Word: vacuumed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...look at most history books, they'll tell you ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first true all-purpose electronic computer. Unveiled in 1946 in a blaze of publicity, it was a monstrous 30-ton machine, as big as two semis and filled with enough vacuum tubes (19,000), switches (6,000) and blinking lights to require an army of attendants. Capable of adding 5,000 numbers in a second, a then unheard of feat, it could compute the trajectory of an artillery shell well before it landed (compared with days of labored hand calculations...
...while this electronic brain, as headline writers called it, took the spotlight, ENIAC had a lot of unsung rivals, many of them shrouded in wartime secrecy. At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing built a succession of vacuum-tube machines called Colossus that made mincemeat of Hitler's Enigma codes. At Harvard, large, clattering electromechanical computers in IBM's Mark series also did wartime calculations. Even the Germans made a stab at computing with Konrad Zuse's Z electromechanical computers, the last of which was the first general-purpose computer controlled by a program...
From the day he first handled one in college in 1948, Robert Noyce knew the new gadget meant the end of balky, bulky vacuum tubes. But he also realized you couldn't do much with transistors until you could link them together, like fibers in an Oriental rug. To everyone's astonishment, the gifted young man from Grinnell, Iowa--a minister's son--achieved that goal in a decade. His integrated circuit, or microchip, not only helped rename an orchard-filled California valley but also led to a seemingly endless harvest of silicon devices, from PCs to coffeemakers...
...addition to the offensive vacuum this year's team is very young. There is only one senior in the lineup, captain Ethan Oberman...
...UNICCO pays Antonio $9.05 for each hour that he, literally, cleans up after us. And, this week, Antonio's pay is up for public debate with the outpouring of protests, posters and rallies organized by the Living Wage Campaign. Antonio, along with his fellow UNICCO workers who vacuum our hallowed halls, the dining staff who serve the "honorable" first-year law students their supper, joins the cashiers at Loker Commons and the Greenhouse as the collective victims of an unlivable wage...