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RISC OS
RISC OS is a computer operating system originally designed by Acorn Computers Ltd in Cambridge, England. First released in 1987, it was designed to run on the ARM chipset, which Acorn had designed concurrently for use in its new line of Archimedes personal computers. RISC OS takes its name from the reduced instruction set computer (RISC) architecture it supports. Between 1987 and 1998, RISC OS was included in every ARM-based Acorn computer model, including the Acorn Archimedes line, Acorn's R line (with RISC iX as a dual-boot option), RiscPC, A7000, and prototype models such as the Acorn NewsPad and Phoebe computer. A version of the OS, named NCOS, was used in Oracle Corporation's Network Computer and compatible systems. After the break-up of Acorn in 1998, development of the OS was forked and continued separately by several companies, including , Pace Micro Technology, and Castle Technology. Since then, it has been bundled with several ARM-based desktop computers such as t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
RISCOS Ltd
RISCOS Ltd. (also referred to as ROL) was a limited company engaged in computer software and IT consulting. It licensed the rights to continue the development of and to distribute it for desktop machines (as an upgrade or for new machines) from Element 14 and subsequently Pace Micro Technology. Company founders include developers who formerly worked within Acorn's dealership network. It was established as a nonprofit company. On or before 4 March 2013 3QD Developments acquired RISCOS Ltd's flavour of RISC OS. RISCOS Ltd was dissolved on 14 May 2013. History RISCOS Ltd was formed to continue end-user-focused development of RISC OS after the de-listing of Acorn Computers, following its purchase by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter in order to benefit from the shareholding that Acorn held in ARM Ltd. In March 1999, RISCOS Ltd obtained exclusive rights to develop and sell RISC OS 4 for the desktop market from Element 14. A few weeks later Pace purchased Acorn's Cambridge headquarters ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acorn Computers
Acorn Computers Ltd. was a British computer company established in Cambridge, England, in 1978. The company produced a number of computers which were especially popular in the United Kingdom, UK, including the Acorn Electron and the Acorn Archimedes. Acorn's computer dominated the UK educational computer market during the 1980s. Though the company was acquired and largely dismantled in early 1999, with various activities being dispersed amongst new and established companies, its legacy includes the development of reduced instruction set computing (RISC) personal computers. One of its operating systems, , continues to be developed by RISC OS Open. Some activities established by Acorn lived on: technology developed by Arm (company), Arm, created by Acorn as a joint venture with Apple, Inc., Apple and VLSI Technology, VLSI in 1990, is dominant in the mobile phone and personal digital assistant (PDA) microprocessor market. Acorn is sometimes referred to as the "British Apple" and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proprietary Software
Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA-bound software—from making use of the software on their own, thereby restricting his or her freedoms. It is often contrasted with open-source or free software. For this reason, it is also known as non-free software or closed-source software. Types Origin Until the late 1960s computers—large and expensive mainframe computers, machines in specially air-conditioned computer rooms—were usually leased to customers rather than sold. Service and all software available were usually supplied by manufacturers without separate charge until 1969. Computer vendors ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Network Computer
The Network Computer (or NC) was a diskless desktop computer device made by Oracle Corporation from about 1996 to 2000. The devices were designed and manufactured by an alliance, which included Sun Microsystems, IBM, and others. The devices were designed with minimum specifications, based on the Network Computer Reference Profile. The brand was also employed as a marketing term to try to popularize this design of computer within enterprise and among consumers. The NC brand was mainly intended to inspire a range of desktop computers from various suppliers that, by virtue of their diskless design and use of inexpensive components and software, were cheaper and easier to manage than standard fat client desktops. However, due to the commoditization of standard desktop components, and due to the increasing availability and popularity of various software options for using full desktops as diskless nodes, thin clients, and hybrid clients, the Network Computer brand never achieved t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells database software and technology (particularly its own brands), cloud engineered systems, and enterprise software products, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, human capital management (HCM) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software (also known as customer experience), enterprise performance management (EPM) software, and supply chain management (SCM) software. History Larry Ellison co-founded Oracle Corporation in 1977 with Bob Miner and Ed Oates under the name Software Development Laboratories (SDL). Ellison took inspiration from the 1970 paper written by Edgar F. Codd on relational database management systems ( RDBMS) named "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks." He heard about the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
NCOS
A non-commissioned officer (NCO) is a military officer who has not pursued a commission. Non-commissioned officers usually earn their position of authority by promotion through the enlisted ranks. (Non-officers, which includes most or all enlisted personnel, are of lower rank than any officer.) In contrast, commissioned officers usually enter directly from a military academy, officer candidate school (OCS), or officer training school (OTS) after receiving a post-secondary degree. The NCO corps usually includes many grades of enlisted, corporal and sergeant; in some countries, warrant officers also carry out the duties of NCOs. The naval equivalent includes some or all grades of petty officer. There are different classes of non-commissioned officers, including junior (lower ranked) non-commissioned officers (JNCO) and senior/staff (higher ranked) non-commissioned officers (SNCO). Function The non-commissioned officer corps has been referred to as "the backbone" of the armed se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Phoebe (computer)
The Phoebe 2100 (or ) was to be Acorn Computers' successor to the RiscPC, slated for release in late 1998. However, in September 1998, Acorn cancelled the project as part of a restructuring of the company. Specification :233 MHz Intel StrongARM SA110 Revision S CPU. Support for multiple CPUs on daughter cards available, but multiple CPU support was not available in RISC OS :64 MHz front-side bus :up to 512 MiB of SDRAM :IOMD2 I/O Controller ::PLX Technology PCI bridge PCI9080 :::4 PCI slots (33MHz) ::PC Style Joystick/Game Port ::3 Acorn Podule expansion sockets ::SMC37672 SuperIO chip supporting: :::PS/2 Keyboard and Mouse :::Two EIDE channels supporting up to four devices (6.4 GB unit supplied) :::Two serial ports :::Parallel Port :::Single Floppy drive :VIDC20 Revision R video controller supporting: ::4 MiB of EDO VRAM running at 200 MHz : NLX form factor Tower case with a custom yellow front panel (by the designers of Iomega's zip drive) : Slot loadin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acorn A7000
The A7000 and A7000+ were Acorn Computers' entry level computers based somewhat on the Risc PC architecture. Launched in 1995, the A7000 was considered a successor to the A5000, fitting into Acorn's range between the A4000 and Risc PC600, featuring a 32 MHz ARM7500 system-on-a-chip (SoC) and either 2 MB, 4 MB or 8 MB of RAM soldered to the motherboard, with a single memory slot permitting up to 128 MB of additional RAM. In performance terms, the A7000 was described as being three to four times faster than the A4000 and slightly faster than a Risc PC 600 model without video RAM fitted, also having comparable MIPS and Dhrystone performance ratings to 66 MHz Intel 486DX2 systems. Unlike the Risc PC, the A7000 had been "designed with the rigours of school life in mind", aiming for "a 7-year classroom lifespan". The machine's case was similar to the Acorn Online Media set-top box design incorporating the same SoC, and the product was considered to have ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
RiscPC
The Risc PC is Acorn Computers's RISC OS/ Acorn RISC Machine computer, launched on 15 April 1994, which superseded the Acorn Archimedes. The Acorn PC card and software allows PC compatible software to be run. Like the Archimedes, the Risc PC continues the practice of having the RISC OS operating system in a ROM module. Risc PC augments the ROM-based core OS with a disk-based directory structure containing configuration information, and some applications which had previously been kept in ROM. At the 1996 BETT Educational Computing & Technology Awards, the machine was awarded Gold in the hardware category. Technical specifications Use The Risc PC was used by music composers and scorewriters to run the Sibelius scorewriting software. Between 1994 and 2008, the Risc PC and A7000+ were used in television for broadcast automation, programmed by the UK company OmniBus Systems: once considered "the world leader in television station automation" and at one point automating " ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
RISC IX
RISC iX is a discontinued Unix operating system designed to run on a series of workstations based on the Acorn Archimedes microcomputer. Heavily based on 4.3BSD, it was initially completed in 1988, a year after Arthur but before RISC OS. It was introduced in the ARM2-based R140 workstation in 1989, followed up by the ARM3-based R200-series workstations in 1990. Features Acorn chose BSD 4.3 as the basis for RISC iX due to its academic origins, these being considered as making the software more appropriate for Acorn's principal target market of tertiary education. SunOS and NeXTSTEP systems were given as examples of other "modern high-performance workstations that use BSD". Other reasons for choosing BSD included better integration of networking and connectivity tools in comparison to System V. * X11 (initially Release 2) with Ardent Window Manager, Tab Window Manager and Ultrix Window Manager available by default, plus X.desktop from IXI Limited * System V virtual memory exte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Reduced Instruction Set Computer
In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set computer (CISC), a RISC computer might require more instructions (more code) in order to accomplish a task because the individual instructions are written in simpler code. The goal is to offset the need to process more instructions by increasing the speed of each instruction, in particular by implementing an instruction pipeline, which may be simpler given simpler instructions. The key operational concept of the RISC computer is that each instruction performs only one function (e.g. copy a value from memory to a register). The RISC computer usually has many (16 or 32) high-speed, general-purpose registers with a load/store architecture in which the code for the register-register instructions (for performing arithmetic and tests) are separate fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Acorn Archimedes
Acorn Archimedes is a family of personal computers designed by Acorn Computers of Cambridge, Cambridge, England. The systems are based on Acorn's own ARM architecture processors and the proprietary operating systems Arthur and RISC OS. The first models were introduced in 1987, and systems in the Archimedes family were sold until the mid-1990s. ARM's Reduced instruction set computer, RISC design, a 32-bit CPU (using 26-bit addressing), running at 8 Hertz, MHz, was stated as achieving 4.5+ Million instructions per second, MIPS, which provided a significant upgrade from 8-bit home computers, such as Acorn's previous machines. Claims of being the fastest micro in the world and running at 18 MIPS were also made during tests. Two of the first models—the A305 and A310—were given the BBC branding, with BBC Worldwide, BBC Enterprises regarding the machines as "a continuing part of the original computer literacy project". Dissatisfaction with the branding arrangement was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
