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The computer industry was a vivid place in the 1980s. IT systems and technologies thrived, and the market offered ever better, smaller, and more useful machines. Innovative technical solutions or intelligent designs that satisfied customers' needs are often listed as computer hardware milestones. Consequently, they became a permanent part of the computerisation history and can be considered hardware heritage artefacts. The purpose of the paper is to analyse the usability of selected portable computer systems. The foundation of the work is a literature review that includes technical specifications, industry reviews, and research papers. Archival materials were obtained from the Internet Archive. Studies have revealed that the main problems design engineers of portable computers had to tackle in the 1980s were the reduction of mass and size of the computer system, portable power (self-power), and the quality of the displayed image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Bulgaria's electronic trade with India between 1967 and 1990. The developing world became a formative learning experience for the computer industry, as it came up against both a highly protectionist state trying to foster its own industry, and competition from Western companies playing to different rules than COMECON rivals. In order to gain a place in this lucrative market, Bulgarian computer enterprises developed their technical services, advertising and negotiating capacities, learning how to be capitalists in a socialist world. This 'learning through competition and copying' was a feedback channel that changed the way that the company operated in other parts of the world, diversifying its marketing and user services within the socialist world too, standing out from the other socialist industries. As such, this global operation was a formative experience for many executives and technicians, making them a group that was plugged into international expertise networks. Thus the computer became a channel for being part of the emerging information economy, and the Global South became a place to meet the First World without restriction. The article thus shows India's importance to Bulgaria as a space to learn from and profit in, rather than an object of socialist development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A robust, portable CE sampler to detect common inorganic ions in situ. • Sampler based on peristaltic and vacuum pumps, a check valve, and a pinch valve. • CE is a promising technology for green analytical chemistry and citizen science. A compact, inexpensive sampler instrument for portable capillary electrophoresis (CE) was developed and tested to monitor common inorganic ions in drinking water samples. The sampler uses peristaltic and vacuum pumps and pinch and check valves to control liquid flows. The paper also addresses various aspects of CE associated with portability, open access instrumentation and prospects of CE for citizen science. The extensive use of items provided by the electronic and computer industry contributes to this trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term "computer utility" has been perennially present in the history of computing, though a precise definition of the term has been fleeting, even when it first appeared in the Mid-1960s. The recent resurgence of interest in the remote provision of computing power has brought with it the historical jumble of definitions that make up that term, and "computer utility" is once again being applied to computer architectures though with little justification or exposition given regarding this use. This article attempts to determine whether past and present applications of the term share any commonalities and in doing so questions whether there has ever existed a true "computer utility." To do so, incarnations of the "computer utility" are examined in two time periods--the 1960s and the 1970s--during which time computer time-sharing enjoyed significant prosperity and now as cloud computing has become increasingly popular and prolific. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

• A sampler for portable capillary electrophoresis to detect GHB in situ. • Sampler based on peristaltic pumps, a check valve, and a pinch valve. • LOD with CCD for GHB 1.7 mg L−1, meets the cutoff testing value for GHB in saliva. A compact, inexpensive sampler instrument for portable capillary electrophoresis was developed for monitoring illegal drugs in human body fluids and evaluated for γ-hydroxybutyric acid (GHB) in simulated saliva samples. The sampler uses peristaltic pumps and pinch and check valves to activate liquid flows. This short communication addresses aspects of CE associated with portability, open access instrumentation, and prospects of CE for citizen science. The extensive use of items provided by the electronic and computer industry contributes to this trend. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the publications in green analytical chemistry (GAC) deal with the benign solvents and procedures and all aspects of measures of the greenness of certain methods. The equally important instrumentation aspects in GAC have received much less attention. Instruments in contemporary analytical chemistry have a significant footprint. Capillary electrophoresis (CE) is a technology that offers an instrument whose ecological footprint could be much less than that of other popular analytical technologies. This paper describes the GAC features of CE with many examples. Those green features of CE include the capability of miniaturization and, thus, the possibility of making portable instruments that can be used in situ. In recent years, many groups have demonstrated increasing interest in developing simple, robust, and inexpensive portable CE instruments. This paper will address aspects of CE associated with portability, open access instrumentation, and prospects of CE for citizen science. The extensive use of items provided by the electronic and computer industry contributes to this trend. [Display omitted] • Instruments in contemporary analytical chemistry have a significant ecological footprint. • Capillary electrophoresis (CE)is a technology with a small ecological footprint. • CE is a promising technology for citizen science due to its simplicity and the wide availability of consumer electronics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a widely-acknowledged shortage of software developers, and reports of a gap between industry needs and software education, the possible gap between students' needs and software development education has not been explored in detail. In their university education, students want to take courses and carry out projects that clearly relate to their lives and their goals. This paper reports on a quantitative study of 297 software development students. The analysis of the results suggests that software development education has a predominantly social relevance to students and also has moderate personal and professional relevance. The following approaches are recommended to improve students' views of the relevance of software development education: use various learning environments; pay special attention to female students, students who did not have IT as a school subject, and students who rate their own academic performance as low; update educators on the latest developments; design programs to appeal to students and to meet societal demands. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

At the end of 1960, Argentina began to incorporate its first computers and develop computing research projects and training programs. This early period overlapped with an renovation movement, and the most notable efforts to appropriate the new technology were initiated at the universities. Led by mathematician Manuel Sadosky, the most relevant contribution came from the Calculus Institute (Instituto de Cálculo, IC) at the University of Buenos Aires. From 1961 to 1966, equipped with a Ferranti Mercury computer, the IC went through a period of rapid growth, and it was fundamental to creating the first computer science degree program in Latin America. After the country's coup d'état in 1966, approximately 90 percent of IC's personnel resigned. Afterward, no institution could match its scientific and professional expertise nor equal its authority and leadership in the field, despite the modernizing rhetoric of the new authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

These reminiscences relate to the period that Brian Randell spent between 1964 and 1966 first at IBM Research working on Project Y and then in the IBM Systems Development Division on the resulting ACS Project--then-secret projects that aimed to build a supercomputer that would be 100 times faster than Stretch. Randell's account is based in part on his memory, but also makes extensive use of the small set of files that he had retained, mainly relating to patent applications. A scanned copy of one of these files, the paper "Dynamic Instruction Scheduling," that he coauthored with Lynn Conway, Don Rozenberg, and Don Senzig in February 1966, is available as an online Web extra https://s3.amazonaws.com/ieeecs.cdn.csdl.public/mags/an/2015/03/man2015030055s.pdf and in Newcastle University's online archive at www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/891.pdf. Because of space constraints just the initial three pages of this paper are included in the present article, which also includes the text from a section on "Interrupts" that was added to the 1969 IBM San Jose Technical Report version of the 1966 paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information about upcoming events of interest to Computer Society members. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at India's IT industry history in the 1970s and early 1980s by focusing on the development of an indigenous microcomputer by the Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL). After gaining independence in 1947, the Indian government embarked on a program that focused on economic development, albeit with a socialist theme and central planning. Indigenization was the prime objective. Some industries were more favored than others, and electronics and computers were initially neglected and hobbled by restrictive policies. Foreign companies were pressured to reduce foreign equity. By the late-1970s, government efforts to induce IBM to transfer equity had failed. The government responded by forcing IBM to leave India and by relaxing policies and permitting local companies to import parts and components to develop computers locally. As a result, many private companies entered the computer sector. HCL was born in 1976 and released its first commercial system in 1978. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Edward Feigenbaum, the recipient of the 2013 Pioneer Award, is one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence and has been one of its leaders for more than 50 years. He became aware of the birth of AI when he was an undergraduate at Carnegie Tech (later, Carnegie Mellon University). Continuing to graduate school there, he was mentored by Herbert Simon, and he also collaborated with Allen Newell. His career has taken him from Carnegie to the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford University, RAND, and the Pentagon. Feigenbaum has also authored and coedited several seminal AI books: Computers and Thought (1963), The Fifth Generation (1983), and the four-volume Handbook of Artificial Intelligence (1980s). In this interview, David Alan Grier and Feigenbaum talk about his career, his mentor Herbert Simon, and the development of AI. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Comparisons between the early British and US computer industries invariably have focused on the differential development of the British Tabulating Machine Company (BTM) and IBM. In this article, the author seeks to refocus examination of BTM (and comparisons of it to IBM) within the context of an American competitor somewhat similar in size, customer base, and organizational capabilities in electronics to BTM: Burroughs Corporation. The cases of BTM and Burroughs demonstrate the complexity of coordinating international R&D joint ventures, the struggle to create advanced products in an emerging technology while preserving existing revenue streams, and the cultural and technical hurdles involved in assimilating R&D resources from acquisitions in a rapidly changing technologically based industry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study addresses the question of the constitution of markets in advanced societies. Specifically, the article studies the role of the traveling trade show in creating the real time computing market, which is part of the US electronics sector, during the mid-1990's. Real time computing products assist the transfer, storage and processing of digital signals in real time and support many of the internet applications we use today. By applying ethnographic methods, we explore the general question of how economic actors cope with uncertainty in the phase of market-making and at the cutting edge of technology. The paper makes two contributions to the existing literature. First, it shows that the attempt to organize a trade show in real time computing was triggered by the uncertainty experienced by sellers regarding the identity of prospective buyers and about the exact use to which they would put the emergent technology which is offered for sale. Secondly, we trace the history of an emergent market. We claim that trade shows for innovative products are important venues at which markets coalesce. The identification and ordering of market actors, the institutionalization of a distinct business culture and the social networks developed among market actors and across the subsidiary markets provided the basic social infrastructure for what later became known as the real time computing industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Current Web service technology is evolving towards a simpler approach to define Web service APIs that challenges the assumptions made by existing languages for Web service composition. RESTful Web services introduce a new kind of abstraction, the resource, which does not fit well with the message-oriented paradigm of the Web service description language (WSDL). RESTful Web services are thus hard to compose using the Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), due to its tight coupling to WSDL. The goal of the BPEL for REST extensions presented in this paper is twofold. First, we aim to enable the composition of both RESTful Web services and traditional Web services from within the same process-oriented service composition language. Second, we show how to publish a BPEL process as a RESTful Web service, by exposing selected parts of its execution state using the REST interaction primitives. We include a detailed example on how BPEL for REST can be applied to orchestrate a RESTful e-Commerce scenario and discuss how the proposed extensions affect the architecture of a process execution engine. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

France, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union implemented various public policies designed to promote the development of local computer industries, beginning in the late 1940s, that had mixed results but were part of a larger pan-European interest in promoting national economic development through the use of technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the problem concerning the Linpack Benchmark 1.0 matrix generator. It examines the ability of the matrix generator in generating matrices with identical columns. It discusses the production of a matrix by the generator with at least two identical columns through defining S as the set of all integers. It explores the establishment of a pseudo-random matrix by Linpack Benchmark. Furthermore, it describes the characteristics of matrix sizes in which the matrix generator has created a matrix with identical columns.

New media is part of the new information economy, and its roots lie in computer graphics and in creative specialized services used in motion picture production, advertising, and other programming especially for television. This paper examines the similarities and differences between Canada's three new media concentrations in the metropolitan centres of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. It investigates whether the industry emerged from similar activities and whether differences in the pattern of development in each region explain contemporary new media activities. It evaluates differences in local market opportunities and whether local specializations have emerged. The third focus is on the predominance of small firms in new media and whether there are differences in the social foundations of production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of the computer industry on the environment, examining how the industry is attempting to reduce its footprint on the planet. Landfills are being filled up with discarded computer equipment, the author states. Of the three areas within the computer industry that touch the environment, disposal, manufacturing, and operations, it is the operational sector that has made the most visible improvements, that article indicates. Other topics include the power consumption of computers, decreasing the use of toxic substances in computers, and the disposal of unwanted equipment.

We present an approach to the analysis and optimisation of heterogeneous multiprocessor embedded systems. The systems are heterogeneous not only in terms of hardware components, but also in terms of communication protocols and scheduling policies. When several scheduling policies share a resource, they are organised in a hierarchy. In this paper, we first develop a holistic scheduling and schedulability analysis that determines the timing properties of a hierarchically scheduled system. Second, we address design problems that are characteristic to such hierarchically scheduled systems: assignment of scheduling policies to tasks, mapping of tasks to hardware components, and the scheduling of the activities. We also present several algorithms for solving these problems. Our heuristics are able to find schedulable implementations under limited resources, achieving an efficient utilisation of the system. The developed algorithms are evaluated using extensive experiments and a real-life example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multicore processors have been utilized in embedded systems and general computing applications for some time. However, these multicore chips execute multiple applications concurrently, with each core carrying out a particular task in the system. Such systems can be found in gaming, automotive real-time systems and video / image encoding devices. These system are commonly deployed to overcome deadline misses, which are primarily due to overloading of a single multitasking core. In this paper, we explore the use of multiple cores for a single application, as opposed to multiple applications executing in a parallel fashion. A single application is parallelized using two different methods: one, a master-slave model; and two, a sequential pipeline model. The systems were implemented using Tensilica’s Xtensa LX processors with queues as the means of communications between two cores. In a master-slave model, we utilized a course grained approach whereby a main core distributes the workload to the remaining cores and reads the processed data before writing the results back to file. In the pipeline model, a lower granularity is used. The application is partitioned into multiple sequential blocks; each block representing a stage in a sequential pipeline. For both models we applied a number of differing configurations ranging from a single core to a nine-core system. We found that without any optimization for the seven core system, the sequential pipeline approach has a more efficient area usage, with an area increase to speedup ratio of 1.83 compared to the master-slave approach of 4.34. With selective optimization in the pipeline approach, we obtained speed ups of up to 4.6 × while with an area increase of only 3.1 × (area increase to speedup ratio of just 0.68). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When accompanied by the appropriate algorithmic approach, seismic imaging is an application that can take advantage of massively parallel computer systems. Three-dimensional (3D) pre-stack time migration (PSTM) and pre-stack depth migration (PSDM) are key components of seismic imaging and require very large computing resources. In this paper, we show that execution of these algorithms can be dramatically accelerated by massive parallelism. Many oil exploration and service companies purchase supercomputing clusters for performing 3D PSTM and PSDM seismic imaging. The common azimuth migration (CAM) algorithm, ported to many architectures, is particularly well suited to offshore marine applications. This paper describes the porting of the CAM algorithm to the IBM Blue Gene/L™ supercomputer, which requires introducing a second level of parallelism, building a parallel 3D-FFT (fast Fourier transform) routine, optimizing a tri-diagonal solver for SIMD (single-instruction, multiple-data) floating-point units, and addressing various I/O concerns. We present results obtained by using up to 16,368 processors for actual data provided from a marine seismic acquisition. Finally, we provide recommendations for porting other pre-stack algorithms to a massively parallel environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the history of stored-program computer ENIAC and its comparison to the Manchester Baby. According to the author, ENIAC was converted to operate in stored-program mode in March-April 1948 before the Manchester Baby in contrast with Hans Neukom observation that the ENIAC first operated in stored-program mode in September 1948. He averred that there is a crucial difference between ENIAC operating in March-May 1948 against Sept. 1948 because the Manchester Baby have first operated on June 21, 1948. Compared to the Manchester Baby, the ENIAC was more powerful, capable of operating far more complex programs. However, on the theoretical side, the Manchester Baby could change the course of the program during runtime while the ENIAC could not.

The Peer-to-Peer (P2P) model, being widely adopted in today's Internet computing, suffers from the problem of topology mismatch between the overlay networks and the underlying physical network. Traditional topology optimization techniques identify physically closer nodes to connect as overlay neighbors, but could significantly shrink the search scope. Recent efforts have been made to address the mismatch problem without sacrificing the search scope, but they either need time synchronization among peers or have a low convergent speed. In this paper, we propose a scalable bipartite overlay (SBO) scheme to optimize the overlay topology by identifying and replacing the mismatched connections. In SBO, we employ an efficient strategy for distributing optimization tasks in peers with different colors. We conducted comprehensive simulations to evaluate this design. The results show that SBO achieves approximately 85 percent of reduction on traffic cost and about 60 percent of reduction on query response time. Our comparisons with previous approaches to address the topology mismatch problem have shown that SBO can achieve a fast convergent speed, without the need of time synchronization among peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sequence alignment is a common and often repeated task in molecular biology. Typical alignment operations consist of finding similarities between a pair of sequences (pairwise sequence alignment) or a family of sequences (multiple sequence alignment). The need for speeding up this treatment comes from the rapid growth rate of biological sequence databases: Every year their size increases by a factor of 1.5 to 2. In this paper we present a new approach to high-performance biological sequence alignment based on commodity PC graphics hardware. Using modern graphics processing units (GPUs) for high-performance computing is facilitated by their enhanced programmability and motivated by their attractive price/performance ratio and incredible growth in speed. To derive an efficient mapping onto this type of architecture, we have reformulated dynamic-programming-based alignment algorithms as streaming algorithms in terms of computer graphics primitives. Our experimental results show that the GPU-based approach allows speedups of more than one order of magnitude with respect to optimized CPU implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of space filling curves for proximity-improving mappings is well known and has found many useful applications in parallel computing. Such curves permit a linear array to be mapped onto a 2D (respectively, 3D) structure such that points that are distance d apart in the linear array are distance O(d½) (O(d½)) apart in the 2D (3D) array and vice versa. We extend the concept of space filling curves to space filling surfaces and show how these surfaces lead to mappings from 20 to 3D so that points at distance d½ on the 2D surface are mapped to points at distance O(d½) in the 3D volume. Three classes of surfaces, associated respectively with the Peano curve, Sierpiriski carpet, and the Hilbert curve, are presented. A methodology for using these surfaces to map from 2D to 3D is developed. These results permit efficient execution of 2D computations on processors interconnected in a 3D grid. The space filling surfaces proposed by us are the first such fractal objects to be formally defined and are thus also of intrinsic interest in the context of fractal geometry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article describes the PWRficient processors developed by P.A. Semi Inc. The authors discuss how the company's processors achieve high performance while consuming very low power. According to the authors, these processors are decedents of the extremely power-efficient StrongArm processor developed by Dan Dobberphul. The dual-core PA6T-1628M system on chip is the first design in the PWRficient family of high performance that target server class performance with power consumption. Some very interesting nuggets about low-power design are provided.

The article offers information on the first licensable, clockless 32-bit processor core, the ARM99BHS. It describes the architecture of ARM996HS and discusses the advantages of the clockless design methodology, including lower power consumption and decreased noise generation. According to the authors, the ARM996HS core is particularly interesting because it is clockless or self-clocked even though it can be embedded in a variety of technologies. Developed through the tide design flow, ARM996HS consumes about one-third the power of comparable synchronous, clock-gated, ARM cores implementing the same instruction set architecture.

A number of recent studies have revealed that the Optical Transpose Interconnection Systems (or OTIS) are promising candidates for future high-performance parallel computers. In this paper, we present and evaluate two general methods for algorithm development on the OTIS. The proposed methods are general in the sense that no specific factor network or problem domain is assumed. The proposed methods allow efficient mapping of a wide class of algorithms into the OTIS. These methods are based on grids and pipelines as popular structures that support a vast body of parallel applications including linear algebra, divide-and-conquer type of algorithms, sorting, and FFT computation. Timing models for measuring the performance of the proposed methods are also provided. Through these models, the performance of various algorithms on the OTIS are evaluated and compared with their counterparts on conventional electronic interconnection systems. This study confirms the viability of the OTIS as an attractive alternative for large-scale parallel architectures. Finally, we show how the proposed methods can be used to design parallel algorithms for linear algebra on the OTIS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]