Kindle Notes & Highlights
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May 23 - October 21, 2019
The impact of the demonstration was such that it has
since entered into computer folklore as “the moth...
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GRAIL was implemented on an IBM System/360 Model
display screen and a Burroughs prototype display controller equipped with a RAND Tablet pointing device.
Despite the use of a medium-scale mainframe computer, the compute-intensive nature of the software was such that the system could onl...
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were based on expensive mainframe systems which made them incompatible with the new vision of personal computing
flat panel display technology was in its infancy
The Alto was based on a custom 16-bit processor with 128 Kilobytes of semiconductor memory
14-inch CRT display in portrait orientation with 606 by 808 resolution raster graphics.
removable disk cartridges, each of which had a storage capaci...
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The clock speed was a respectable 5.9 MHz.
The task of developing this network was given to Robert M (Bob) Metcalfe
Metcalfe had studied the University of Hawaii’s ALOHAnet system while working on his doctoral dissertation at
Harvard in...
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Diablo disk drive.
The Ethernet network was operational by November 1973
Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group.
Kay’s work on object-oriented programming had resulted in the development of a new language and programming environment which he called Smalltalk,
Smalltalk-72,
Diana Merry,
these windows could be overlapped in order to make the most of the Alto’s limited screen resolution, a concept which had first appeared in Kay’s 1969 doctoral thesis.
pop-up menus for accessing commonly used commands which were displayed at the cursor position by pressing the middle mouse button.
Kay’s concept of overlapping windows led to the adoption of a desktop metaphor,
The mouse was also used to select text for editing and function keys were used for commands such as cut, copy, paste and undo.
added menus at the top of each window to create a modeless interface.
‘styles’ to represent a set of properties which control the formatting of a document, such as headings, fonts and paragraph alignment.
Development of BravoX began in 1976 and was com...
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what made it special was the use of small pictograms or ‘icons’ to represent commands.
This type of user interface acquired the acronym WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers).
novel laser printing mechanism invented by optical engineer Gary K Starkweather at Xerox’s Webster Research Center in 1969.
The Star graphical user interface was developed by a team led by David Canfield Smith, who also coined the term ‘icon’ in his doctoral thesis at Stanford University.
The desktop metaphor pioneered on the Alto was extended to include icons for representing files, folders and objects which perform functions, such as an e-mail inbox, a calculator, a printer and a floppy disk drive.
allowing text to be cut and pasted between them.
A study had shown that users seldom wanted to overlap windows, preferring instead to place the windows alongside each other,
384 Kilobytes of memory which was expandable up to 1.5 Megabytes, a choice of 10, 29 or 42 Megabyte hard disks and an 8-inch floppy disk drive.
3Com and Adobe Systems,
the Swiss computer scientist Niklaus E Wirth,
Introduced in September 1979, the MC68000 was one of the earliest 32-bit microprocessors to reach the market. It quickly became established as the 32-bit
bit microprocessor of choice amongst computer designers due to its 16-bit data bus and 24-bit external address bus which made the chip much less expensive to produce and easier to implement than a full 32-bit device.
The result was the Stanford University Network (SUN) which initially incorporated the Xerox equipment plus two DEC VAX 11/780 minicomputers.
Vinod Khosla,
former MBA classmate Scott G McNealy,
Sun Microsystems in Santa Clara, California, in February 1982,
BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) Unix,
meet the principal developer, a postgraduate student and part-time teaching assistant by the name of William N (Bill) Joy.
Between 1985 and 1989 Sun Microsystems was reputed to be the fastest growing company in the United States.
Sun’s own design of microprocessor, the SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture).
company’s Network File System (NFS) becoming established through the RFC process as the industry standard
“The Network is the Computer”
In 1984 Silicon Graphics
