Originally, the word computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and a computer was a person who computes. Since the advent of the electronic computer, it has come to also mean the operation and usage of these machines, the electrical processes carried out within the computer hardware itself, and the theoretical concepts governing them (computer science).
Science and theory
Hardware
See information processor for a high-level block diagram.
Instruction-level taxonomies
After the commoditization of memory, attention turned to optimizing CPU performance at the instruction level. Various methods of speeding up the fetch-execute cycle include:
Business computing
Human factors
Numeric data
Character data
Other data topics
Classes of computers
Companies - current
Companies - historic
- Acorn, bought by Olivetti
- Bendix Corporation
- Burroughs, merged with Univac to become Unisys
- Compaq, bought by Hewlett-Packard
- Control Data
- Cray
- Data General
- DEC, bought by Compaq, in turn bought by Hewlett-Packard
- Digital Research - a software company for the early microprocessor-based computers
- English Electric
- Ferranti
- General Electric, computer division bought by Honeywell, then Bull
- Honeywell, computer division bought by Bull and
- ICL
- Leo
- Lisp Machines, Inc.
- Marconi
- Nixdorf , bought by Siemens
- Olivetti
- Osborne
- Packard Bell
- Raytheon
- Royal McBee
- RCA
- Scientific Data Systems, sold to Xerox
- Siemens
- Sinclair Research
- Symbolics
- Univac, merged with Burroughs to become Unisys
- Varian
- Wang
Professional organizations
Standards organizations and consortia
(see also
standardization)
Miscellaneous