Alto in was originally conceived in 1972 an internal memorandum written by Butler Lampson and Chuck Thacker initially designed. I had 128 Kbyte of main memory (expandable to 512), as well as a removable hard disk cartridges of 2.5 Mbyte, all housed in a cabinet the size of a small fridge. The Central Processing Unit (CPU) High was an innovative micro-processor which used microcode for most entry / exit, rather than hardware. Machine microcode performed 16 tasks, one of which carried the usual set of instructions (quite similar to the Data General Nova), while the remainder control the display, refresh memory, disk, network and other functions of input / output. For example, the driver of the bitmap display was little more than a shift register of 16 bits, the microcode was used to upload information to the display refresh from main memory into the shift register.
In addition to an Ethernet connection, the only output device was a High CRT (tube cathode rays) with two levels (black and white) mounted on a vertical. Their input devices are a keyboard, a three button mouse and keyboard functions optional (chord keyset). The concept of the latter two items were taken from the On-Line System (On-Line System) of the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). While the mouse was an instant hit among the users of the Alto, the keyboard function never became popular.
All mice had high three buttons. The first of mechanical operation, it had two wheels perpendicular to each other. these were soon replaced by mouse ball, invented by Bill English. Later we were introduced optical mice, first with white light and then with infrared. The buttons on these old mice were prepared and were elongated along instead of being as wide.
The keyboard was configured so that each key was a bit of a set of records. This feature used to change from where it was initialized (boot) High. The records of the keyboard is used as the address of record from which to initialize and so, by pressing a specific set of keys while you press the START button, you could load different microcode and operating systems. This led to the expression “starting nose (not boot), when the number of keys necessary to launch an operating system under test was greater than the number of fingers. This type of boot resulted in “move2keys,” a program that moved the files to disk so that it could use a sequence of keys.
There were other peripherals for the High, as a TV camera, a daisy wheel type printer and a parallel port, but were quite rare. High external disks can also control which made it a file server. This was a fairly common application for this computer.
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Q: 2009 has not been easy for many people – it is a difficult time for Sony at the time ‘ - Engadget
Like ASUS Gigabyte has pulled all the work during this year’s CeBIT. The outfit had problems with new equipment for display, including a fresh bunch of netbooks, a pair of new input peripherals (mice, keyboards, usual) and an all-in-one PC known as the AIO-1192. Unfortunately, the device we were looking forward to the treatment of most was locked, but that’s probably because … - ThomasNet
Targeting industrial Ethernet use X20-hub system, 100Base-FX underlying standard, and is based on LC Duplex technology. There is no loss of performance (wire speed), as internal downgrading technology is not used. Unit also comes with 2 RJ45 connectors. This story is related to the following: Optics and Photonics Computer Hardware and Peripherals Test and Measuring Instruments … - CNET
Although PS2 backward compatibility has been droppedfrom this version, the 80GB PS3 is still a superb Blu-ray player and high-definition game console.