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49-461: The "FM" part of the name means "Fujitsu Micro" like their earlier products, while the "Towns" part is derived from the code name the system was assigned while in development, "Townes". This refers to Charles Townes , one of the winners of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics , following a custom of Fujitsu at the time to code name PC products after Nobel Prize winners. The e in "Townes" was dropped when

98-399: A clock speed of 16 MHz , with the option of adding an 80387 FPU , features one or two megabytes of RAM (with a possible maximum of 6 MB), one or two 3.5" floppy disk drives, a PCMCIA memory card slot and a single-speed CD-ROM drive. Its package includes a gamepad , a mouse and a microphone . The earlier, more distinctive models featuring a vertical CD-ROM tray on the front of

147-414: A custom Fujitsu graphics chip, enabling video modes ranging from 320×200 to 720×512 resolutions, with 16 to 32,768 simultaneous colors out of a possible 4096 to 16 million (depending on the video mode); most of these video modes have two memory pages , and it allows the use of up to 1024 sprites of 16×16 pixels each. It also has a built-in font ROM for the display of kanji characters. The system has

196-468: A greater understanding of the nature and purpose of the universe. Townes had German, Scottish, English, Welsh, Huguenot French, and Scotch Irish ancestry, Townes was born in Greenville, South Carolina , the son of Henry Keith Townes (1876–1958), an attorney, and Ellen Sumter Townes ( née  Hard ; 1881–1980). His brother, Henry Keith Townes Jr., (January 20, 1913 – May 2, 1990),

245-586: A large mass in such a small space implied that the central object (the radio source Sagittarius A* ) contains a supermassive black hole . Sagittarius A* was one of the first black holes detected; subsequently its mass has been more accurately determined to be 4.3 million solar masses. Townes's last major technological creation was the Infrared Spatial Interferometer with Walt Fitelson, Ed Wishnow and others. The project combined three mobile infrared detectors aligned by lasers that study

294-506: A professor of physics at Berkeley, said of Townes. "His strength was his curiosity and his unshakable optimism, based on his deep Christian spirituality." Townes work was published widely in books and peer-reviewed journal articles, including: Townes was widely recognized for his scientific work and leadership. . Molex connector A Molex connector is a two-piece pin-and-socket interconnection which became an early electronic standard. Developed by Molex Connector Company in

343-579: A single housing, and each housing can be either male or female. There are three typical pin sizes: 1.57 mm (0.062 in), 2.13 mm (0.084 in), and 2.36 mm (0.093 in). The 1.57 mm pin can carry 5 A of current, while the 2.36 mm can carry 8.5 A. Because the pins have a large contact surface area and fit tightly, these connectors are typically used for power. These connectors are polarized so that they usually cannot be inserted incorrectly. They lock into position using an integrated latch. Despite its widespread adoption,

392-553: Is a list of models and the CPUs they contain from the factory: FMV Towns The FM Towns system is able to play regular audio CDs , and also supports the use of 8 PCM voices and 6 FM channels, using the Ricoh RF5c68 and Yamaha YM2612 sound chips, respectively. The system has ports in the front to accommodate karaoke , LEDs to indicate volume level, and software to add popular voice-altering effects such as echoes. Games on

441-431: Is loaded from CD-ROM by default. A SCSI Centronics 50/SCSI-1/Full-Pitch port is provided for connecting external SCSI disk drives, and is the most common way to connect a hard drive to an FM Towns PC. Although internal drives are rare, there is a hidden compartment with a SCSI 50-pin connector where a hard drive may be connected, but the power supply module does not typically provide the required Molex connector to power

490-461: Is more widely known as a "Molex connector" despite not being from the Molex company. Molex developed and patented the first examples of this connector style in the late 1950s and early 1960s. First used in home appliances, other industries soon began designing it into their products from automobiles to vending machines to minicomputers . In October 1963, AMP (now TE Connectivity ) introduced

539-474: Is notably used in Fujitsu's FM Towns computer series, along with Sega's System 18 and System 32 arcade game system boards . The RF5c68 supports eight 8-bit PCM channels, with 19.6 kHz or variable sampling rate . Audio bit depth ranges from 8-bit to 10-bit . Charles Townes Charles Hard Townes (July 28, 1915 – January 27, 2015) was an American physicist . Townes worked on

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588-847: Is one of the 20 American recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics to sign a letter addressed to President George W. Bush in May 2008, urging him to "reverse the damage done to basic science research in the Fiscal Year 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill" by requesting additional emergency funding for the Department of Energy 's Office of Science , the National Science Foundation , and the National Institute of Standards and Technology . The Galactic Center of

637-561: Is received by the motherboard and in turn passed along to the power supply. This allows the motherboard to remove power upon shutdown (with the exception of the aforementioned 5V standby power, which is always on), and also to "wake up" the computer by events such as key presses, mouse clicks, "wake on lan" events, and scheduled alarm times. These "wakeup" features are often configurable via the BIOS/CMOS setup. The desktop computer hard-drive connector (AMP Mate-n-Lok 1-480424-0 power connector)

686-554: Is standard on all 5.25-inch floppy drives , 3.5-inch PATA and non- SCA SCSI disk drives; however, newer SATA disk drives employ a more advanced interconnection with 15 contacts. These advanced connection systems were first developed by Molex and other connector companies, often working together to develop interconnection standards. As SATA becomes more prevalent, Molex connectors can be found repurposed, through use of an adaptor, to serve as six-pin PCIe power connectors to make up for

735-450: Is that the AT power supply connector did not have a signal to turn on the power supply, and also did not supply separate, "always-on" +5V standby power. The power supply was instead turned on and off via a mechanical switch that disconnected mains power. Modern, ATX supplies, by contrast, are capable of being switched on and off by the computer itself, and the power button is actually a signal that

784-512: Is to check for any sign of blackening or browning on the white plastic shell, which would indicate the need to replace the arcing connector. In extreme cases the whole connector can melt due to the heat from arcing. Certain Molex connectors are used for providing power to the motherboard , fans , floppy disk drive , CD/DVD drive , video card , some older hard drive models, and more. Compatible connectors are available from many manufacturers, not just Molex and AMP. In 20/24-pin configurations,

833-786: The IBM PC, a computer with improved graphics and sound was considered to overcome the PC-9801 in the home-use field in Japan. With many multimedia innovations for its time, the FM Towns was that system, though for a number of reasons it never broke far beyond the boundaries of its niche market status. Eventually, the FM Towns lost much of its uniqueness by adding a DOS/V (PC clone plus DOS with native Japanese language support) compatibility mode switch, until Fujitsu finally discontinued making FM Towns specific hardware and software and moved to focus on

882-537: The IBM PC clones (Fujitsu FMV) that many Japanese manufacturers - who previously were not players in the PC market - were building by the mid to late 1990s. To this day, Fujitsu is known for its laptop PCs globally, and FM Towns (and Marty) users have been relegated to a small community of aficionados. Several variants were built; the first system (FM TOWNS model1 and model2) is based on an Intel 80386DX processor running at

931-652: The 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics . Townes also developed the use of masers and lasers for astronomy , was part of a team that first discovered complex molecules in space, and determined the mass of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy. During 2002–2003, Townes served as a Karl Schwarzschild Lecturer in Germany and the Birla Lecturer and Schroedinger Lecturer in India . Townes

980-421: The 8981 series, but the original Mate-n-Lok connectors remain available from TE Connectivity. In such a connector, cylindrical spring-metal pins fit into cylindrical spring-metal sockets. The pins and sockets are held in a rectangular matrix in a nylon shell. The connector typically has 2 to 24 contacts and is polarized or keyed to ensure correct orientation. Pins and sockets can be arranged in any combination in

1029-512: The CD-ROM drive to be accessed is contained in a system ROM ; this, coupled with Fujitsu's decision to charge only a minimal license fee for the inclusion of a bare-bones Towns OS on game CD-ROMs, allows game developers to make games bootable directly from CD-ROM without the need for a boot floppy or hard disk. Various Linux and BSD distributions have also been ported to the FM Towns system, including Debian and Gentoo . The FM Towns features

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1078-434: The FM Towns regularly use Red Book Audio CD music tracks, especially if they are designed specifically for the Fujitsu system. Games ported from the PC-9801, for instance, might have used only PCM/FM music. This was a novelty and innovation far ahead of other PCs of the time made possible by the standard CD-ROM drive found in every FM Towns computer. The Ricoh RF5c68 is an eight-channel sound chip developed by Ricoh . It

1127-657: The Mate-n-Lok connector. The AMP connector was similar to the patented Molex connectors but not interchangeable. Both were widely used in the computer industry and the term "Molex connector" is often used to refer to all nylon plugs and receptacles. The first 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, the Shugart SA400, introduced in August 1976, used the AMP Mate-n-Lok connector part number 350211-1. This connector became

1176-592: The Milky Way had long puzzled astronomers, and thick dust obscures the view of it in visible light. During the mid to late 1970s, Townes together with Eric Wollman, John Lacy, Thomas Geballe and Fred Baas studied Sagittarius A , the H II region at the Galactic Center, at infrared wavelengths. They observed ionized neon gas swirling around the center at such velocities that the mass at the very center must be approximately equal to that of 3 million suns. Such

1225-1074: The Mini-Fit ;Jr. connector (Molex Mini-fit Jr. 39-28-1203, former 5566-20A or 39-28-1243, former 5566-24A) may be used on ATX motherboards as the main power connector. The same style of connector, in single or paired 4-, 6-, or 8-pin configurations, may be used for additional CPU power and graphics card power. Power delivery to these devices has increased in successive generations of PC components, as their higher signal sophistication and speed requirements have raised their electrical demands. The Mini-Fit Jr. can also be found in other consumer and industrial electric devices, such as major appliances , with high circuit density and high current requirements. Older, AT motherboards utilized two connectors, commonly referred to as "P8" and "P9" that were positioned directly next to each other. These supplied +5V, +12V, −5V, −12V, "power-good signal", and ground. The most notable difference from modern 20/24-pin ATX power connectors

1274-717: The Towns OS API ( TBIOS ) for handling several graphic modes, sprites, sounds, a mouse, gamepads, and CD-audio. The FM Towns is capable of booting its graphical Towns OS straight from CD in 1989 - two years before Amiga CDTV booted its GUI-based AmigaOS 1.3 from internal CD drive and the CD-bootable System 7 was released for the Macintosh in 1991, and five years before the El Torito specification standardized boot-CDs on IBM PC compatibles in 1994. To boot

1323-592: The UCB campus, visiting and working regularly in the physics department or at the Space Sciences Laboratory past his 99th birthday and only a few months before his death. Townes' health began to decline, and he died on route to the hospital in Oakland, California , on January 27, 2015, at the age of 99. "He was one of the most important experimental physicists of the last century," Reinhard Genzel ,

1372-580: The US government's Science and Technology Advisory Committee for the Apollo lunar landing program . After becoming a professor of the University of California, Berkeley in 1967, he began an astrophysical program that produced several important discoveries, for example, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Townes was religious and believed that science and religion are converging to provide

1421-422: The ability to overlay different video modes; for example, the 320×200 video mode with 32,768 colors can be overlaid with a 640×480 mode using 16 colors, which allows games to combine high-color graphics with high-resolution kanji text. It uses 640 KB of video RAM , including 512 KB VRAM and 128 KB sprite RAM . Sprite layer: Up to two graphical layers can be overlaid, whether it is two bitmap layers, or

1470-427: The beauty of nature is "obviously God-made" and that God created the universe for humans to emerge and flourish. He prayed every day and ultimately felt that religion is more important than science because it addresses the most important long-range question: the meaning and purpose of our lives. Townes's belief in the convergence of science and religion is based on claimed similarities: Townes had steadily been active at

1519-405: The case (model1, model2, 1F, 2F, 1H, 2H, 10F and 20F) were often referred to as the "Gray" Towns, and were the ones most directly associated with the "FM Towns" brand. Most featured 3 memory expansion slots and used 72-pin non-parity SIMMs with a required timing of 100 ns or less and a recommended timing of 60ns. Hard drives are not standard equipment, and are not required for most uses. The OS

FM Towns - Misplaced Pages Continue

1568-447: The connector has problems. It is difficult to remove because it is held in place by friction instead of a latch, and some poorly constructed connectors may have one or more pins detach from the connector during mating or de-mating. There is also a tendency for the loosely inserted pins on the male connector to skew out of alignment. The female sockets can spread, making the connection imperfect and subject to arcing . Standard practice

1617-563: The drive. The video output is 15 kHz RGB (though some programs used a 31 kHz mode) using the same DB15 connector and pinouts as the PC-9801. The operating system used is Windows 3.0/3.1/95 and a graphical OS called Towns OS, based on MS-DOS and the Phar Lap DOS extender (RUN386.EXE). Most games for the system were written in protected mode Assembly and C using the Phar Lap DOS extender. These games usually utilize

1666-650: The late 1950s, the design features cylindrical spring-metal pins that fit into cylindrical spring-metal sockets, both held in a rectangular matrix in a nylon shell. AMP (now TE Connectivity ) introduced the Mate-n-Lok connector in October 1963, which was similar to Molex's patented design but not compatible. It featured improvements such as being keyed to prevent incorrect insertion. The Mate-n-Lok connector design led to several connector types that have become established for connecting power in desktop PCs because of their simplicity, reliability, flexibility, and low cost, and

1715-766: The long run, they must converge". He wrote in a statement after winning the Templeton Prize during 2005: "Science tries to understand what our universe is like and how it works, including us humans. Religion is aimed at understanding the purpose and meaning of our universe, including our own lives. If the universe has a purpose or meaning, this must be reflected in its structure and functioning, and hence in science." Townes's opinions concerning science and religion were expounded in his essays "The Convergence of Science and Religion", "Logic and Uncertainties in Science and Religion", and his book Making Waves . Townes felt that

1764-463: The more multimedia-friendly FM Towns was created. NEC's PC-9801 computers were widespread and dominated in the 1980s, at one point reaching 70% of the 16/32-bit computer market, but the early models had limited graphics (640×400 with 16 of 4096 colors) and sounds (4-operator/3 voice monaural FM sounds + 3 channel SSG sounds). Just as Commodore saw an opening for the Amiga in some global markets against

1813-454: The same principle was applied to higher frequencies, the term laser was used (the word "light" substituting for the word "microwave"). During 1953, Townes, James P. Gordon , and Herbert J. Zeiger built the first ammonia maser at Columbia University . This device used stimulated emission in a stream of energized ammonia molecules to produce amplification of microwaves at a frequency of about 24.0  gigahertz . From 1959 to 1961, he

1862-409: The same star. If each telescope is 10 meters from the other, it creates an impression of a 30-meter lens. Observations of Betelgeuse , a red giant in the shoulder of the constellation Orion , found that it is increasing and decreasing in size at the rate of 1% per year, 15% over 15 years. ISI produces extremely high angular and spatial resolution . The technology is also playing an important role in

1911-637: The search for extraterrestrial life in collaborations with Dan Werthimer of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Townes married Frances H. Brown, an activist for the homeless, during 1941. They lived in Berkeley, California and had four daughters, Linda Rosenwein, Ellen Anderson, Carla Kessler, and Holly Townes. A religious man and a member of the United Church of Christ , Townes believed that "science and religion [are] quite parallel, much more similar than most people think and that in

1960-467: The sprite layer with a bitmap background layer. The latter is useful for action games , though the sprite function is not as advanced as that of rival 32-bit computer, the Sharp X68000 . When the sprite layer is used, it is rendered to VRAM layer 1 on top, with the bitmap background as VRAM layer 0 below. When two bitmap layers are used, then both are rendered to VRAM layers 0 and 1. The following

2009-450: The standard for 5.25-inch format peripherals such as hard drives and was used until introduction of SATA drives . In 1983, Molex introduced the 8981 connector under the trademark Disk Drive Power Connection System, which was fully compatible with the AMP Mate-n-Lok connector. The Molex 8981 series was only produced in a 4-position option, unlike the Mate-n-Lok family which includes many other contact arrangements. Molex has since discontinued

FM Towns - Misplaced Pages Continue

2058-580: The system from CD-ROM , the FM TOWNS has a "hidden C:" ROM drive in which a minimum MS-DOS system, CD-ROM driver and MSCDEX.EXE are installed. This minimal DOS system runs first, and the DOS system reads and executes the Towns OS IPL stored in CD-ROM after that. The Towns OS CD-ROM has an IPL, MS-DOS system ( IO.SYS ) , DOS extender, and Towns API (TBIOS). A minimal DOS system that allows

2107-516: The system went into production to make it clearer that the term was to be pronounced like the word "towns" rather than the potential "tow-nes". Fujitsu decided to release a new home computer after the FM-7 was technologically overcome by NEC 's PC-8801 . During the life of the FM-7, Fujitsu learnt that software sales drove hardware sales, and in order to acquire usable software quickly, the new computer

2156-510: The theory and application of the maser , for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics associated with both maser and laser devices. He shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov . Townes was an adviser to the United States Government, meeting every US president from Harry S. Truman (1945) to Bill Clinton (1999). He directed

2205-702: Was a renowned entomologist who was a world authority on Ichneumon wasps . Charles earned his B.S. in Physics and B.A. in Modern Languages at Furman University , where he graduated in 1935. Townes completed work for the Master of Arts degree in physics at Duke University in 1937, and then began graduate school at the California Institute of Technology , from which he received a Ph.D. degree in 1939. During World War II , he worked on radar bombing systems at Bell Labs . In 1950, Townes

2254-510: Was appointed as a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley , where he remained for almost 50 years; his status was as professor emeritus by the time of his death during 2015. Between 1966 and 1970, he was chairman of the NASA Science Advisory Committee for the Apollo lunar landing program. For his creation of the maser, Townes along with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov received

2303-563: Was appointed professor at Columbia University . He served as executive director of the Columbia Radiation Laboratory from 1950 to 1952. He was Chairman of the Physics Department from 1952 to 1955. In 1951, Townes conceived a new way to create intense, precise beams of coherent radiation , for which he invented the acronym maser (for Microwave Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation). When

2352-603: Was on leave of absence from Columbia University to serve as vice president and director of research of the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit organization, which advised the U.S. government and was operated by eleven universities. Between 1961 and 1967, Townes served as both provost and professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Then, during 1967, he

2401-554: Was to be based on Fujitsu's "FMR50" system architecture. The FMR50 system, released at 1986, was another x86 /DOS-based computer similar to NEC's popular PC-9801 . The FMR50 computers were sold with moderate success in Japanese offices, particularly in Japanese government offices. There were hundreds of software packages available for the FMR, including Lotus 1-2-3 , WordStar , Multiplan , and dBASE III . With this basis of compatibility,

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