Research

This brief history illustrates the origins and major events in open source. •Overview •Expensive, esoteric computers •The rise of proprietary software •Proprietary UNIX •The debate on the fringes •Linux •The Internet and the Bazaar •Netscape's big move •The Open Source Initiative •Dot-coms and anti-Microsoft •The current storm

Compiled by Barbara Flueckiger, professor of film studies at the University of Zurich; please report errors or suggestions, download table as PDF (without links, version January 2011).

1824: Peter Roget presented his paper 'The persistence of vision with regard to moving objects' to the British Royal Society. 1831: Dr. Joseph Antoine Plateau (a Belgian scientist) and Dr. Simon Rittrer constructed a machine called a phenakitstoscope. This machine produced an illusion of movement by allowing a viewer to gaze at a rotating disk containing small windows; behind the windows was another disk containing a sequence of images. When the disks were rotated at the correct speed, the synchronization of the windows with the images created an animated effect.

What is Gentoo? Gentoo is a free operating system based on either Linux or FreeBSD that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme configurability, performance and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.

A daemon is a type of program on Unix-like operating systems that runs unobtrusively in the background, rather than under the direct control of a user, waiting to be activated by the occurance of a specific event or condition.

Someone prodded me into drawing up a timeline of the Emacs family tree. Let me know if you have any additions/corrections.

dBASE was the first widely used database application for microcomputers, published by Ashton-Tate for CP/M, and later on the Apple II and IBM PC under DOS where it became one of the best-selling software titles for a number of years. dBASE was never able to transition successfully to Microsoft Windows and was eventually displaced by newer products like Paradox and FoxPro. Ashton-Tate was later sold to Borland in 1991, which sold the rights to the product line in 1999 to the newly-formed dBASE Inc.

dBASE may be traced back to the mid 1960's in the form of a system called RETRIEVE, which was marketed by Tymshare Corporation. RETRIEVE was used by Jet Propulsion Laboratory of Pasadena,Calif. In the late 60’s Jeb Long, a new programmer at JPL, was assigned the task of writing a program which would perform the same functions as RETRIEVE.

MATLAB® is a high-level technical computing language and interactive environment for algorithm development, data visualization, data analysis, and numerical computation. Using MATLAB, you can solve technical computing problems faster than with traditional programming languages, such as C, C++, and Fortran.

MATLAB is an interactive programming environment for scientific computing. MATLAB is heavily used in many technical fields for data analysis, problem solving, and for experimentation and algorithm development. Discipline-specific software written in MATLAB, organized into libraries of functions called toolboxes, is widely used as well. MATLAB has found extensive use as the basis for computational laboratory work in technical education; more than 1000 textbooks use MATLAB as a teaching vehicle. MATLAB is a product of The Mathworks of Natick, Massachusetts, USA.