Research

The pace at which computers get updated is getting faster and faster. We are no longer impressed by the giant leaps humanity sometimes takes when it come to technology. Even though we continuously invent new ways to speed up, make smaller, and refine already existing technology, it looks like we are about to reach the end of processor speeds by the end of 2023. Some people don’t feel too worried about it, but should we be? The fact is that if everything stays on course, the microchips will get too small to hold the electrons that determine the processor speed. So what will happen when we have reached this limit? Will there be some kind of new technology that will take its place and further increase processor speeds?

History a Brief History of GUI Graphic User Interfaces were considered unnecessary overhead by early computer developers, who were struggling to develop enough CPU horsepower to perform simple calculations. As CPU power increased in the sixties and early seventies, industrial engineers began to study the terminal entry programs of mainframes to optimize entry times and reduce mis-types. The earliest mainframe query protocols still in use, i.e., airline reservation systems, were developed during this period to queue as much information as possible into the shortest command. Essentially, operators were trained to perform computer language interpretation in their heads.

The first Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) theorist was Vannevar Bush, a War Scientist who worked at MIT (Massachusets Institute of Technology) during World War II. In 1945 he published the article "As We May Think" 4 in a magazine, in which he describes his vision of an information-administration tool, the Memex. The concept envisions a hypermedia system in which data is stored on microfilm and made accessible, linkable and programmable.

Journal of Imaging Science and Technology · Volume 42, Number 1, January/February 1998 Progress and Trends in Ink-jet Printing Technology Hue P. Le, Le Technologies, Inc., Beaverton, Oregon This paper provides a brief review of the various paths undertaken in the development of ink-jet printing. Highlights of recent progress and trends in this technology are discussed. The technologies embedded in the latest ink-jet products from current industry leaders in both thermal and piezoelectric drop-on-demand ink-jet methods are also described. Finally, this article presents a list of the potential ink-jet technology applications that have emerged in the past few years.

In the Days Before GUIs WordPerfect originated in the days when top-of-the-line printers were daisywheel impact devices requiring manual intervention to change fonts, and when on-screen displays were restricted to a single monospaced font. Particularly flexible dot-matrix printers included half a dozen fonts.

In order to provide an efficient and effective way to control printer features across many different printing devices, HP created PCL. PCL was originally conceived and devised for HP's dot matrix and Inkjet printers. The first printer in HP's LaserJet series, the HP LaserJet was released in 1984 with the PCL 3 version of the language.

Is the floppy disk dead? As an useful format the answer to this is a resounding... Probably... After all it's a venerable format first introduced in 1971. Though it has gone through many incarnations since it reached maximum capacity at 2880Kb in 1991. Since then the world of computer storage has moved on and though many PCs are still supplied with floppy drives and floppy disks are still being sold in the shop perhaps it's time for this storage solution to finally fade away. After all, there are other solution which will perform the floppy disk's function equally well: if not better.

In 1980 Sony and Philips set the standard for the digital audio (DA) compact disc format. In 1982, the first Sony CD player called the CD-101 was released with Billy Joel's 52nd Street being the first musical production. With the success of CDs the first portable car players became available in 1984. Then, in 1985, the automatic CD changer with a carousel appeared on the market. In the 1990s, the industry began to adopt various storage standards to unify the plethora of hybrid CD formats perfected by third-party developers. These commonly agreed-upon formats were published in a set of coloured-cover books, becoming commonly known by their de facto names as the coloured-book standards. Today many formats are available for various applications such as computer data storage (CD-ROM), imaging (PhotoCD), interactive multimedia (CDi), multi-session data and audio (mixed mode 1 & 2), with the most common of these being the digital audio (DA) format.

One of the revolutionary technological breakthroughs of the late 20th Century was the creation of the compact disc. The CD technology was first developed by Sony in the late 1970s, and became available commercially in the 1980s. By the end of the 1980s, the CD had emerged as the medium of choice for audio playback, replacing the vinyl album, 8 track and cassette tape.

A Compact Disc or CD is an optical disc used to store digital data, originally developed for storing digital audio. The CD, available on the market since late 1982, remains the standard physical medium for commercial audio recordings as of 2007.