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Miracle Systems
Miracle Systems Ltd. were a manufacturer of personal computer peripherals and upgrades, specializing in the Sinclair QL, in the 1980s and early 1990s.The company was incorporated in February 1983. Initially, they produced simple peripherals such as an RS-232 to Centronics parallel printer interface adapter. Later, they designed the ''Expanderam'' series of RAM expansion cards for the QL, which led to the ''Trump Card'' combined RAM expansion and floppy disk interface. This was notable in that it mapped RAM into memory space reserved for external peripheral devices, thus allowing the QL's RAM to be expanded to 768 kB rather than the official limit of 512 kB. The ''Trump Card'' was later superseded by the ''Gold Card'' processor upgrade card. This replaced the QL's 68008 CPU with a 16 MHz 68000 and included 2 MB of RAM, a floppy disk interface (supporting DD, HD, and ED density 3.5 in drives) and a non-volatile real-time clock. Gold Card plugged into the QL expansion slot and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Limited Company
In a limited company, the Legal liability, liability of members or subscribers of the company is limited to what they have invested or guaranteed to the company. Limited companies may be limited by Share (finance), shares or by guarantee. In a company limited by shares, the liability of members is limited to the unpaid value of shares. In a company limited by guarantee, the liability of owners is limited to such amount as the owners may undertake to contribute to the assets of the company, in the event of being wound up. The former may be further divided in public companies (public limited company, public limited companies) and private companies (private limited company, private limited companies). Who may become a member of a private limited company is restricted by law and by the company's rules. In contrast, anyone may buy shares in a public limited company. Limited companies can be found in most countries, although the detailed rules governing them vary widely. It is also com ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Motorola 68EC040
The Motorola 68040 ("''sixty-eight-oh-forty''") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 series, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060, skipping the 68050. In keeping with general Motorola naming, the 68040 is often referred to as simply the '040 (pronounced ''oh-four-oh'' or ''oh-forty''). The 68040 was the first 680x0 family member with an on-chip Floating-Point Unit (FPU). It thus included all of the functionality that previously required external chips, namely the FPU and Memory Management Unit (MMU), which was added in the 68030. It also had split instruction and data caches of 4 kilobytes each. It was fully pipelined, with six stages. Versions of the 68040 were created for specific market segments, including the 68LC040, which removed the FPU, and the 68EC040, which removed both the FPU and MMU. Motorola had intended the EC variant for embedded use, but embedded processors during the 68040's time did not need the powe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Defunct Computer Companies Of The United Kingdom
Defunct may refer to: * ''Defunct'' (video game), 2014 * Zombie process or defunct process, in Unix-like operating systems See also * * :Former entities * End-of-life product In Industry (economics), industry, product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its inception through the Product engineering, engineering, Product design, design, and Manufacturing, ma ... * Obsolescence {{Disambiguation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sinclair Research
Sinclair Research Ltd is a British consumer electronics company founded by Clive Sinclair in Cambridge in the 1970s. In 1980, the company entered the home computer market with the ZX80 at £99.95, at that time the cheapest personal computer for sale in the United Kingdom. A year later, the ZX81 became available through retailers, introducing home computing to a generation, with more that 1.5 million sold. In 1982 the ZX Spectrum was released, becoming the UK's best selling computer, and competing aggressively against Commodore and Amstrad. A combination of the failures of the Sinclair QL computer and the TV80 pocket television led to financial difficulties in 1985, and a year later Sinclair sold the rights to its computer products and brand name to Amstrad. Sinclair Research Ltd continued to exist as a one-man company, marketing Clive Sinclair's inventions. History Founding and early years On 25 July 1961, Clive Sinclair founded his first company, Sinclair Radi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cambridge Systems Technology
Cambridge Systems Technology (CST) was a company formed in the early 1980s by ex-Torch Computers engineers David Oliver and Martin Baines, to produce peripherals for the BBC Micro, and later, with Graham Priestley, Sinclair QL microcomputers. Products included IEEE 488, floppy disk and SCSI interfaces. Following the demise of the Sinclair QL in 1986, CST began producing the Thor series of QL-compatible personal computers. These had limited commercial success, and CST had ceased trading by the end of the decade. References See also * Miracle Systems * Sinclair QL * Sinclair Research Sinclair Research Ltd is a British consumer electronics company founded by Clive Sinclair in Cambridge in the 1970s. In 1980, the company entered the home computer market with the ZX80 at £99.95, at that time the cheapest personal computer ... Defunct companies based in Cambridgeshire Defunct computer companies of the United Kingdom Defunct computer hardware companies Companie ... [...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] |
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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sinclair QDOS
QDOS is the multitasking operating system found on the Sinclair QL personal computer and its clones. It was designed by Tony Tebby whilst working at Sinclair Research, as an in-house alternative to 68K/OS, which was later cancelled by Sinclair, but released by original authors GST Computer Systems. Its name is not regarded as an acronym and sometimes written as Qdos in official literature. QDOS was implemented in Motorola 68000 assembly language, and on the QL, resided in 48 KB of ROM, consisting of either three 16 KB EPROM chips or one 32 KB and one 16 KB ROM chip. These ROMs also held the SuperBASIC interpreter, an advanced variant of BASIC programming language with structured programming additions. This also acted as the QDOS command-line interpreter.1 KB = 1024 bytes Facilities provided by QDOS included management of processes (or "jobs" in QDOS terminology), memory allocation, and an extensible "redirectable I/O system", providing a generic framew ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SMSQ/E
SMSQ/E is a computer operating system originally developed in France by Tony Tebby, the designer of the original QDOS operating system for the Sinclair QL personal computer. It began life as SMSQ, a QDOS-compatible version of SMS2 intended for the Miracle Systems QXL emulator card for PCs. This was later developed into an extended version, SMSQ/E, for the Atari ST. It consists of a QDOS compatible SMS kernel, a rewritten SuperBASIC interpreter called SBasic, a complete set of SuperBASIC procedures and functions and a set of extended device drivers originally written for the QL emulator for the Atari ST. It also integrates many extensions previously only available separately for the QL, like Toolkit II (quite essential SuperBASIC add-on), the Pointer Environment (the QL's mouse and windowing system) and the Hotkey System 2. While SMSQ/E does not run on any unmodified QL, it runs on all of the more advanced QL compatible platforms, from the Miracle Systems (Super)GoldCard CPU ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Industry Standard Architecture
Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is the 16-bit internal bus (computing), bus of IBM PC/AT and similar computers based on the Intel 80286 and its immediate successors during the 1980s. The bus was (largely) backward compatible with the 8-bit bus of the 8088-based IBM PC, including the IBM PC/XT as well as IBM PC compatibles. Originally referred to as the PC bus (8-bit) or AT bus (16-bit), it was also termed ''I/O Channel'' by IBM. The ISA term was coined as a retronym by IBM PC clone manufacturers in the late 1980s or early 1990s as a reaction to IBM attempts to replace the AT bus with its new and incompatible Micro Channel architecture. The 16-bit ISA bus was also used with 32-bit processors for several years. An attempt to extend it to 32 bits, called Extended Industry Standard Architecture (EISA), was not very successful, however. Later buses such as VESA Local Bus and Peripheral Component Interconnect, PCI were used instead, often along with ISA slots on the same mainbo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FPGA
A field-programmable gate array (FPGA) is a type of configurable integrated circuit that can be repeatedly programmed after manufacturing. FPGAs are a subset of logic devices referred to as programmable logic devices (PLDs). They consist of an array of programmable logic device, programmable logic block, logic blocks with a connecting grid, that can be configured "in the field" to interconnect with other logic blocks to perform various digital functions. FPGAs are often used in limited (low) quantity production of custom-made products, and in research and development, where the higher cost of individual FPGAs is not as important, and where creating and manufacturing a custom circuit would not be feasible. Other applications for FPGAs include the telecommunications, automotive, aerospace, and industrial sectors, which benefit from their flexibility, high signal processing speed, and parallel processing abilities. A FPGA configuration is generally written using a hardware descr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IBM PC Compatible
An IBM PC compatible is any personal computer that is hardware- and software-compatible with the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) and its subsequent models. Like the original IBM PC, an IBM PC–compatible computer uses an x86-based central processing unit, sourced either from Intel or a second source like AMD, Cyrix or other vendors such as Texas Instruments, Fujitsu, OKI, Mitsubishi or NEC and is capable of using interchangeable commodity hardware such as expansion cards. Initially such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones, but the term "IBM PC compatible" is now a historical description only, as the vast majority of microcomputers produced since the 1990s are IBM compatible. IBM itself no longer sells personal computers, having sold its division to Lenovo in 2005. " Wintel" is a similar description that is more commonly used for modern computers. The designation "PC", as used in much of personal computer history, has not meant "pe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
