... the Navy ordered Grace Murray Hopper to the
Computation Lab to assist Howard Aiken with programming it.
Hopper had been a professor of mathematics at Vassar College and
had taken leave to attend ... in chapter 7.
Sorting Data
Regardless of what level of programming language they used, all
commercial and many scientific installations had to contend with an
activity that was intimately r...
... getting war
materials and men across the Atlantic. Following the War, the newly
created Air Force was faced with a mathematically similar problem in
maintaining and supplying air bases scattered across ... especially those aspects of it that have remained stable
through the past half-century of computer design.
Aside from the internal storage of programs, a major characteristic of...
... carried
Computing Comes of Age, 1956–1964 71
quality of ‘‘random access’’: that any piece of data was as accessible as
any other, in contrast to the sequential retrieval of a datum from a deck
of ... penetration of computing two decades later, in
the form of automatic teller machines, bar-coded products scanned at
supermarket and retail check-out stations, and massive fin...
... commit-
tee had to argue that the advantages of having a path for upward
migration for 36 0-customers would overwhelm any advantages of a
competitor’s shot at a particular model.
At the highest end ... of cards to the campus IBM
mainframe. Among its most famous applications was as a controller for
the Tech Model Railroad Club’s layout.
57
Clearly the economics of
mainframe co...
... and
economical way of using a computer.
A key factor was the development of disk storage that offered rapid
and direct access to large amounts of data. IBM had pioneered the use
of disk storage with RAMAC ... played a
crucial role by providing a market. The ‘‘advanced’’ Minuteman was a
brand-new missile wrapped around an existing airframe. Autonetics, the
division of North...
... from a company that made
oscilloscopes.
By 1970 the first of a line of dramatically cheaper and smaller
calculators appeared that used integrated circuits.
28
They were about
the size of a paperback ... was writing BASIC for the Altair, Gates was at Harvard. He
did not have access to an 8080-based system, but he did have access to a
PDP-10 at Harvard’s computing center (named a...
... formal and
serious than those on Usenet, although they also had a wide range. After
about a decade and a half of parallel operations, all three of these
streams blended into a community of news, ... A few programs were announced at the
same time: a ‘‘paint’’ (drawing) program, based on work done at Xerox-
PARC on a Data General Nova, and a word processor that came close...
... help of others at NCSA, Mosaic was rewritten to run on
Windows-based machines and Macintoshes as well as workstations. As a
product of a government-funded laboratory, Mosaic was made available
free ... did
introduce a phrase that would figure in later trials. This was a suit filed in
1987 by Lotus against a company called Paperback Software, established
by Adam Osborne of portab...
... Development of PASCAL,’’ ACM
Sigplan Notices 28: 3 (March 19 93) : 33 3 34 2.
Notes to Pages 104–107 37 1
87. Paul Cress, Paul Dirkson, and J. Wesley Graham, Fortran IV with WATFOR and
WATFIV (Englewood ... accountant’s once -a- year affair with a woman. The accountant (played
by Alan Alda in the movie version) used the Bowmar to keep track of the affair.
30 . Electronics (April 17...