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Atari Transputer Workstation
The Atari Transputer Workstation (also known as ATW-800, or simply ATW) is a workstation class computer released by Atari Corporation in the late 1980s, based on the INMOS Transputer. It was introduced in 1987 as the Abaq, but the name was changed before sales began. Sales were almost non-existent, and the product was canceled after only a few hundred units were made. History In 1986, Tim King left his job at MetaComCo, along with a few other employees, to start Perihelion Software in England. There they began developing a new parallel-processing operating system named ''HeliOS''. At about the same time a colleague, Jack Lang, started Perihelion (later Perihelion Hardware) to create a new Transputer-based workstation that would run HeliOS. While at MetaComCo, much of the Perihelion Software team had worked with both Atari Corp. and Commodore International, producing the programming language ST BASIC for the former, and AmigaDOS for the latter. The principals still had contacts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Atari Corporation
Atari Corporation was an American manufacturer of Home computer, home computers and Video game console, video game consoles. It was founded by Jack Tramiel on May 17, 1984, as Tramel Technology, Ltd., but then took on the Atari name less than two months later when WarnerMedia, Warner Communications sold the home gaming and computing assets of Atari, Inc. to Tramiel. Its chief products were the Atari ST, Atari XE, Atari 7800, Atari Lynx and Atari Jaguar; in addition to hardware, the company also published video games for its home systems and also had an in-house development team for Lynx and Jaguar software for porting, or developing original titles such as Warbirds (video game), ''Warbirds'' and ''Trevor McFur in the Crescent Galaxy''. In 1996, the company Reverse takeover, reverse merged with JT Storage, JTS Corp., becoming a small ''de facto'' non-operating division which itself closed after JTS sold all Atari assets to Hasbro Interactive in 1998. History The company was fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Amiga 2000
The Amiga 2000 (A2000) is a personal computer released by Commodore in March 1987. It was introduced as a "big box" expandable variant of the Amiga 1000 but quickly redesigned to share most of its electronic components with the contemporary Amiga 500 for cost reduction. Expansion capabilities include two 3.5" drive bays (one of which is used by the included floppy drive) and one 5.25" bay that could be used by a 5.25" floppy drive (for IBM PC compatibility), a hard drive, or CD-ROM once they became available. The Amiga 2000 is the first Amiga model that allows expansion cards to be added internally. SCSI host adapters, memory cards, CPU cards, network cards, graphics cards, serial port cards, and PC compatibility cards were available, and multiple expansions can be used simultaneously without requiring an expansion cage like the Amiga 1000 does. Not only does the Amiga 2000 include five Zorro II card slots, the motherboard also has four PC ISA slots, two of which are inline ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Graphics Processing Unit
A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal computers, workstations, and game consoles. GPUs were later found to be useful for non-graphic calculations involving embarrassingly parallel problems due to their parallel structure. The ability of GPUs to rapidly perform vast numbers of calculations has led to their adoption in diverse fields including artificial intelligence (AI) where they excel at handling data-intensive and computationally demanding tasks. Other non-graphical uses include the training of neural networks and cryptocurrency mining. History 1970s Arcade system boards have used specialized graphics circuits since the 1970s. In early video game hardware, RAM for frame buffers was expensive, so video chips composited data together as the display was being scann ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Bit Blit
Bit blit (also written BITBLT, BIT BLT, BitBLT, Bit BLT, Bit Blt etc., which stands for ''bit block transfer'') is a data operation commonly used in computer graphics in which several bitmaps are combined into one using a ''boolean function''. The operation involves at least two bitmaps: a "source" (or "foreground") and a "destination" (or "background"), and possibly a third that is often called the "mask". The result may be written to a fourth bitmap, though often it replaces the destination. The pixels of each are combined using a program-selectable ''raster operation'', a bit-wise boolean formula. The most obvious raster operation overwrites the destination with the source. Others may involve AND, OR, XOR, and NOT operations. The Commodore Amiga's graphics chipset (and others) could combine three source bitmaps using any of the 256 possible 3-input boolean functions. Modern graphics software has almost completely replaced bitwise operations with more general mathematical o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Blitter
A blitter is a circuit, sometimes as a coprocessor or a logic block on a microprocessor, dedicated to the rapid movement and modification of data within a computer's memory. A blitter can copy large quantities of data from one memory area to another relatively quickly, and in parallel with the CPU, while freeing up the CPU's more complex capabilities for other operations. A typical use for a blitter is the movement of a bitmap, such as windows and icons in a graphical user interface or images and backgrounds in a 2D video game. The name comes from the bit blit operation of the 1973 Xerox Alto, which stands for bit-block transfer. A blit operation is more than a memory copy, because it can involve data that's not byte aligned (hence the ''bit'' in ''bit blit''), handling transparent pixels (pixels which should not overwrite the destination), and various ways of combining the source and destination data. Blitters have largely been superseded by programmable graphics process ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Graphical User Interface
A graphical user interface, or GUI, is a form of user interface that allows user (computing), users to human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through Graphics, graphical icon (computing), icons and visual indicators such as secondary notation. In many applications, GUIs are used instead of text-based user interface, text-based UIs, which are based on typed command labels or text navigation. GUIs were introduced in reaction to the perceived steep learning curve of command-line interfaces (CLIs), which require commands to be typed on a computer keyboard. The actions in a GUI are usually performed through direct manipulation interface, direct manipulation of the graphical elements. Beyond computers, GUIs are used in many handheld mobile devices such as MP3 players, portable media players, gaming devices, smartphones and smaller household, office and Distributed control system, industrial controls. The term ''GUI'' tends not to be applied to other lower-displa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
X Window System
The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at version 11 (hence "X11") since September 1987. The X.Org Foundation leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X.Org Server, available as free and open-source software under the MIT License and similar permissive licenses. Purpose and abilities X is an architecture-independent system for remote graphical user interfaces and input device capabilities. Each person using a networked computer terminal, terminal has the ability to interact with the display with any type of user input device. In its standard distribution it is a complete, albeit simple, display and interface solution which delivers a standard widget toolkit, toolkit and protocol stack for building graphical user interfaces on most Unix-like operating syst ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Memory Management Unit
A memory management unit (MMU), sometimes called paged memory management unit (PMMU), is a computer hardware unit that examines all references to computer memory, memory, and translates the memory addresses being referenced, known as virtual memory addresses, into physical addresses in main memory. In modern systems, programs generally have addresses that access the theoretical maximum memory of the computer architecture, 32 or 64 bits. The MMU maps the addresses from each program into separate areas in physical memory, which is generally much smaller than the theoretical maximum. This is possible because programs rarely use large amounts of memory at any one time. Most modern operating systems (OS) work in concert with an MMU to provide virtual memory (VM) support. The MMU tracks memory use in fixed-size blocks known as ''pages''. If a program refers to a location in a page that is not in physical memory, the MMU sends an interrupt to the operating system. The OS selects a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Unix
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell System, AT&T licensed Unix to outside parties in the late 1970s, leading to a variety of both academic and commercial Unix variants from vendors including University of California, Berkeley ( BSD), Microsoft (Xenix), Sun Microsystems ( SunOS/ Solaris), HP/ HPE ( HP-UX), and IBM ( AIX). The early versions of Unix—which are retrospectively referred to as " Research Unix"—ran on computers such as the PDP-11 and VAX; Unix was commonly used on minicomputers and mainframes from the 1970s onwards. It distinguished itself from its predecessors as the first portable operating system: almost the entire operating system is written in the C programming language (in 1973), which allows U ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Unix-like
A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-like Application software, application is one that behaves like the corresponding List of POSIX commands, Unix command or Unix shell, shell. Although there are general Unix philosophy, philosophies for Unix design, there is no technical standard defining the term, and opinions can differ about the degree to which a particular operating system or application is Unix-like. Some well-known examples of Unix-like operating systems include Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. These systems are often used on servers as well as on personal computers and other devices. Many popular applications, such as the Apache HTTP Server, Apache web server and the Bash (Unix shell), Bash shell, are also designed to be used on Unix-like systems. Definition The Open ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
Instructions Per Second
Instructions per second (IPS) is a measure of a computer's Central processing unit, processor speed. For complex instruction set computers (CISCs), different Machine code, instructions take different amounts of time, so the value measured depends on the instruction mix; even for comparing processors in the same family the IPS measurement can be problematic. Many reported IPS values have represented "peak" execution rates on artificial instruction sequences with few Subroutine, branches and no Resource contention, cache contention, whereas realistic workloads typically lead to significantly lower IPS values. Memory hierarchy also greatly affects processor performance, an issue barely considered in IPS calculations. Because of these problems, synthetic Benchmark (computing), benchmarks such as Dhrystone are now generally used to estimate computer performance in commonly used applications, and raw IPS has fallen into disuse. The term is commonly used in association with a metric pr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] [Amazon] |
