Research

Chuck Moore's Programming Language 1.1 Early Development Moore's programming career began in the late 1950's at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory with programs to compute ephemerides, orbital elements, satellite station positions, etc. [Moore, 1958], [Veis, 1960]. His source code filled two card trays. To minimize recompiling this large program, he developed a simple interpreter to read cards controlling the program. This enabled him to compose different equations for several satellites without recompiling. This interpreter featured several commands and concepts that survived into modern Forth, principally a command to read "words" separated by spaces and one to convert numbers from external to internal form, plus an IF … ELSE construct. He found free-form input to be both more efficient (smaller and faster code) and reliable than the more common Fortran practice of formatting into specific columns, which had resulted in numerous re-runs due to mis-aligned columns.

Dr. Robert Moog was the pioneer of the analog synthesizer. His visionary work is recognized by all who participated at the leading edge of music synthesis. However, these devices had to be adjusted hourly to keep them in tune. Creating a composition with them was tedious at best. Hal Chamberlin and David Cox, founders of Micro Technology Unlimited (MTU), quickly realized this problem disappeared with digital synthesis, and started to develop products using digital synthesis and audio editing. The roots for the DAW started from the commercial needs for precise control of audio on computers; government funded speech research, commercial telephone research, and University computer music synthesis centers. Only the music centers needed 16-bit quality A/D-D/A converters running at CD quality sample rates. The first Professional DAWs were mini and mainframe computers with audio A/D-D/A converters added for audio input/output. The status "father of Digital Audio" is granted to Max Matthews who was at AT&T doing speech research for Telephony.

The first computers did not have operating systems. However, software tools for managing the system and simplifying the use of hardware appeared very quickly afterwards, and gradually expanded in scope. By the early 1960s, commercial computer vendors were supplying quite extensive tools for streamlining the development, scheduling, and execution of jobs on batch processing systems. Examples were produced by UNIVAC and Control Data Corporation, amongst others. Through the 1960s, several major concepts drove the development of operating systems. They included the development of the IBM System/360, a family of mainframe computers available in widely differing capacities and price points, for which a single operating system OS/360 was developed. IBM's current mainframe operating systems are distant descendants of this original system, and applications written for the OS/360 can still be run on modern machines.

Operating systems have been evolving through the years. In this excerpt from his book, Modern Operating Systems, Andrew Tanenbaum briefly looks at a few of the highlights. Since operating systems have historically been closely tied to the architecture of the computers on which they run, Dr. Tanenbaum looks at successive generations of computers to see what their operating systems were like. This mapping of operating system generations to computer generations is crude, but it does provide some structure where there would otherwise be none.

Foreword 1977 Pullman, Washington. I was working as a Sales Executive for the Xerox Corporation. One of the Xerox Service Technicians and I were walking down one of the main streets after work - headed for a local watering hole - when we passed a Radio Shack store that had one of the new TRS-80 Microcomputers on display in the window. He said "I've been reading about these - let's go inside and look at it." I wasn't sure why he would want to look at a computer - we were working for the world's largest copier company and I had absolutely no interest in computers. He walked up to this computer and began typing on the keyboard. In less than a minute he had a message appearing on the computer screen that kept repeating his name and "Xerox Corporation." I was both astounded and fascinated. Here was an ordinary human being - a regular guy - who walks up to a computer and gets it follow his commands! This was a moment that changed my life.

Founded in 1989, Maestro Technologies is a leading developer of integrated software solutions for the construction industry – and only the construction industry. Our portfolio of software solutions was designed from day one to address the dynamic, project-driven environment of the construction industry. From submitting initial bids, to tracking change order details, determining percentage of completion, and managing payroll - the Maestro solutions track costs, revenues and communications from planning to closing using a single interface. And this is all backed by our leading customer support and professional services organizations to ensure you receive the high level of service you richly deserve.

For over a decade, the Chairmen's Committee and Sponsors of the Computerworld Honors Program have made possible the creation of oral histories and video biographies of some of the most provocative thinkers and leaders of the information technology revolution.

In the 1980s I wrote dozens of letters to companies asking for more information on their products. Some of them manufactured hardware or wrote software while others were vendors of other companies' products. I kept all the materials they sent me, from catalogs of software to brochures for new products, in a stack which eventually grew to over a foot high with hundreds of sheets of paper.

Computer history is a fascinating realm of interesting facts and exciting events occurring through the 20th and 21st centuries (NOT!!!!). Your group will be embarking on a mission, if you decide to accept it (actually you have little choice in the matter), to produce your own accurate view of the history of computers. Instead of listening to your teacher talk about computer history you have a group mission.

Of course, there are many aspects to the architecture of a computer besides its instruction set. As an example of a user-interface element that varies from one computer to another, here is a laptop-esque keyboard in what I consider to be a very nice, if old style, color scheme: