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8-inch floppy disk, inserted in drive, (3½-inch floppy diskette, in front, shown for scale) 3½-inch, high-density floppy diskettes with adhesive labels affixed The first commercial floppy disks, developed in the late 1960s, were 8 inches (203.2 mm) in diameter; [4] [5] they became commercially available in 1971 as a component of IBM products and both drives and disks were then sold ...
An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also include accounting software for cost allocation of processor time , mass storage , peripherals, and ...
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 ...
In computing, a shell is a computer program that exposes an operating system's services to a human user or other programs. In general, operating system shells use either a command-line interface (CLI) or graphical user interface (GUI), depending on a computer's role and particular operation. It is named a shell because it is the outermost layer ...
In the context of an operating system, a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls a particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton. [1] A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other computer programs to access hardware functions without needing to ...
The notion of "large" amounts of data is of course highly dependent on the time frame and the market segment, as storage device capacity has increased by many orders of magnitude since the beginnings of computer technology in the late 1940s and continues to grow; however, in any time frame, common mass storage devices have tended to be much larger and at the same time much slower than common ...
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A Maxell-branded 3-inch Compact Floppy Disk. The floppy disk is a data storage and transfer medium that was ubiquitous from the mid-1970s well into the 2000s. [1] Besides the 3½-inch and 5¼-inch formats used in IBM PC compatible systems, or the 8-inch format that preceded them, many proprietary floppy disk formats were developed, either using a different disk design or special layout and ...