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IBM RAMAC 305
The IBM 305 RAMAC was the first commercial computer that used a moving-head hard disk drive (magnetic disk storage) for secondary storage. The system was publicly announced on September 14, 1956,650 RAMAC announcement The 305 RAMAC and the 650 RAMAC were internally announced on September 4, 1956. with test units already installed at the U.S. Navy and at private corporations. RAMAC stood for "Random Access Method of Accounting and Control", as its design was motivated by the need for real-time accounting in business.IBM RAMAC promotional film /ref> History RAMAC wa ...[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IBM 370 Printer
The IBM 370 printer was used on the IBM 305 RAMAC computer system, introduced by IBM on September 14, 1956. The 370 was connected to the 305 by a serial data line from the ''S track'' of the computer's drum memory (the printer and punch both obtain information from a single output track, the control as to what information to print or punch and how, is within the print and punch units) and printed 80-columns with a punched tape controlled carriage. Line formatting was programmed by inserting wire jumpers into a plugboard control panel. The printer mechanism used an eight sided, seven position (56 character) print slug in a horizontal orientation. The ''X'', ''O'', and ''2'' bits of the character code rotate the slug and the ''1'', ''4'', and ''8'' bits selected the position. The platen hammer then struck the paper from behind, causing the selected character to print. Of the 56 characters on the print slug, only 47 were printable with the standard valid character set of the IBM 305 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IBM 350
IBM manufactured magnetic disk storage devices from 1956 to 2003, when it sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi. Both the hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) were invented by IBM and as such IBM's employees were responsible for many of the innovations in these products and their technologies. The basic mechanical arrangement of hard disk drives has not changed since the IBM 1301. Disk drive performance and characteristics are measured by the same standards now as they were in the 1950s. Few products in history have enjoyed such spectacular declines in cost and physical size along with equally dramatic improvements in capacity and performance. IBM manufactured 8-inch floppy disk drives from 1969 until the mid-1980s, but did not become a significant manufacturer of smaller-sized, 5.25- or 3.5-inch floppy disk drives (the dimension refers to the diameter of the floppy disk, not the size of the drive). IBM always offered its magnetic disk drives for sale but did no ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Binary-coded Decimal
In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal (BCD) is a class of binary encodings of decimal numbers where each digit is represented by a fixed number of bits, usually four or eight. Sometimes, special bit patterns are used for a sign or other indications (e.g. error or overflow). In byte-oriented systems (i.e. most modern computers), the term ''unpacked'' BCD usually implies a full byte for each digit (often including a sign), whereas ''packed'' BCD typically encodes two digits within a single byte by taking advantage of the fact that four bits are enough to represent the range 0 to 9. The precise four-bit encoding, however, may vary for technical reasons (e.g. Excess-3). The ten states representing a BCD digit are sometimes called '' tetrades'' (the nibble typically needed to hold them is also known as a tetrade) while the unused, don't care-states are named ''pseudo-tetrad(e)s'', ''pseudo-decimals'', or ''pseudo-decimal digits''. BCD's main virtue, in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Variable Word Length Computer
In computing, a word is any processor design's natural unit of data. A word is a fixed-sized datum handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor. The number of bits or digits in a word (the ''word size'', ''word width'', or ''word length'') is an important characteristic of any specific processor design or computer architecture. The size of a word is reflected in many aspects of a computer's structure and operation; the majority of the registers in a processor are usually word-sized and the largest datum that can be transferred to and from the working memory in a single operation is a word in many (not all) architectures. The largest possible address size, used to designate a location in memory, is typically a hardware word (here, "hardware word" means the full-sized natural word of the processor, as opposed to any other definition used). Documentation for older computers with fixed word size commonly states memory sizes in words rather than bytes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plugboard
A plugboard or control panel (the term used depends on the application area) is an array of jack (connector), jacks or sockets (often called hubs) into which patch cords can be inserted to complete an electrical circuit. Control panels are sometimes used to direct the operation of unit record equipment, :Cryptographic hardware, cipher machines, and History of computing hardware#Digital computation, early computers. The array of holes is often contained in a flat removable panel that can be inserted into a machine and pressed against an array of contacts. This allows the machine to be quickly switched between different applications. The contacts on the machine are hard wired to the various devices that comprise the machine, such as relays, counters, inputs from each card reader column, outputs to a card punch column or printer position, and so on. The wiring on a plugboard connects these devices to perform a specific function, say reading cards and summing up the numbers punched ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drum Memory
Drum memory was a magnetic data storage device invented by Gustav Tauschek in 1932 in Austria. Drums were widely used in the 1950s and into the 1960s as computer memory. Many early computers, called drum computers or drum machines, used drum memory as the main working memory of the computer. Some drums were also used as Auxiliary memory, secondary storage as for example various IBM_drum_storage, IBM drum storage drives and the UNIVAC FASTRAND series of drums. Drums were displaced as primary computer memory by magnetic core memory, which offered a better balance of size, speed, cost, reliability and potential for further improvements. Drums were then replaced by hard disk drives for secondary storage, which were both less expensive and offered denser storage. The manufacturing of drums ceased in the 1970s. Technical design A drum memory or drum storage unit contained a large metal cylinder, coated on the outside surface with a ferromagnetic recording material. It could be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Machine Language
In computer programming, machine code is computer code consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). For conventional binary computers, machine code is the binaryOn nonbinary machines it is, e.g., a decimal representation. representation of a computer program that is actually read and interpreted by the computer. A program in machine code consists of a sequence of machine instructions (possibly interspersed with data). Each machine code instruction causes the CPU to perform a specific task. Examples of such tasks include: # Load a word from memory to a CPU register # Execute an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) operation on one or more registers or memory locations # Jump or skip to an instruction that is not the next one In general, each architecture family (e.g., x86, ARM) has its own instruction set architecture (ISA), and hence its own specific machine code language. There are exceptions, such as the V ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IBM 350 RAMAC
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is a publicly traded company and one of the 30 companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. IBM is the largest industrial research organization in the world, with 19 research facilities across a dozen countries; for 29 consecutive years, from 1993 to 2021, it held the record for most annual U.S. patents generated by a business. IBM was founded in 1911 as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR), a holding company of manufacturers of record-keeping and measuring systems. It was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924 and soon became the leading manufacturer of Tabulating machine, punch-card tabulating systems. During the 1960s and 1970s, the IBM mainframe, exemplified by the IBM System/360, System/360 and its successors, wa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
