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Bull Gamma 10
The Gamma 10 was a business computer designed and marketed by the Compagnie des Machines Bull starting in 1963. Built as the successor to the Gamma 3 and as a response to the success of IBM's transistorized 1401, the Gamma 10 was a compact second-generation computer aimed at business use. Developed during a period of modernization at Bull under the influence of General Electric, it played a key role in the transition from punched card equipment to electronic data processing on the European market. Widely adopted by small and medium-sized businesses across Europe during the 1960s, the Gamma 10 holds the distinction of being the first European computer to surpass 1,000 units sold. Description The Gamma 10 used a hybrid technology based on germanium transistors, diodes, and electromechanical relays. Its modular architecture, typical of the 1960s, was built around interchangeable logic modules plugged into a backplane. Each module contained discrete components soldered onto print ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Compagnie Des Machines Bull
Bull SAS (also known as Groupe Bull, Bull Information Systems, or simply Bull) is a French computer company headquartered in Les Clayes-sous-Bois, in the western suburbs of Paris. The company has also been known at various times as Bull General Electric, Honeywell Bull, CII Honeywell Bull, and Bull HN. Bull was founded in 1931, as H.W. Egli - Bull, to capitalize on the punched card technology patents of Norwegian engineer Fredrik Rosing Bull (1882–1925). After a reorganization in 1933, with new investors coming in, the name was changed to Compagnie des Machines Bull (CMB). Bull has a worldwide presence in more than 100 countries and is particularly active in the defense, finance, health care, manufacturing, public, and telecommunication sectors. History Origins On 31 July 1919, Norwegian engineer Fredrik Rosing Bull filed a patent for a "combined sorter-recorder-tabulator of punch cards" machine that he had developed with financing from the Norwegian insurance company ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magnetic-core Memory
In computing, magnetic-core memory is a form of random-access memory. It predominated for roughly 20 years between 1955 and 1975, and is often just called core memory, or, informally, core. Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magnetic material (usually a Ferrite (magnet)#Semi-hard ferrites, semi-hard ferrite). Each core stores one bit of information. Two or more wires pass through each core, forming an X-Y array of cores. When an electrical current above a certain threshold is applied to the wires, the core will become magnetized. The core to be assigned a value – or ''written'' – is selected by powering one X and one Y wire to half of the required current, such that only the single core at the intersection is written. Depending on the direction of the currents, the core will pick up a clockwise or counterclockwise magnetic field, storing a 1 or 0. This writing process also causes electricity to be electromagnetic induction, induced into nearby wires. If t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
History Of Computing
The history of computing is longer than the history of computing hardware and modern computing technology and includes the history of methods intended for pen and paper or for chalk and slate, with or without the aid of tables. Concrete devices Digital computing is intimately tied to the representation of number A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The most basic examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can ...s. But long before abstractions like ''the number'' arose, there were mathematical concepts to serve the purposes of civilization. These concepts are implicit in concrete practices such as: *''Bijection, One-to-one correspondence'', a rule to counting, count ''how many'' items, e.g. on a tally stick, eventually abstracted into ''numbers''. *''Comparison to a standard'', a method for assuming ''reproducibility'' in a measure ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IBM System/360 Model 20
The IBM System/360 Model 20 is the smallest member of the IBM System/360 family announced in November 1964. The Model 20 supports only a subset of the System/360 instruction set, with binary numbers limited to 16 bits and no floating point arithmetic. In later years it would have been classified as a 16-bit minicomputer rather than a mainframe, but the term "minicomputer" was not current, and in any case IBM wanted to emphasize the compatibility of the Model 20 rather than its differences from the rest of the System/360 line. It does, however, have the full System/360 decimal instruction set, that allows for addition, subtraction, product, and dividend of up to 31 decimal digits. Developed by IBM in Böblingen, Germany, the system was intended for data processing and as a replacement for tabulating equipment. An incompatible small computer, the IBM 1130 introduced the following year, was designed for scientific and engineering computing. The design of the Model 20 was the resul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Magnetic Tape
Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic storage made of a thin, magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic film. It was developed in Germany in 1928, based on the earlier magnetic wire recording from Denmark. Devices that use magnetic tape can with relative ease record and play back audio, visual, and binary computer data. Magnetic tape revolutionized sound recording and reproduction and broadcasting. It allowed radio, which had always been broadcast live, to be recorded for later or repeated airing. Since the early 1950s, magnetic tape has been used with computers to store large quantities of data and is still used for backup purposes. Magnetic tape begins to degrade after 10–20 years and therefore is not an ideal medium for long-term archival storage. The exception is data tape formats like Linear Tape-Open, LTO which are specifically designed for long-term archiving. Information in magnetic tapes is often recorded in tracks which are narrow and long areas of in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Line Printer
A line printer Printer (computing), prints one entire line of text before advancing to another line. Most early line printers were printer (computing)#Impact printers, impact printers. Line printers are mostly associated with unit record equipment and the early days of digital computing, but the technology is still in use. Print speeds of 600 lines per minute (approximately 10 pages per minute) were achieved in the 1950s, later increasing to as much as 1200 lpm. Line printers print a complete line at a time and have speeds in the range of 150 to 2500 lines per minute. Some types of impact line printers are #Drum printer, drum printers, #Band printer, band-printers, and #Chain printer, chain printers. Non-impact technologies have also been used, e.g., thermal printing, thermal line printers were popular in the 1970s and 1980s, some inkjet and laser printers produce output a line or a page at a time. Designs Many impact printers, such as the daisywheel printer and dot matri ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Punched Card
A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a stiff paper-based medium used to store digital information via the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Developed over the 18th to 20th centuries, punched cards were widely used for data processing, the control of automated machines, and computing. Early applications included controlling weaving looms and recording census data. Punched cards were widely used in the 20th century, where unit record equipment, unit record machines, organized into data processing systems, used punched cards for Input (computer science), data input, data output, and data storage. The IBM 12-row/80-column punched card format came to dominate the industry. Many early digital computers used punched cards as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and Data (computing), data. Punched cards were used for decades before being replaced by magnetic storage and terminals. Their influence persists in cultural references, sta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Assembly Language
In computing, assembly language (alternatively assembler language or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence between the instructions in the language and the architecture's machine code instructions. Assembly language usually has one statement per machine instruction (1:1), but constants, comments, assembler directives, symbolic labels of, e.g., memory locations, registers, and macros are generally also supported. The first assembly code in which a language is used to represent machine code instructions is found in Kathleen and Andrew Donald Booth's 1947 work, ''Coding for A.R.C.''. Assembly code is converted into executable machine code by a utility program referred to as an '' assembler''. The term "assembler" is generally attributed to Wilkes, Wheeler and Gill in their 1951 book '' The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Dig ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Backplane
A backplane or backplane system is a group of electrical connectors in parallel with each other, so that each pin of each connector is linked to the same relative pin of all the other connectors, forming a computer bus. It is used to connect several printed circuit boards together to make up a complete computer system. Backplanes commonly use a printed circuit board, but wire-wrapped backplanes have also been used in minicomputers and high-reliability applications. A backplane is generally differentiated from a motherboard by the lack of on-board processing and storage elements. A backplane uses plug-in cards for storage and processing. Usage Early microcomputer systems like the Altair 8800 used a backplane for the processor and expansion cards. Backplanes are normally used in preference to cables because of their greater reliability. In a cabled system, the cables need to be flexed every time that a card is added or removed from the system; this flexing eventually cause ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bull Gamma 3
The Gamma 3 was an early electronic vacuum-tube computer. It was designed by Compagnie des Machines Bull in Paris, France and released in 1952. Originally designed as an electronic accelerator for electromechanical tabulating machines, similar to the IBM 604, it was gradually enhanced with new features and evolved into a first-generation stored program computer (Gamma AET, 1955, then ET, 1957). In its stored-program configurations, the Gamma 3 mostly competed with the IBM 650. Over the course of its ten-year availability, this machine facilitated the transition from electromechanical unit records equipment to computers. The Gamma 3 was a commercial success, eventually selling more than 1200 units and prompting IBM to release the 1401 as a competitor. The Gamma 3 was succeeded by the lower-end Gamma 10, the mid-range Gamma 30, and the large, high-end Gamma 60 mainframe. History Until the 1950s, Compagnie des Machines Bull, like its rival IBM, primarily marketed punched car ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
