and peripheral device designs. The original 53C90 lacked direct memory access (DMA) capability, an omission that was addressed in the 53C90A and subsequent versions. The 53C90(A) and later 53C94 supported the ANSI X3.l3I-I986 SCSI-1 protocol, implementing the eight bit parallel SCSI bus and eight bit host data bus transfers. The 53CF94 and 53CF96 added SCSI-2 support and implemented larger transfer sizes per SCSI transaction. Additionally, the 53CF96 could be interfaced to a single-ended bus or a high voltage differential (HVD) bus, the latter which supported long bus cables. All members of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SONIC (Ethernet Controller)
SONIC (System-Oriented Network Interface Controller) DP83932 is a National Semiconductor 10 Mbit/s Ethernet controller. In the early 1990s, integrated ethernet subsystems based on the SONIC controller were used in computer workstations such as the MIPS Magnum The MIPS Magnum was a line of computer workstations designed by MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. and based on the MIPS series of RISC microprocessors. The first Magnum was released in March, 1990, and production of various models continued until 1993 w ... family and the Olivetti M700, ''inter alia''. External linksSONIC documentation Networking hardware {{compu-network-stub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Semiconductor
National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer which specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly with headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The company produced power management integrated circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions. National's key markets included wireless handsets, displays and a variety of broad electronics markets, including medical, automotive, industrial and test and measurement applications. On September 23, 2011, the company formally became part of Texas Instruments as the "Silicon Valley" division. History Founding National Semiconductor was founded in Danbury, Connecticut, by Dr. Bernard J. Rothlein on May 27, 1959, when he and seven colleagues, Edward N. Clarke, Joseph J. Gruber, Milton Schneider, Robert L. Hopkins, Robert L. Koch, Richard R. Rau and Arthur V. Siefert, left their employment at the semiconductor division of Sperry Rand Corp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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