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Computing Surface
Meiko Scientific Ltd. was a British supercomputer company based in Bristol, founded by members of the design team working on the Inmos transputer microprocessor. History In 1985, when Inmos management suggested the release of the transputer be delayed, Miles Chesney, David Alden, Eric Barton, Roy Bottomley, James Cownie, and Gerry Talbot resigned and formed Meiko (Japanese for "well-engineered") to start work on massively parallel machines based on the processor. Nine weeks later in July 1985, they demonstrated a transputer system based on experimental 16-bit transputers at the SIGGRAPH in San Francisco. In 1986, a system based on 32-bit T414 transputers was launched as the ''Meiko Computing Surface''. By 1990, Meiko had sold more than 300 systems and grown to 125 employees. In 1993, Meiko launched the second-generation ''Meiko CS-2'' system, but the company ran into financial difficulties in the mid-1990s. The technical team and technology was transferred to a joint venture com ...
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Private Company
A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose Stock, shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in their respective listed markets. Instead, the Private equity, company's stock is offered, owned, traded or exchanged privately, also known as "over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter". Related terms are unlisted organisation, unquoted company and private equity. Private companies are often less well-known than their public company, publicly traded counterparts but still have major importance in the world's economy. For example, in 2008, the 441 list of largest private non-governmental companies by revenue, largest private companies in the United States accounted for $1.8 trillion in revenues and employed 6.2 million people, according to ''Forbes''. In general, all companies that are not owned by the government are classified as private enterprises. This definition encompasses both publ ...
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Italy
Italy, officially the Italian Republic, is a country in Southern Europe, Southern and Western Europe, Western Europe. It consists of Italian Peninsula, a peninsula that extends into the Mediterranean Sea, with the Alps on its northern land border, as well as List of islands of Italy, nearly 800 islands, notably Sicily and Sardinia. Italy shares land borders with France to the west; Switzerland and Austria to the north; Slovenia to the east; and the two enclaves of Vatican City and San Marino. It is the List of European countries by area, tenth-largest country in Europe by area, covering , and the third-most populous member state of the European Union, with nearly 59 million inhabitants. Italy's capital and List of cities in Italy, largest city is Rome; other major cities include Milan, Naples, Turin, Palermo, Bologna, Florence, Genoa, and Venice. The history of Italy goes back to numerous List of ancient peoples of Italy, Italic peoples—notably including the ancient Romans, ...
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Daemon (computing)
In computing, a daemon is a program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user. Customary convention is to name a daemon process with the letter ''d'' as a suffix to indicate that it's a daemon. For example, is a daemon that implements system logging facility, and is a daemon that serves incoming SSH connections. Even though the concept can apply to many computing systems, the term ''daemon'' is used almost exclusively in the context of Unix-based systems. In other contexts, different terms are used for the same concept. Systems often start daemons at boot time that will respond to network requests, hardware activity, or other programs by performing some task. Daemons such as cron may also perform defined tasks at scheduled times. Terminology In the context of computing, the word is generally pronounced either as or . The term was coined by the programmers at MIT's Project MAC. According to Fernando J. Cor ...
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SunOS
SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems from 1982 until the mid-1990s. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on BSD, while versions 5.0 and later are based on UNIX System V Release 4 and are marketed under the brand name '' Solaris''. History SunOS 1 only supported the Sun-2 series systems, including Sun-1 systems upgraded with Sun-2 ( 68010) CPU boards. SunOS 2 supported Sun-2 and Sun-3 ( 68020) series systems. SunOS 4 supported Sun-2 (until release 4.0.3), Sun-3 (until 4.1.1), Sun386i (4.0, 4.0.1 and 4.0.2 only) and Sun-4 ( SPARC) architectures. Although SunOS 4 was intended to be the first release to fully support Sun's new SPARC processor, there was also a SunOS 3.2 release with preliminary support for Sun-4 systems. SunOS 4.1.2 introduced support for Sun's first sun4m-architecture multiprocessor machines (t ...
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Sun-4
Sun-4 is a series of Unix workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, first appearing in July 1987, with the launch of the Sun 4/260. The original Sun-4 series were VMEbus-based systems similar to the earlier Sun-3 series, but employing microprocessors based on Sun's own SPARC V7 RISC architecture in place of the 68k family processors of previous Sun models. Sun 4/280 was a base system used for building an early RAID prototype. Models Models are listed in approximately chronological order. : In 1989, Sun dropped the "Sun-4" name for marketing purposes in favor of the SPARCstation and SPARCserver brands for new models, although early SPARCstation/server models were also assigned Sun-4-series model numbers. For example, the SPARCstation 1 was also known as the Sun 4/60. This practice was phased out with the introduction of the SPARCserver 600MP series in 1991. The term ''Sun-4'' continued to be used in an engineering context to identify the basic hardware archi ...
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Sun-3
Sun-3 is a series of UNIX computer workstations and servers produced by Sun Microsystems, launched on September 9, 1985. The Sun-3 series are VMEbus-based systems similar to some of the earlier Sun-2 series, but using the Motorola 68020 microprocessor, in combination with the Motorola 68881 floating-point co-processor (optional on the Sun 3/50) and a proprietary Sun MMU. Sun-3 systems were supported in SunOS versions 3.0 to 4.1.1_U1 and also have current support in NetBSD and Linux. It used to be supported by OpenBSD but the port was discontinued after the 2.9 release. Sun-3 models Models are listed in approximately chronological order. : (Max. RAM sizes may be greater when third-party memory boards are used.) Image:Sun3_CPU.jpg, Original Sun-3 CPU board Image:Sun3_4MbMemory_Sun3_Scsi.jpg, Original Sun-3 4 MB memory board with Sun-3 SCSI Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between comput ...
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VMEbus
VMEbus (Versa Module Eurocard bus) is a computer bus standard physically based on Eurocard sizes. History In 1979, during development of the Motorola 68000 CPU, one of their engineers, Jack Kister, decided to set about creating a standardized bus system for 68000-based systems. The Motorola team brainstormed for days to select the name VERSAbus. VERSAbus cards were large, , and used edge connectors. Only a few products adopted it, including the IBM System 9000 instrument controller and the Automatix robot and machine vision systems. Kister was later joined by John Black, who refined the specifications and created the ''VERSAmodule'' product concept. A young engineer working for Black, Julie Keahey designed the first VERSAmodule card, the VERSAbus Adaptor Module, used to run existing cards on the new VERSAbus. Sven Rau and Max Loesel of Motorola-Europe added a mechanical specification to the system, basing it on the Eurocard standard that was then late in the stand ...
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Operating System
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of Scheduling (computing), processor time, mass storage, peripherals, and other resources. For hardware functions such as input and output and memory allocation, the operating system acts as an intermediary between programs and the computer hardware, although the application code is usually executed directly by the hardware and frequently makes system calls to an OS function or is interrupted by it. Operating systems are found on many devices that contain a computerfrom cellular phones and video game consoles to web servers and supercomputers. , Android (operating system), Android is the most popular operating system with a 46% market share, followed ...
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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 ...
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Multi-user
Multi-user software is computer software that allows access by multiple users of a computer. Time-sharing systems are multi-user systems. Most batch processing systems for mainframe computers may also be considered "multi-user", to avoid leaving the CPU idle while it waits for I/O operations to complete. However, the term " multitasking" is more common in this context. An example is a Unix or Unix-like system where multiple remote users have access (such as via a serial port or Secure Shell) to the Unix shell prompt at the same time. Another example uses multiple X Window sessions spread across multiple terminals powered by a single machine – this is an example of the use of thin client. Similar functions were also available in a variety of non-Unix-like operating systems, such as Multics, VM/CMS, OpenVMS, MP/M, Concurrent CP/M, Concurrent DOS, FlexOS, Multiuser DOS, REAL/32, OASIS, THEOS, PC-MOS, TSX-32 and VM/386. Some multi-user operating systems such as ...
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Occam (programming Language)
occam is a programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ... which is Concurrent computing, concurrent and builds on the communicating sequential processes (CSP) process algebra, Inmos document 72 occ 45 03 and shares many of its features. It is named after philosopher William of Ockham after whom Occam's razor is named. Occam is an Imperative programming, imperative Procedural programming, procedural language (such as Pascal (programming language), Pascal). It was developed by David May (computer scientist), David May and others at Inmos (trademark INMOS), advised by Tony Hoare, as the native programming language for their transputer microprocessors, but implementations for other platforms are available. The most widely known version is occam 2; its program ...
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Random-access Memory
Random-access memory (RAM; ) is a form of Computer memory, electronic computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working Data (computing), data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read (computer), read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the memory, in contrast with other direct-access data storage media (such as hard disks and Magnetic tape data storage, magnetic tape), where the time required to read and write data items varies significantly depending on their physical locations on the recording medium, due to mechanical limitations such as media rotation speeds and arm movement. In today's technology, random-access memory takes the form of integrated circuit (IC) chips with MOSFET, MOS (metal–oxide–semiconductor) Memory cell (computing), memory cells. RAM is normally associated with Volatile memory, volatile types of memory where s ...
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