Research

This Timeline is based on "A History of the Internet" by Harri K. Salminen. It has been complemented with details from a paper by Juha Heinänen, "Eunet in Finland – History". Facts about the development of the Finnish Communication and Internet Exchange (FICIX) have been supplied by Jorma Mellin. The document has been edited by Tommi Karttaavi. Comments can be sent to [email protected]. This version dated: 2004-08-09

The Internet emerged in the U.S. engineering research community between 1969 and 1983, an outgrowth of the marriage between computing and communications technologies. Australian computing researchers had less advanced but cost-effective mechanisms in place at the time, and adopted the Internet protocols only when they had reached a level of maturity. Rapid progress was made from 1989 onwards. By 1993-94, the U.S. Internet backbones were in transition from an academic infrastructure to a more conventional business model. Australian use by individuals, business and government grew almost as fast as it did in the fastest adopting countries, the U.S.A. and Scandinavia. As a result, a new business model was implemented in Australia in 1994-95.

1955 [1] IBM introduces the 704. Principal architect is Gene Amdahl; it is the first commercial machine with floating-point hardware, and is capable of approximately 5 kFLOPS.

Human-computer interaction (HCI) is an area of research and practice that emerged in the early 1980s, initially as a specialty area in computer science. HCI has expanded rapidly and steadily for three decades, attracting professionals from many other disciplines and incorporating diverse concepts and approaches. To a considerable extent, HCI now aggregates a collection of semi-distinct fields of research and practice in human-centered informatics. However, the continuing synthesis of disparate conceptions and approaches to science and practice in HCI has produced a dramatic example of how different epistemologies and paradigms can be reconciled and integrated.

Even in prehistoric times there were no doubt schemes for computation based for example on making specific arrangements of pebbles. Such schemes were somewhat formalized a few thousand years ago with the invention of the abacus. And by about 200 BC the development of gears had made it possible to create devices (such as the Antikythera device from perhaps around 90 BC) in which the positions of wheels would correspond to positions of astronomical objects. By about 100 AD Hero had described an odometer-like device that could be driven automatically and could effectively count in digital form. But it was not until the 1600s that mechanical devices for digital computation appear to have actually been built. Around 1621 Wilhelm Schickard probably built a machine based on gears for doing simplified multiplications involved in Johannes Kepler’s calculations of the orbit of the Moon. But much more widely known were the machines built in the 1640s by Blaise Pascal for doing addition on numbers with five or so digits and in the 1670s by Gottfried Leibniz for doing multiplication, division and square roots. At first, these machines were viewed mainly as curiosities. But as the technology improved, they gradually began to find practical applications. In the mid-1800s, for example, following the ideas of Charles Babbage, so-called difference engines were used to automatically compute and print tables of values of polynomials. And from the late 1800s until about 1970 mechanical calculators were in very widespread use. (In addition, starting with Stanley Jevons in 1869, a few machines were constructed for evaluating logic expressions, though they were viewed almost entirely as curiosities.)

openSUSE ( /ˌoʊpənˈsuːzə/) is a general purpose operating system built on top of the Linux kernel, developed by the community-supported openSUSE Project and sponsored by SUSE. After Novell acquired SUSE Linux in January 2004, Novell decided to release the SUSE Linux Professional product as a 100% open source project.

Linus Benedict Torvalds (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈliːn.ɵs ˈtuːɹ.vald̥s] ( listen); born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish[2][5] software engineer and hacker, best known for having initiated the development of the Linux kernel. He later became the chief architect of the Linux kernel, and now acts as the project's coordinator. He also created the revision control system Git.

Desktop virtualization (sometimes called client virtualization), as a concept, separates a personal computer desktop environment from a physical machine using the client–server model of computing. Virtual desktop infrastructure, sometimes referred to as virtual desktop interface (VDI) is the server computing model enabling desktop virtualization, encompassing the hardware and software systems required to support the virtualized environment.

In computing, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is a virtual machine implementation using the operating system's kernel. This often allows for greater performance than when using virtual machine solutions which rely on user-space drivers. For the sake of this article, KVM will refer to the Linux kernel virtualization infrastructure. KVM supports native virtualization on x86 processors that provide Intel VT-x or AMD-V extensions but does not depend on it; it has also been ported to S/390,[1] PowerPC,[2] and IA-64, and an ARM port is in progress.

Qumranet, Inc is an enterprise software company offering a desktop virtualization platform based on hosted desktops in Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM) on servers, linked with their SPICE protocol. The company is also the creator, maintainer and global sponsor of the KVM open source hypervisor.