Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Friday, September 21, 2012
Thursday, August 18, 2011
A century of IT
web3.University of North Texas
A Century of IT (Excerpts)
Last month marked another significant IT anniversary. IBM turned 100 years old, marking a century of development in information technology. From card sorters and typewriters to mainframes and supercomputers, IBM had a large role in how we organized and transmitted business information in the twentieth century.
Another way in which IBM supported the popularization of the Internet was via the development of the IBM Personal Computer. While the first IBM PC predated the commercial Internet by many years, it was the IBM PC standard that changed the course of computing and IT. The Apple II started the personal computing revolution, Commodore, Atari and Radio Shack (TRS-80) had their brief contributions, but it's no question that the IBM PC and the many compatible hardware emulations to follow opened up computing to a much wider audience.
The PC also served as a platform for networked communication, with store and forward networks like FidoNet acting like a BITNET for the masses. Later, in the heyday of dialup networks like Compuserv and AOL the PC was a popular platform for such connectivity. The personal Internet would not have happened nearly as quickly without the personal computer.
IBM was the dominant computing company for a large part of the twentieth century. You might say that information technology was to the 1900's what railroads were to the 1800's and IBM was in the middle of it all and driving much of the progress for most of the century. IBM no longer makes PCs (they sold that business to a Chinese company, Lenovo), but the idea that ordinary people can write apps, create videos, or develop the next big thing on the Internet would not be possible without the IBM's pioneering role in defining information technology and personal computing. Even considering the positives and negatives associated with IBM, you can't deny its influence. That's a pretty impressive 100 years.
Last month marked another significant IT anniversary. IBM turned 100 years old, marking a century of development in information technology. From card sorters and typewriters to mainframes and supercomputers, IBM had a large role in how we organized and transmitted business information in the twentieth century.
Another way in which IBM supported the popularization of the Internet was via the development of the IBM Personal Computer. While the first IBM PC predated the commercial Internet by many years, it was the IBM PC standard that changed the course of computing and IT. The Apple II started the personal computing revolution, Commodore, Atari and Radio Shack (TRS-80) had their brief contributions, but it's no question that the IBM PC and the many compatible hardware emulations to follow opened up computing to a much wider audience.
The PC also served as a platform for networked communication, with store and forward networks like FidoNet acting like a BITNET for the masses. Later, in the heyday of dialup networks like Compuserv and AOL the PC was a popular platform for such connectivity. The personal Internet would not have happened nearly as quickly without the personal computer.
IBM was the dominant computing company for a large part of the twentieth century. You might say that information technology was to the 1900's what railroads were to the 1800's and IBM was in the middle of it all and driving much of the progress for most of the century. IBM no longer makes PCs (they sold that business to a Chinese company, Lenovo), but the idea that ordinary people can write apps, create videos, or develop the next big thing on the Internet would not be possible without the IBM's pioneering role in defining information technology and personal computing. Even considering the positives and negatives associated with IBM, you can't deny its influence. That's a pretty impressive 100 years.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
History of Mac OS X
Source
| This article is part of the Mac OS X series. |
| New features |
| History |
| Transition to Intel processors |
| Architecture |
| Technologies |
| List of applications |
| Components |
Mac OS X is the newest of Apple Inc.'s Mac OS line of operating systems. Although it is officially designated as simply "version 10" of the Mac OS, "version 9" had a completely different codebase, file system, design, and hardware support. Mac OS had been Apple's primary operating system since 1984, and the family was backward compatible, so Mac OS X supported an emulated version 9 until version 10.5.
Unlike its predecessor, Mac OS X is a Unix-like operating system built on technology that had been developed at NeXT through the second half of the 1980s and up until Apple purchased the company in early 1997. It was first released in 1999 as Mac OS X Server 1.0, with a desktop-oriented version (Mac OS X v10.0) following in March 2001. Since then, six more distinct "client" and "server" editions of Mac OS X have been released, the most recent being Mac OS X v10.6, which was first made available on August 28, 2009. Releases of Mac OS X are named after big cats; the current version of Mac OS X is nicknamed "Snow Leopard".
Diagram of the relationships between Unix systems including the ancestors of Mac OS X
Saturday, January 31, 2009
history of internet
ll"History of the internet" is an animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to filesharing, from Arpanet to Internet.
The history is told using the PICOL icons on picol.org , which are available for download soon. On blog.picol.org you can get news about this project.
Voice-over by Steve Taylor http://voice-pool.com
Credits for subtitles:
(The correctness of the subtiles depends on the people listed down here)
English: Stefan Badragan | youtube.com/StevXtremeThe history is told using the PICOL icons on picol.org , which are available for download soon. On blog.picol.org you can get news about this project.
Voice-over by Steve Taylor http://voice-pool.com
Credits for subtitles:
(The correctness of the subtiles depends on the people listed down here)
Italian: Stefan Badragan
German: me
French: Arnaud 'dehy' DE MOUHY
Bulgarian: Andrian Georgiev
Sunday, September 14, 2008
History of free software
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it was normal for computer users to have the freedoms that are provided by free software.
Software was commonly shared by individuals who used computers and by hardware manufacturers who were glad that people were making software that made their hardware useful. In the 1970s and early 1980s, the software industry began using technical measures (such as only distributing binary copies of computer programs) to prevent computer users from being able to study and modify software. In 1980 copyright law was extended to computer programs.
In 1983, Richard Stallman, longtime member of the hacker community at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, announced the GNU project, saying that he had become frustrated with the effects of the change in culture of the computer industry and its users. Software development for the GNU operating system began in January 1984, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) was founded in October 1985. He developed a free software definition and the concept of "copyleft", designed to ensure software freedom for all.
Free software is a widespread international concept, producing software used by individuals, large organizations, and governmental administrations. Free software has a very high market penetration in server-side Internet applications such as the Apache web server, MySQL database, and PHP scripting language. Completely free computing environments are available as large packages of basic system software, such as the many GNU/Linux distributions and FreeBSD. Free software developers have also created free versions of almost all commonly used desktop applications, including Web browsers, office productivity suites, and multimedia players. It is important to note, however, that in many categories, free software for individual workstations or home users has only a fraction of the market share of its proprietary competitors. Most free software is distributed online without charge, or off-line at the marginal cost of distribution, but this pricing model is not required, and people may sell copies of free software programs for any price.
The economic viability of free software has been recognised by large corporations such as IBM, Red Hat, and Sun Microsystems. Many companies whose core business is not in the IT sector choose free software for their Internet information and sales sites, due to the lower initial capital investment and ability to freely customize the application packages. Also, some non-software industries are beginning to use techniques similar to those used in free software development for their research and development process; scientists, for example, are looking towards more open development processes, and hardware such as microchips are beginning to be developed with specifications released under copyleft licenses (see the OpenCores project, for instance). Creative Commons and the free culture movement have also been largely influenced by the free software movement.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Unix, Linux, Free-Open Source SW
A History of UNIX and UNIX Licences
The history of UNIX is in large part the history of UNIX licensing. An interview with UNIX, Internet historian Peter Salus, author of A Quarter Century of Unix (AWL). Taped at Usenix Technical Conference 2001. [2001-09-26] (0:49:50)
Unix historian, author Peter Salus retraces the ten year history of Linux. Peter Salus is the author of A Quarter Century of Unix published by Addison-Wesley. [2002-03-12] (1:11:08)
The history of UNIX is in large part the history of UNIX licensing. An interview with UNIX, Internet historian Peter Salus, author of A Quarter Century of Unix (AWL). Taped at Usenix Technical Conference 2001. [2001-09-26] (0:49:50)
- VIDEO PLAY RealPlayer VIDEO [34-150kbps] [FIREWALL] (requiere por lo menos tranferencia de 250kbps)
10 Year History of Linux
Unix historian, author Peter Salus retraces the ten year history of Linux. Peter Salus is the author of A Quarter Century of Unix published by Addison-Wesley. [2002-03-12] (1:11:08) Entire Program (1:11:08)
- AUDIO PLAY MP3
- AUDIO SAVE MP3 (17,074K)
Problems with MP3? READ MP3 HELP.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
Yggdrasil: Fist Linux Live CD
Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X
Excerpts from: The Daemon, the GNU & the Penguin ~ by Dr. Peter H. Salus
Chapter 20. Proliferating Penguins - Part I:
From the early 1980s on, the big gripe about Unix was that it had split and resplit, that there were just too many variants. The fact that they had a common base was irrelevant to the critics -- and many (if not most) of those critics were selling VMS or MVS or DOS or...
Following Linus' postings of 1991, there soon were what we have come to call "distributions." And, rather than utilizing ftp, they came on CD-ROM.
The first of these was Adam Richter's Yggdrasil
(in the Old Norse Edda, Yggdrasil is the "world ash," from a branch of which Odin/Wotan made his spear). Yggdrasil alpha was released on 8 December 1992. It was called LGX: Linux/GNU/X -- the three components of the system. Recall that Gilmore, Tiemann and Henkel-Wallace formed Cygnus in 1989. Richter spoke to Michael Tiemann about setting up a business, but was "definitely uninterested in joining forces with Cygnus."
Yggdrasil beta was released the next year. Richter's press release read:
The Yggdrasil beta release is the first UNIX(R) clone to include multimedia facilities as part of its base configuration. The beta release also includes X-windows, networking ... an easy installation mechanism, and the ability to run directly from the CD-ROM.
The beta was priced at $50; the production release was $99.
SuSE was formed in 1992 also, as a consulting group (SuSE was originally S.u.S.E., which stood for "Software-und-System-Entwicklung," Software and System Development), but did not release a Linux distribution for several years. The next distribution -- and the oldest still in existence -- was Patrick Volkerding's Slackware, released 16 July 1993, soon after he graduated from Minnesota State University Moorhead. It, in turn, was the basis for SuSE's release "Linux 1.0" of SLS/Slackware in 1994. (SLS was "Softlanding Linux System," Peter McDonald's 1992 distribution, on which parts of Slackware were based.) SuSE later integrated Florian La Roche's Jurix distribution, resulting in a unique distribution: SuSE 4.2 (1996).
The next year, Mark Bolzern was trying to sell a Unix database from Multisoft, a German company. He encountered difficulties because it was relatively expensive to set up the Unix system. Then he came across Gnu/Linux and realized that he now had a real solution. He convinced Multisoft to port Flagship (the db) to Linux and "that was the first commercial product released on Linux," Bolzern said.
"People were always having trouble installing Linux," he continued, "and then Flagship wouldn't run right because something had changed." Bolzern decided that what was needed was a release that wouldn't change for a year, so he "picked a specific distribution of Slackware" and "the name Linux Pro." Soon he was selling more Linux than Flagship: "we're talking hundreds per month."
And when Red Hat came out, Bolzern picked that up.
Mark Ewing had set up Red Hat in 1993. Mark Ewing has said: "I started Red Hat to produce a development tool I thought the world needed. Linux was just becoming available and I used [it] as my development platform. However, I soon found that I was spending more time managing my Linux box than I was developing my software, and I concluded that what the world really needed was a good Linux distribution..."
Excerpts from: The Daemon, the GNU & the Penguin ~ by Dr. Peter H. Salus
Chapter 20. Proliferating Penguins - Part I:
From the early 1980s on, the big gripe about Unix was that it had split and resplit, that there were just too many variants. The fact that they had a common base was irrelevant to the critics -- and many (if not most) of those critics were selling VMS or MVS or DOS or...
Following Linus' postings of 1991, there soon were what we have come to call "distributions." And, rather than utilizing ftp, they came on CD-ROM.
The first of these was Adam Richter's Yggdrasil
(in the Old Norse Edda, Yggdrasil is the "world ash," from a branch of which Odin/Wotan made his spear). Yggdrasil alpha was released on 8 December 1992. It was called LGX: Linux/GNU/X -- the three components of the system. Recall that Gilmore, Tiemann and Henkel-Wallace formed Cygnus in 1989. Richter spoke to Michael Tiemann about setting up a business, but was "definitely uninterested in joining forces with Cygnus."
Yggdrasil beta was released the next year. Richter's press release read:
The Yggdrasil beta release is the first UNIX(R) clone to include multimedia facilities as part of its base configuration. The beta release also includes X-windows, networking ... an easy installation mechanism, and the ability to run directly from the CD-ROM.
The beta was priced at $50; the production release was $99.
SuSE was formed in 1992 also, as a consulting group (SuSE was originally S.u.S.E., which stood for "Software-und-System-Entwicklung," Software and System Development), but did not release a Linux distribution for several years. The next distribution -- and the oldest still in existence -- was Patrick Volkerding's Slackware, released 16 July 1993, soon after he graduated from Minnesota State University Moorhead. It, in turn, was the basis for SuSE's release "Linux 1.0" of SLS/Slackware in 1994. (SLS was "Softlanding Linux System," Peter McDonald's 1992 distribution, on which parts of Slackware were based.) SuSE later integrated Florian La Roche's Jurix distribution, resulting in a unique distribution: SuSE 4.2 (1996).
The next year, Mark Bolzern was trying to sell a Unix database from Multisoft, a German company. He encountered difficulties because it was relatively expensive to set up the Unix system. Then he came across Gnu/Linux and realized that he now had a real solution. He convinced Multisoft to port Flagship (the db) to Linux and "that was the first commercial product released on Linux," Bolzern said.
"People were always having trouble installing Linux," he continued, "and then Flagship wouldn't run right because something had changed." Bolzern decided that what was needed was a release that wouldn't change for a year, so he "picked a specific distribution of Slackware" and "the name Linux Pro." Soon he was selling more Linux than Flagship: "we're talking hundreds per month."
And when Red Hat came out, Bolzern picked that up.
Mark Ewing had set up Red Hat in 1993. Mark Ewing has said: "I started Red Hat to produce a development tool I thought the world needed. Linux was just becoming available and I used [it] as my development platform. However, I soon found that I was spending more time managing my Linux box than I was developing my software, and I concluded that what the world really needed was a good Linux distribution..."
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