Showing posts with label check. Show all posts
Showing posts with label check. Show all posts

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Check Out This Picture Of The First Laptop


Via Old Picture Of The Day, here's the Osborne 1, which was released in 1981.

It weighed ~25 pounds, had a 5-inch screen, and cost $1,800.

Osborne 1

Technically, this was the first "portable" computer. It wasn't until a couple of years later that the term "laptop" was actually used.

Here's some history from Wikipedia:

As the personal computer became feasible in the early 1970s, the idea of a portable personal computer followed. A "personal, portable information manipulator" was imagined by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in 1968,[6] and described in his 1972 paper as the "Dynabook".[7]

The IBM SCAMP project (Special Computer APL Machine Portable), was demonstrated in 1973. This prototype was based on the PALM processor (Put All Logic In Microcode).

The IBM 5100, the first commercially available portable computer, appeared in September 1975, and was based on the SCAMP prototype.[8]

As 8-bit CPU machines became widely accepted, the number of portables increased rapidly. The Osborne 1, released in 1981, used the Zilog Z80 and weighed 23.6 pounds (10.7 kg). It had no battery, a 5 in (13 cm) CRT screen, and dual 5.25 in (13.3 cm) single-density floppy drives. In the same year the first laptop-sized portable computer, the Epson HX-20, was announced.[9] The Epson had a LCD screen, a rechargeable battery, and a calculator-size printer in a 1.6 kg (3.5 lb) chassis. Both Tandy/RadioShack and HP also produced portable computers of varying designs during this period.[10][11]

The first laptops using the flip form factor appeared in the early 1980s. The Dulmont Magnum was released in Australia in 1981–82, but was not marketed internationally until 1984–85. The $8,150 ($18,540 in current dollar terms) GRiD Compass 1100, released in 1982, was used at NASA and by the military among others. The Gavilan SC, released in 1983, was the first computer described as a "laptop" by its manufacturer[12] From 1983 onward, several new input techniques were developed and included in laptops, including the touchpad (Gavilan SC, 1983), the pointing stick (IBM ThinkPad 700, 1992) and handwriting recognition (Linus Write-Top,[13] 1987). Some CPUs, such as the 1990 Intel i386SL, were designed to use minimum power to increase battery life of portable computers, and were supported by dynamic power management features such as Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow! in some designs.

Displays reached VGA resolution by 1988 (Compaq SLT/286), and colour screens started becoming a common upgrade in 1991 with increases in resolution and screen size occurring frequently until the introduction of 17"-screen laptops in 2003. Hard drives started to be used in portables, encouraged by the introduction of 3.5" drives in the late 1980s, and became common in laptops starting with the introduction of 2.5" and smaller drives around 1990; capacities have typically lagged behind physically larger desktop drives. Optical storage, read-only CD-ROM followed by writeable CD and later read-only or writeable DVD and Blu-Ray, became common in laptops soon in the 2000s.

On March 2011, Lenovo has built the world's first eye-controlled laptop with using eye tracking technology from Tobii. A built-in small infrared camera will track eye's positioning which make as mouse do as select, point, scroll, etc. There are also games with eye fully functioning.[14]

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Check Out This Picture Of The First Laptop


Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/kQItDcUOrbU/the-first-laptop-2011-6

Friday, April 29, 2011

Check Out Facebook’s New Energy-Efficient Data Center

Cloud technologies power some of Internet’s most well-known sites—Picasa, Gmail, Facebook, and Zynga, just to name a few—and cloud companies are striving to make the computer processing behind these sites as energy efficient as possible.

With that in mind, Facebook, Dell, HP, Rackspace, Skype, Zynga, and others have teamed together to form the Open Compute Project to share best practices for making more energy efficient and economical data centers.

To kick-start the project, Facebook unveiled its innovative new data center and contributed the specifications and designs to Open Compute. “Cloud companies are working hard to become more and more energy efficient…[and] this is a big step forward today in having computing be more and more green,” explains Graham Weston, Chairman of Rackspace.

A small team of Facebook engineers has been working on the project for two years. They custom designed the software, servers, and data center from the ground up.

One of the most significant features of the facility was that Facebook eliminated the centralized UPS system found in most data centers. “In a typical data center, you’re taking utility voltage, you’re transforming it, you’re bringing it into the data center and you’re distributing it to your servers,” explains Tom Furlong, Director of Site Operations at Facebook.

Facebook data center“There are some intermediary steps there with a UPS system and with energy transformations that occur that cost you money and energy—between about 11% and 17%. In our case, you do the same thing from the utility, but you distribute it straight to the rack, and you do not have that energy transformation at a UPS or at a PDU level. You get very efficient energy to the actual server. The server itself is then taking that energy and making useful work out of it,” he said.

To regulate temperature in the facility, Facebook utilizes an evaporative cooling system. Outside air comes into the facility through a set of dampers and proceeds into a succession of stages where the air is mixed, filtered and cooled before being sent down into the data center itself.

“The system is always looking at [the conditions] coming in”, says Furlong, “and then it’s trying to decide, ‘what is it that I want to present to the servers? Do I need to add moisture to [the air]? How much of the warm air do I add back into it?’” The upper temperature threshold for the center is set for 80.6 degrees Fahrenheit, but it will likely be raised to 85 degrees, as the servers have proven capable of tolerating higher temperatures than had originally been thought.

Facebook data centerThe servers used in the data center are unique as well. They are “vanity free”—no extra plastic and significantly fewer parts than traditional servers. And, by thoughtful placing of the memory, CPU and other parts, they are engineered to be easier to cool.

Now that these plans and specifications have been released as part of the Open Compute Project, the goal is for other companies to benefit from and contribute to them. “The idea of Open source, crowd sourcing, Wikipedia—these are all part of a new era of thinking enabled by the same force,” explains Weston, “which is that when things are open, there’s more innovation around them.”

More info:

Facebook announcement: http://tinyurl.com/4x67au9
Open Compute Project web site: http://opencompute.org/

This post originally appeared on Building43.

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Check Out Facebook’s New Energy-Efficient Data Center


Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/CYDM07jXj8Y/facebooks-new-energy-efficient-data-center-2011-4

Friday, February 25, 2011

Check Out This Silly Apple Video (AAPL)

This is everything we today find silly about the 1980s -- in a promotional Apple video.

It's a nice look at the past when personal computing was new and a reminder that even the greatest brands can make pretty awful marketing once in a while.

(Via @Zyote on Twitter)

Don't Miss: The Life And Awesomeness Of Steve Jobs →

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Check Out This Silly Apple Video (AAPL)


Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/ZLaNMzOCmAU/silly-apple-video-2011-2

Thursday, February 24, 2011

HOLY CRAP! Check Out How Thin The Latest Issue Of Time Magazine Is!

Time magazine was kind enough to send us a couple of complimentary issues to showcase its Davos coverage.

(Yes, we know, Davos was months ago, but we guess some folks are still interested in it.)

Anyway, the main thing that occurred to us as we slipped the issues out of the envelope was that there must be some sort of mistake.

These couldn't be actual issues of Time magazine, could they? These pamphlets?

Time magazine used to be thick and beefy, stuffed chock full of ads. Of the newsweeklies, it was supposed to just be Newsweek that had shat the bed--Time magazine was supposedly still coining money. So these HAD to be some sort of special international edition, didn't they?

It seems not.

As best we can tell, the two issues Time was kind enough to send us are ACTUAL RECENT ISSUES.

And, holy crap, are they thin!!!

Here's a top-down view. That's a pen on the left and an iPhone on the right.

Time Magazine top

And here's the sideview. The pen (left) and iPhone (right) tower over the darn thing!  In fact, the magazine is hardly thicker than the iPhone's SCREEN!

Time Magazine side

Here's hoping Time's circulation revenue is hanging in there. Because they sure can't be eating well on those ads...

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HOLY CRAP! Check Out How Thin The Latest Issue Of Time Magazine Is!


Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider/~3/ocOzp6NY668/time-magazine-thin-2011-2