Computers/Information Technology

Linux is a free reimplementation of the POSIX specification, with SYSV and BSD extensions, developed primarily by Linus
Torvalds (torvalds@kruuna.helsinki.fi) at the university of Helsinki in Finland.Linux was developed with the help of other
programmers across the Internet, allowing anyone with enough knowledge to develop and change the system.
A large amount of code written for linux is developed by the GNU project at The Free Software Foundation in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.

The Dark Ages: C/C++ Networking and the Need for Change
Before Java, simple network connectivity required lots of code.
C/C++ provided many, many choices/options for networking
Good for C programmers.
Most programmers did not use all these options.

Welcome to Computer Chronicles: From Stone to Silicon! This page is designed to inform people young and old about how the computers that we use today came into being. The voyage starts in about 3000 BC, with the invention of the abacus in ancient China. It proceeds through the development of vacuum tubes, transistors, integrated circuits, microprocessors and countless other inventions until the computer of today.

Interest in and use of the World Wide Web has been expanding at a phenomenal rate. As the Web grows, so must its vehicle of communication, HTML. The HTML 2.0 specification is dated November, 1995. Since then, the HTML 3.0 draft specification expired on September 28, 1995, without becoming recommended, and HTML 3.2 became a W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Recommendation on January 14, 1997. Now we have the public draft for HTML 4.0, announced on July 8, 1997. This draft is almost certain to undergo changes before being accepted by the W3C as a Proposed Recommendation--if it does, indeed, ever become a recommendation.

The ABACUS II, designed and built by Texas Instruments, was the first practical automated production machine for the assembly of integrated circuits. Using heat and pressure, it bonded fine gold wire to microscopic contacts on the silicon chip and pin connections on the package. The ABACUS II could maintain a positioning accuracy of ± 0.00025 inch while bonding up to 375 devices an hour. Following the success of this prototype, almost 1,000 ABACUS II wire bonders were built, making the economical mass production of integrated circuits a reality.

WELCOME
To the History of Home Video Games homepage!
NOTE: This page is dedicated to Home Videogames. Are you into Arcade Games? Don't fret! There's plenty of info out there. Click here if you're interested in that sort of thing.

The following timeline provides a look at important occurrences in the development of the field of artificial intelligence. Those items in bold print are what we considered the most significant events in the development of AI. To investigate a topic further, follow the links provided, or check out some of the other sites provided at the bottom of the page.

In 1949, a young engineer named Ralph Baer was given an assignment to build a television set. He wasn't supposed to build just any television set, but one that would be the absolute best of all televisions. This was not a problem for Baer, but he wanted to go beyond his original assignment and incorporate some kind of game into the set. He didn't know exactly what kind of game he had in mind, but it didn't really matter because his managers nixed the idea. It would take another 18 years for his idea to become a reality, and by that time there would be other people to share in the glory, like Willy Higinbotham, who designed an interactive tennis game played on an oscilloscope, and Steve Russell, who programmed a rudimentary space game on a DEC PDP-1 mainframe computer. And then there was also Nolan Bushnell, who played that space game and dreamed of a time when fairground midways would be filled with games powered by computers.

Linux is a freely available operating system for PCs: to be more precise, it is one of many flavors of Unix. Linux is being developed on the Internet by several thousand people, first and foremost by Linus Torvalds , who created Linux for the 80386 in 1991. Linux is being tested and used by many more (the total is thought to be in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions).

Shareware was born simultaneously in two places. In Tiburon, California, it was born as the program PC-Talk, fathered by Andrew Fluegelman. In Bellevue, Washington, it sprang to life as PC-File, the brain child of Jim Knopf. This is my half of the story. I'm Jim Knopf, the father of Shareware. This is the story I used to call "How did I get into this mess?"
I needed a program to print mailing labels for a local church congregation. I had an Apple computer, so I wrote the program in Applesoft BASIC. I wanted more than just a label printing program, so I wrote a general purpose database program. I liked what I produced so much the program itself became a hobby - something I continued to work on and improve in my spare time.