Synergy User Manual and Tutorial. - THE CORE MEMORY

Synergy User Manual and Tutorial
all assets. The Western Electric Engineering Dept. was organized in 1907 and a research
branch to do scientific research and development was organized in 1911. On December
27, 1925, Bell Telephone Laboratories was created to consolidate the research labs from
AT&T and Western Electric, which remained a wholly owned subsidiary of AT&T after
the divestiture of the seven regional Bell companies. Bell Laboratories would eventually
become one of the world’s premier communication and computer research centers. One
of Bell Labs contributions to computing was the development of UNIX by Dennis
Ritchie and Kenneth Thomson in 1970. In 1991, AT&T acquired NCR, formerly
National Cash Register, which became AT&T Global Information Solutions. xi
The explosion in population growth between 1880 and 1890,
due to increased birth rates and immigration, created a great
dilemma for the Census Bureau. During this time, Herman
Hollerith (right) was a statistician for the Census Bureau and
was responsible to solve problems related to the processing
of large amounts of data from the 1880 US census. He was
attempting to find ways of manipulating data mechanically as
was suggested to him by Dr. John Shaw Billings. In 1882,
Hollerith joined MIT to teach mechanical engineering and
also started to experiment with Billings’ suggestion by
studying the operation of the Jacquard loom. Though he
found that the loom’s operation was not useful for processing data, he determined that the
punched cards were very useful for storing data. In 1884, Hollerith devised a method to
convert the data stored on the punched cards into electrical impulses using card-reading
device. He also developed a typewriter-like device to record the data on the punched
cards, which changed very little in its design over the next 50 years. The card readers
used pins that pass through the holes in the cards creating electrical contacts, where the
impulses from these contacts would activate mechanical counters to manipulate and tally
the data. This system was successfully demonstrated in 1887 by tabulating mortality
statistics and won the bid to be used to tabulate the 1890 Census data.
Hollerith had Pratt and Whitney manufacture the
punching devices and the Western Electric
Company to manufacture the counting devices. The
Census Bureau’s new system was ready by 1890
and processing the first data by September the same
year. The count was completed by December 12,
1890 revealing that the total population of the
United States to be 62,622,250. The count was not
only completed eight times faster than if it was
performed manually, it also allowed the gathering
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