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Peter Samson
Peter R. Samson (born 1941 in Fitchburg, Massachusetts) is an American computer scientist, best known for creating pioneering computer software for the TX-0 and PDP-1. Samson studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) between 1958-1963. He wrote, with characteristic wit, the first editions of the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) dictionary, a predecessor to the Jargon File. He appears in '' Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution'' by Steven Levy. Career The Tech Model Railroad Club As a member of the Tech Model Railroad Club in his student days at MIT, Samson was noted for his contributions to the Signals and Power Subcommittee, the technical side of the club. Steven Levy Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist and Editor at Large for ''Wired'' who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 book ...'s ''Hackers: Heroes of the Comput ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fitchburg, Massachusetts
Fitchburg is a city in northern Worcester County, Massachusetts, United States. The third-largest city in the county, its population was 41,946 at the 2020 census. Fitchburg is home to Fitchburg State University as well as 17 public and private elementary and high schools. History Fitchburg was first settled in by Europeans in 1730 as part of Lunenburg, and was officially set apart from that town and incorporated in 1764. The area was previously occupied by the Nipmuc tribe. It is named for John Fitch, one of the committee that procured the act of incorporation. In July 1748 Fitch and his family, living in this isolated spot, were abducted to Canada by Native Americans, but returned the next year. Fitchburg is situated on both the Nashua River and a railroad line. The original Fitchburg Railroad ran through the Hoosac Tunnel, linking Boston and Albany, New York. The tunnel was built using the Burleigh Rock Drill, designed and built in Fitchburg. Fitchburg was a 19th-centur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Steven Levy
Steven Levy (born 1951) is an American journalist and Editor at Large for ''Wired'' who has written extensively for publications on computers, technology, cryptography, the internet, cybersecurity, and privacy. He is the author of the 1984 book '' Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution'', which chronicles the early days of the computer underground. Levy published eight books covering computer hacker culture, artificial intelligence, cryptography, and multi-year exposés of Apple, Google, and Facebook. His most recent book, '' Facebook: The Inside Story'', recounts the history and rise of Facebook from three years of interviews with employees, including Chamath Palihapitiya, Sheryl Sandberg, and Mark Zuckerberg. Career In 1978, Steven Levy rediscovered Albert Einstein's brain in the office of the pathologist who removed and preserved it. In 1984, his book '' Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution'' was published. He described a "hacker ethic", which became a guideline to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Troff
troff (), short for "typesetter roff", is the major component of a document processing system developed by Bell Labs for the Unix operating system. troff and the related nroff were both developed from the original roff. While nroff was intended to produce output on terminals and line printers, troff was intended to produce output on typesetting systems, specifically the Graphic Systems CAT that had been introduced in 1972. Both used the same underlying markup language and a single source file could normally be used by nroff or troff without change. ''troff'' features commands to designate fonts, spacing, paragraphs, margins, footnotes and more. Unlike many other text formatters, ''troff'' can position characters arbitrarily on a page, even overlapping them, and has a fully programmable input language. Separate preprocessors are used for more convenient production of tables, diagrams, and mathematics. Inputs to troff are plain text files that can be created by any text edit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TJ-2
TJ-2 (Type Justifying Program) was published by Peter Samson in May 1963 and is thought to be the first page layout program. Although it lacks page numbering, page headers and footers, TJ-2 is the first word processor to provide a number of essential typographic alignment and automatic typesetting features: * Columnation, indentation, margins, justification, and centering * Word wrap, page breaks and automatic hyphenation * Tab stop simulation Developed from two earlier Samson programs, Justify and TJ-1, TJ-2 was written for the PDP-1 that was donated to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961 by Digital Equipment Corporation. Taking English text as input, TJ-2 aligns left and right margins, justifying the output using white space and word hyphenation. Text is marked-up with single lowercase characters combined with the PDP-1's overline character, carriage returns, and internal concise codes. The computer's six toggle switches control the input and output devices, e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Creative Computing
''Creative Computing'' was one of the earliest magazines covering the microcomputer revolution. Published from October 1974 until December 1985, the magazine covered the spectrum of hobbyist/home/personal computing in a more accessible format than the rather technically oriented ''Byte (magazine), Byte''. The magazine was created to cover educational-related topics. Early issues include articles on the use of computers in the classroom, various simple programs like madlibs and various programming challenges, mostly in BASIC programming language, BASIC. By the late 1970s, it had moved towards more general coverage as the microcomputer market emerged. Hardware coverage became more common, but type-in programs remained common into the early 1980s. The company published several books, the most successful being ''BASIC Computer Games'', the first million-selling computer book. Their ''Best of Creative Computing'' collections were also popular. ''Creative Computing'' also published so ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Expensive Planetarium
''Spacewar!'' is a space combat video game developed in 1962 by Steve Russell in collaboration with Martin Graetz, Wayne Wiitanen, Bob Saunders, Steve Piner, and others. It was written for the newly installed DEC PDP-1 minicomputer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After its initial creation, ''Spacewar!'' was expanded further by other students and employees of universities in the area, including Dan Edwards and Peter Samson. It was also spread to many of the few dozen installations of the PDP-1 computer, making ''Spacewar!'' the first known video game to be played at multiple computer installations. The game features two spaceships, "the needle" and "the wedge", engaged in a dogfight while maneuvering in the gravity well of a star. Both ships are controlled by human players. Each ship has limited weaponry and fuel for maneuvering, and the ships remain in motion even when the player is not accelerating. Flying near the star to provide a gravity assist was a common ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harmony Compiler
Harmony Compiler was written by Peter Samson at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The compiler was designed to encode music for the PDP-1 and built on an earlier program Samson wrote for the TX-0 computer. ] Jack Dennis noticed and had mentioned to Samson that the sound ''on'' or ''off'' state of the TX-0's speaker could be enough to play music.p. 24/ref> They succeeded in building a WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ... program for one voice before or by 1960. For the PDP-1 which arrived at MIT in September 1961, Samson designed the Harmony Compiler which synthesizes four voices from input in a text-based notation. Although it created music in many genres, it was optimized for baroque music. PDP-1 music is merged from four channels and played bac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PDP-1
The PDP-1 (''Programmed Data Processor-1'') is the first computer in Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP series and was first produced in 1959. It is famous for being the computer most important in the creation of hacker culture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, BBN and elsewhere. The PDP-1 is the original hardware for playing history's first game on a minicomputer, Steve Russell's ''Spacewar!'' Description The PDP-1 uses an 18-bit word size and has 4096 words as standard main memory (equivalent to 9,216 eight-bit bytes, though the system actually divides an 18-bit word into six-bit characters), upgradable to 65,536 words. The magnetic-core memory's cycle time is 5.35 microseconds (corresponding roughly to a clock speed of 187 kilohertz); consequently most arithmetic instructions take 10.7 microseconds (93,458 operations per second) because they use two memory cycles: the first to fetch the instruction, the second to fetch or store the data word. Signed numbers are r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jack Dennis
Jack Bonnell Dennis (born October 13, 1931) is a computer scientist and Emeritus Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The work of Dennis in computer systems and computer languages is recognized to have played a key role in hacker culture. As a Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty member he sponsored easier access to computer facilities at MIT during the early development of the subculture. Much of what would later become Unix came from his early collaboration with Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. This collaborative and open philosophy lives on today. Dennis was also a member of the historic Tech Model Railroad Club, which incubated much of the early slang and traditions of hacking. Early life and education Dennis graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as Bachelor of Science (1953), Master of Science (1954), and Doctor of Science (1958). His doctoral thesis analyzed the relation between mathem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TX-0
The TX-0, for ''Transistorized Experimental computer zero'', but affectionately referred to as tixo (pronounced "tix oh"), was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64 K of 18-bit words of magnetic-core memory. Construction of the TX-0 began in 1955 and ended in 1956.Highlights from ''The Computer Museum Report'' Volume 8 Spring 1984 The Computer Museum, Boston, MA, archived at ed-thelen.org, retrieved 2010-2-19 It was used continually through the 1960s at . The TX-0 incorpo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Security Clearance
A security clearance is a status granted to individuals allowing them access to classified information (state or organizational secrets) or to restricted areas, after completion of a thorough background check. The term "security clearance" is also sometimes used in private organizations that have a formal process to vet employees for access to sensitive information. A clearance by itself is normally not sufficient to gain access; the organization must also determine that the cleared individual needs to know specific information. No individual is supposed to be granted automatic access to classified information solely because of rank, position, or a security clearance. Canada Background Government classified information is governed by the Treasury Board Standard on Security Screening, the ''Security of Information Act'' and '' Privacy Act''. Only those that are deemed to be loyal and reliable, and have been cleared are allowed to access sensitive information. The policy w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IBM 704
The IBM 704 is a large digital mainframe computer introduced by IBM in 1954. It was the first mass-produced computer with hardware for floating-point arithmetic. The IBM 704 ''Manual of operation'' states: The type 704 Electronic Data-Processing Machine is a large-scale, high-speed electronic calculator controlled by an internally stored program of the single address type. The 704 at that time was thus regarded as "pretty much the only computer that could handle complex math". The 704 was a significant improvement over the earlier IBM 701 in terms of architecture and implementation. Like the 701, the 704 uses vacuum-tube logic circuitry, but increased the instruction size from 18-bit to 36-bit, the same as the memory's word size. Changes from the 701 include the use of magnetic-core memory instead of Williams tubes, floating-point arithmetic instructions, 15-bit addressing and the addition of three index registers. To support these new features, the instructions we ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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