Introduction to DOS

The development of MS-DOS

MS-DOS is the most well known operating system, the most commercialised version is that of Microsoft, christened "MS-DOS" (there are other versions such as DR-DOS). MS-DOS was created in 1981 when it was used on an IBM PC.

Introduction to the operating system

DOS, as with any operating system, controls computer activity. It manages operations such as data flow, display, data entry amongst other various elements that make up a system.

The role of DOS is to interpret commands that the user enters via the keyboard.
These commands allow the following tasks to be executed:

A brief history of the Macintosh

This article's goal is to trace the history of Apple, Inc. through its major products, and in particular its flagship: the Macintosh.

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs were two high school friends to whom we owe the creation of the first Apple computers. Their first steps into the computer industry were with Hewlett Packard (for Wozniak), and Atari (for Jobs). It was Steve Wozniak who was inspired first, creating what would later become the Apple I in 1976. His friend Jobs urged him on, and on 1 April 1976, they created the company Apple Computer, in order to be able to sell the Apple I. This first machine was unsuccessful, and they had to wait until 1977 for their company's first hit, the Apple II.

Introduction to Microsoft Windows NT

Windows NT (for "New Technology") is a 32-bit operating system developed by Microsoft.

Windows NT's outward appearance makes it look a lot like Windows 95/98/Millennium, but Windows NT has a separately developed kernel. Because of this, Windows NT has the following characteristics:

• Windows NT is a preemptive multitasking system;
• Windows NT is a multi-user system, which means that depending on the user who is connected to the system, the interface might be different, as might system privileges;
• Windows NT natively supports numerous network features;
• Windows NT has more security, in particular for the file system (NTFS) as well as for the robustness of the OS.

NT, 2000, XP

History and genesis of Linux

This entirely free operating system is the brainchild of Linus B.Torvalds. At the beginning of the 90s, Torvalds wanted to create his own operating system for his graduate project. Linus Torvalds intended to develop a version of UNIX which could be used on a 80386 type architecture. The first UNIX clone which worked on a PC was Minix, written by Andrew Tanenbaum, a minimal operating system which could be used on a PC. Linus Torvalds then decided to expand the possibilities of Minix by developing what would become Linux. Amused by this initiative, a number of persons contributed to help Linus Torvalds turn this system into reality, and in 1991, a first version of the system was published. In March 1992, the first version containing almost no bug was distributed.

With the growing number of developers working on this system, the system quickly integrated free redevelopments of tools available on commercial UNIX systems. Aftwards, new tools for Linux began to appear at an incredible rate.

History of Windows

Windows is the operating system sold by the Seattle-based company Microsoft. Microsoft, originally christened "Traf-O-Data" in 1972, was renamed "Micro-soft" in November 1975, then "Microsoft" on November 26, 1976.

Microsoft entered the marketplace in August 1981 by releasing version 1.0 of the operating system Microsoft DOS (MS-DOS), a 16-bit command-line operating system

The first version of Microsoft Windows (Microsoft Windows 1.0) came out in November 1985. It had a graphical user interface, inspired by the user interface of the Apple computers of the time. Windows 1.0 was not succesful with the public, and Microsoft Windows 2.0, launched December 9, 1987, did not do much better.

7 Rules of Success from Steve Jobs Life

Steve Jobs' impact on your life cannot be underestimated. His innovations have likely touched nearly every aspect -- computers, movies, music and mobile. Here are 7 rules of success from Steve Job's life

10 Best Hacker Movies (Films about Computer Hacking) of All Time

I have here my top 10 list or my all time favorite hacker movies or films that involve computer hacking. Feel free to share yours on the comment section later on:

10. Swordfish
If you are a big fan of Halle Berry and of course, computers, then this movie is for you. This action-packed film involves a high-tech robber/villain named Gabriel Shear (John Travolta) against Stanley Jobson (Hugh Jackman), a super hacker convicted by the FBI but who is trying to stay clean. Gabriel is the leader of a covert counter-terrorist unit called Black Cell who wants to steal $9.5 billion worth of money from a secret government slush fund (codenamed Swordfish). But since it's locked up behind a complicated encryption system, he offers the desperate Stanley $10 million to hack into the system and steal the money for him.

Hacking & Security Related Movies

Swordfish (2001)	Hackers 2: Takedown	Antitrust (2001)	Sneakers (1992)	Die Hard 4 (2007)
The Net (1995)	Hackers (1995)	Tron (1982)	Tron: Legacy (2010)	WarGames (1983)

Top 10 Richest Person in Technology 2011 | Net Worth

1. Bill Gates

Net worth: $53 billion

Despite his net worth rising $13 billion since last year, software visionary Gates dropped in rank to the world’s second richest man, beaten by Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim Helu. A big reason for Gates’ larger fortune: Microsoft shares rose 50% in the last 12 months. Other investments include Four Seasons hotels, Televisa and AutoNation. Gates stepped down from day-to-day duties at Microsoft in July 2008 to focus on philanthropy at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates Home

Internet History Urdu 1

Internet History Video 2

Internet History Video 1

Internet History Part 4

1990

ARPANET formally shuts down. In twenty years, ‘the net’ has grown from 4 to over 300,000 hosts. Countries connecting in 1990 include Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Greece, India, Ireland, South Korea, Spain, and Switzerland. Several search tools, such as ARCHIE, Gopher, and WAIS start to appear. Institutions like the National Library of Medicine, Dow Jones, and Dialog are now on line.

Internet History Part 3

1980

Landweber’s proposal has many enthusiastic reviewers. At an NSF-sponsored workshop, the idea is revised in a way that both wins approval and opens up a new epoch for NSF itself. The revised proposal includes many more universities. It proposes a three-tiered structure involving ARPANET, a TELENET-based system, and an e-mail only service called PhoneNet. Gateways connect the tiers into a seamless whole. This brings the cost of a site within the reach of the smallest universities. Moreover,

Internet History Part 2

1970

DEC's PDP-10 DEC's PDP-11

Nodes are added to the ARPANET at the rate of one per month. Programmers Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson at Bell Labs complete the UNIX operating system on a spare DEC minicomputer. UNIX combines many of the time-sharing and file-management features offered by Multics and wins a wide following, particularly among scientists. Bob Metcalfe builds a high-speed (100 Kbps) network interface between the MIT IMP and a PDP-6 to the ARPANET. It runs for 13 years without human intervention.

Internet History Part 1

"In the Beginning, ARPA created the ARPANET. And the ARPANET was without form and void. And darkness was upon the deep.

An Illustrated History of Computers Part 4

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John Kopplin © 2002

The title of forefather of today's all-electronic digital computers is usually awarded to ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania between 1943 and 1945 by two professors, John Mauchly and the 24 year old J. Presper Eckert, who got funding from the war department after promising they could build a machine that would replace all the "computers", meaning the women who were employed calculating the firing tables for the army's artillery guns. The day that Mauchly and Eckert saw the first small piece of ENIAC work, the persons they ran to bring to their lab to show off their progress were some of these female computers (one of whom remarked, "I was astounded that it took all this equipment to multiply 5 by 1000").
ENIAC filled a 20 by 40 foot room, weighed 30 tons, and used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes. Like the Mark I, ENIAC employed paper card readers obtained from IBM (these were a regular product for IBM, as they were a long established part of business accounting machines, IBM's forte). When operating, the ENIAC was silent but you knew it was on as the 18,000 vacuum tubes each generated waste heat like a light bulb and all this heat (174,000 watts of heat) meant that the computer could only be operated in a specially designed room with its own heavy duty air conditioning system. Only the left half of ENIAC is visible in the first picture, the right half was basically a mirror image of what's visible.

An Illustrated History of Computers Part 3

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John Kopplin © 2002

IBM continued to develop mechanical calculators for sale to businesses to help with financial accounting and inventory accounting. One characteristic of both financial accounting and inventory accounting is that although you need to subtract, you don't need negative numbers and you really don't have to multiply since multiplication can be accomplished via repeated addition.
But the U.S. military desired a mechanical calculator more optimized for scientific computation. By World War II the U.S. had battleships that could lob shells weighing as much as a small car over distances up to 25 miles. Physicists could write the equations that described how atmospheric drag, wind, gravity, muzzle velocity, etc. would determine the trajectory of the shell. But solving such equations was extremely laborious. This was the work performed by the human computers. Their results would be published in ballistic "firing tables" published in gunnery manuals. During World War II the U.S. military scoured the country looking for (generally female) math majors to hire for the job of computing these tables. But not enough humans could be found to keep up with the need for new tables. Sometimes artillery pieces had to be delivered to the battlefield without the necessary firing tables and this meant they were close to useless because they couldn't be aimed properly. Faced with this situation, the U.S. military was willing to invest in even hair-brained schemes to automate this type of computation.
One early success was the Harvard Mark I computer which was built as a partnership between Harvard and IBM in 1944. This was the first programmable digital computer made in the U.S. But it was not a purely electronic computer. Instead the Mark I was constructed out of switches, relays, rotating shafts, and clutches. The machine weighed 5 tons, incorporated 500 miles of wire, was 8 feet tall and 51 feet long, and had a 50 ft rotating shaft running its length, turned by a 5 horsepower electric motor. The Mark I ran non-stop for 15 years, sounding like a roomful of ladies knitting. To appreciate the scale of this machine note the four typewriters in the foreground of the following photo.

An Illustrated History of Computers Part 2

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John Kopplin © 2002

Just a few years after Pascal, the German Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (co-inventor with Newton of calculus) managed to build a four-function (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division) calculator that he called the stepped reckoner because, instead of gears, it employed fluted drums having ten flutes arranged around their circumference in a stair-step fashion. Although the stepped reckoner employed the decimal number system (each drum had 10 flutes), Leibniz was the first to advocate use of the binary number system which is fundamental to the operation of modern computers. Leibniz is considered one of the greatest of the philosophers but he died poor and alone.

Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner (have you ever heard "calculating" referred to as "reckoning"?)

In 1801 the Frenchman Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a power loom that could base its weave (and hence the design on the fabric) upon a pattern automatically read from punched wooden cards, held together in a long row by rope. Descendents of these punched cards have been in use ever since (remember the "hanging chad" from the Florida presidential ballots of the year 2000?).

Jacquard's Loom showing the threads and the punched cards