Research

A+ is a powerful and efficient programming language. It is freely available under the GNU General Public License. It embodies a rich set of functions and operators, a modern graphical user interface with many widgets and automatic synchronization of widgets and variables, asynchronous execution of functions associated with variables and events, dynamic loading of user compiled subroutines, and many other features. Execution is by a rather efficient interpreter. A+ was created at Morgan Stanley. Primarily used in a computationally-intensive business environment, many critical applications written in A+ have withstood the demands of real world developers over many years. Written in an interpreted language, A+ applications tend to be portable.

Not any computer programming language can do anything. There are limitations, and actually, different languages are used for different tasks.

Germany - Konrad Zuse During the 1930's and 40's in Germany, Konrad Zuse was developing a series of automatic calculating machines. They were almost entirely mechanical and had no stored program but they were contolled by punched tape (old film reels hand punched). The first compputer, the Z1, was entirely mechanical, including memory and logic gates, and so data transfer was difficult. The Z2 used relays for gates but was too unreliable for much use. The Z3, in 1941, used relays for memory as well, and had in total 2,600 of them. It was as fast as the Harvard Mark I, produced 2 years later, and could do 3,4 additions in a second. The Z4 was similar except Zuse reverted to a mechanical memory. In 1950, this was the only operational computer in Europe.

The history of the web browser dates back to the late 1980s. We liked this infographic. The thickness of each band illustrates the relative popularity of each browser.

The development and evolution of the Mozilla browser, from its Netscape-seeded beginnings through the Firefox releases of today, can be fascinating. Numerous changes occurred to the software in terms of technology, features, and appearance; particularly when Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox were both in their infancy and many groundbreaking developments were made. Much of this software was not widely seen or used when initially released, with its focus limited to enterprising testers and developers for several years. Several releases, however, provided the basis for Netscape 6.x and 7.x releases that were oriented towards end users, which as an essential part of the context are also covered here.

The Opera browser started out in 1994 as a research project in Norway's telecom company, Telenor. Independent development was continued by Opera Software ASA in 1995. The first public release of the Opera Browser was version 2.12 although earlier demo versions have been found and screenshots of the 1.0 version are available on the web.

Jon S. von Tetzchner, along with colleague Geir Ivarsøy, started developing a Web browser while working for Norwegian Telecom Research (Telenor) in 1994. Soon after, the Opera browser was available for the public and is now widely used, pioneering many innovations that have revolutionized Web browsing.

BIOS is an acronym for Basic Input Output System. It is the program that stores configuration details about your computer hardware and enables your computer to boot up. Every time your computer is switched on the BIOS loads configuration data into main memory, performs a routine diagnostic test on your hardware, then loads the operating system. The BIOS resides in a ROM (Read-Only memory) chip, which is mounted on the motherboard, usually in a socket so it is removable.To the right is an example of what a BIOS chip may look like in your motherboard. This is a PLCC 32 pin type BIOS chip. It is a very common type.

ASP was first announced by Microsoft in November, 1996 (code named "Denali") and introduced March 97 to manage HTTP 1.0 as a part of Microsoft's Internet Information Server version 3 (code name “Gibraltar”).

Milestone years, culled from a variety of sources. If you search the net you will find dozens of chronologies, so why compile yet another? Sadly most seem more determined to show that the digital computer was developed in their own country by their own company than they are to correctly attribute the pioneering work of individuals. For example, the bizarre legal ruling in an American court in 1971, that the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was not the first digital computer, in favour of ENIAC's claim. A legal ruling reversed in 1973 after a lengthy court trial. So now you can be sued for denying that Iowa State University's slogan Birthplace of the Electronic Digital Computer is true!