Category Archives: Inventions

Short for CD-Rewritable disk, a type of CD disk that enables you to write onto it in multiple sessions. One of the problems with CD-R disks is that you can only write to them once. With CD-RW drives and disks, you can treat the optical disk just like a floppy or hard disk, writing data onto it multiple times.
The first CD-RW drives became available in mid-1997. They can read CD-ROMs and can write onto today’s CD-R disks, but they cannot write on normal CD-ROMs. This means that disks created with a CD-RW drive can only be read by a CD-RW drive. However, a new standard called MultiRead, developed jointly by Philips Electronics and Hewlett-Packard, will enable CD-ROM players to read disks create by CD-RW drives. Many experts believed that CD-RW disks would be a popular storage medium until DVD devices became widely available.

Early technology company Kalpana introduced the first network switch in 1989, the Etherswitch. A networking equipment vendor in Silicon Valley during the 80s and 90s, they developed the concept of a multiport network switch and also created EtherChannel. Kalpana was acquired by Cisco in 1994. Basically just a bridge, the Etherswitch used multiple ports instead of the industry standard two.

Dissed by many of the other elite companies at the time, the basic seven port switch offered features found in most modern switches such as low latency, full-duplex, and plug and play operation.  It originally sold for $10,500. Although expensive compared to today, it was one-third the cost of Ethernet routers of the day. Cisco, initially only interested in routing, realized it would also need to embrace switching to become dominant in the networking market and eventually bought Kalpana and it’s related technology.  Little did anyone realize the impact this technology would have on the world and the internet.

From Pixar Studios‘, What Is Renderman?

Leading digital effects houses and computer graphics specialists use Pixar’s Renderman® because it is the highest quality renderer available anywhere and has been production tested through successful use in feature films for over ten years. Pixar’s Renderman is stable, fast, and efficient for handling complex surface appearances and images.

RenderMan’s powerful shading language and anti-aliased motion blur allow designers to believably integrate stunning synthetic effects with live-action footage. In addition, Renderman is backed by Pixar’s technical staff, who know the challenges of creating digital effects.

Renderman is also an industry standard interface specification for photorealistic renderers.

American engineers have been calling small flaws in machines “bugs” for over a century. Thomas Edison talked about bugs in electrical circuits in the 1870s. When the first computers were built during the early 1940s, people working on them found bugs in both the hardware of the machines and in the programs that ran them.

In 1947, Grace Hopper, working on the Mark II computer at Harvard University found a moth stuck in one of the components. She taped the insect in their logbook and labeled it “first actual case of bug being found.” The use of the words “bug” and “debug” soon became a standard.

CDs and DVDs are everywhere these days. Whether they are used to hold music, data or computer software, they have become the standard medium for distributing large quantities of information in a reliable package. Compact discs are so easy and cheap to produce that America Online sent out millions of them every year to entice new users. And if you have a computer and CD-R drive, you can create your own CDs, including any information you want. The first CD of general interest was Grolier’s Electronic Encyclopedia.

The Speak N Spell learning aid functioned much like a parent preparing a student for a spelling quiz. It would say the word, allow the pressing of keys labeled with the alphabet to spell out the word, then report on the result of the effort.

An outgrowth of Texas Instrument’s basic research in synthetic speech, the product was designed to help children seven and up learn how to spell and pronounce more than 200 commonly misspelled words. Solid State Speech™ was an entirely new concept which stored words in a solid-state memory much like a calculator stores numbers.

Speak N Spell employed an entirely new concept in speech reproduction. Unlike tape recorders and pull-string phonograph records used then in many “speaking” toys, the Solid State Speech circuitry had no moving parts. When it was told to say something, it drew a word from memory, processed it through an integrated circuit model of a human vocal tract and then spoke electronically. In its main mode of operation, Speak N Spell randomly selected a word and pronounced it in standard American English. A child pressed the unit’s alphabetic keys to spell the word, which appeared, letter by letter, on an eight-character display screen. Right answers earned verbal and visual praise; wrong answers received patient encouragement to try again. A number of games were offered to intrigue children of all ages.

In a thesis submitted to Harvard University in 1973, Bob Metcalfe outlines the foundation for a new networking protocol he calls “Ethernet” , representing the architecture of a LAN, creating what would eventually be the standard internetworking system. It is interesting to note his original dissertation regarding the ARPANet was rejected because it contained too much engineering and not enough theory. He later revised it after he studied ALOHAnet, which had the theory he was lacking and allowed the paper to be accepted.

Metcalfe molded his ideas into a new network architecture, which he called Ethernet after the word “ether”, borrowing a transmission protocol from ALOHAnet in which messages wait for a pause in the activity and then retransmit. The first Ethernet system was completed in May, 1973 at Xerox and operated at 3 mbps. In 1980 Xerox began marketing systems running at 10 mbps. This architecture would later cement Ethernet as the standard in the early 1980’s.