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West PC-800
The West PC-800 was a home computer introduced by Norwegian company West Computer AS in 1984. The computer was designed as an alarm center allowing use of several CPUs (6502, Z80, 8086, 68000) and operating systems. The company introduced an IBM PC compatible in early 1986 and the West PC-800 line was phased out. History West Computer AS was founded in late 1983 by Tov Westby, Terje Holen and Geir Ståle Sætre. In early 1984, the company presented its computer then called Sherlock at the Mikrodata'84 fair. The new computer had both 6502 and Z80 CPUs, promised rich expansion capabilities and included two rather unusual features: a wireless keyboard and an alarm device, which could report fire, flood or burglary via phone and the built-in modem. The machine was released in Autumn 1984 at the Sjølyst "Home and Hobby" fair. The West PC 800 did not sell as well as expected, probably due to weak Apple II position in Norway, and West Computer AS announced in late 1985 the IBM PC compat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
West PC 800
West is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from east and is the direction in which the Sun sets on the Earth. Etymology The word "west" is a Germanic word passed into some Romance languages (''ouest'' in French, ''oest'' in Catalan, ''ovest'' in Italian, ''vest'' in Romanian, ''oeste'' in Spanish and Portuguese). As in other languages, the word formation stems from the fact that west is the direction of the setting sun in the evening: 'west' derives from the Indo-European root ''*wes'' reduced from ''*wes-pero'' 'evening, night', cognate with Ancient Greek ἕσπερος hesperos 'evening; evening star; western' and Latin vesper 'evening; west'. Examples of the same formation in other languages include Latin occidens 'west' from occidō 'to go down, to set' and Hebrew מַעֲרָב (maarav) 'west' from עֶרֶב (erev) 'evening'. West is sometimes abbreviated as W. Navigation To go west using a compass for navigatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Baud
In telecommunications and electronics, baud (; symbol: Bd) is a common unit of measurement of symbol rate, which is one of the components that determine the speed of communication over a data channel. It is the unit for symbol rate or modulation rate in symbols per second or pulses per second. It is the number of distinct symbol changes (signalling events) made to the transmission medium per second in a digitally modulated signal or a bd rate line code. Baud is related to '' gross bit rate'', which can be expressed in bits per second (bit/s). If there are precisely two symbols in the system (typically 0 and 1), then baud and bits per second are equivalent. Naming The baud unit is named after Émile Baudot, the inventor of the Baudot code for telegraphy, and is represented according to the rules for SI units. That is, the first letter of its symbol is uppercase (Bd), but when the unit is spelled out, it should be written in lowercase (baud) except when it begins a sentence ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Megabyte
The megabyte is a multiple of the unit byte for digital information. Its recommended unit symbol is MB. The unit prefix ''mega'' is a multiplier of (106) in the International System of Units (SI). Therefore, one megabyte is one million bytes of information. This definition has been incorporated into the International System of Quantities. In the computer and information technology fields, other definitions have been used that arose for historical reasons of convenience. A common usage has been to designate one megabyte as (220 B), a quantity that conveniently expresses the binary architecture of digital computer memory. Standards bodies have deprecated this binary usage of the mega- prefix in favor of a new set of binary prefixes, by means of which the quantity 220 B is named mebibyte (symbol MiB). Definitions The unit megabyte is commonly used for 10002 (one million) bytes or 10242 bytes. The interpretation of using base 1024 originated as technical jargon for the byte m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hard Disk Drive
A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, platters coated with magnetic material. The platters are paired with disk read-and-write head, magnetic heads, usually arranged on a moving actuator arm, which read and write data to the platter surfaces. Data is accessed in a random-access manner, meaning that individual Block (data storage), blocks of data can be stored and retrieved in any order. HDDs are a type of non-volatile storage, retaining stored data when powered off. Modern HDDs are typically in the form of a small disk enclosure, rectangular box. Hard disk drives were introduced by IBM in 1956, and were the dominant secondary storage device for History of general-purpose CPUs, general-purpose computers beginning in the early 1960s. HDDs maintained this position into the modern er ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Floppy Disk
A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a fabric that removes dust particles from the spinning disk. The three most popular (and commercially available) floppy disks are the 8-inch, 5¼-inch, and 3½-inch floppy disks. Floppy disks store digital data which can be read and written when the disk is inserted into a floppy disk drive (FDD) connected to or inside a computer or other device. The first floppy disks, invented and made by IBM in 1971, had a disk diameter of . Subsequently, the 5¼-inch (133.35 mm) and then the 3½-inch (88.9 mm) became a ubiquitous form of data storage and transfer into the first years of the 21st century. 3½-inch floppy disks can still be used with an external USB floppy disk drive. USB drives for 5¼-inch, 8-inch, and other-size floppy disks are rare ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cassette Tape
The Compact Cassette, also commonly called a cassette tape, audio cassette, or simply tape or cassette, is an analog audio, analog magnetic tape recording format for Sound recording and reproduction, audio recording and playback. Invented by Lou Ottens and his team at the Netherlands, Dutch company Philips, the Compact Cassette was released in August 1963. Compact Cassettes come in two forms, either containing content as a prerecorded cassette (''Musicassette''), or as a fully recordable "blank" cassette. Both forms have two sides and are reversible by the user. Although List of magnetic tape cartridges and cassettes, other tape cassette formats have also existed—for example the Microcassette—the generic term ''cassette tape'' is normally used to refer to the Compact Cassette because of its ubiquity. From 1983 to 1991 the cassette tape was the most popular Timeline of audio formats, audio format for new Record sales, music sales in the United States. Compact Cassettes con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
OS-9
OS-9 is a family of real-time, process-based, multitasking, multi-user operating systems, developed in the 1980s, originally by Microware Systems Corporation for the Motorola 6809 microprocessor. It was purchased by Radisys Corp in 2001, and was purchased again in 2013 by its current owner Microware LP. The OS-9 family was popular for general-purpose computing and remains in use in commercial embedded systems and amongst hobbyists. Today, OS-9 is a product name used by both a Motorola 68000-series machine language OS and a portable (PowerPC, x86, ARM, MIPS, SH4, etc.) version written in C, originally known as OS-9000. History The first version ("OS-9 Level One"), which dates back to 1979–1980, was written in assembly language for the Motorola 6809 CPU, and all of its processes ran within the 64KB address space of the CPU without a memory management unit. It was developed as a supporting operating system for the BASIC09 project, contracted for by Motorola as part ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Motorola 6809
The Motorola 6809 ("''sixty-eight-oh-nine''") is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code, and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes. The 6809 was among the most powerful 8-bit processors of its era. It was also among the most expensive; in 1981 single-unit quantities were compared to for a Zilog Z80 and for a 6502. It was launched when a new generation of 16-bit processors were coming to market, like the Intel 8086, and 32-bit designs were on the horizon, including Motorola's own 68000. It was not feature ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Motorola 68000
The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector. The design implements a 32-bit instruction set, with 32-bit registers and a 16-bit internal data bus. The address bus is 24 bits and does not use memory segmentation, which made it easier to program for. Internally, it uses a 16-bit data arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and two more 16-bit ALUs used mostly for addresses, and has a 16-bit external data bus. For this reason, Motorola termed it a 16/32-bit processor. As one of the first widely available processors with a 32-bit instruction set, large unsegmented address space, and relatively high speed for the era, the 68k was a popular design through the 1980s. It was widely used in a new generation of personal computers with graphical user interfaces, including the Macintosh 128K, Amiga, ... [...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] |
Function Key
A function key is a key on a computer or computer terminal, terminal computer keyboard, keyboard that can be programmed to cause the operating system or an application program to perform certain actions, a form of soft key. On some keyboards/computers, function keys may have default actions, accessible on power-on. Function keys on a terminal may either generate short fixed sequences of characters, often beginning with the escape character (ASCII 27), or the characters they generate may be configured by sending special character sequences to the terminal. On a standard computer keyboard, the function keys may generate a fixed, single byte code, outside the normal ASCII range, which is translated into some other configurable sequence by the keyboard device driver or interpreted directly by the application program. Function keys may have abbreviations or pictographic representations of default actions printed on/besides them, or they may have the more common "F-number" designatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
