Word: vacuum
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Created at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC weighed 30 tons and contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, which failed at an average of one every seven minutes. The arrival of the transistor and the miniaturized circuit in the 1950s made it possible to reduce a room-size computer to a silicon chip the size of a pea. And prices kept dropping. In contrast to the $487,000 paid for ENIAC, a top IBM personal computer today costs about $4,000, and some discounters offer a basic Timex-Sinclair 1000 for $77.95. One computer expert illustrates the trend by estimating that...
...first electronic digital computer in the U.S., unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946, was a collection of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and 6,000 switches, and occupied the space of a two-car garage. Yet ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was, in retrospect, a dimwit. When it worked, it did so only for short bursts because its tubes kept burning out. Built to calculate artillery firing tables, the half-million dollar ENIAC could perform 5,000 additions or subtractions per second. Today almost any home computer, costing only...
...follow it. It has been wired to gather up messages that appear between quotation marks and translate them, character by character, into sequences of numbers. These numbers, in turn, are translated into a corresponding sequence of electrical signals. These signals are sent to an electron "gun" housed in the vacuum tube behind the computer's video screen. This gun, following the sequence of signals, fires bursts of electrons at the back side of the screen. The electrons strike bits of phosphor that coat the screen and energize them, lighting up a pattern of dots. These dots form the shape...
...papers. So does Carter, when he is talking about Arabs and Israelis. Henry Kissinger, anathema to Reagan's right-wing supporters, has been called in as a consultant by Secretary of State George Shultz. "The reason guru-grabbing has come into such vogue is that a strategy vacuum exists within the divided Reagan White House," writes conservative Columnist William Safire. He regards Reagan's National Security Adviser, William Clark, as "Living proof that still waters can run shallow." Safire's remark is living proof that when it comes to malice toward one another, top conservatives...
...pilot of the command ship during Apollo ll's 1969 historic flight to the moon, Astronaut Mike Collins had perhaps less reason than his lunar-walking buddies to fret about the clumsy, complex garments that protected them from the harsh vacuum of space. But some of today's astronauts are seriously worried about just how precarious s space suits can be. In a report as bluntly critical as any issued by NASA since its post-mortem on the disastrous 1967 launch-pad fire that killed three astronauts, the space agency has found alarmingly sloppy oversights...