The Automatic Digital Network System began development in the late 1950s as a joint project between IBM, Western Union, and RCA for the US Air Force to centralize communications for its vast number of logistics centers. Built on a network of “switching centers” in strategic locations in the US and…
The Atlas was the first real supercomputer and was developed by Tom Kilburn and a team at Manchester University in England. A transistorized computer, it was the first to use virtual memory and pioneered paging. It was brought online on December 7th, 1962 as part of a joint project with…
Computer engineer Paul Baran of BBN (Bolt,Beranek,Newman) writes a paper, “On Distributed Communication Networks”, describing what later becomes known as packet switching, in which digital data are sent over a distributed network in small units and reassembled into a whole message at the receiving end. Packet switching will be an…
From “Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC): The Genesis of a Technological Revolution” by Samuel A. Rosenfeld Personal computers, now as ubiquitous as typewriters, are direct descendants of the LINC, an invention made some two decades ago, at the close of the paleo/computing era. In the early 1960’s, digital computers were accorded…
What do you do when you run out of real random access memory (RAM)? Easy. Pass it off to virtual memory. To do this you need a virtual memory manager (usually a function of the operating system) that maps chunks of data and code to storage areas that aren’t RAM….