Research

Apollo Computer, Inc., founded 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo was one of the first vendors of graphical workstations in the 1980s. Apollo produced much of its own hardware and software.

Silicon Graphics, Inc. (commonly initialised to SGI, historically sometimes referred to as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark. Its initial market was 3D graphics display terminals, but its products, strategies and market positions evolved significantly over time.

MAINGEAR is an American privately held boutique computer manufacturer headquartered in Kenilworth, New Jersey. MAINGEAR specializes in custom gaming computers, desktops, custom laptops, media center computers, and workstations which are built and supported in the United States.

BOXX Technologies is a private company manufacturing high-performance computing hardware solutions focused toward the visual effects, game development, CGI animation and broadcasting markets. The company was founded in 1996 as Digital Emulsion of Phoenix, Arizona. As of 1998, BOXX Technologies is located in Austin, Texas.

Alienware is an American computer hardware subsidary of Dell, Inc. It mainly assembles third party components into desktops and laptops with custom enclosures for high-performance gaming. These products also support graphically intense applications such as video editing, simulation, and audio editing. Alienware also offers for sale rebadged computer peripherals, such as headsets, computer mice, monitors and keyboards. Their hardware has distinctive "sci-fi" styling, typically including decorative lighting. Alienware was founded in 1996 by Nelson Gonzalez and Alex Aguila. Alienware's corporate headquarters is located in The Hammocks, unincorporated Miami-Dade County, Florida, near Miami.

AVADirect, Inc. is an American computer manufacturing company located in Twinsburg, Ohio near Cleveland. They specialize in highly customized computer systems including Microsoft Windows and Linux servers, high-end workstations and gaming systems, business PCs, and notebooks.

A workstation is a high-end microcomputer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by one person at a time, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term workstation has also been used to refer to a mainframe computer terminal or a PC connected to a network.

A complete history of computing would include a multitude of diverse devices such as the ancient Chinese abacus, the Jacquard loom (1805) and Charles Babbage's ``analytical engine'' (1834). It would also include discussion of mechanical, analog and digital computing architectures. As late as the 1960s, mechanical devices, such as the Marchant calculator, still found widespread application in science and engineering. During the early days of electronic computing devices, there was much discussion about the relative merits of analog vs. digital computers. In fact, as late as the 1960s, analog computers were routinely used to solve systems of finite difference equations arising in oil reservoir modeling. In the end, digital computing devices proved to have the power, economics and scalability necessary to deal with large scale computations. Digital computers now dominate the computing world in all areas ranging from the hand calculator to the supercomputer and are pervasive throughout society. Therefore, this brief sketch of the development of scientific computing is limited to the area of digital, electronic computers. The evolution of digital computing is often divided into generations. Each generation is characterized by dramatic improvements over the previous generation in the technology used to build computers, the internal organization of computer systems, and programming languages. Although not usually associated with computer generations, there has been a steady improvement in algorithms, including algorithms used in computational science. The following history has been organized using these widely recognized generations as mileposts.

Microsoft Forefront Threat Management Gateway (Forefront TMG), formerly known as Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA Server), is a network security and protection solution for Microsoft Windows, described by Microsoft as "enables businesses by allowing employees to safely and productively use the Internet for business without worrying about malware and other threats".

A home server is a server located in a private residence providing services to other devices inside and/or outside the household through a home network and/or the Internet. Such services may include file and/or printer serving, media center serving, web serving, web caching, account authentication and backup services. Because of the relatively low number of computers on a typical home network, a home server commonly does not require significant computing power. Often, users reuse older systems, and home servers with specifications as low as 1 GHz CPU and 256 MB of RAM can be used. Large, preferably fast hard drives (ATA-100 or SATA) and a network interface card are usually all the hardware required for home file serving. An uninterruptible power supply is recommended in case of power outages that can possibly corrupt data.