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Magnetic Drum Digital Differential Analyzer
The MADDIDA (Magnetic Drum Digital Differential Analyzer) was a special-purpose digital computer used for solving systems of ordinary differential equations. It was the first computer to represent bits using voltage levels and whose entire logic was specified in Boolean algebra. Invented by Floyd Steele, MADDIDA was developed at Northrop Aircraft Corporation between 1946 and 1949 to be used as a guidance system for the Snark missile. No guidance system, however, resulted from the work on the MADDIDA, and rather it was used for aeronautical research. In 1952, the MADDIDA became the world's top-selling commercial digital computer (albeit a special-purpose machine), six units having been sold. (The general-purpose UNIVAC I delivered its seventh unit in 1954.) Development Development on the project began in March 1946 at Northrop Corporation with the goal of producing a subsonic cruise missile designated "MX-775", which came to be called the Snark. Northrop's parameters for th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Northrop Corporation
Northrop Corporation was an American aircraft manufacturer from its formation in 1939 until its 1994 merger with Grumman to form Northrop Grumman. The company is known for its development of the flying wing design, most successfully the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.Parker, Dana T. ''Building Victory: Aircraft Manufacturing in the Los Angeles Area in World War II,'' pp. 93-106, Cypress, CA, 2013. . History Jack Northrop founded 3 companies using his name. The first was the Avion Corporation in 1928, which was absorbed in 1929 by the United Aircraft and Transport Corporation as a subsidiary named "Northrop Aircraft Corporation" (and later became part of Boeing). The parent company moved its operations to Kansas in 1931, and so Jack, along with Donald Douglas, established a "Northrop Corporation" located in El Segundo, California, which produced several successful designs, including the Northrop Gamma and Northrop Delta. However, labor difficulties led to the dissolution of the c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diode Logic
Diode logic (DL), or diode-resistor logic (DRL), is the construction of Boolean logic gates from diodes. Diode logic was used extensively in the construction of early computers, where semiconductor diodes could replace bulky and costly active vacuum tube elements. The most common use for diode logic is in diode–transistor logic (DTL) integrated circuits that, in addition to diodes, include inverter logic to provide a NOT function and signal restoration. While diode logic has the advantage of simplicity, the lack of an amplifying stage in each gate limits its application. Not all logical functions can be implemented in diode logic alone; only the non-inverting logical AND and logical OR functions can be realized by diode gates. If several diode logic gates are cascaded, the voltage levels at each stage are significantly changed, so diode logic is normally limited to a single stage, though, in special designs, two-stage systems are sometimes achieved. Simplifying assumptions ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Research Corporation (CRC)
The Computer Research Corporation (CRC) was an early developer of minicomputers. It was founded on July 16, 1950.Reilly 2003, p. 164. The founding owners of CRC were Floyd Steele, Donald Eckdahl, Hrant (Harold) Sarkinssian, Richard Sprague, and Irving S. Reed. With the exception of Reed, all members of the CRC had been on the design team for the MADDIDA, a special-purpose digital computer developed from 1946 to 1949 for Northrop. Realizing that a problem-oriented language (POL) could be used to make a general-purpose computer function as a differential analyzer The differential analyser is a mechanical analogue computer designed to solve differential equations by integration, using wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform the integration. It was one of the first advanced computing devices to be used operat ..., the MADDIDA design team left Northrup in 1950 to focus on designing general-purpose computers, leading to them to found the CRC. After developing the Cadac, an early m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Irving S
Irving may refer to: People *Irving (name), including a list of people with the name Fictional characters * Irving, the main character's love interest in Cathy (comic strip) * Lloyd Irving, the main protagonist in the ''Tales of Symphonia'' video game Places Canada * Irving Nature Park, a park in Saint John, N.B. United States *Irving, California, former name of Irvington, California * Irving, Illinois * Irving, Iowa *Irving (Duluth), Minnesota *Irving, New York *Irving, Texas *Irving, Wisconsin, a town **Irving (community), Wisconsin, an unincorporated community *Irving Park, Chicago, Illinois * Irving Township, Montgomery County, Illinois * Irving Township, Michigan * Irving Township, Minnesota * Lake Irving, a lake in Minnesota Companies * Irving Group of Companies, Canadian conglomerate based in Saint John, New Brunswick, controlled by the Irving family, including: ** J. D. Irving, a conglomerate with holdings in forestry, pulp and paper, tissue, newsprint, building su ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DYNAMO (programming Language)
DYNAMO (DYNAmic MOdels) is a simulation language and accompanying graphical notation developed within the system dynamics analytical framework. It was originally for industrial dynamics but was soon extended to other applications, including population and resource studies and urban planning. DYNAMO was initially developed under the direction of Jay Wright Forrester in the late 1950s, by Dr. Phyllis Fox, Alexander L. Pugh III, Grace Duren, and others at the M.I.T. Computation Center. DYNAMO was used for the system dynamics simulations of global resource depletion reported in the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, but has since fallen into disuse. Beginnings In 1958, Forrester unwittingly instigated DYNAMO's development when he asked an MIT staff programmer to compute needed solutions to some equations, for a Harvard Business Review paper he was writing about industrial dynamics. The programmer, Richard Bennett, chose to implement a system (SIMPLE - "Simulation of Industrial Ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Simulation Language
A computer simulation language is used to describe the operation of a simulation on a computer.Fritzson, Peter, and Vadim Engelson.Modelica—A unified object-oriented language for system modeling and simulation" European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1998. There are two major types of simulation: continuous and discrete event though more modern languages can handle more complex combinations. Most languages also have a graphical interface and at least a simple statistic gathering capability for the analysis of the results. An important part of discrete-event languages is the ability to generate pseudo-random numbers and variants from different probability distributions. See also * Discrete event simulation * List of computer simulation software The following is a list of notable computer simulation software. Free or open-source * Advanced Simulation Library - open-source hardware accelerated multiphysics simulation software. * ASCE ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digital Differential Analyzer
A digital differential analyzer (DDA), also sometimes called a digital integrating computer, is a digital implementation of a differential analyzer. The integrators in a DDA are implemented as accumulators, with the numeric result converted back to a pulse rate by the overflow of the accumulator. The primary advantages of a DDA over the conventional analog differential analyzer are greater precision of the results and the lack of drift/noise/slip/lash in the calculations. The precision is only limited by register size and the resulting accumulated rounding/truncation errors of repeated addition. Digital electronics inherently lacks the temperature sensitive drift and noise level issues of analog electronics and the slippage and " lash" issues of mechanical analog systems. For problems that can be expressed as differential equations, a DDA can solve them much faster than a general purpose computer (using similar technology). However reprogramming a DDA to solve a different prob ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Navy Electronics Laboratory
The U.S. Navy Electronics Laboratory (''NEL'') was created in 1945, with consolidation of the naval radio station, radar operators training school, and radio security activity of the Navy Radio and Sound Lab (NRSL) and its wartime partner, the University of California Division of War Research. NEL’s charter was “''to effectuate the solution of any problem in the field of electronics, in connection with the design, procurement, testing, installation and maintenance of electronic equipment for the U.S. Navy.''” Its radio communications and sonar work was augmented with basic research in the propagation of electromagnetic energy in the atmosphere and of sound in the ocean. History In November 1945, the Navy Radio and Sound Lab was renamed as Navy Electronics Laboratory. 80% of the Point Loma Military Reservation evolved into the Naval Electronics Laboratory Center (NELC) at the end of World War II. In turn NELC was merged into the Naval Ocean Systems Center (NOSC) in 1977. Thi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Max Palevsky
Max Palevsky (July 24, 1924 – May 5, 2010) was an American art collector, venture capitalist, philanthropist, and computer technology pioneer. He was known as a member of the Malibu Mafia – a group of wealthy American Jewish men who donated money to liberal and progressive causes and politicians. Early life Palevsky was born in Chicago, Illinois, to Jewish immigrant parents — Izchok (Isadore) Palevsky (born May 10, 1890, in Pinsk, in the Brest Region of the Russian Empire ow in Belarus">Belarus.html" ;"title="ow in Belarus">ow in Belarus died September 27, 1969, in Los Angeles), and Sarah Greenblatt (born May 16, 1894, died December 28, 1949, in Chicago). Izchok had arrived in Baltimore from Bremen, Germany, on the S.S. ''Brandenburg'' on March 18, 1910, while Sarah immigrated around 1916. Palevsky's parents spoke Yiddish fluently, but little English. His father, a house painter, did not have a car and had to use the Chicago streetcars to transport his equipment. The y ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a museum of computer history, located in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the information age, and explores the computing revolution and its impact on society. History The museum's origins date to 1968 when Gordon Bell began a quest for a historical collection and, at that same time, others were looking to preserve the Whirlwind computer. The resulting ''Museum Project'' had its first exhibit in 1975, located in a converted coat closet in a DEC lobby. In 1978, the museum, now ''The Digital Computer Museum'' (TDCM), moved to a larger DEC lobby in Marlborough, Massachusetts. Maurice Wilkes presented the first lecture at TDCM in 1979 – the presentation of such lectures has continued to the present time. TDCM incorporated as '' The Computer Museum'' (TCM) in 1982. In 1984, TCM moved to Boston, locating on Museum Wharf. In 1996/1997, the TCM History Center (TCMHC) was established; a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digital Computers
A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations (computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These programs enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks. A computer system is a nominally complete computer that includes the hardware, operating system (main software), and peripheral equipment needed and used for full operation. This term may also refer to a group of computers that are linked and function together, such as a computer network or computer cluster. A broad range of industrial and consumer products use computers as control systems. Simple special-purpose devices like microwave ovens and remote controls are included, as are factory devices like industrial robots and computer-aided design, as well as general-purpose devices like personal computers and mobile devices like smartphones. Computers power the Internet, which links bill ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ENIAC
ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. There were other computers that had these features, but the ENIAC had all of them in one package. It was Turing-complete and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming. Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory), its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon. ENIAC was completed in 1945 and first put to work for practical purposes on December 10, 1945.* ENIAC was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946, having cost $487,000 (), and was heralded as a "Giant Brain" by the press. It had a speed on the order of one thousand times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines; this ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
