Research

History of Decompilation (1960-1979) Decompilers have been written for a variety of applications since the development of the first compilers. The very first decompiler was written by Joel Donnelly in 1960 at the Naval Electronic Labs to decompile machine code to Neliac on a Remington Rand Univac M-460 Countess computer. The project was supervised by Professor Maurice Halstead, who worked on decompilation during the 1960s and 70s, and published techniques which form the basis for today's decompilers. It is for this reason that we dedicate this page to the memory of Prof Maurice Halstead and award him the title of Father of Decompilation.

Overview Nothing epitomizes modern life better than the computer. For better or worse, computers have infiltrated every aspect of our society. Today computers do much more than simply compute: supermarket scanners calculate our grocery bill while keeping store inventory; computerized telphone switching centers play traffic cop to millions of calls and keep lines of communication untangled; and automatic teller machines (ATM) let us conduct banking transactions from virtually anywhere in the world. But where did all this technology come from and where is it heading? To fully understand and appreciate the impact computers have on our lives and promises they hold for the future, it is important to understand their evolution.

Machine code or machine language is a system of instructions and data executed directly by a computer's central processing unit. Machine code may be regarded as a primitive (and cumbersome) programming language or as the lowest-level representation of a compiled and/or assembled computer program. Programs in interpreted languages are not represented by machine code, however, their interpreter (which may be seen as a processor executing the higher level program) often is. Machine code is sometimes called native code when referring to platform-dependent parts of language features or libraries. Machine code should not be confused with so called "bytecode", which is executed by an interpreter.

1972 The KDF9 computer is retired from service and replaced by an ICL 1906A installed in a new specially-designed building in Elms Road. The Service Division of the Computer Centre was greatly expanded in size and moved into the new building, while the Academic Division (responsible for all computer science teaching and research) remained in the Aston-Webb Building and adjacent "temporary" huts. This physical separation of the Academic and Service Divisions of the Computer Centre led inevitably to a sharper separation in their roles. The Academic Division began to function more and more as any other academic department in the Faculty of Science and Engineering (and the University moved gradually to funding it in this way also). However, computer science teaching and research was still totally dependent upon the Service Division for all computing facilities (in 1972 the Academic Division had no computing equipment of its own).

Minicomputer is a largely obsolete term for a class of multi-user computers which make up the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems (mainframe computers) and the smallest single-user systems (microcomputers or personal computers). More modern terms for such machines include midrange systems (common in IBM parlance), workstations (common in Sun Microsystems and general UNIX/Linux parlance), and servers.

Prime Computer produced minicomputers from 1972 until 1992. They came in various shapes and sizes and used the PrimOS operating system. They were big old propriety boxes of course. Prime Computer was one of the 70s and 80s minicomputer manufacturers. In 1980 Prime Computer was the number one moving stock on the NYSE up a stunning 272%!

This is The Minicomputer Orphanage, a place where you can find information on computers from companies no longer in business. It contains sales brochures, reference manuals, and other things. This was started because with the passage of time, these computer systems are just below the Internet event horizon, and there is almost no on-line information on them.

1780 - Early public schools adopt the teacher/manager model with the teacher as the primary manger of instruction and assessment in a single classroom. 1946 - First vacuum tube-based computers developed; universities help in computer development effort; technology used in war effort.

The Mark-8 Minicomputer was the third microprocessor based computer ever made available to the public, second in America, and the first to grace the cover of a popular magazine. Arguably, the first widely known. Here's my short version of computer history.

Introduction: the history of Minicomputers in the Netherlands - written for the evaluation committee of the Dutch Historical Computers Register by Geert Rolf, Willem van der Poel, Edo Dooijes and Gerard Alberts, September 2007 Compared with normal, big computers, minicomputers, which originated in the early 60s, were limited in size, but also in capacity. Unlike the then-standard mainframe machines, the principal environmental requirement was: connection with the outside physical world by means of sensors and actuators. The word length was small and memory capacity was relatively limited, due to the expected applications.