Questions tagged [history]
History of computers, digital electronics, hardware manufacturers, and software developers.
991 questions
5votes
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Did the CDC 7600 have a 'deadstart switch panel' like the 6600?
The CDC 6600 had a panel of 12 rows of 12 switches which was used to start the machine. A 12-word program for Peripheral Processor 0 (PP0) could be set up on the switches and loaded into PP0 memory, ...
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3votes
0answers
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Looking for Hans Pufal's Comprehensive Computer Catalogue
During the 1990 Hans Pufal started to create a list of all (*1) computers ever made, he called it the Comprehensive Computer Catalogue (CCC). It was an incredible piece of work done by a very ...
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4answers
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What is the origin of hexadecimal and binary notation in computer? [closed]
The idea of a binary and hexadecimal notation were not new in the 1900s, and a timeline of sorts can be made,as follows -- the binary system seems to have a poorer history. However, none of these ...
- 903
19votes
2answers
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Origin of "foo", "bar", and "baz"
I'm pretty sure I've seen references to these words as placeholders, variable names, etc. going back to at least the 1970s. I always guessed there was a connection to "FUBAR" there somewhere,...
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6answers
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What was the most complete encoding for English before Unicode?
According to the Unicode website: These earlier character encodings were limited and did not cover characters for all the world’s languages. Even for a single language like English, no single ...
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8votes
3answers
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When did CRT monitors become common?
The use of CRT displays on computers date back to Whirlwind I (1951). I also know there was use of them on PDP's and IBM's. However, most times when I look up stuff before around '75, a CRT display ...
- 903
3votes
0answers
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Did any Algol 58 implementation support the “do” facility?
Algol 58 had a do statement that performed a kind of macro substitution. It is described on page 16 in the preliminary report. Even though the language was intentionally drafty and incomplete, various ...
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4votes
1answer
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Who originated the paged database structure with extents?
An old (late 1970s) DBM library I'm reverse-engineering has the following page structure (genericized): Contents Comment Page ID DB name + page number in the DB Usage Extent count in the pageThe last ...
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Why is the term "card" used in "expansion card"?
I'm curious about the historical origin of the use of the word "card" in "expansion card." "Expansion board" makes sense, given it's a PCB, and a PCB is a board (of ...
- 303
1vote
1answer
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Is the first version of Ken Thompson's DBM library still available?
Per Wikipedia, In computing, a DBM is a library and file format providing fast, single-keyed access to data. ... The original dbm library and file format was a simple database engine, originally ...
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5votes
2answers
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Have any 2-bit or 3-bit computers ever been designed?
Computers can work with as little as 1 bit of data at a time, have only 1 instruction, and 1-bit RAM was once common. A big step up, 4-bit architectures were very versatile, including the famous Intel ...
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24votes
4answers
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Was there a different 64-bit design for x86 from Intel?
I remember reading an article in a computer magazine around the year 2000 (most likely in the German c't magazine), about the different (planned?) 64-bit extensions for the x86 family. It had an ...
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5votes
0answers
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Rationale for requiring struct prefix in C [closed]
In C, if you declare a struct like: struct point { int x, y; }; you also have to use struct when referring to point, e.g.: struct point p; // declare p as struct point because all struct, union,...
14votes
6answers
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What was the first multi core CPU? [closed]
What was the first CPU which was capable of running two independent instructions in parallel? The commonly given answer is the IBM POWER4 but that's likely incorrect because the Sun MAJC 5200 was, to ...
- 1,252
10votes
0answers
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What is the history behind the four different "official-looking" icons seen in the wild for Yellow Book CDs?
While building a wall of nostalgic logos, I realized that one of the "Compact Disc" logo variants I was certain I remembered... ...had no vector logo files anywhere on the Internet and, it ...
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