... 169
NACA. See National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics
NAS. See National Advanced Systems
NASA (National Aeronautics and
Space Administration). See also
National Advisory Committee for
Aeronautics
440 ... originated with Donald Davies of the
National Physical Laboratory in the U.K. See Martin Campbell-Kelly, ‘‘Data
Communications at the National Physical Laboratory (1965–1975),’’ Annals...
... 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...
... 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...
... information-handling
machines, played. Information or ‘‘intelligence’’ has been a crucial
part of all warfare, but as a means to an end. In the Cold War it
became an end in itself. This was a war of code-breaking, ... Eckert and Mauchly designed and built
the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical
Engineering. The ENIAC was an electronic calculator...
... 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...
... 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...
... commit-
tee had to argue that the advantages of having a path for upward
migration for 360-customers would overwhelm any advantages of a
competitor’s shot at a particular model.
At the highest end ... on modern
personal computers, than like the archival storage style of mainframe
tape drives.
66
The physical packaging of the PDP-8, a factor that mattered less for
large syste...
... 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 after Howard Aiken).
He ... 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...
... 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 ... it took large teams of people to create in the
commercial or academic world.
As important as that programming was, just as important was the legal
agreement Stallman crafted to guaran...
... collections. A Bowmar was
even mentioned in the hit Broadway play ‘‘Same Time Next Year,’’ which was
about an accountant’s once -a- year affair with a woman. The accountant (played
by Alan Alda in the ... the last time these words are spoken. But promises of a technological
Utopia have been common in American history, and at least a few
champions of the Internet are aware of ho...