DAVID WEISS
Ethernet
"The blue network cables" on the back of a computer, it's a network system using these familiar "twisted pair" wires to form a LAN (local areanetwork in your home or office before your router sends stuff out over thelarger internet).
Grace Hopper
"The grandmother of COBOL", she was an American computer scientist and US Navy rear admiral who, in the 1950's, pioneered tools to move programming from low-level instructions to higher-level English-like languages, including inventing the first compiler and greatly influencing the creation of the COBOL language, popular for business applications.
WYSIWYG
"What You See Is What You Get" when your editor software shows you exactly what the final product will look like. Originally, it was "show me what will print on the screen before I waste a bunch of paper" but now it can be a web page editor or anything else that shows you the final look asyou're editing.
Spacewar!
1962: The first video game, or at least the first made where the program code was shared with others and not just used on the one computer it was first written on. It's a two-player 2-D spaceship shooter game. The computer it ran on was the DEC PDP-1 which only a few universities, laboratories, and companies could afford (at $120,000 in 1961, that's a million-dollar computer in today's money). In 1979, the single-player Asteroids game was pretty similar and a big hit in arcades for a quarter a game. Now you can find it free online.
Liang Lingzan
A Chinese inventor who in around the year 725 built the first fully mechanical clock, an astronomical water clock made of bronze to calculate dawn, dusk, and lunar phase.
NoSQL
A nonrelational database that is better tuned for accessing large data sets.
JavaScript
A scripting language developed by Netscape to enable Web authors to design interactive sites
AWS
Amazon Web Services offers reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services. Free to join, pay only for what you use.
Texas Instruments
American company in the semiconductor business, known historically forproducing the silicon transistor, the transistor radio, the integrated circuit (Jack Kilby), the hand-held calculator, speech synthesizer chips, DLP projectors in movie theatres, and maybe most importantly today DSP chips (digital signal processors) that are embedded in many, many things from consumer electronics to industrial to medical to military.
Pingala
An ancient Indian scholar (around 200 BC?) known for first investigating the binary number system (using only 0 and 1, or light and heavy) in the meter of poetry and music
R
Award Winning Top rated IT Services and Products in Concord, CA, Computer Repair, Notebook Repair, Laptop Repair, Managed Services Provider, cost-effective strategies for IT, since 1986, innovative computer solutions for home users to small-to-medium-sized companies and large Fortune 500.
Bill Gates
Bill Gates created MICROSOFT
C#
C# is designed to work with Microsoft's .Net platform.
C++
C++ is a general-purpose object-oriented programming (OOP) language, developed by Bjarne Stroustrup, and is an extension of the C language.
Robert Noyce
Called the "Mayor of Silicon Valley", he worked there in semiconductors, first for Shockley before leaving with 7 others to found Fairchild, then leaving that with Gordon Moore to found Intel (1968). He was a pioneer in the first integrated circuits.
Dennis Ritchie
Computer scientist at Bell Labs who wrote the C programming language (still very popular) and co-wrote the Unix operating system (alive today in many forms including macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, and more) in the late 1960s-early 1970s.
Windows
Computers. a section of a display screen that can be created for viewing information from another part of a file or from another
cyber bullying
Cyberbullying is the use of cell phones, instant messaging, e-mail, chat rooms or social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter to harass, threaten or intimidate someone.
the slide rule
Developed in the 1600s, these devices used logarithmic scales on sliding pieces of wood to quickly perform mathematical calculations, and were used extensively into the 1970s until electronic calculators from Texas Instruments and Hewlett Packard became easily available.
Edsger Dijkstra
Dutch computer scientist (1930-2002) famous for graph algorithms, concurrent and distributed computing, and for hating the "go to" statement in many programming languages that jumps the code's flow toan arbitrary position, leading to confusing "spaghetti code". Instead, he preferred "structured programming" which is how we organize code todayin organized pieces like functions.
Kathleen Booth
English mathematician, author, and professor who in 1947 wrote the first assembly language, the low-level instructions for a given CPU design.
Claude Shannon
Father of information theory: at MIT and then Bell Labs, he developed the theoretical proof that electrical switches could implement all of the problems solvable by Boolean algebra, worked on cryptography during World War II, and with his formula for information entropy, invented the field of information theory.
Al-Jazari
Father of robotics: Arab scholar, engineer, and inventor who around the year 1200 wrote a book of mechanical designs including a design for a programmable mannequin, an elephant clock, and his castle clock, a water-powered astronomical clock with elaborate animated figures.
Charles Babbage
Father of the computer: In 1822 he designed the first mechanical computer, starting with his "Difference Engine" for calculating polynomial functions, then his more general purpose "Analytical Engine" which he never completed, but whose design is much the same as modern computers.
Alan Turing
Father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence: this English computer scientist developed a mathematical model of computation called the Turing machine, worked in World War II at Bletchley Park to break the cryptographic code of the Nazis' Enigma machine, and developed the Turing test for whether artificial intelligence can be distinguished from a human. There is a recent movie, The Imitation Game, about him. He was tragically treated horribly by the British government after the war.
Intel
Founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore in Silicon Valley, California, this is the dominant chip maker in the world for PC microprocessors. Servers, PCs, laptops and some tablets, but not really many phones. Phones mostly use ARM-based chips (RISC or reduced instruction set computer, lower power, less heat, so more battery life) while Intel is good at fast, hot, expensive, and power-hungry chips, though they are making progress in power use.
Hewlett-Packard
Founded in a garage in California in the 1930s, HP is a huge company known for PCs, calculators, printers, software and services.
Morse code
From the 1800s, the encoding of text and decimal digits into a binary series of dots and dashes for transmission on telegraph lines, where common letters have shorter codes than more rare letters.
Konrad Zuse
German engineer who created the first programmable computer in 1941, called the Z3, then the first high-level programming language, called Plankalkül (German for Plan Calculus).
Napier's bones
In the early 1600s, a Scottish mathematician made this calculating device out of rods covered in patterns of digits which were inserted into a board and allowed rapid computation of products and quotients.
Moore's law
Gordon Moore worked in Silicon Valley in semiconductors, first for Shockley before leaving with 7 others to found Fairchild, then leaving thatwith Robert Noyce to found Intel (1968). He's most known for his "law" that the number of transistors in chip doubles about every two years. Quite accurate for about 50 years, it looks like it's about done—hard to shrink transistors any more.
GUI
Graphical User Interface. Commonly on PCs it's WIMP for "windows, icons, menus, pointer", but GUI is more general for whatever visual interactive system is presented to the user.
HTTP
HTTP means HyperText Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web and this protocol defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands.
Douglas Engelbart
He gave "The Mother of All Demos" at a conference in 1968 ("demo" is short for product demonstration). He showed graphical "windows", hypertext links, the mouse, better graphics than had been seen (bitmap), real-time collaboration, video conferencing, word processing, and more. This was absolutely ridiculously advanced for the time—like seeing a decade or two into the future. You can find the demo online! He worked ata lab at the Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International), and later some of its workers went on to Xerox PARC (the copy machine company) where many of these ideas were refined, and where Steve Jobs visited and saw the future of his Apple Macintosh.
IBM
Herman Hollerith invented a mechanical punch-card-based tabulator machine to help with the US Census of 1890, resulting in a company that became International Business Machines, the dominant company in computing through most of the 20th century.
Packet-switching
How the internet works: data transmissions are broken into small chunkscalled packets with a header (describing the to and from addressing of thedata and the correct order of the packets) and payload (actual data). Packets can be routed independently and reassembled into the correct data at the receiving end.
John von Neumann
Hungarian-American mathematician known for describing in 1945 the computer architecture where there's a CPU, a memory unit containing both data and instructions together, input and output devices, and external storage. This architecture is the basis of most modern computer designs. He also made fundamental contributions to Game Theory, nuclear weapon design on the Manhattan Project, the mathematics of quantum mechanics, and more.
PC clones
IBM PC compatible computers are those similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, able to run the same software and support the same expansion cards as those. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones.
UNIVAC
Improved upon the ENIAC, this was the first commercial computer in the US. It was designed for military, government, and big business use. Thousands of vacuum tubes made the programmable circuits. Data was on magnetic tape. First one was in Philly. It famously predicted Eisenhower's victory in the 1952 presidential election.
Bell Labs
In Murray Hill, New Jersey, this famous 20th century laboratory (named after telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell) was the origin of much of the modern world of technology: the transistor (all modern computers and electronics), the laser (now in the fiber optics that form the infrastructure of the internet), the CCD (electronic cameras), the Unix operating system (basis for macOS, iOS, Linux, etc.), the C and C++ programming languages. Oh, and by accident the faint leftover glow of the Big Bang, called the cosmic microwave background, was discovered there, too.
IBM PC
In September 1975 the company introduced the IBM 5100, its first "portable" computer. ("Portable" meant that it weighed just 55 pounds and you could buy a special travel case to lug it around in.)
ENIAC
Invented in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, an enormous electronic computer, the size of a small house, with tens of thousands of electrical components, used to compute hydrogen bomb calculations using the Monte Carlo method of random sampling for simulations.
Jacquard loom
Invented in France in around 1800, this machine automated the production of textiles in complex patterns by using a long series of punched cards, and different patterns of holes in the cards programmed different patterns in the resulting cloth.
JSON
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) is a lightweight data-interchange format. It is easy for humans to read and write.
MIT
Massachusetts Institute of Technology: university with research labs and many associated software projects and startup companies like BBN Technologies (first email, early networking), VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet app for PC), the GNU Project (lots of popular free and open- source software), Akamai (distributed content delivery on the internet), the RSA public-key cryptography system (initializing secure connections on the internet), the LISP programming language, and the educational programming languages Logo, Scratch, and App Inventor.
EDSAC
May 6, 1949: birthday of modern computing. At Cambridge University in England, John von Neumann's design worked as a complete programmable computer using paper tape to input and output data.
Dell
Michael Dell founded Dell Computer Corporation, dba PC's Limited, in 1984 while a student at the University of Texas at Austin. Operating from Michael Dell's off-campus dormitory room at Dobie Center, the startup aimed to sell IBM PC-compatible computers built from stock components.
Azure
Microsoft Azure is an open, flexible, enterprise-grade cloud computing platform.
Microsoft
Microsoft was founded by Paul Allen and Bill Gates on April 4, 1975, to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Microsoft Windows.
Jack Kilby
Nobel Prize-winning electrical engineer who built the first practical integrated circuits at Texas Instruments in 1958. (He made them using the semiconductor germanium, which Bob Noyce soon replaced with silicon which we use today.) He also co-invented the handheld calculator and the thermal printer.
William Shockley
Nobel Prize-winning physicist who led the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs, in 1947 New Jersey. After conflict at Bell Labs, he left for California to start a new lab. Eight of his employees were unhappy with his management style and left to form Fairchild Semiconductor and to use silicon instead of germanium for their transistors - the origin of "Silicon Valley", California. (Two of them left Fairchild and formed Intel.)
Java
One design goal of Java is portability, which means that programs written for the Java platform must run similarly on any combination of hardware and operating system with adequate runtime support.
UNIX
Operating System developed in the 1970s at the Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (and others). It's the source of a huge number of modern operating systems including macOS and iOS (Apple), Android (Google), and Linux, but not Microsoft Windows.
XEROX PARC
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) is a division of the copy machine company Xerox, known for its early development of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) with a "desktop" and "windows" with a mouse, the laser printer, ethernet networking—basically the PC of the 1980s and 1990s butthey had it working in the 1970s and failed to do anything with it commercially (too expensive). Steve Jobs saw it and Apple made the more affordable Macintosh.
PHP
PHP executes on the server, while a comparable alternative, JavaScript, executes on the client. PHP is an alternative to Microsoft's Active Server Page ( ASP) technology.
Oracle
Prediction
public key cryptograph
Public key cryptography (PKC) is an encryption technique that uses a paired public and private key (or asymmetric key) algorithm for secure data communication. A message sender uses a recipient's public key to encrypt a message. To decrypt the sender's message, only the recipient's private key may be used.
Python
Python is said to be relatively easy to learn and portable, meaning its statements can be interpreted in a number of operating systems, including UNIX-based ... principle of least privilege (POLP):
the Macintosh
Released by Apple all you needed, to do was click a menu selection button.
Ruby
Ruby is considered similar to Smalltalk and Perl . The authors of the book Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide , David Thomas and Andrew Hunt say that it is fully object-oriented, like Smalltalk, although more conventional to use, and as convenient as Perl.
Bletchley Park
Secret British headquarters assigned during World War II to break the cryptographic code of the Nazis' Enigma machine and others. It was the site of specially designed mechanical devices and vacuum-tube-based electronic computers developed to aid in the analysis of enemy ciphers.
Tim Berners-Lee
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee OM KBE FRS FREng FRSA FBCS (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English engineer and computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web.
SAP
Special Access Program
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs is responsible for the The Apple II The iPod. iTunes. The iPhone. The iPad.
Steve Wozniak
Steve Wozniak is an American computer scientist best known as one of the founders of Apple and the inventor of the Apple II computer.
SQL
Structured Query Language, an international standard for database manipulation.
Sun Microsytems
Sun Microsystems, Inc. was an American company which sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services, and that created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the Network File System (NFS) and SPARC.
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was an early packet switching network and the first network to implement the protocol suite TCP/IP. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet
the Cloud
The Cloud may refer to: The Cloud (company), a wireless network operator
GPL license
The GNU General Public License is a widely used free software license, which guarantees end users the freedom to run, study, share and modify the software.
IoT (internet of things)
The Internet of Things refers to the ever-growing network of physical objects that feature an IP address for internet connectivity, and the communication that occurs between these objects and other Internet-enabled devices and systems.
DNS
The Internet's system for converting alphabetic names into numeric IP addresses. For example, when a Web address (URL) is typed into a browser, DNS servers return the IP address of the Web server associated with that name.
Minitel
The Minitel was a Videotex online service accessible through telephone lines, and is considered one of the world's most successful pre-World Wide Web online services.
NEXT
The NeXT Computer is a workstation computer developed, marketed, and sold by NeXT Inc. It runs the Mach- and BSD-derived, Unix-based NeXTSTEP operating system, with a proprietary GUI using a Display PostScript-based back end.
Apple
The company Steve Jobs created that changed he world of technology
Altair 8800
The first commercially successful personal computer. Well, it's not much to look at, but hobbyists could buy one for a reasonable price from this little company in New Mexico called MITS, when otherwise computers were only available to research labs and large companies. Bill Gates and Paul Allen (college drop-outs—please don't do that!) told the Altair's creator they had a BASIC programming language interpreter that would work on the Altair and could they demonstrate it? They had no such program and didn't even have an Altair, but in 8 weeks they got it working, traveled to New Mexico to show it, and founded Microsoft in 1975. In California, Steve "Woz" Wozniak (expelled from University of Colorado for hacking) also saw an Altair at the local Homebrew Computer Club.
Pong
The first commercially successful video game, played like tennis, and it was in arcades and bars as well as in early home games consoles. 1970s.
Ada Lovelace
The first computer programmer: in 1843 she translated an Italian description of Babbage's "Analytical Engine" into English and added her own notes containing the first computer program, and she even has a programming language named after her.
Atari 2600
The first enormously successful home video game console (they sold like 30 million). Arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac Man were add-on cartridges you could buy (around the year 1980).
FORTRAN
The first high-level programming language, invented at IBM in the 1950's and still used today in numerical and scientific computing.
The Abacus
These ancient devices (starting around 2500 BC) were made of beads on a wooden frame for numerical computing; even square roots can be done.
George Boole
This English mathematician developed binary or "Boolean" algebra (with just 1 and 0, true and false), which is implemented today in digital circuitsand computer programming.
Blaise Pascal
This French scholar from the 1600s invented the mechanical calculator and later had a programming language named after him.
integrated circuit
This is a collection of electronic circuits all produced together on one piece of silicon. Transistors are integrated into this small "microchip" or just "chip" and the whole thing is fabricated in multiple layers by photolithography. Very, very different from wiring individual components together by hand in older vacuum-tube-based electronics: IC fabrication facilities cost billions but can mass-produce tiny chips at low cost.
the Transistor
This is why we're here, one of the most important inventions of human history (I'll admit "fire" and "the wheel" were pretty good, too). It uses electricity to affect the conductivity of doped silicon, and so uses electricity to control other electricity, which can control other electricity and so on. Electrical signals can be amplified and switched on/off, all with no moving parts. Transistors printed by the billions using photolithography make up the microchips used in our modern devices.A working transistor was made at Bell Labs in 1947 New Jersey, but really the 1970's is when the microprocessor came about commercially in "Silicon Valley", California.
Swift
This means that the various accessors have what is in effect a pointer to the same data storage, but this takes place far below the level of the language, in the computer's memory management unit (MMU)
Vint Cerf
Vint Cerf (Vinton Gray Cerf) is an American computer scientist best known as an Internet pioneer. With engineer Bob Kahn, Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol suite and the architecture that enabled the global "network of networks" that the Internet has become. ... Founding president of the Internet Society
VisiCalc
VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet computer program for personal computers, originally released for the Apple II by VisiCorp.
spreadsheet
an electronic document in which data is arranged in the rows and columns of a grid and can be manipulated and used in calculations
Watson
Watson is a question answering computer system capable of answering questions posed in natural language, developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci.
AI (artificial intelligence)
a branch of computer science dealing with the simulation of intelligent behavior in computers. 2 : the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior.
relational database
a database structured to recognize relations among stored items of information
blockchain
a digital ledger in which transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are recorded chronologically and publicly.
wifi
a facility allowing computers, smartphones, or other devices to connect to the Internet or communicate with one another wirelessly within a particular area.
broadband
a high-capacity transmission technique using a wide range of frequencies, which enables a large number of messages to be communicated simultaneously.
Android
a mobile robot usually with a human form
search engine
a program that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web.
BASIC
a simple high-level computer programming language that uses familiar English words, designed for beginners and formerly used widely.
intellectual property
a work or invention that is the result of creativity, such as a manuscript or a design, to which one has rights and for which one may apply for a patent, copyright, trademark, etc.
World Wide Web
an information system on the Internet that allows documents to be connected to other documents by hypertext links, enabling the user to search for information by moving from one document to another.
digital identity
defines identity as "set of attributes related to an entity". ... This may also be referred to as an online identity.
zero-day
deriving from or relating to a previously unknown vulnerability to attack in some software. "the service is designed to detect all manner of malware, including zero-day threats"
iOS
is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware.
malware
software that is intended to damage or disable computers and computer systems.
TCP/IP
stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, which is a set of networking protocols that allows two or more computers to communicate.
GNU/Linux
the GNU project was created for the development of a Unix-like operating system that comes with source code that can be copied, modified, and redistributed.
Net neutrality
the principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites.
social media
websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.
