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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] |
Microsoft Binary Format
In computing, Microsoft Binary Format (MBF) is a format for floating-point numbers which was used in Microsoft's BASIC language products, including MBASIC, GW-BASIC and QuickBASIC prior to version 4.00. There are two main versions of the format. The original version was designed for memory-constrained systems and stored numbers in 32 bits (4 bytes), with a 23-bit Significand, mantissa, 1-bit sign, and an 8-bit exponent. Microsoft_BASIC#Extended_BASIC-80, Extended (12k) BASIC included a double-precision type with 64 bits. During the period when it was being ported from the Intel 8080 platform to the MOS 6502 processor, computers were beginning to ship with more memory as a standard feature. This version was offered with the original 32-bit format or an optional expanded 40-bit (5-byte) format. The 40-bit format was used by most home computers of the 1970s and 1980s. These two versions are sometimes known as "6-digit" and "9-digit", respectively. On Personal Comput ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Altair BASIC
Altair BASIC is a discontinued interpreter for the BASIC programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800 and subsequent S-100 bus computers. It was Microsoft's first product (as Micro-Soft), distributed by MITS under a contract. Altair BASIC was the start of the Microsoft BASIC product range. Origin and development Bill Gates recalls that, when he and Paul Allen read about the Altair in the January 1975 issue of ''Popular Electronics'', they understood that the price of computers would soon drop to the point that selling software for them would be a profitable business. "While walking through Harvard Square one day, Allen spotted the Popular Electronics cover that features the Altair. ... Allen ran to tell Bill that he thought their big break had finally come. Bill agreed." Gates believed that, by providing a BASIC interpreter for the new computer, they could make it more attractive to hobbyists. They contacted MITS founder Ed Roberts, told him that they were developing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Altair 8800 And Model 33 ASR Teletype
Altair is the brightest star in the constellation of Aquila and the twelfth-brightest star in the night sky. It has the Bayer designation Alpha Aquilae, which is Latinised from α Aquilae and abbreviated Alpha Aql or α Aql. Altair is an A-type main-sequence star with an apparent visual magnitude of 0.77 and is one of the vertices of the Summer Triangle asterism; the other two vertices are marked by Deneb and Vega. It is located at a distance of from the Sun. Altair is currently in the G-cloud—a nearby interstellar cloud, an accumulation of gas and dust. Altair rotates rapidly, with a velocity at the equator of approximately 286 km/s.From values of ''v'' sin ''i'' and ''i'' in the second column of Table 1, Monnier et al. 2007. This is a significant fraction of the star's estimated breakup speed of 400 km/s. A study with the Palomar Testbed Interferometer revealed that Altair is not spherical, but is flattened at the poles due to i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Punched 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] |
Floating-point Arithmetic
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-poin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monte Davidoff
Monte Davidoff (; born 1956) is an American computer programmer. Davidoff is from Glendale, Wisconsin. He graduated from Nicolet High School in 1974, and went on to Harvard College, where he majored in applied mathematics, the department at Harvard that, at the time, included computer science. Davidoff also worked at WHRB, the college radio station, and graduated from Harvard in 1978. A college dormmate of Bill Gates who had a summer job at Gates's new company Microsoft during college, Davidoff is best known for writing the Microsoft Binary Format floating-point arithmetic routines for Altair BASIC while he was at Harvard. The routines were subsequently reused in Microsoft BASIC products for other systems. He later worked at Honeywell Information Systems on the Multics project, Tandem Computers, Ready Systems, and Stratus Computer. Since 2000 he has consulted through his own company, Alluvial Software. See also *Microsoft Binary Format References External linksAlluvial Softw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Secondary School
A secondary school describes an institution that provides secondary education and also usually includes the building where this takes place. Some secondary schools provide both '' secondary education, lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) and ''upper secondary education'' (ages 14 to 18), i.e., both levels 2 and 3 of the International Standard Classification of Education, ISCED scale, but these can also be provided in separate schools. In the United States, US, the secondary education system has separate Middle school#United States, middle schools and High school in the United States, high schools. In the United Kingdom, UK, most state schools and Independent school, privately-funded schools accommodate pupils between the ages of 11–16 or 11–18; some UK Independent school, private schools, i.e. Public school (United Kingdom), public schools, admit pupils between the ages of 13 and 18. Secondary schools follow on from primary school, primary schools and prepare for voc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PDP-11
The PDP-11 is a series of 16-bit minicomputers sold by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from 1970 into the 1990s, one of a set of products in the Programmed Data Processor (PDP) series. In total, around 600,000 PDP-11s of all models were sold, making it one of DEC's most successful product lines. The PDP-11 is considered by some experts to be the most popular minicomputer. The PDP-11 included a number of innovative features in its instruction set and additional general-purpose registers that made it much easier to program than earlier models in the PDP series. Further, the innovative Unibus system allowed external devices to be easily interfaced to the system using direct memory access, opening the system to a wide variety of peripherals. The PDP-11 replaced the PDP-8 in many real-time computing applications, although both product lines lived in parallel for more than 10 years. The ease of programming of the PDP-11 made it very popular for general-purpose computing uses also. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BASIC-PLUS
BASIC-PLUS is an extended dialect of the BASIC programming language that was developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for use on its RSTS/E time-sharing operating system for the PDP-11 series of 16-bit minicomputers in the early 1970s through the 1980s. BASIC-PLUS was based on BASIC-8 for the TSS/8, itself based very closely on the original Dartmouth BASIC. BASIC-PLUS added a number of new structures, as well as features from JOSS concerning conditional statements and formatting. In turn, BASIC-PLUS was the version on which the original Microsoft BASIC was patterned. Notable among the additions made to BASIC-PLUS was the introduction of string functions like and , in addition to Dartmouth's original all-purpose command. In future versions of the language, notably Microsoft's, was removed and BASIC-PLUS's string functions became the only ways to perform these sorts of operations. Most BASICs to this day follow this convention. The language was later rewritten as a true ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline. The company produced many different product lines over its history. It is best known for the work in the minicomputer market starting in the mid-1960s. The company produced a series of machines known as the PDP line, with the PDP-8 and PDP-11 being among the most successful minis in history. Their success was only surpassed by another DEC product, the late-1970s VAX "supermini" systems that were designed to replace the PDP-11. Although a number of competitors had successfully competed with Digital through the 1970s, the VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space. As microcomputers improved in the late 1980s, especially wit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minicomputer
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, ''The New York Times'' suggested a consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than (), with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC. The class formed a distinct group with its own software architectures and operating systems. Minis were designed for control, instrumentation, human interaction, and communication switching as distinct from calculation and record keeping. Many were sold indirectly to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for final end use application. During the two decade lifetime of the minicomputer class (1965–1985), almost 100 companies formed and only a half ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PDP-10
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especially as the TOPS-10 operating system became widely used. The PDP-10's architecture is almost identical to that of DEC's earlier PDP-6, sharing the same 36-bit word length and slightly extending the instruction set (but with improved hardware implementation). Some aspects of the instruction set are unusual, most notably the ''byte'' instructions, which operate on bit fields of any size from 1 to 36 bits inclusive, according to the general definition of a byte as ''a contiguous sequence of a fixed number of bits''. The PDP-10 was found in many university computing facilities and research labs during the 1970s, the most notable being Harvard University's Aiken Computation Laboratory, MIT's AI Lab and Project MAC, Stanford's SAIL, Computer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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