IT History, Etc. - Hardware: Tidbits

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In the early 1950's in the US Air Force, the first agencies to have computers were the research and development departments, for scientific purposes. As business applications for computers began to become more prevalent in the civilian market in the 1960's, the Comptroller Organization within the Air Force began to argue that all business applications on computers (along the lines of payroll, budgeting, and accounting) should be routed through their department. They saw the potential at the time to use computers to control the flow of money, and took advantage of these developments to further control management within the Air Force. As a matter of fact, this is what did happen, and the comptrollers ended up making many of the management decisions before they reached the command level. This is more of an interesting example of how computers can impact the hierarchy of an organization.

A video card or graphics card is the component which fabricates data into visual representation such as graphical user interfaces (GUI). The two main graphics companies today are ATI Technologies and NVIDIA, ATI being the market leader with 59% of the graphics card market and NVIDIA being 37% as of Q3 2004. The most well known graphics card from long ago was the Hercules Graphics Card, which was monochromatic and supported one high resolution text mode and a single graphics mode. It was developed in 1982, and was used on IBM PC’s. It was the first truly popular graphics card for excellent power and great price.

A sound card is the component which fabricates data into auditory signals and sounds. Sound cards were not widely used until 1988. Two of the first sound card companies were Creative Labs and AdLib. The most important sound card change came with the invention of the SoundBlaster sound card by Creative Labs. Creative Lab’s Sound Blaster line remains to this day as the most successful sound card line in PC history. It could pump out digital sound processes, included a joystick port, and could interface MIDI equipment. All of this, and it cost the same as the AdLib inferior card. This made the Soundblaster the most popular sound card throughout the 90’s.

Memory is a temporary storage used in a computer to hold information which allows the CPU and other components to access data quickly. Memory is used because it is much faster than a hard drive to access. There are many different variations of RAM (Random Access Memory). The most common type today is SDRAM (Sychronous Dynamic Random Access Memory), which comes in flavors of 66mhz, 100mhz, and 133mhz clock speeds. Another varient of SD is DDR SDRAM (Double Data Rate SDRAM), which comes in many varieties, such as 200mhz, 266mhz, 333mhz, and DDR2, which comes in 400mhz, 533mhz, 667mhz, 800mhz.

An ethernet is a component which allows two or more computers or components to communicate using direct electrical data transfers. Ethernet is currently the most popular way of networking to date. The three most popular types are 10BASE-T, 100BASE-TX, and 1000BASE-T. All run at 10mbps, 100mbps, or 1000mbps.

CD-ROM (Compact Disk-Read Only Memory) is a drive capable of reading CD's, with many varients being able to write and rewrite CD's and DVD's (Digital Video Drive). A CD comes in 650 megabyte and 700 megabyte flavors, as well as some mini-CD's which are smaller and hold about half the amount of data. A CD is a very thin circular piece of plastic with a metal layer of writable film on it. The film has small bumps on it called hills and has imprints called valleys. The computer reads these hills and valleys as 1’s and 0’s, basic binary.

Motherboards include a user interface in order for the user to change different hardware profiles and preferences, called the BIOS. BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System, also sometimes called the Built-In Operating System. It can also be called CMOS (Copper Metal-Oxide Semiconductor). BIOS also prepares the computer for communications and processes. The BIOS performs the POST (Power-On Self Test)

A chipset is a large grouping of many circuits, which when configured, work together, and is found on a motherboard in one or more cases.

The front side bus (FSB) is the data bus which transfers the signals between the CPU (Processor) and the other components of the computer. The speed of the entire computer is dramatically faster with a higher FSB speed.

The PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) is the most common connection for internal peripherals inside the computer on the motherboard. The PCI suceeded the ISA (Industry Standard Architecture), which was much larger and slower than PCI. A new version, PCI Express, has been incorperated and is mainly being used for graphics cards, as well as other peripherals because it is faster than AGP and PCI.The AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) is used strictly for graphics cards only. It comes in speeds of 1x, 2x, 4x, and 8x.