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Names of many computer terms, especially computer applications, often relate to the function they perform, e.g., a compiler is an application that compiles (programming language source code into the computer's machine language). However, there are other terms with less obvious origins, which are of etymological interest.
A human computer, with microscope and calculator, 1952. It was not until the mid-20th century that the word acquired its modern definition; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first known use of the word computer was in a different sense, in a 1613 book called The Yong Mans Gleanings by the English writer Richard Brathwait: "I haue [] read the truest computer of Times, and the best ...
The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) was the first electronic general-purpose computer, announced to the public in 1946. It was Turing-complete, [45] digital, and capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems. Women implemented the programming for machines like the ENIAC, and men created the hardware.
The term was coined by the programmers at MIT's Project MAC.According to Fernando J. Corbató, who worked on Project MAC around 1963, his team was the first to use the term daemon, inspired by Maxwell's demon, an imaginary agent in physics and thermodynamics that helped to sort molecules, stating, "We fancifully began to use the word daemon to describe background processes that worked ...
Microsoft, by successfully negotiating with IBM to develop the first operating system for the PC , profited enormously from the PC's success over the following decades, via the success of MS-DOS and its add-on-cum-successor, Microsoft Windows. Winning the negotiation was a pivotal moment in Microsoft's history.
The dictionary incorporates the text of other free resources, such as the Jargon File, as well as covering many other computing-related topics. Due to its availability under the GNU Free Documentation License , a copyleft license, it has in turn been incorporated in whole or part into other free content projects, such as Wikipedia .
Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. A modern english thesaurus. A thesaurus (pl.: thesauri or thesauruses), sometimes called a synonym dictionary or dictionary of synonyms, is a reference work which arranges words by their meanings (or in simpler terms, a book where one can find different words with similar meanings to other words), [1] [2] sometimes as a hierarchy of broader and narrower terms ...
The Online Etymology Dictionary or Etymonline, sometimes abbreviated as OED (not to be confused with the Oxford English Dictionary, which the site often cites), is a free online dictionary that describes the origins of English words, written and compiled by Douglas R. Harper. [1]