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Micronics
Micronics Computers, Inc. was an American computer company active from 1986 to 1998 that manufactured complete systems, motherboards, and peripherals. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Micronics was one of the largest domestic motherboard manufacturers in the United States in the 1990s. After acquiring Orchid Technology in 1994, the company entered the market for multimedia products, such as graphics adapters and sound cards. In 1998, Micronics was acquired by Diamond Multimedia. History Foundation and growth (1986–1992) Micronics Computers was founded by Frank Lin, Dean Chang, Harvey Wong, and Minsiu Huang, four Taiwan-American electronics engineers and businessmen in Mountain View, California, in November 1986. Lin and Chang were the company's principal founders, the company originally based out of Lin's home garage in San Francisco. The two set out to found Micronics as an OEM vendor of IBM PC compatible motherboards for systems integrators to buy in bulk. While devoti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orchid Technology
Orchid Technology was a privately held company founded by Le Nhon Bui in 1982. History 1982 to 1984 The company's original flagship product was its PCNet card, a 1 megabit-per-second LAN (networking) card for IBM PCs and clones. Notably, the acronym LAN (Local Area Networking) is the Vietnamese word for "Orchid". Hence, the origin of the company name. Also in 1982, it introduced the Orchid Graphics Adapter, a graphics board for IBM PC compatible computers. It was intended to provide high resolution (at the time) monochrome graphic abilities to computers limited to text displays. It was aimed at the business market and one of the three first third party graphic boards for PCs. After this successful product, the company embarked on introducing high-performance add-in cards, most notably the LIM ( Lotus, Intel Microsoft standard) which extended DOS out to 1M, Multi-purpose network cards that included RAM, clock, serial printer ports and Network COAX TCP-IP capabilities. Orchid d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diamond Multimedia
Diamond Multimedia is an American company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced graphics cards, motherboards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players; however, the company began with the production of the TrackStar, an add-on card for IBM PC compatibles which emulates Apple II computers. They were one of the major players in the 2D and early 3D graphics card competition throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Diamond Multimedia is a subsidiary of Tul Corporation. History The company was founded by Chong Moon Lee with H. H. Huh, who acted as the technical designer. Diamond Multimedia later merged with S3 Graphics, S3, Incorporated in 1999 after a long-time cooperative business arrangement, when S3 decided to expand their business from producing graphics chipsets to manufacturing retail graphics cards. The move paralleled the 1999 3dfx purchase of STB Systems, which changed 3dfx from a graphics chipset supplier to companies including Diamond, int ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mountain View, California
Mountain View is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, part of the San Francisco Bay Area. Named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains, the population was 82,376 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Mountain View was integral to the early history and growth of Silicon Valley, and is the location of many high technology companies. In 1956, William Shockley established Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, the first company to develop silicon semiconductor devices in Silicon Valley. Mountain View houses the headquarters of many of the world's largest technology companies, including Google and Alphabet Inc., Unicode Consortium, Intuit, Applied Intuition, NASA Ames Research Center, and former or existing headquarters for NortonLifeLock, Symantec, 23andMe, LinkedIn, Samsung, Quora and Synopsys. History The fertile land between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the shores of the southern San Francisco Bay once supported multiple village ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intel 80286
The Intel 80286 (also marketed as the iAPX 286 and often called Intel 286) is a 16-bit microprocessor that was introduced on February 1, 1982. It was the first 8086-based CPU with separate, non- multiplexed address and data buses and also the first with memory management and wide protection abilities. It had a data size of 16 bits, and had an address width of 24 bits, which could address up to 16M of memory with a suitable operating system such as Windows compared to 1M for the 8086. The 80286 used approximately 134,000 transistors in its original nMOS ( HMOS) incarnation and, just like the contemporary 80186, it can correctly execute most software written for the earlier Intel 8086 and 8088 processors. The 80286 was employed for the IBM PC/AT, introduced in 1984, and then widely used in most PC/AT compatible computers until the early 1990s. In 1987, Intel shipped its five-millionth 80286 microprocessor. History and performance Intel's first 80286 chips were specified for ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alpha Microsystems
Alpha Microsystems, Inc., often shortened to Alpha Micro, was an American computer company founded in 1977 in Costa Mesa, California, by John French, Dick Wilcox and Bob Hitchcock. During the dot-com bubble, dot-com boom, the company changed its name to AlphaServ, then NQL Inc., reflecting its pivot toward being a provider of Internet software. However, the company soon reverted to its original Alpha Microsystems name after the dot-com bubble burst. Products The first Alpha Micro computer was the S-100 bus, S-100 AM-100, based upon the WD16 microprocessor chipset from Western Digital. In April 1978, the two-board AM-100 was offered at $1,495 (). As of 1982, AM-100/L and the AM-1000 were based on the Motorola Motorola 68000, 68000 and succeeding processors, though Alpha Micro swapped several addressing lines to create byte-ordering compatibility with their earlier processor. Early peripherals included standard computer terminals (such models as Soroc, Hazeltine Corporation, H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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] |
MS-DOS
MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few operating systems attempting to be compatible with MS-DOS, are sometimes referred to as "DOS" (which is also the generic acronym for disk operating system). MS-DOS was the main operating system for IBM PC compatibles during the 1980s, from which point it was gradually superseded by operating systems offering a graphical user interface (GUI), in various generations of the graphical Microsoft Windows operating system. IBM licensed and re-released it in 1981 as PC DOS 1.0 for use in its PCs. Although MS-DOS and PC DOS were initially developed in parallel by Microsoft and IBM, the two products diverged after twelve years, in 1993, with recognizable differences in compatibility, syntax and capabilities. Beginning in 1988 with DR-DOS, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dallas
Dallas () is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of Texas metropolitan areas, most populous metropolitan area in Texas and the Metropolitan statistical area, fourth-most populous metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 million people. It is the most populous city in and the county seat, seat of Dallas County, Texas, Dallas County, covering nearly 386 square miles into Collin County, Texas, Collin, Denton County, Texas, Denton, Kaufman County, Texas, Kaufman, and Rockwall County, Texas, Rockwall counties. With a 2020 United States census, 2020 census population of 1,304,379, it is the List of United States cities by population, ninth-most populous city in the U.S. and the List of cities in Texas by population, third-most populous city in Texas after Houston and San Antonio. Located in the North Texas region, the city of Dallas is the main core of the largest metropolitan area in the Southern Unite ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
X Terminal
X, or x, is the twenty-fourth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ex'' (pronounced ), plural ''exes''."X", ''Oxford English Dictionary'', 2nd edition (1989); ''Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged'' (1993); "ex", ''op. cit''. History The letter , representing , was inherited from the Etruscan alphabet. It perhaps originated in the of the Euboean alphabet or another Western Greek alphabet, which also represented . Its relationship with the of the Eastern Greek alphabets, which represented , is uncertain. The pronunciation of in the Romance languages underwent sound changes, with various outcomes: * French: (e.g. ''laisser'' from ''laxare'') * Italian: (e.g. ''asse'' from ''axem'') and, in some cases, (e.g. ''lasciare'' from ''laxare'') * Portuguese: (e.g. ''eixo'' from ''axem'') ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
I486
The Intel 486, officially named i486 and also known as 80486, is a microprocessor introduced in 1989. It is a higher-performance follow-up to the i386, Intel 386. It represents the fourth generation of binary compatible CPUs following the Intel 8086, 8086 of 1978, the Intel 80286 of 1982, and 1985's i386. It was the first tightly-instruction pipeline, pipelined x86 design as well as the first x86 chip to include more than one million transistors. It offered a large on-chip Cache (computing), cache and an integrated floating-point unit. When it was announced, the initial performance was originally published between 15 and 20 VAX Unit of Performance, VAX MIPS, between 37,000 and 49,000 Dhrystone, dhrystones per second, and between 6.1 and 8.2 double-precision Whetstone (benchmark), megawhetstones per second for both 25 and 33 MHz version. A typical 50 MHz i486 executes 41 million instructions per second Dhrystone MIPS and SPECint, SPEC integer rating of 27.9.Chen, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Micro Channel Architecture
Micro Channel architecture, or the Micro Channel bus, is a proprietary hardware, proprietary 16-bit computing, 16- or 32-bit computing, 32-bit parallel communication, parallel computer bus (computing), bus publicly introduced by IBM in 1987 which was used on IBM PS/2, PS/2 and other computers until the mid-1990s. Its name is commonly abbreviated as "MCA", although not by IBM. In IBM products, it superseded the Industry Standard Architecture, ISA bus and was itself subsequently superseded by the Peripheral Component Interconnect, PCI bus architecture. Background The development of Micro Channel was driven by both technical and business pressures. Technology The IBM AT bus, which later became known as the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus, had a number of technical design limitations, including: * A slow bus speed. * A limited number of interrupts, fixed in hardware. * A limited number of I/O device addresses, also fixed in hardware. * Hardwired and complex configur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Extended Industry Standard Architecture
The Extended Industry Standard Architecture (frequently known by the acronym EISA and pronounced "eee-suh") is a bus standard for IBM PC compatible computers. It was announced in September 1988 by a consortium of PC clone vendors (the Gang of Nine) as an alternative to IBM's proprietary Micro Channel architecture (MCA) in its PS/2 series.Compaq Leads 'Gang of Nine' In Offering Alternative to MCA, ''InfoWorld'', Sep 19, 1988. In comparison with the AT bus, which the Gang of Nine retroactively renamed to the ISA bus to avoid infringing IBM's trademark on its PC/AT computer, EISA is extended to 32 bits and allows more than one CPU to share the bus. The bus mastering support is also enhanced to provide access to 4 GB of memory. Unlike MCA, EISA can accept older ISA cards — the lines and slots for EISA are a superset of ISA. EISA was much favoured by manufacturers due to the proprietary nature of MCA, and even IBM produced some machines supporting it. It was ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
