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DEC PDP-6
The PDP-6, short for Programmed Data Processor model 6, is a computer developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) during 1963 and first delivered in the summer of 1964. It was an expansion of DEC's existing 18-bit systems to use a 36-bit data word, which was at that time a common word size for large machines like IBM mainframes. The system was constructed using the same germanium individual transistor-based System Module layout as DEC's earlier machines, like the PDP-1 and PDP-4. The system was designed with real-time computing use in mind, not just batch processing as was typical for most mainframes. Using a 36-bit word with 18-bit addresses allowed it to efficiently store the cons structure found in the Lisp language, which made it particularly useful in artificial intelligence labs like Project MAC at MIT. The PDP-6 was also notable for its inclusion of floating point instructions as a standard feature, which was relatively rare at that time. It was also complex, expensi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Gordon Bell
Chester Gordon Bell (August 19, 1934 – May 17, 2024) was an American electrical engineer and manager. An early employee of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), from 1960–1966, Bell designed several of their PDP machines and later served as the company's Vice President of Engineering from 1972–1983, overseeing development of the VAX computer systems. Bell's later career included roles as an entrepreneur, investor, founding Assistant Director of NSF's Computing and Information Science and Engineering Directorate from 1986–1987, and researcher emeritus at Microsoft Research from 1995–2015. Early life and education Gordon Bell was born in Kirksville, Missouri. He grew up helping with the family business, Bell Electric, repairing appliances and wiring homes. Bell received a BS (1956), and MS (1957) in electrical engineering from MIT. He then went to the New South Wales University of Technology (now UNSW) in Australia on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1957–58, where he ta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
PDP-4
The PDP-4 was the successor to the Digital Equipment Corporation's PDP-1. History This 18-bit machine, first shipped in 1962, was a compromise: "with slower memory and different packaging" than the PDP-1, but priced at $65,000 - less than half the price of its predecessor. All later 18-bit PDP machines (PDP-7, 7, PDP-9, 9 and PDP-15, 15) are based on a similar, but enlarged instruction set, more powerful than, but based on the same concepts as, the 12-bit PDP-5/PDP-8 series. Approximately 54 were sold. Hardware The system's memory cycle is 8 microseconds, compared to 5 microseconds for the PDP-1. The PDP-4 weighs about . Mass storage Both the PDP-1 and the PDP-4 were introduced as paper tape-based systems. The only use, if any, for IBM-compatible 200 Magnetic tape data storage#Bytes per inch, BPI or 556 BPI magnetic tape was for data. The use of "mass storage" drums - not even a megabyte and non-removable - were an available option, but were not in the spirit of the “per ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Character Code
Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical character (computing), characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using computers. The numerical values that make up a character encoding are known as code points and collectively comprise a code space or a code page. Early character encodings that originated with optical or electrical telegraphy and in early computers could only represent a subset of the characters used in written languages, sometimes restricted to Letter case, upper case letters, Numeral system, numerals and some punctuation only. Over time, character encodings capable of representing more characters were created, such as ASCII, the ISO/IEC 8859 encodings, various computer vendor encodings, and Unicode encodings such as UTF-8 and UTF-16. The Popularity of text encodings, most popular character encoding on the World Wide Web is UTF-8, which is used in 98.2% of surve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Instruction Set
In computer science, an instruction set architecture (ISA) is an abstract model that generally defines how software controls the CPU in a computer or a family of computers. A device or program that executes instructions described by that ISA, such as a central processing unit (CPU), is called an ''implementation'' of that ISA. In general, an ISA defines the supported Machine code, instructions, data types, Register (computer), registers, the hardware support for managing Computer memory, main memory, fundamental features (such as the memory consistency, addressing modes, virtual memory), and the input/output model of implementations of the ISA. An ISA specifies the behavior of machine code running on implementations of that ISA in a fashion that does not depend on the characteristics of that implementation, providing binary compatibility between implementations. This enables multiple implementations of an ISA that differ in characteristics such as Computer performance, performa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Flip-Chip Module
A Flip-Chip module is a component of digital logic systems made by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) for its PDP-7, PDP-8, PDP-9, and PDP-10 computers, and related peripherals, beginning on August 24, 1964. Description As used by DEC, the term described a proprietary way to package electronic circuitry which was used for central processing units, peripheral controllers, and many other digital or analog electronic products produced by the company. The first flip-chip modules mated with single-sided 18-contact card edge connectors with contacts on 1/8 inch centers. Circuit boards were 2-7/16 inches wide by 5 inches long, with a handle adding 1/2 inch. Double-height modules with two connectors side by side were 5-3/16 inches wide. Later, when two-sided boards were introduced, upwards-compatible double-sided 36-contact edge connectors were used, but the basic connector and board dimensions remained unchanged. If more component real estate area were required for electronic cir ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Silicon
Silicon is a chemical element; it has symbol Si and atomic number 14. It is a hard, brittle crystalline solid with a blue-grey metallic lustre, and is a tetravalent metalloid (sometimes considered a non-metal) and semiconductor. It is a member of group 14 in the periodic table: carbon is above it; and germanium, tin, lead, and flerovium are below it. It is relatively unreactive. Silicon is a significant element that is essential for several physiological and metabolic processes in plants. Silicon is widely regarded as the predominant semiconductor material due to its versatile applications in various electrical devices such as transistors, solar cells, integrated circuits, and others. These may be due to its significant band gap, expansive optical transmission range, extensive absorption spectrum, surface roughening, and effective anti-reflection coating. Because of its high chemical affinity for oxygen, it was not until 1823 that Jöns Jakob Berzelius was first able to p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Floating Point Unit
A floating-point unit (FPU), numeric processing unit (NPU), colloquially math coprocessor, is a part of a computer system specially designed to carry out operations on floating-point numbers. Typical operations are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root. Modern designs generally include a fused multiply-add instruction, which was found to be very common in real-world code. Some FPUs can also perform various transcendental functions such as exponential or trigonometric calculations, but the accuracy can be low, so some systems prefer to compute these functions in software. Floating-point operations were originally handled in software in early computers. Over time, manufacturers began to provide standardized floating-point libraries as part of their software collections. Some machines, those dedicated to scientific processing, would include specialized hardware to perform some of these tasks with much greater speed. The introduction of microcode in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and science. In response to the increasing Technological and industrial history of the United States, industrialization of the United States, William Barton Rogers organized a school in Boston to create "useful knowledge." Initially funded by a land-grant universities, federal land grant, the institute adopted a Polytechnic, polytechnic model that stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. MIT moved from Boston to Cambridge in 1916 and grew rapidly through collaboration with private industry, military branches, and new federal basic research agencies, the formation of which was influenced by MIT faculty like Vannevar Bush. In the late twentieth century, MIT became a leading center for research in compu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Project MAC
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ... (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab). Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research. Research activities CSAIL's research activities are organized around a number of semi-autonomous research groups, each of which is headed by one or more professors or research scientists. These groups are divided up into seven gene ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of research in computer science that develops and studies methods and software that enable machines to machine perception, perceive their environment and use machine learning, learning and intelligence to take actions that maximize their chances of achieving defined goals. High-profile applications of AI include advanced web search engines (e.g., Google Search); recommendation systems (used by YouTube, Amazon (company), Amazon, and Netflix); virtual assistants (e.g., Google Assistant, Siri, and Amazon Alexa, Alexa); autonomous vehicles (e.g., Waymo); Generative artificial intelligence, generative and Computational creativity, creative tools (e.g., ChatGPT and AI art); and Superintelligence, superhuman play and analysis in strategy games (e.g., ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lisp (programming Language)
Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, it is the second-oldest high-level programming language still in common use, after Fortran. Lisp has changed since its early days, and many dialects have existed over its history. Today, the best-known general-purpose Lisp dialects are Common Lisp, Scheme, Racket, and Clojure. Lisp was originally created as a practical mathematical notation for computer programs, influenced by (though not originally derived from) the notation of Alonzo Church's lambda calculus. It quickly became a favored programming language for artificial intelligence (AI) research. As one of the earliest programming languages, Lisp pioneered many ideas in computer science, including tree data structures, automatic storage management, dynamic typing, conditionals, higher-order function ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cons
In computer programming, ( or ) is a fundamental function in most dialects of the Lisp programming language. ''constructs'' memory objects which hold two values or pointers to two values. These objects are referred to as (cons) cells, conses, non-atomic s-expressions ("NATSes"), or (cons) pairs. In Lisp jargon, the expression "to cons ''x'' onto ''y''" means to construct a new object with (cons ''x'' ''y''). The resulting pair has a left half, referred to as the (the first element, or '' contents of the address part of register''), and a right half, referred to as the (the second element, or '' contents of the decrement part of register''). It is loosely related to the object-oriented notion of a constructor, which creates a new object given arguments, and more closely related to the constructor function of an algebraic data type system. The word "cons" and expressions like "to cons onto" are also part of a more general functional programming jargon. Sometimes operato ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
