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Tallgrass Technologies
Tallgrass Technologies Corporation was the first manufacturer to offer a hard disk drive product for the IBM PC. Tallgrass was a Kansas City based microcomputer hardware and software company founded in December 1980 by David M. Allen. The hard disk drive product was initially sold in Computerland stores, alongside the original IBM PC. Tallgrass added tape-backup systems to its product line in 1982. Tallgrass was significant in the history of the PC because IBM shipped its PCs for almost two years without any hard-drive option. The IBM name attracted the makers of larger, professional software products that required a hard-drive's speed and capacity. The early availability of the Tallgrass hard-drives enabled those software products to make earlier entrances into the PC market. The parallel introductions, of the IBM PC with the Tallgrass hard-drive, catalyzed the growth of the PC market compared to what it would have been without the hard-drive option. Tallgrass was one of Sea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hard Disk Drive
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] |
6809
The Motorola 6809 ("''sixty-eight-oh-nine''") is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes. Among the most powerful 8-bit processors of its era, it was also much more expensive. In 1980 a 6809 in single-unit quantities was compared to for a Zilog Z80 and for a 6502. It was launched when a new generation of 16-bit processors were coming to market, like the Intel 8086, and 32-bit designs were on the horizon, including Motorola's own 68000. It was not feature competit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CMS Enhancements
CMS Enhancements Inc. (originally Complete Management Systems) was an American computer company headquartered in Irvine, California. Founded in 1983, the company's main product lines in the 1980s were internal and external hard drives and tape drives. The company's hard drives were chiefly sourced from Seagate and reconfigured in bespoke configurations for certain computing platforms, such as the Macintosh (under the MacLite name), the IBM PC, and the Compaq Deskpro, among others. The company encountered financial difficulty in the early 1990s following two failed attempts at selling its own personal computers, and it reorganized into AmeriQuest Technologies in 1993. History 1983–1990 CMS Enhancements was founded in Irvine, California, as Complete Management Systems in July 1983, . by Jamshed "Jim" Farooquee, Mason Tarkeshian, and Tom Ong. . Farooquee, the principal founder, had moved to the United States after graduating from a technical college in Karachi, Pakistan, in 197 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PrairieTek
PrairieTek was a hard drive manufacturer located in Longmont, Colorado in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was founded by Terry Johnson in 1985. It manufactured 5 and 10 megabyte " ruggedized" miniature hard drives for the laptop computer market. Its PrairieTek 220 was the first hard drive, a potentially profitable move, but by the time the drive entered into mass production, its storage capacity was already low for the market. "PrairieTek's single disk 40MB model, potentially a cost-effective competitive product, was...late to market." Unlike many manufacturers of the time, PrairieTek did not rest the drive heads on the disks, but instead used reverse EMF (ElectroMagnetic Force) to park the drives on a spreader bar. At the time all manufacturers parked heads on the platters in an out of the way place. When the platters spun up, with the increasingly smooth surface of the platter, the heads had a tendency to stick to the surface (sticktion) which resulted in ripping them ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Archive Corporation
Archive Corporation was a computer tape drive manufacturer, based in Costa Mesa, California, that was acquired by Conner Peripherals in 1993. History The company was founded in 1980 and based out of Costa Mesa, California. The company employed 3,367 in 1990 and reached revenues of US$293 million in that year, up from $79 million in 1986. Of particular note are the Archive DDS tape drives produced for Silicon Graphics that could also read and write Digital Audio Tapes: the Archive Python 4320 and the Archive Peregrine 4326 (rebranded under Conner or Seagate). Prior to this, Archive was a leading vendor of the very popular quarter-inch cartridge (QIC) format which was a popular distribution format for Unix workstations and servers. For example, software for the Sun-3 (running the Motorola 68K family) and the Sun-4 (based on SPARC processors) was most commonly distributed on QIC media before CD-ROMs became more cost-effective. Archive was better known for their QIC dr ... [...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] |
86-DOS
86-DOS (known internally as QDOS, for Quick and Dirty Operating System) is a discontinued operating system developed and marketed by Seattle Computer Products (SCP) for its Intel 8086-based computer kit. 86-DOS shared a few of its commands with other operating systems like OS/8 and CP/M, which made it easy to port programs from the latter. Its application programming interface was very similar to that of CP/M. The system was licensed and then purchased by Microsoft and developed further as MS-DOS and PC DOS. History Origins 86-DOS was created because sales of the Seattle Computer Products 8086 computer kit, demonstrated in June 1979 and shipped in November, were languishing due to the absence of an operating system. The only software that SCP could sell with the board was Microsoft's Standalone Disk BASIC-86, which Microsoft had developed on a prototype of SCP's hardware. SCP wanted to offer the 8086-version of CP/M that Digital Research had initially announced for Nove ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Seattle Computer Products
Seattle Computer Products (SCP) was a Tukwila, Washington, microcomputer hardware company which was one of the first manufacturers of computer systems based on the 16-bit Intel 8086 processor. SCP began shipping its first S-100 bus 8086 CPU boards to customers in November 1979, about 21 months before IBM introduced its Personal Computer which was based on the slower 8088 and introduced the 8-bit ISA bus. SCP shipped an operating system for that hardware about a year before the release of the PC, which was modified by Microsoft for the PC and renamed IBM PC DOS. SCP was staffed partly by high-school students from nearby communities who soldered and assembled the computers. Some of them would later work for Microsoft. Corporate history Twenty-two-year-old Tim Paterson was hired in June 1978 by SCP's owner Rodney Maurice Brock (26 August 1930 – 30 November 2018). At the time, SCP built memory boards for microcomputers, but after attending a local seminar on Intel's just-re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Device Driver
In computing, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other computer programs to access hardware functions without needing to know precise details about the hardware being used. A driver communicates with the device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which the hardware connects. When a calling program invokes a routine in the driver, the driver issues commands to the device (drives it). Once the device sends data back to the driver, the driver may invoke routines in the original calling program. Drivers are hardware dependent and operating-system-specific. They usually provide the interrupt handling required for any necessary asynchronous time-dependent hardware interface. Purpose The main purpose of device drivers is to provide abstraction by acting as a translator be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IBM PC DOS
IBM PC DOS, an acronym for IBM Personal Computer Disk Operating System, is a discontinued disk operating system for IBM PC compatibles. It was manufactured and sold by IBM from the early 1980s into the 2000s. Developed by Microsoft, it was also sold by that company as MS-DOS. Both operating systems were identical or almost identical until 1993, when IBM began selling PC DOS 6.1 with new features. The collective shorthand for PC DOS and MS-DOS was DOS, which is also the generic term for disk operating system, and is shared with dozens of disk operating systems called DOS. History The IBM task force assembled to develop the IBM PC decided that critical components of the machine, including the operating system, would come from outside vendors. This radical break from company tradition of in-house development was one of the key decisions that made the IBM PC an industry standard. Microsoft, founded five years earlier by Bill Gates, was eventually selected for the operating system. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Apple IIe
The Apple IIe (styled as Apple //e) is the third model in the Apple II series of personal computers produced by Apple Computer. The ''e'' in the name stands for ''enhanced'', referring to the fact that several popular features were now built-in that were formerly only available as upgrades or add-ons in earlier models. Improved expandability combined with the new features made for a very attractive general-purpose machine to first-time computer shoppers. As the last surviving model of the Apple II computer line before discontinuation, and having been manufactured and sold for nearly 11 years with relatively few changes, the IIe earned the distinction of being the longest-lived computer in Apple's history. History Apple Computer planned to discontinue the Apple II series after the introduction of the Apple III in 1980; the company intended to clearly establish market segmentation by designing the Apple III to appeal to the business market, leaving the Apple II for home and educ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
