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126-550: The concepts of the PostScript language were seeded in 1976 by John Gaffney at Evans & Sutherland , a computer graphics company. At that time, Gaffney and John Warnock were developing an interpreter for a large three-dimensional graphics database of New York Harbor . Concurrently, researchers at Xerox PARC had developed the first laser printer and had recognized the need for a standard means of defining page images. In 1975–76 Bob Sproull and William Newman developed

252-404: A MOS -based chipset as the core CPU. The design was significantly (approximately 20 times) smaller and much more reliable than the mechanical systems it competed against and was used in all of the early Tomcat models. This system contained "a 20-bit, pipelined , parallel multi-microprocessor ". The Navy refused to allow publication of the design until 1997. Released in 1998, the documentation on

378-458: A RIP for Raster Image Processor) for the PostScript language was a common component of laser printers during the 1980s and 1990s. However, the cost of implementation was high; computers output raw PS code that would be interpreted by the printer into a raster image at the printer's natural resolution. This required high performance microprocessors and ample memory . The LaserWriter used a 12 MHz Motorola 68000 , making it faster than any of

504-505: A bit slice approach necessary. Instead of processing all of a long word on one integrated circuit, multiple circuits in parallel processed subsets of each word. While this required extra logic to handle, for example, carry and overflow within each slice, the result was a system that could handle, for example, 32-bit words using integrated circuits with a capacity for only four bits each. The ability to put large numbers of transistors on one chip makes it feasible to integrate memory on

630-460: A control logic section. The ALU performs addition, subtraction, and operations such as AND or OR. Each operation of the ALU sets one or more flags in a status register , which indicate the results of the last operation (zero value, negative number, overflow , or others). The control logic retrieves instruction codes from memory and initiates the sequence of operations required for the ALU to carry out

756-616: A static design , meaning that the clock frequency could be made arbitrarily low, or even stopped. This let the Galileo spacecraft use minimum electric power for long uneventful stretches of a voyage. Timers or sensors would awaken the processor in time for important tasks, such as navigation updates, attitude control, data acquisition, and radio communication. Current versions of the Western Design Center 65C02 and 65C816 also have static cores , and thus retain data even when

882-550: A trade secret . Paxton worked on several other related improvements, such as font hinting . Adobe was also responsible for porting PostScript to the Canon's Motorola 68000 chip. Apple and Adobe announced the LaserWriter at Apple's annual stockholder meeting on January 23, 1985. It was the first printer to ship with PostScript, sparking the desktop publishing (DTP) revolution in the mid-1980s. The original PostScript royalty

1008-463: A PostScript program: the execution of which results in the original document. This program can be sent to an interpreter in a printer, which results in a printed document, or to one inside another application, which will display the document on-screen. Since the document-program is the same regardless of its destination, it is called device-independent . PostScript is noteworthy for implementing on-the-fly rasterization in which everything, even text,

1134-529: A ROM chip for storing the programs, a dynamic RAM chip for storing data, a simple I/O device, and a 4-bit central processing unit (CPU). Although not a chip designer, he felt the CPU could be integrated into a single chip, but as he lacked the technical know-how the idea remained just a wish for the time being. While the architecture and specifications of the MCS-4 came from the interaction of Hoff with Stanley Mazor ,

1260-521: A brief period between 1986 and 1989 E&S was also a supercomputer vendor, but their ES-1 was released just as the supercomputer market was drying up in the post- Cold War military wind-down. Only a handful of machines were built, most broken up for scrap. One sample ES-1 is in storage at the Computer History Museum . During the 1990s E&S tried to expand into several other commercial markets. The Freedom Series graphics engine

1386-562: A chip for a terminal they were designing, the Datapoint 2200 —fundamental aspects of the design came not from Intel but from CTC. In 1968, CTC's Vic Poor and Harry Pyle developed the original design for the instruction set and operation of the processor. In 1969, CTC contracted two companies, Intel and Texas Instruments , to make a single-chip implementation, known as the CTC 1201. In late 1970 or early 1971, TI dropped out being unable to make

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1512-471: A complete computer processor could be contained on several MOS LSI chips. Designers in the late 1960s were striving to integrate the central processing unit (CPU) functions of a computer onto a handful of MOS LSI chips, called microprocessor unit (MPU) chipsets. While there is disagreement over who invented the microprocessor, the first commercially available microprocessor was the Intel 4004 , released as

1638-537: A complete single-chip calculator IC for the Monroe/ Litton Royal Digital III calculator. This chip could also arguably lay claim to be one of the first microprocessors or microcontrollers having ROM , RAM and a RISC instruction set on-chip. The layout for the four layers of the PMOS process was hand drawn at x500 scale on mylar film, a significant task at the time given the complexity of

1764-468: A courtroom demonstration computer system, together with RAM, ROM, and an input-output device. In 1968, Garrett AiResearch (who employed designers Ray Holt and Steve Geller) was invited to produce a digital computer to compete with electromechanical systems then under development for the main flight control computer in the US Navy 's new F-14 Tomcat fighter. The design was complete by 1970, and used

1890-497: A decades-long legal battle with the state of California over alleged unpaid taxes on his patent's windfall after 1990, which would culminate in a landmark Supreme Court case addressing states' sovereign immunity in Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt (2019) . Along with Intel (who developed the 8008 ), Texas Instruments developed in 1970–1971 a one-chip CPU replacement for the Datapoint 2200 terminal,

2016-782: A four-function calculator. The TMS1802NC, despite its designation, was not part of the TMS 1000 series; it was later redesignated as part of the TMS 0100 series, which was used in the TI Datamath calculator. Although marketed as a calculator-on-a-chip, the TMS1802NC was fully programmable, including on the chip a CPU with an 11-bit instruction word, 3520 bits (320 instructions) of ROM and 182 bits of RAM. In 1971, Pico Electronics and General Instrument (GI) introduced their first collaboration in ICs,

2142-479: A language suitable for running the entire GUI of a computer. Sun added a number of new commands for timers, mouse control, interrupts and other systems needed for interactivity, and added data structures and language elements to allow it to be completely object oriented internally. A complete GUI, three in fact, were written in NeWS and provided for a time on their workstations. However, the ongoing efforts to standardize

2268-406: A laser printer makes it possible to position high-quality graphics and text on the same page. PostScript made it possible to fully exploit these characteristics by offering a single control language that could be used on any brand of printer. PostScript went beyond the typical printer control language and was a complete programming language of its own. Many applications can transform a document into

2394-402: A listing on NASDAQ . In the 1980s E&S added a Digital Theater division, supplying all-digital projectors to create immersive mass-audience experiences at planetariums, visitor attractions and similar education and entertainment venues. Digital Theater grew to become a major arm of E&S commercial activity with hundreds of Digistar 1 and 2 systems installed around the world, such as at

2520-541: A major advance over Intel, and two year earlier. It actually worked and was flying in the F-14 when the Intel 4004 was announced. It indicates that today's industry theme of converging DSP - microcontroller architectures was started in 1971. This convergence of DSP and microcontroller architectures is known as a digital signal controller . In 1990, American engineer Gilbert Hyatt was awarded U.S. Patent No. 4,942,516, which

2646-507: A number of technologies for this task, but most shared the property that the glyphs were physically difficult to change, as they were stamped onto typewriter keys, bands of metal, or optical plates. This changed to some degree with the increasing popularity of dot matrix printers . The characters on these systems were drawn as a series of dots, as defined by a font table inside the printer. As they grew in sophistication, dot matrix printers started including several built-in fonts from which

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2772-462: A printer. When Steve Jobs left Apple and started NeXT , he pitched Adobe on the idea of using PS as the display system for his new workstation computers. The result was Display PostScript , or DPS. DPS added basic functionality to improve performance by changing many string lookups into 32 bit integers, adding support for direct output with every command, and adding functions to allow the GUI to inspect

2898-500: A professor. Shannon is considered "The Father of Information Theory". In 1951 Microprogramming was invented by Maurice Wilkes at the University of Cambridge , UK, from the realisation that the central processor could be controlled by a specialised program in a dedicated ROM . Wilkes is also credited with the idea of symbolic labels, macros and subroutine libraries. Following the development of MOS integrated circuit chips in

3024-550: A reliable part. In 1970, with Intel yet to deliver the part, CTC opted to use their own implementation in the Datapoint 2200, using traditional TTL logic instead (thus the first machine to run "8008 code" was not in fact a microprocessor at all and was delivered a year earlier). Intel's version of the 1201 microprocessor arrived in late 1971, but was too late, slow, and required a number of additional support chips. CTC had no interest in using it. CTC had originally contracted Intel for

3150-486: A rival vendor in the planetarium market, giving the combined business the largest base of installed planetaria worldwide and adding in-house projection-dome manufacturing capability to E&S' offering. In 2006 Evans and Sutherland sold its simulation business, which for decades was the core of the company, to Rockwell Collins . On February 10, 2020, Elevate Entertainment and Evans & Sutherland announced that Elevate would purchase E&S for $ 1.19 per share in cash in

3276-451: A single MOS LSI chip in 1971. The single-chip microprocessor was made possible with the development of MOS silicon-gate technology (SGT). The earliest MOS transistors had aluminium metal gates , which Italian physicist Federico Faggin replaced with silicon self-aligned gates to develop the first silicon-gate MOS chip at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968. Faggin later joined Intel and used his silicon-gate MOS technology to develop

3402-449: A single-chip CPU with the proper speed, power dissipation and cost. The manager of Intel's MOS Design Department was Leslie L. Vadász at the time of the MCS-4 development but Vadász's attention was completely focused on the mainstream business of semiconductor memories so he left the leadership and the management of the MCS-4 project to Faggin, who was ultimately responsible for leading the 4004 project to its realization. Production units of

3528-454: A software engineer reporting to him, and with Busicom engineer Masatoshi Shima , during 1969, Mazor and Hoff moved on to other projects. In April 1970, Intel hired Italian engineer Federico Faggin as project leader, a move that ultimately made the single-chip CPU final design a reality (Shima meanwhile designed the Busicom calculator firmware and assisted Faggin during the first six months of

3654-612: A system can provide control strategies that would be impractical to implement using electromechanical controls or purpose-built electronic controls. For example, an internal combustion engine's control system can adjust ignition timing based on engine speed, load, temperature, and any observed tendency for knocking—allowing the engine to operate on a range of fuel grades. The advent of low-cost computers on integrated circuits has transformed modern society . General-purpose microprocessors in personal computers are used for computation, text editing, multimedia display , and communication over

3780-571: A system is expected to handle larger volumes of data or require a more flexible user interface , 16-, 32- or 64-bit processors are used. An 8- or 16-bit processor may be selected over a 32-bit processor for system on a chip or microcontroller applications that require extremely low-power electronics , or are part of a mixed-signal integrated circuit with noise-sensitive on-chip analog electronics such as high-resolution analog to digital converters, or both. Some people say that running 32-bit arithmetic on an 8-bit chip could end up using more power, as

3906-653: A transaction valued at $ 14,500,000. An Evans & Sutherland computer was used in the creation of the Project Genesis simulation sequence in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982). The star fields, and the tactical bridge displays on the Kobayashi Maru simulator and USS Enterprise were created by Evans & Sutherland employees and filmed directly from the screen of a prototype Digistar system at company headquarters. This film

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4032-470: A whole CPU onto a single or a few integrated circuits using Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) greatly reduced the cost of processing power. Integrated circuit processors are produced in large numbers by highly automated metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) fabrication processes , resulting in a relatively low unit price . Single-chip processors increase reliability because there are fewer electrical connections that can fail. As microprocessor designs improve,

4158-531: Is a general purpose processing entity. Several specialized processing devices have followed: Microprocessors can be selected for differing applications based on their word size, which is a measure of their complexity. Longer word sizes allow each clock cycle of a processor to carry out more computation, but correspond to physically larger integrated circuit dies with higher standby and operating power consumption . 4-, 8- or 12-bit processors are widely integrated into microcontrollers operating embedded systems. Where

4284-419: Is a multipurpose, clock -driven, register -based, digital integrated circuit that accepts binary data as input, processes it according to instructions stored in its memory , and provides results (also in binary form) as output. Microprocessors contain both combinational logic and sequential digital logic , and operate on numbers and symbols represented in the binary number system. The integration of

4410-577: Is a static data structure made for efficient access and embeds navigational information suitable for interactive viewing. PostScript is a Turing-complete programming language, belonging to the concatenative group of programming languages. It is an interpreted , stack-based language similar to Forth but with strong dynamic typing , data structures inspired by those found in Lisp , scoped memory and, since language level 2, garbage collection . The language syntax uses reverse Polish notation , which makes

4536-407: Is actually every two years, and as a result Moore later changed the period to two years. These projects delivered a microprocessor at about the same time: Garrett AiResearch 's Central Air Data Computer (CADC) (1970), Texas Instruments ' TMS 1802NC (September 1971) and Intel 's 4004 (November 1971, based on an earlier 1969 Busicom design). Arguably, Four-Phase Systems AL1 microprocessor

4662-449: Is an American computer graphics firm founded in 1968 by David Evans and Ivan Sutherland . Its current products are used in digital projection environments like planetariums . Its simulation business, which it sold to Rockwell Collins , sold products that were used primarily by the military and large industrial firms for training and simulation . The company was founded in 1968 by David C. Evans and Ivan Sutherland , professors in

4788-484: Is bounded by physical limitations on the number of transistors that can be put onto one chip, the number of package terminations that can connect the processor to other parts of the system, the number of interconnections it is possible to make on the chip, and the heat that the chip can dissipate . Advancing technology makes more complex and powerful chips feasible to manufacture. A minimal hypothetical microprocessor might include only an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), and

4914-423: Is disagreement over who deserves credit for the invention of the microprocessor, the first commercially available microprocessor was the Intel 4004 , designed by Federico Faggin and introduced in 1971. Continued increases in microprocessor capacity have since rendered other forms of computers almost completely obsolete (see history of computing hardware ), with one or more microprocessors used in everything from

5040-475: Is its handling of fonts . The font system uses the PS graphics primitives to draw glyphs as curves, which can then be rendered at any resolution . A number of typographic issues had to be considered with this approach. One issue is that fonts do not scale linearly at small sizes and features of the glyphs will become proportionally too large or small and start to look displeasing. PostScript avoided this problem with

5166-598: Is needed for such a printer, Ghostscript can be used. There are also a number of commercial PostScript interpreters, such as TeleType Co. 's T-Script or Brother 's BR-Script3 . PostScript became commercially successful due to the introduction of the graphical user interface (GUI), allowing designers to directly lay out pages for eventual output on laser printers. However, the GUIs' own graphics systems were generally much less sophisticated than PostScript; Apple's QuickDraw , for instance, supported only basic lines and arcs, not

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5292-439: Is possible to write computer programs in PostScript just like any other programming language. A Hello World program , the customary way to show a small example of a complete program in a given language, might look like this in PostScript (level 2): or if the output device has a console PostScript uses the point as its unit of length. However, unlike some of the other versions of the point, PostScript uses exactly 72 points to

5418-510: Is specified in terms of straight lines and cubic Bézier curves (previously found only in CAD applications), which allows arbitrary scaling, rotating and other transformations. When the PostScript program is interpreted, the interpreter converts these instructions into the dots needed to form the output. For this reason, PostScript interpreters are occasionally called PostScript raster image processors , or RIPs. Almost as complex as PostScript itself

5544-400: The de facto standard for electronic document distribution. On high-end printers, PostScript processors remain common, and their use can dramatically reduce the CPU work involved in printing documents, transferring the work of rendering PostScript images from the computer to the printer. The first version of the PostScript language was released to the market in 1984. The qualifier Level 1

5670-619: The CADC , and the MP944 chipset, are well known. Ray Holt's autobiographical story of this design and development is presented in the book: The Accidental Engineer. Ray Holt graduated from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in 1968, and began his computer design career with the CADC. From its inception, it was shrouded in secrecy until 1998 when at Holt's request, the US Navy allowed

5796-504: The F-14 Central Air Data Computer in 1970 has also been cited as an early microprocessor, but was not known to the public until declassified in 1998. Other embedded uses of 4-bit and 8-bit microprocessors, such as terminals , printers , various kinds of automation etc., followed soon after. Affordable 8-bit microprocessors with 16-bit addressing also led to the first general-purpose microcomputers from

5922-578: The Harlequin RIP , both by Global Graphics . A free software version, with several other applications, is Ghostscript . Several compatible interpreters are listed on the Undocumented Printing Wiki. Some basic, inexpensive laser printers do not support PostScript, instead coming with drivers that simply rasterize the platform's native graphics formats rather than converting them to PostScript first. When PostScript support

6048-516: The Internet . Many more microprocessors are part of embedded systems , providing digital control over myriad objects from appliances to automobiles to cellular phones and industrial process control . Microprocessors perform binary operations based on Boolean logic , named after George Boole . The ability to operate computer systems using Boolean Logic was first proven in a 1938 thesis by master's student Claude Shannon , who later went on to become

6174-540: The Saint Louis Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri . In the mid-1980s Evans & Sutherland introduced a geometric modeling system called CDRS, that provided high quality surface design capabilities together with a photo-realistic rendering system. CDRS was sold to many well known manufacturers including both Ford & Chrysler. CDRS was acquired by Parametric Technology Corporation in 1995. For

6300-535: The X11 system led to its introduction and widespread use on Sun systems, and NeWS never became widely used. The PDF and PostScript share the same imaging model and both documents are mutually convertible to each other. Both documents produce the same result when printed. The difference between the PDF and PostScript is that the PDF lacks the general-purpose programming language framework of the PostScript language. A PDF document

6426-601: The array and dictionary types, but cannot be declared to the type system, which sees them all only as arrays and dictionaries, so any further typing discipline to be applied to such user-defined "types" is left to the code that implements them. The character "%" is used to introduce comments in PostScript programs. As a general convention, every PostScript program should start with the characters "%!PS" as an interpreter directive so that all devices will properly interpret it as PostScript. Typically, PostScript programs are not produced by humans, but by other programs. However, it

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6552-460: The "level" terminology in favor of simple versioning) came at the end of 1997, and along with many new dictionary-based versions of older operators, introduced better color handling and new filters (which allow in-program compression/decompression, program chunking, and advanced error-handling). PostScript 3 was significant in terms of replacing the existing proprietary color electronic prepress systems, then widely used for magazine production, through

6678-414: The 1970s the company expanded their line of simulation systems, first building a five-projector graphics system to simulate a ship steaming into New York Harbor and through its surroundings. This graphics system was installed on the mock-up of a ship's bridge and used to train ship's pilots how to navigate into and out of New York Harbor. The project, called CAORF (Computer Aided Operations Research Facility),

6804-457: The 1990s. Motorola introduced the MC6809 in 1978. It was an ambitious and well thought-through 8-bit design that was source compatible with the 6800 , and implemented using purely hard-wired logic (subsequent 16-bit microprocessors typically used microcode to some extent, as CISC design requirements were becoming too complex for pure hard-wired logic). Another early 8-bit microprocessor

6930-465: The 4004 were first delivered to Busicom in March 1971 and shipped to other customers in late 1971. The Intel 4004 was followed in 1972 by the Intel 8008 , intel's first 8-bit microprocessor. The 8008 was not, however, an extension of the 4004 design, but instead the culmination of a separate design project at Intel, arising from a contract with Computer Terminals Corporation , of San Antonio TX, for

7056-433: The 4004, along with Marcian Hoff , Stanley Mazor and Masatoshi Shima in 1971. The 4004 was designed for Busicom , which had earlier proposed a multi-chip design in 1969, before Faggin's team at Intel changed it into a new single-chip design. Intel introduced the first commercial microprocessor, the 4-bit Intel 4004, in 1971. It was soon followed by the 8-bit microprocessor Intel 8008 in 1972. The MP944 chipset used in

7182-667: The 6100 was being incorporated into some military designs until the early 1980s. The first multi-chip 16-bit microprocessor was the National Semiconductor IMP-16 , introduced in early 1973. An 8-bit version of the chipset was introduced in 1974 as the IMP-8. Other early multi-chip 16-bit microprocessors include the MCP-1600 that Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) used in the LSI-11 OEM board set and

7308-548: The Best!". Microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circuitry required to perform the functions of a computer's central processing unit (CPU). The IC is capable of interpreting and executing program instructions and performing arithmetic operations. The microprocessor

7434-528: The CMOS WDC 65C02 in 1982 and licensed the design to several firms. It was used as the CPU in the Apple IIe and IIc personal computers as well as in medical implantable grade pacemakers and defibrillators , automotive, industrial and consumer devices. WDC pioneered the licensing of microprocessor designs, later followed by ARM (32-bit) and other microprocessor intellectual property (IP) providers in

7560-624: The Computer Science Department at the University of Utah . who were pioneers in computer graphics technology. They formed the company to produce hardware to run the systems being developed in the university, working from an abandoned barracks on the university grounds. The company was later housed in the University of Utah Research Park . Most of the employees were active or former students, and included Jim Clark , who started Silicon Graphics , Ed Catmull , co-founder of Pixar , and John Warnock , founder of Adobe . In

7686-544: The Interpress language. Warnock left with Chuck Geschke and founded Adobe Systems in December 1982. They, together with Doug Brotz, Ed Taft and Bill Paxton created a simpler language, similar to Interpress, called PostScript, which went on the market in 1984. Meanwhile, in the spring of 1983, Steve Jobs came to visit Adobe and was dazzled by PostScript's potential, especially for the new Macintosh computer he

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7812-477: The Macintosh computers to which it was attached. When the laser printer engines themselves cost over a thousand dollars the added cost of PS was marginal. But, as printer mechanisms fell in price, the cost of implementing PS became too great a fraction of overall printer cost. In addition, with desktop computers becoming more powerful during the 1990s than their attached printers, it no longer made sense to offload

7938-402: The PS system in the computer rather than the printer. This led to the natural evolution of PS from a printing system to one that could also be used as the host's own graphics language. There were numerous advantages to this approach; not only did it help eliminate the possibility of different output on screen and printer, but it also provided a powerful graphics system for the computer, and allowed

8064-523: The PostScript licensing deal, and Adobe had to shift focus immediately from high-end, high-resolution printing devices to the consumer-oriented Apple LaserWriter laser printer. At that time, the 300-dpi Canon laser printing engine to be used in LaserWriters was seen as good enough only for proof printing (i.e., for crude rough drafts of material whose final drafts would be sent to professional high-resolution devices), but Jobs presented Adobe with

8190-697: The Press format, which was eventually used in the Xerox Star system to drive laser printers. But Press, a data format rather than a language, lacked flexibility, and PARC mounted the Interpress effort to create a successor. In 1978, John Gaffney and Martin Newell then at Xerox PARC wrote J & M or JaM (for "John and Martin") which was used for VLSI design and the investigation of type and graphics printing. This work later evolved and expanded into

8316-488: The TMX 1795 (later TMC 1795.) Like the 8008, it was rejected by customer Datapoint. According to Gary Boone, the TMX 1795 never reached production. Still it reached a working prototype state at 1971 February 24, therefore it is the world's first 8-bit microprocessor. Since it was built to the same specification, its instruction set was very similar to the Intel 8008. The TMS1802NC was announced September 17, 1971, and implemented

8442-683: The Z80's built-in memory refresh circuitry) allowed the home computer "revolution" to accelerate sharply in the early 1980s. This delivered such inexpensive machines as the Sinclair ZX81 , which sold for US$ 99 (equivalent to $ 331.79 in 2023). A variation of the 6502, the MOS Technology 6510 was used in the Commodore 64 and yet another variant, the 8502, powered the Commodore 128 . The Western Design Center, Inc (WDC) introduced

8568-561: The announcement of TrueType, Adobe published the specification for the Type 1 font format. Retail tools such as Altsys Fontographer (acquired by Macromedia in January 1995, owned by FontLab since May 2005) added the ability to create Type 1 fonts. Since then, many free Type 1 fonts have been released; for instance, the fonts used with the TeX typesetting system are available in this format. In

8694-617: The basis for handling PostScript outlines in OpenType fonts. The CID-keyed font format was also designed, to solve the problems in the OCF/Type 0 fonts , for addressing the complex Asian-language ( CJK ) encoding and very large character set issues. The CID-keyed font format can be used with the Type 1 font format for standard CID-keyed fonts, or Type 2 for CID-keyed OpenType fonts. To compete with Adobe's system, Apple designed their own system, TrueType , around 1991. Immediately following

8820-450: The challenge of making PostScript render high-quality output to such a low-resolution device (which for most consumers would be their only printing device). In response, Warnock and Brotz solved the so-called "appearance problem" of making the stem width of letters scale properly so that they look good at all resolutions. Their breakthrough was so important that Adobe has never patented the technology, in order to keep its details concealed as

8946-918: The chip must execute software with multiple instructions. However, others say that modern 8-bit chips are always more power-efficient than 32-bit chips when running equivalent software routines. Thousands of items that were traditionally not computer-related include microprocessors. These include household appliances , vehicles (and their accessories), tools and test instruments, toys, light switches/dimmers and electrical circuit breakers , smoke alarms, battery packs, and hi-fi audio/visual components (from DVD players to phonograph turntables ). Such products as cellular telephones, DVD video system and HDTV broadcast systems fundamentally require consumer devices with powerful, low-cost, microprocessors. Increasingly stringent pollution control standards effectively require automobile manufacturers to use microprocessor engine management systems to allow optimal control of emissions over

9072-465: The chip, and would have owed them US$ 50,000 (equivalent to $ 376,171 in 2023) for their design work. To avoid paying for a chip they did not want (and could not use), CTC released Intel from their contract and allowed them free use of the design. Intel marketed it as the 8008 in April, 1972, as the world's first 8-bit microprocessor. It was the basis for the famous " Mark-8 " computer kit advertised in

9198-558: The chip. Pico was a spinout by five GI design engineers whose vision was to create single-chip calculator ICs. They had significant previous design experience on multiple calculator chipsets with both GI and Marconi-Elliott . The key team members had originally been tasked by Elliott Automation to create an 8-bit computer in MOS and had helped establish a MOS Research Laboratory in Glenrothes , Scotland in 1967. Calculators were becoming

9324-479: The chips were to make a special-purpose CPU with its program stored in ROM and its data stored in shift register read-write memory. Ted Hoff , the Intel engineer assigned to evaluate the project, believed the Busicom design could be simplified by using dynamic RAM storage for data, rather than shift register memory, and a more traditional general-purpose CPU architecture. Hoff came up with a four-chip architectural proposal:

9450-622: The clock is completely halted. The Intersil 6100 family consisted of a 12-bit microprocessor (the 6100) and a range of peripheral support and memory ICs. The microprocessor recognised the DEC PDP-8 minicomputer instruction set. As such it was sometimes referred to as the CMOS-PDP8 . Since it was also produced by Harris Corporation, it was also known as the Harris HM-6100 . By virtue of its CMOS technology and associated benefits,

9576-454: The complex B-splines and advanced region filling options of PostScript. In order to take full advantage of PostScript printing, applications on the computers had to re-implement those features using the host platform's own graphics system. This led to numerous issues where the on-screen layout would not exactly match the printed output, due to differences in the implementation of these features. As computer power grew, it became possible to host

9702-406: The cost of manufacturing a chip (with smaller components built on a semiconductor chip the same size) generally stays the same according to Rock's law . Before microprocessors, small computers had been built using racks of circuit boards with many medium- and small-scale integrated circuits , typically of TTL type. Microprocessors combined this into one or a few large-scale ICs. While there

9828-542: The diagram. Additionally, a set of "bindings" was provided to allow PS code to be called directly from the C programming language . NeXT used these bindings in their NeXTStep system to provide an object oriented graphics system. Although DPS was written in conjunction with NeXT, Adobe sold it commercially and it was a common feature of most Unix workstations in the 1990s. Sun Microsystems took another approach, creating NeWS . Instead of DPS's concept of allowing PS to interact with C programs, NeWS instead extended PS into

9954-525: The documents into the public domain. Holt has claimed that no one has compared this microprocessor with those that came later. According to Parab et al. (2007), The scientific papers and literature published around 1971 reveal that the MP944 digital processor used for the F-14 Tomcat aircraft of the US Navy qualifies as the first microprocessor. Although interesting, it was not a single-chip processor, as

10080-461: The early 1960s, MOS chips reached higher transistor density and lower manufacturing costs than bipolar integrated circuits by 1964. MOS chips further increased in complexity at a rate predicted by Moore's law , leading to large-scale integration (LSI) with hundreds of transistors on a single MOS chip by the late 1960s. The application of MOS LSI chips to computing was the basis for the first microprocessors, as engineers began recognizing that

10206-500: The early 1970s they purchased General Electric 's flight simulator division and formed a partnership with Rediffusion Simulation , a UK -based flight simulator company, to design and build digital flight simulators. For the next three decades this was E&S's primary market, delivering display systems with enough brightness to light up a simulator cockpit to daytime light levels. These simulators were used for training in in-flight refueling, carrier landing, AWACS, and B52. Later in

10332-415: The early 1990s, there were several other systems for storing outline-based fonts, developed by Bitstream and Metafont for instance, but none included a general-purpose printing solution and they were therefore not widely used. In the late 1990s, Adobe joined Microsoft in developing OpenType , essentially a functional superset of the Type 1 and TrueType formats. When printed to a PostScript output device,

10458-493: The first true microprocessor built on a single chip, priced at US$ 60 (equivalent to $ 450 in 2023). The claim of being the first is definitely false, as the earlier TMS1802NC was also a true microprocessor built on a single chip and the same applies for the - prototype only - 8-bit TMX 1795. The first known advertisement for the 4004 is dated November 15, 1971, and appeared in Electronic News . The microprocessor

10584-548: The implementation). Faggin, who originally developed the silicon gate technology (SGT) in 1968 at Fairchild Semiconductor and designed the world's first commercial integrated circuit using SGT, the Fairchild 3708, had the correct background to lead the project into what would become the first commercial general purpose microprocessor. Since SGT was his very own invention, Faggin also used it to create his new methodology for random logic design that made it possible to implement

10710-405: The inch. Thus: For example, in order to draw a vertical line of 4 cm length, it is sufficient to type: More readably and idiomatically, one might use the following equivalent, which demonstrates a simple procedure definition and the use of the mathematical operators mul and div : (Technically, most printers have a construction-implied unprintable margin around the physical borders of

10836-431: The inclusion of font hinting , in which additional information is provided in horizontal or vertical bands to help identify the features in each letter that are important for the rasterizer to maintain. The result was significantly better-looking fonts even at low resolution. It had formerly been believed that hand-tuned bitmap fonts were required for this task. At the time, the technology for including these hints in fonts

10962-459: The instruction. A single operation code might affect many individual data paths, registers, and other elements of the processor. As integrated circuit technology advanced, it was feasible to manufacture more and more complex processors on a single chip. The size of data objects became larger; allowing more transistors on a chip allowed word sizes to increase from 4- and 8-bit words up to today's 64-bit words. Additional features were added to

11088-565: The introduction of smooth shading operations with up to 4096 shades of grey (rather than the 256 available in PostScript Level 2), as well as DeviceN, a color space that allowed the addition of additional ink colors (called spot colors ) into composite color pages. Prior to the introduction of Interpress and PostScript, printers were designed to print character output given the text—typically in ASCII —as input. There were

11214-589: The largest single market for semiconductors so Pico and GI went on to have significant success in this burgeoning market. GI continued to innovate in microprocessors and microcontrollers with products including the CP1600, IOB1680 and PIC1650. In 1987, the GI Microelectronics business was spun out into the Microchip PIC microcontroller business. The Intel 4004 is often (falsely) regarded as

11340-408: The licensing fees for their implementation of PostScript for printers, known as a raster image processor or RIP . As a number of new RISC -based platforms became available in the mid-1980s, some found Adobe's support of the new machines to be lacking. This and issues of cost led to third-party implementations of PostScript becoming common, particularly in low-cost printers (where the licensing fee

11466-488: The magazine Radio-Electronics in 1974. This processor had an 8-bit data bus and a 14-bit address bus. The 8008 was the precursor to the successful Intel 8080 (1974), which offered improved performance over the 8008 and required fewer support chips. Federico Faggin conceived and designed it using high voltage N channel MOS. The Zilog Z80 (1976) was also a Faggin design, using low voltage N channel with depletion load and derivative Intel 8-bit processors: all designed with

11592-452: The methodology Faggin created for the 4004. Motorola released the competing 6800 in August 1974, and the similar MOS Technology 6502 was released in 1975 (both designed largely by the same people). The 6502 family rivaled the Z80 in popularity during the 1980s. A low overall cost, little packaging, simple computer bus requirements, and sometimes the integration of extra circuitry (e.g.

11718-408: The microprocessor and the payment of substantial royalties through a Philips N.V. subsidiary, until Texas Instruments prevailed in a complex legal battle in 1996, when the U.S. Patent Office overturned key parts of the patent, while allowing Hyatt to keep it. Hyatt said in a 1990 Los Angeles Times article that his invention would have been created had his prospective investors backed him, and that

11844-445: The mid-1970s on. The first use of the term "microprocessor" is attributed to Viatron Computer Systems describing the custom integrated circuit used in their System 21 small computer system announced in 1968. Since the early 1970s, the increase in capacity of microprocessors has followed Moore's law ; this originally suggested that the number of components that can be fitted onto a chip doubles every year. With present technology, it

11970-419: The order of operations unambiguous, but reading a program requires some practice, because one has to keep the layout of the stack in mind. Most operators (what other languages term functions ) take their arguments from the stack, and place their results onto the stack. Literals (for example, numbers) have the effect of placing a copy of themselves on the stack. Sophisticated data structures can be built on

12096-757: The packaged PDP-11/03 minicomputer —and the Fairchild Semiconductor MicroFlame 9440, both introduced in 1975–76. In late 1974, National introduced the first 16-bit single-chip microprocessor, the National Semiconductor PACE , which was later followed by an NMOS version, the INS8900 . Next in list is the General Instrument CP1600 , released in February 1975, which was used mainly in

12222-494: The printers to be "dumb" at a time when the cost of the laser engines was falling. In a production setting, using PostScript as a display system meant that the host computer could render low-resolution to the screen, higher resolution to the printer, or simply send the PS code to a smart printer for offboard printing. However, PostScript was written with printing in mind, and had numerous features that made it unsuitable for direct use in an interactive display system. In particular, PS

12348-522: The processor architecture; more on-chip registers sped up programs, and complex instructions could be used to make more compact programs. Floating-point arithmetic , for example, was often not available on 8-bit microprocessors, but had to be carried out in software . Integration of the floating-point unit , first as a separate integrated circuit and then as part of the same microprocessor chip, sped up floating-point calculations. Occasionally, physical limitations of integrated circuits made such practices as

12474-435: The rasterization work onto the resource-constrained printer. By 2001, few low-end printer models came with onboard support for PostScript, largely due to growing competition from much cheaper non-PostScript inkjet printers, and new software-based methods to render PostScript images on computers, making them suitable for any printer. PDF , a descendant of PostScript, provides one such method, and has largely replaced PostScript as

12600-524: The same die as the processor. This CPU cache has the advantage of faster access than off-chip memory and increases the processing speed of the system for many applications. Processor clock frequency has increased more rapidly than external memory speed, so cache memory is necessary if the processor is not to be delayed by slower external memory. The design of some processors has become complicated enough to be difficult to fully test , and this has caused problems at large cloud providers. A microprocessor

12726-442: The sheet, and the 0 0 coordinates are calibrated to its corner, so you might have to use a different starting point to actually see something.) Most implementations of PostScript use single-precision reals (24-bit mantissa), so it is not meaningful to use more than 9 decimal digits to specify a real number, and performing calculations may produce unacceptable round-off errors. Evans %26 Sutherland Evans & Sutherland

12852-440: The smallest embedded systems and handheld devices to the largest mainframes and supercomputers . A microprocessor is distinct from a microcontroller including a system on a chip . A microprocessor is related but distinct from a digital signal processor , a specialized microprocessor chip, with its architecture optimized for the operational needs of digital signal processing . The complexity of an integrated circuit

12978-564: The standard outline font technology for both Windows and the Macintosh. Today, third-party PostScript-compatible interpreters are widely used in printers and multifunction peripherals (MFPs). For example, CSR plc 's IPS PS3 interpreter, formerly known as PhoenixPage, is standard in many printers and MFPs, including those developed by Hewlett-Packard and sold under the LaserJet and Color LaserJet lines. Other third-party PostScript solutions used by print and MFP manufacturers include Jaws and

13104-472: The technology were left with the Type 3 Font (also known as PostScript Type 3 Font , PS3 or T3 ). Type 3 fonts allowed for all the sophistication of the PostScript language, but without the standardized approach to hinting. The Type 2 font format was designed to be used with Compact Font Format (CFF) charstrings, and was implemented to reduce the overall font file size. The CFF/Type2 format later became

13230-459: The unneeded parts of the OpenType font are omitted, and what is sent to the device by the driver is the same as it would be for a TrueType or Type 1 font, depending on which kind of outlines were present in the OpenType font. Adobe supported Type 1 fonts in its products until January 2023, when it fully removed support in favor of OpenType fonts. In the 1980s, Adobe drew most of its revenue from

13356-461: The user could select, and some models allowed users to upload their own custom glyphs into the printer. Dot matrix printers also introduced the ability to print raster graphics . The graphics were interpreted by the computer and sent as a series of dots to the printer using a series of escape sequences . These printer control languages varied from printer to printer, requiring program authors to create numerous drivers . Vector graphics printing

13482-574: The venture investors leaked details of his chip to the industry, though he did not elaborate with evidence to support this claim. In the same article, The Chip author T.R. Reid was quoted as saying that historians may ultimately place Hyatt as a co-inventor of the microprocessor, in the way that Intel's Noyce and TI's Kilby share credit for the invention of the chip in 1958: "Kilby got the idea first, but Noyce made it practical. The legal ruling finally favored Noyce, but they are considered co-inventors. The same could happen here." Hyatt would go on to fight

13608-491: The widely varying operating conditions of an automobile. Non-programmable controls would require bulky, or costly implementation to achieve the results possible with a microprocessor. A microprocessor control program ( embedded software ) can be tailored to fit the needs of a product line, allowing upgrades in performance with minimal redesign of the product. Unique features can be implemented in product line's various models at negligible production cost. Microprocessor control of

13734-418: Was added when Level 2 was introduced. PostScript Level 2 was introduced in 1991, and included several improvements: improved speed and reliability, support for in-Raster Image Processing (RIP) separations, image decompression (for example, JPEG images could be rendered by a PostScript program), support for composite fonts , and the form mechanism for caching reusable content. PostScript 3 (Adobe dropped

13860-419: Was also delivered in 1969. The Four-Phase Systems AL1 was an 8-bit bit slice chip containing eight registers and an ALU. It was designed by Lee Boysel in 1969. At the time, it formed part of a nine-chip, 24-bit CPU with three AL1s. It was later called a microprocessor when, in response to 1990s litigation by Texas Instruments , Boysel constructed a demonstration system where a single AL1 formed part of

13986-403: Was based on a 16-bit serial computer he built at his Northridge, California , home in 1969 from boards of bipolar chips after quitting his job at Teledyne in 1968; though the patent had been submitted in December 1970 and prior to Texas Instruments ' filings for the TMX 1795 and TMS 0100, Hyatt's invention was never manufactured. This nonetheless led to claims that Hyatt was the inventor of

14112-401: Was based on the idea of collecting up PS commands until the showpage command was seen, at which point all of the commands read up to that point were interpreted and output. In an interactive system, this was clearly not appropriate, nor did PS have any sort of interactivity built in; for example, supporting hit detection for mouse interactivity obviously did not apply when PS was being used on

14238-977: Was built for the US Maritime Academy. The project paved the way for other visual simulation systems including a NASA Space Shuttle manipulator arm, EVS, submarine periscope and space station docking simulators. Starting in 1969, E&S produced the LDS-1 (Line Drawing System-1) , and later the Picture System 1, 2 and PS300 series. These unique "calligraphic" (analog vector drawing) color displays had depth cueing and could draw large wireframe models and manipulate (rotate, shift, zoom) them in real time. They were used both in chemistry by pharmaceutical companies to visualize large molecules such as enzymes or polynucleotides, and by aerospace companies, such as Boeing, McDonnell-Douglas and others, to design aircraft. The Evans & Sutherland Shaded Picture System

14364-484: Was carefully guarded, and the hinted fonts were compressed and encrypted into what Adobe called a Type 1 Font (also known as PostScript Type 1 Font , PS1 , T1 or Adobe Type 1 ). Type 1 was effectively a simplification of the PS system to store outline information only, as opposed to being a complete language (PDF is similar in this regard). Adobe would then sell licenses to the Type 1 technology to those wanting to add hints to their own fonts. Those who did not license

14490-460: Was designed by a team consisting of Italian engineer Federico Faggin , American engineers Marcian Hoff and Stanley Mazor , and Japanese engineer Masatoshi Shima . The project that produced the 4004 originated in 1969, when Busicom , a Japanese calculator manufacturer, asked Intel to build a chipset for high-performance desktop calculators . Busicom's original design called for a programmable chip set consisting of seven different chips. Three of

14616-586: Was developed to work with Sun Microsystems , IBM , Hewlett-Packard , and DEC workstations. 3D Pro technology was developed for the first wave of 3D graphics cards for PCs. Also, the MindSet virtual set system was created to address the needs of the broadcast video market. In 1993 Evans and Sutherland helped Japanese arcade giant Namco with texture-mapping technology in Namco's System 22 arcade board that powered Ridge Racer . The help that E&S gave Namco

14742-434: Was developing at Apple . To John Sculley 's frustration, Jobs licensed the PostScript technology from Adobe by offering a $ 1.5 million advance against PostScript royalties, plus $ 2.5 million in exchange for 20 percent of Adobe shares. During a series of meetings in 1983, Jobs also repeatedly offered for Apple to buy Adobe outright, but the founders kept turning him down. In December 1983, the two companies finally signed off on

14868-504: Was five percent of the list price for each laser printer sold, which was $ 350 of the original LaserWriter list price of $ 6,995, and such royalties provided nearly all of Adobe's income during its early years. (Apple later renegotiated the contract to pay a licensing fee based on volume of printers shipped.) The combination of technical merits and widespread availability made PostScript the language of choice for graphical output for printing applications. An interpreter (sometimes referred to as

14994-478: Was introduced in 1973, and was the first commercially available product capable of producing real-time, shaded hidden-line 3D graphics. It was extremely expensive and could only produce black-and-white images at a resolution of 256x256. The end of the Picture System line came in the late 1980s, when raster devices on workstations could render anti-aliased lines faster. In 1978 the company went public with

15120-511: Was left to special-purpose devices, called plotters . Almost all plotters shared a common command language, HPGL , but were of limited use for anything other than printing graphics. In addition, they tended to be expensive and slow, and thus rare. Laser printers combine the best features of both printers and plotters. Like plotters, laser printers offer high quality line art, and like dot-matrix printers, they are able to generate pages of text and raster graphics. Unlike either printers or plotters,

15246-432: Was not the Intel 4004 – they both were more like a set of parallel building blocks you could use to make a general-purpose form. It contains a CPU, RAM , ROM , and two other support chips like the Intel 4004. It was made from the same P-channel technology, operated at military specifications and had larger chips – an excellent computer engineering design by any standards. Its design indicates

15372-512: Was one of the first ever to use computer graphics (after Futureworld in 1976). Star fields and some of the other shots were reused in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) and later films. NBC would later use an Evans & Sutherland Picture System for its 1984–1985 promotional campaign "Let's All Be There!", as well as subsequent campaigns, concluding with the 1989–1990 season promotional campaign "Come Home to

15498-654: Was similar to the help that Martin Marietta gave Sega with the MODEL 2 board that powered Daytona USA and Desert Tank arcade games. In 1998 Evans and Sutherland acquired AccelGraphics Inc, a manufacturer of computer graphics boards, for $ 52m. Since its launch in July 2002, the company's Digistar 3 system became the world's fastest selling Digital Theater system and is installed in upwards of 120 fulldome venues worldwide. On May 9, 2006, Evans & Sutherland acquired Spitz Inc,

15624-471: Was the Signetics 2650 , which enjoyed a brief surge of interest due to its innovative and powerful instruction set architecture . A seminal microprocessor in the world of spaceflight was RCA 's RCA 1802 (aka CDP1802, RCA COSMAC) (introduced in 1976), which was used on board the Galileo probe to Jupiter (launched 1989, arrived 1995). RCA COSMAC was the first to implement CMOS technology. The CDP1802

15750-450: Was the sticking point) or in high-end typesetting equipment (where the quest for speed demanded support for new platforms faster than Adobe could provide). At one point, Microsoft licensed to Apple a PostScript-compatible interpreter it had bought called TrueImage , and Apple licensed to Microsoft its new font format, TrueType . Apple ended up reaching an accord with Adobe and licensed genuine PostScript for its printers, but TrueType became

15876-469: Was used because it could be run at very low power , and because a variant was available fabricated using a special production process, silicon on sapphire (SOS), which provided much better protection against cosmic radiation and electrostatic discharge than that of any other processor of the era. Thus, the SOS version of the 1802 was said to be the first radiation-hardened microprocessor. The RCA 1802 had

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