122-720: TRIPOS ( TRI vial P ortable O perating S ystem ) is a computer operating system . Development started in 1976 at the Computer Laboratory of Cambridge University and it was headed by Dr. Martin Richards . The first version appeared in January 1978 and it originally ran on a PDP-11 . Later it was ported to the Computer Automation LSI4 and the Data General Nova . Work on a Motorola 68000 version started in 1981 at
244-494: A TCP/IP connection - the systems are used to run Open G I's BROOMS Application suite . Open G I have added a number of features to support the modern office such as the ability to integrate into many mainstream applications and services such as SQL server, Citrix XENAPP, terminal servers, etc. The following list of commands is supported by the TRIPOS CLI. Cintpos is an experimental interpretive version of TRIPOS which runs on
366-510: A binary system meant that Zuse's machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable, given the technologies available at that time. The Z3 was not itself a universal computer but could be extended to be Turing complete . Zuse's next computer, the Z4 , became the world's first commercial computer; after initial delay due to the Second World War, it was completed in 1950 and delivered to
488-632: A central processing unit (CPU) in the form of a microprocessor , together with some type of computer memory , typically semiconductor memory chips. The processing element carries out arithmetic and logical operations, and a sequencing and control unit can change the order of operations in response to stored information . Peripheral devices include input devices ( keyboards , mice , joysticks , etc.), output devices ( monitors , printers , etc.), and input/output devices that perform both functions (e.g. touchscreens ). Peripheral devices allow information to be retrieved from an external source, and they enable
610-413: A hierarchical file system and multiple command line interpreters . The most important TRIPOS concepts have been the non-memory-management approach (meaning no checks are performed to stop programs from using unallocated memory) and message passing by means of passing pointers instead of copying message contents. Those two concepts together allowed for sending and receiving over 1250 packets per second on
732-419: A keyboard , and computed and printed the results, demonstrating the feasibility of an electromechanical analytical engine. During the first half of the 20th century, many scientific computing needs were met by increasingly sophisticated analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or electrical model of the problem as a basis for computation . However, these were not programmable and generally lacked
854-514: A mass-production basis, which limited them to a number of specialized applications. At the University of Manchester , a team under the leadership of Tom Kilburn designed and built a machine using the newly developed transistors instead of valves. Their first transistorized computer and the first in the world, was operational by 1953 , and a second version was completed there in April 1955. However,
976-429: A monolithic integrated circuit (IC) chip. Kilby's IC had external wire connections, which made it difficult to mass-produce. Noyce also came up with his own idea of an integrated circuit half a year later than Kilby. Noyce's invention was the first true monolithic IC chip. His chip solved many practical problems that Kilby's had not. Produced at Fairchild Semiconductor, it was made of silicon , whereas Kilby's chip
1098-459: A 10 MHz Motorola 68010 CPU. Most of TRIPOS was implemented in BCPL . The kernel and device drivers were implemented in assembly language . One notable feature of TRIPOS/BCPL was its cultural use of shared libraries, untypical at the time, resulting in small and therefore fast loading utilities. For example, many of the standard system utilities were well below 0.5 Kbytes in size, compared to
1220-634: A 1998 retrospective, it was the first working machine to contain all of the elements essential to a modern electronic computer. As soon as the Baby had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project began at the university to develop it into a practically useful computer, the Manchester Mark 1 . The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1 , the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer. Built by Ferranti , it
1342-506: A Chip (SoCs) are complete computers on a microchip (or chip) the size of a coin. They may or may not have integrated RAM and flash memory . If not integrated, the RAM is usually placed directly above (known as Package on package ) or below (on the opposite side of the circuit board ) the SoC, and the flash memory is usually placed right next to the SoC. This is done to improve data transfer speeds, as
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#17330930640631464-594: A day. Mazak UK have the parent company's European manufacturing facility (for CNC machine tools) in the north of Worcester. Nearby on the Blackpole Ind Est, Froude Hofmann have their world headquarters, who make dynamometers . Roxel UK develops solid-fuel rockets for missiles south of Kidderminster and in Hartlebury . The West Midlands Safari Park is in Bewdley , west of Kidderminster. Morgan Technical Ceramics
1586-563: A large turnover; nearby to west Metalrax , headquartered in Alvechurch , make (via subsidiaries) most of the bakeware sold in the UK. Roger Dyson Group manufactures auto-recovery vehicles in north Droitwich. South of Bromsgrove, L.G. Harris & Co make paintbrushes . Lea & Perrins is in Worcester . Joy Mining Machinery are in the west of Worcester. Worcester, Bosch Group make 1,200 boilers
1708-403: A medieval European counting house , a checkered cloth would be placed on a table, and markers moved around on it according to certain rules, as an aid to calculating sums of money. The Antikythera mechanism is believed to be the earliest known mechanical analog computer , according to Derek J. de Solla Price . It was designed to calculate astronomical positions. It was discovered in 1901 in
1830-520: A much more general design, an analytical engine , was possible. The input of programs and data was to be provided to the machine via punched cards , a method being used at the time to direct mechanical looms such as the Jacquard loom . For output, the machine would have a printer, a curve plotter and a bell. The machine would also be able to punch numbers onto cards to be read in later. The engine would incorporate an arithmetic logic unit , control flow in
1952-514: A nominally complete computer that includes the hardware , operating system , software , and peripheral equipment needed and used for full operation; or to a group of computers that are linked and function together, such as a computer network or computer cluster . A broad range of industrial and consumer products use computers as control systems , including simple special-purpose devices like microwave ovens and remote controls , and factory devices like industrial robots . Computers are at
2074-524: A number of successes at breaking encrypted German military communications. The German encryption machine, Enigma , was first attacked with the help of the electro-mechanical bombes which were often run by women. To crack the more sophisticated German Lorenz SZ 40/42 machine, used for high-level Army communications, Max Newman and his colleagues commissioned Flowers to build the Colossus . He spent eleven months from early February 1943 designing and building
2196-436: A population of 592,057. After Worcester (103,872) the largest settlements are Redditch (87,036), Kidderminster (57,400), and Malvern (30,462). It contains six local government districts , which are part of a two-tier non-metropolitan county also called Worcestershire . The county historically had complex boundaries , and included Dudley and the southwestern suburbs of Birmingham . The River Severn flows through
2318-573: A running club and doubling as a rugby club from 1880, the football club was founded in 1886. In 1987, the club won the FA Trophy for the first time, and seven years later reached the fifth round of the FA Cup , also winning the GM Vauxhall Conference title in 1994 but being denied Football League status as their Aggborough Stadium did not meet capacity requirements. However, when the club next won
2440-546: A sequence of sets of values. The whole machine was to be controlled by a read-only program, which was complete with provisions for conditional branching . He also introduced the idea of floating-point arithmetic . In 1920, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the invention of the arithmometer , Torres presented in Paris the Electromechanical Arithmometer, which allowed a user to input arithmetic problems through
2562-477: A single non-metropolitan county of Hereford and Worcester . The County Boroughs of Dudley and Warley, along with Stourbridge and Halesowen, were incorporated into the new West Midlands Metropolitan county . The West Midlands County Council existed for only a few years before abolition in April 1986, although the West Midlands still exists as a ceremonial county . In the 1990s UK local government reform ,
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#17330930640632684-515: A small section of Amblecote . The Local Government Act redefined its status and the County Borough of Dudley became part of Staffordshire, the county of which all of these areas had been part. At the same time, Worcestershire gained a new county borough named Warley , which was an amalgamation of Oldbury Urban District , Rowley Regis Urban District , the County Borough of Smethwick and parts of Dudley and Tipton . During this reorganisation,
2806-460: A successful demonstration of its use in computing tables in 1906. In his work Essays on Automatics published in 1914, Leonardo Torres Quevedo wrote a brief history of Babbage's efforts at constructing a mechanical Difference Engine and Analytical Engine. The paper contains a design of a machine capable to calculate formulas like a x ( y − z ) 2 {\displaystyle a^{x}(y-z)^{2}} , for
2928-642: A typical minimum of about 20 Kbytes for functionally equivalent code on a modern Unix or Linux. TRIPOS was ported to a number of machines, including the Data General Nova 2 , the Computer Automation LSI4, Motorola 68000 and Intel 8086 - based hardware. It was offered as the standard operating system on the Microbox III, a computer based on the Motorola 68010 produced by Micro Concepts, alongside alternatives such as CP/M and OS-9 . It included support for
3050-402: A universal Turing machine. Early computing machines had fixed programs. Changing its function required the re-wiring and re-structuring of the machine. With the proposal of the stored-program computer this changed. A stored-program computer includes by design an instruction set and can store in memory a set of instructions (a program ) that details the computation . The theoretical basis for
3172-468: Is a ceremonial county in the West Midlands of England . It is bordered by Shropshire , Staffordshire , and the West Midlands county to the north, Warwickshire to the east, Gloucestershire to the south, and Herefordshire to the west. The city of Worcester is the largest settlement and the county town . The county is largely rural, and has an area of 1,741 km (672 sq mi) and
3294-513: Is also home to the world's oldest continually published newspaper, the Berrow's Journal , established in 1690. Malvern was one of the centres of the 19th-century rise in English spa towns due to Malvern water being believed to be very pure, containing "nothing at all". The 2011 census found the population of Worcestershire to be 566,169, an increase of 4.4% from the 2001 population of 542,107. Though
3416-774: Is headquartered at Lickhill in Stourport-on-Severn . Egbert H. Taylor in Elmley Lovett , near Hartlebury is a manufacturer of metal bins. Liquid crystal displays were developed in 1972 in conjunction with the Royal Radar Establishment , where Geoffrey Dummer invented the idea of the integrated circuit in 1952. It was based in Malvern , and became the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment , which developed thermal imaging and pyroelectric infrared detectors , and
3538-812: Is now a large site owned by QinetiQ . Morgan Motor Company is in Malvern Link . Commsoft RMS is in Evesham . For many years Group 4 Security , which was the largest security company in Europe, had its headquarters in Broadway , on the edge of the Cotswolds ; G4S Integrated Services now has its HQ there. Local government in Worcestershire has changed several times since the middle of the 19th century. Worcestershire contained numerous exclaves , which were areas of land cut off from
3660-607: Is some evidence of Roman occupation in Worcestershire; the area later became part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Hwicce , and then Mercia . Worcestershire was constituted as a county around 927, as the Kingdom of England formed. During the High Middle Ages the county was the site of the Battle of Evesham , in which Simon de Montfort was defeated, and in 1651 the Battle of Worcester
3782-463: Is the stored program , where all the instructions for computing are stored in memory. Von Neumann acknowledged that the central concept of the modern computer was due to this paper. Turing machines are to this day a central object of study in theory of computation . Except for the limitations imposed by their finite memory stores, modern computers are said to be Turing-complete , which is to say, they have algorithm execution capability equivalent to
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3904-603: The Antikythera wreck off the Greek island of Antikythera , between Kythera and Crete , and has been dated to approximately c. 100 BCE . Devices of comparable complexity to the Antikythera mechanism would not reappear until the fourteenth century. Many mechanical aids to calculation and measurement were constructed for astronomical and navigation use. The planisphere was a star chart invented by Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī in
4026-522: The Cambridge Ring local area network . More recently, Martin Richards produced a port of TRIPOS to run under Linux , using Cintcode BCPL virtual machine. As of February 2020, TRIPOS is still actively maintained by Open G I Ltd. (formerly Misys Financial Systems ) in Worcestershire , UK . Many British insurance brokers have a Linux/Intel based TRIPOS system serving networked workstations over
4148-502: The Cintcode BCPL virtual machine , also developed by Martin Richards. Computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to automatically carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation ). Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs . These programs enable computers to perform a wide range of tasks. The term computer system may refer to
4270-500: The Cotswolds AONB. Worcestershire contains a broad expanse of green belt area, widening to over 16 kilometres (9.9 mi) in places. It is part of the larger belt surrounding the West Midlands county, and first drawn up from the 1950s. All of the county's districts other than Malvern Hills contain some portion of the belt. The largest and most successful football club in the county is Kidderminster Harriers . Founded in 1877 as
4392-704: The County Borough of Birmingham , on 1 October 1891. This was followed by Quinton Urban District , which was ceded to Birmingham in November 1909, and then by the Rural District of Yardley and the greater part of the Urban District of King's Norton and Northfield , which were absorbed into Birmingham under the Greater Birmingham Scheme on 9 November 1911. Thus these areas were transferred from Worcestershire to Warwickshire. Dudley's historical status within
4514-524: The Diocese of Worcester and through its aristocratic links ensured that the exclave was governed on a largely autonomous basis. Worcester was designated a county corporate , and thus became separate from the rest of Worcestershire. In 1926, Dudley County Borough council purchased several square miles of land to the north of the town centre, mostly in Sedgley ( Staffordshire ), including Dudley Castle . This
4636-504: The E6B circular slide rule used for time and distance calculations on light aircraft. In the 1770s, Pierre Jaquet-Droz , a Swiss watchmaker , built a mechanical doll ( automaton ) that could write holding a quill pen. By switching the number and order of its internal wheels different letters, and hence different messages, could be produced. In effect, it could be mechanically "programmed" to read instructions. Along with two other complex machines,
4758-574: The ETH Zurich . The computer was manufactured by Zuse's own company, Zuse KG , which was founded in 1941 as the first company with the sole purpose of developing computers in Berlin. The Z4 served as the inspiration for the construction of the ERMETH , the first Swiss computer and one of the first in Europe. Purely electronic circuit elements soon replaced their mechanical and electromechanical equivalents, at
4880-756: The Norman conquest of England ; the Domesday Book noted in 1086 that in seven of the twelve hundreds covering Worcestershire, the Crown had no authority. The Crown's authority was replaced by the Bishop of Worcester and the Abbots at Pershore, Westminster and Evesham. William the Conqueror gave to his allies and friends manors and parishes captured from the Anglo-Saxons. Despite
5002-582: The Severn valley. The Severn is the United Kingdom's longest river and flows through Bewdley , Stourport-on-Severn and Worcester . The River Avon flows through the Worcestershire town on Evesham and joins the Severn at Tewkesbury , Gloucestershire . Several coniferous and deciduous woodlands are located in the north of the county. The Vale of Evesham runs through the south of the county and to its south are
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5124-795: The Southern Premier League , and Worcester City of the Midland Football League . The county is home to Worcestershire County Cricket Club , traditionally the first stop on any touring national side's schedule in England. Formed officially in 1865, the Club initially played in Boughton Park, before moving to its current New Road ground, which today can host 5,500 spectators, in 1895. The club has won five County Championships in its history, most recently in 1989. Worcester Rugby Football Club,
5246-665: The Terribly Reliable, Incredibly Portable Operating System . The name TRIPOS also refers to the Tripos system of undergraduate courses and examinations , which is unique to Cambridge University. In July 1985, the Amiga was introduced, incorporating TRIPOS in the AmigaDOS module of AmigaOS . AmigaDOS included a command-line interface and the Amiga File System . The entire AmigaDOS module
5368-593: The University of Bath . MetaComCo acquired the rights to the 68000 version and continued development until TRIPOS was chosen by Commodore in March 1985 to form part of an operating system for their new Amiga computer; it was also used at Cambridge as part of the Cambridge Distributed Computing System . Students in the Computer Science department at Cambridge affectionately refer to TRIPOS as
5490-476: The West Midlands ). Worcestershire County Council was reformed, although some services are shared with the newly formed Herefordshire Council , including waste management and the youth offending service. The former Hereford and Worcester districts of Redditch, Worcester, Bromsgrove, Wychavon and Wyre Forest were retained with little or no change. However the Leominster and Malvern Hills districts straddled
5612-711: The Worcester Warriors , are the county's largest and most successful Rugby Union team, having been promoted to the Premiership in 2004. The Warriors were relegated to the RFU Championship in 2010 but rebounded back to the Premiership in 2011. Worcester Warriors play at the Sixways Stadium on the outskirts of Worcester, holding over 12,000 spectators, thus making it the largest stadium in the county. Sixways has hosted
5734-489: The microcomputer revolution in the 1970s. The speed, power, and versatility of computers have been increasing dramatically ever since then, with transistor counts increasing at a rapid pace ( Moore's law noted that counts doubled every two years), leading to the Digital Revolution during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Conventionally, a modern computer consists of at least one processing element , typically
5856-504: The "second generation" of computers. Compared to vacuum tubes, transistors have many advantages: they are smaller, and require less power than vacuum tubes, so give off less heat. Junction transistors were much more reliable than vacuum tubes and had longer, indefinite, service life. Transistorized computers could contain tens of thousands of binary logic circuits in a relatively compact space. However, early junction transistors were relatively bulky devices that were difficult to manufacture on
5978-513: The 1920s, Vannevar Bush and others developed mechanical differential analyzers. In the 1890s, the Spanish engineer Leonardo Torres Quevedo began to develop a series of advanced analog machines that could solve real and complex roots of polynomials , which were published in 1901 by the Paris Academy of Sciences . Charles Babbage , an English mechanical engineer and polymath , originated
6100-499: The 19th century, Worcester was a centre for the manufacture of gloves; the town of Kidderminster became a centre for carpet manufacture, and Redditch specialised in the manufacture of needles, springs and hooks. Droitwich Spa , situated on large deposits of salt, was a centre of salt production from Roman times, with one of the principal Roman roads running through the town. These old industries have since declined, to be replaced by other, more varied light industry . The county
6222-475: The Birmingham boundary at Frankley , Rubery and Rednal . Frankley parish was later split into two: New Frankley and the area around Bartley Reservoir transferred from Bromsgrove District to Birmingham in April 1995; but the small village of Frankley remained in Worcestershire and became a new civil parish under the same name. From 1974, the central and southern parts of the county were amalgamated with Herefordshire and with Worcester County Borough to form
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#17330930640636344-554: The Cambridge EDSAC of 1949, became operational in April 1951 and ran the world's first routine office computer job . The concept of a field-effect transistor was proposed by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1925. John Bardeen and Walter Brattain , while working under William Shockley at Bell Labs , built the first working transistor , the point-contact transistor , in 1947, which was followed by Shockley's bipolar junction transistor in 1948. From 1955 onwards, transistors replaced vacuum tubes in computer designs, giving rise to
6466-473: The Conference title six years later, their stadium had been upgraded and promotion was granted, giving the county its first (and thus far only) Football League members. However, the club's Football League membership was short-lived, as Harriers were relegated back to the Conference in 2005 after just five years in the Football League, and have yet to reclaim their status. The county is also represented by Alvechurch , Bromsgrove Sporting and Redditch United of
6588-429: The EDVAC in 1945. The Manchester Baby was the world's first stored-program computer . It was built at the University of Manchester in England by Frederic C. Williams , Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill , and ran its first program on 21 June 1948. It was designed as a testbed for the Williams tube , the first random-access digital storage device. Although the computer was described as "small and primitive" by
6710-403: The ENIAC were six women, often known collectively as the "ENIAC girls". It combined the high speed of electronics with the ability to be programmed for many complex problems. It could add or subtract 5000 times a second, a thousand times faster than any other machine. It also had modules to multiply, divide, and square root. High speed memory was limited to 20 words (about 80 bytes). Built under
6832-429: The MOS transistor, was invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960 and was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturized and mass-produced for a wide range of uses. With its high scalability , and much lower power consumption and higher density than bipolar junction transistors, the MOSFET made it possible to build high-density integrated circuits . In addition to data processing, it also enabled
6954-412: The Norman Conquest, the rest of the county was still held by the Abbeys of Pershore and Evesham, the Bishop of Worcester and Priory . The first Norman Sheriff Urse d'Abetot , built the castle of Worcester and seized much church land, some of which became part of the Crown's hundreds in Worcestershire. and was in dispute with the Bishop of Worcester over the rights of the sheriff. Bishop Wulfstan
7076-399: The Scottish scientist Sir William Thomson in 1872 was of great utility to navigation in shallow waters. It used a system of pulleys and wires to automatically calculate predicted tide levels for a set period at a particular location. The differential analyser , a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration , used wheel-and-disc mechanisms to perform
7198-437: The U.S. Although the ENIAC was similar to the Colossus, it was much faster, more flexible, and it was Turing-complete. Like the Colossus, a "program" on the ENIAC was defined by the states of its patch cables and switches, a far cry from the stored program electronic machines that came later. Once a program was written, it had to be mechanically set into the machine with manual resetting of plugs and switches. The programmers of
7320-417: The US, John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry of Iowa State University developed and tested the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) in 1942, the first "automatic electronic digital computer". This design was also all-electronic and used about 300 vacuum tubes, with capacitors fixed in a mechanically rotating drum for memory. During World War II, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park achieved
7442-566: The advent of the integrated circuit (IC). The idea of the integrated circuit was first conceived by a radar scientist working for the Royal Radar Establishment of the Ministry of Defence , Geoffrey W.A. Dummer . Dummer presented the first public description of an integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C. , on 7 May 1952. The first working ICs were invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor . Kilby recorded his initial ideas concerning
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#17330930640637564-485: The area of the administrative county grew only where Stourbridge took in the majority of Amblecote Urban District from Staffordshire and the designation of Redditch in 1964 as a New Town . This in turn saw expansion into the area in and around the villages of Ipsley and Matchborough in Warwickshire. The Redditch New Town designation coincided with a considerable programme of social and private house building in Droitwich , Worcester, Bromsgrove, Kidderminster and along
7686-507: The basic concept which underlies all electronic digital computers. By 1938, the United States Navy had developed an electromechanical analog computer small enough to use aboard a submarine . This was the Torpedo Data Computer , which used trigonometry to solve the problem of firing a torpedo at a moving target. During World War II similar devices were developed in other countries as well. Early digital computers were electromechanical ; electric switches drove mechanical relays to perform
7808-530: The best Arithmetician that euer [ sic ] breathed, and he reduceth thy dayes into a short number." This usage of the term referred to a human computer , a person who carried out calculations or computations . The word continued to have the same meaning until the middle of the 20th century. During the latter part of this period, women were often hired as computers because they could be paid less than their male counterparts. By 1943, most human computers were women. The Online Etymology Dictionary gives
7930-471: The calculation. These devices had a low operating speed and were eventually superseded by much faster all-electric computers, originally using vacuum tubes . The Z2 , created by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1939 in Berlin , was one of the earliest examples of an electromechanical relay computer. In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with the Z3 , the world's first working electromechanical programmable , fully automatic digital computer. The Z3
8052-399: The centre of the county from north to south, forming a wide plain. The southwest of the county contains part of the Malvern Hills , a National Landscape which contains Worcestershire Beacon , at 425 m (1,394 ft) the county's highest point. The southwest contains a small part of the Cotswolds , and in the northwest is part of the Wyre Forest , a national nature reserve . There
8174-486: The concept of a programmable computer. Considered the " father of the computer ", he conceptualized and invented the first mechanical computer in the early 19th century. After working on his difference engine he announced his invention in 1822, in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society , titled "Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables". He also designed to aid in navigational calculations, in 1833 he realized that
8296-577: The core of general-purpose devices such as personal computers and mobile devices such as smartphones . Computers power the Internet , which links billions of computers and users. Early computers were meant to be used only for calculations. Simple manual instruments like the abacus have aided people in doing calculations since ancient times. Early in the Industrial Revolution , some mechanical devices were built to automate long, tedious tasks, such as guiding patterns for looms . More sophisticated electrical machines did specialized analog calculations in
8418-418: The county is even more colourful, changing hands from Worcestershire to Staffordshire and Warwickshire, before returning to Worcestershire at differing times over the centuries. The southern boundary of the county was also complex, with parish boundaries penetrating deep into Gloucestershire and vice versa. Worcestershire County Council came into existence following the Local Government Act 1888 and covered
8540-409: The county of Hereford & Worcester was abolished, and the non-metropolitan county or shire county of Worcestershire regained its historic border with Herefordshire. The recreated County of Worcestershire came into existence on 1 April 1998 as an administrative and ceremonial county, although this excluded the Black Country towns of Dudley, Halesowen, Oldbury and Stourbridge (which remained part of
8662-440: The data signals do not have to travel long distances. Since ENIAC in 1945, computers have advanced enormously, with modern SoCs (such as the Snapdragon 865) being the size of a coin while also being hundreds of thousands of times more powerful than ENIAC, integrating billions of transistors, and consuming only a few watts of power. The first mobile computers were heavy and ran from mains power. The 50 lb (23 kg) IBM 5100
8784-507: The decision of the British Government to cease funding. Babbage's failure to complete the analytical engine can be chiefly attributed to political and financial difficulties as well as his desire to develop an increasingly sophisticated computer and to move ahead faster than anyone else could follow. Nevertheless, his son, Henry Babbage , completed a simplified version of the analytical engine's computing unit (the mill ) in 1888. He gave
8906-454: The direction of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC's development and construction lasted from 1943 to full operation at the end of 1945. The machine was huge, weighing 30 tons, using 200 kilowatts of electric power and contained over 18,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. The principle of
9028-479: The doll is at the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire of Neuchâtel , Switzerland , and still operates. In 1831–1835, mathematician and engineer Giovanni Plana devised a Perpetual Calendar machine , which through a system of pulleys and cylinders could predict the perpetual calendar for every year from 0 CE (that is, 1 BCE) to 4000 CE, keeping track of leap years and varying day length. The tide-predicting machine invented by
9150-475: The early 11th century. The astrolabe was invented in the Hellenistic world in either the 1st or 2nd centuries BCE and is often attributed to Hipparchus . A combination of the planisphere and dioptra , the astrolabe was effectively an analog computer capable of working out several different kinds of problems in spherical astronomy . An astrolabe incorporating a mechanical calendar computer and gear -wheels
9272-525: The early 2000s. These smartphones and tablets run on a variety of operating systems and recently became the dominant computing device on the market. These are powered by System on a Chip (SoCs), which are complete computers on a microchip the size of a coin. Computers can be classified in a number of different ways, including: Worcestershire Worcestershire ( / ˈ w ʊ s t ər ʃ ər / WUUST -ər-shər , /- ʃ ɪər / -sheer ; written abbreviation: Worcs )
9394-399: The early 20th century. The first digital electronic calculating machines were developed during World War II , both electromechanical and using thermionic valves . The first semiconductor transistors in the late 1940s were followed by the silicon -based MOSFET (MOS transistor) and monolithic integrated circuit chip technologies in the late 1950s, leading to the microprocessor and
9516-473: The exact definition of the term "microprocessor", it is largely undisputed that the first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004 , designed and realized by Federico Faggin with his silicon-gate MOS IC technology, along with Ted Hoff , Masatoshi Shima and Stanley Mazor at Intel . In the early 1970s, MOS IC technology enabled the integration of more than 10,000 transistors on a single chip. System on
9638-772: The final of the LV Cup on three occasions. The village of Broadheath , about 6.2 miles (10 km) northwest of the city of Worcester, is the birthplace of the composer Edward Elgar . It is claimed that the county was the inspiration for the Shire , a region of J. R. R. Tolkien 's fictional Middle-earth , described in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . Tolkien was thought to have named Bilbo Baggins ' house " Bag End " after his Aunt Jane's Worcestershire farm. Tolkien wrote of Worcestershire, "Any corner of that county (however fair or squalid)
9760-503: The first Colossus. After a functional test in December 1943, Colossus was shipped to Bletchley Park, where it was delivered on 18 January 1944 and attacked its first message on 5 February. Colossus was the world's first electronic digital programmable computer. It used a large number of valves (vacuum tubes). It had paper-tape input and was capable of being configured to perform a variety of boolean logical operations on its data, but it
9882-725: The first attested use of computer in the 1640s, meaning 'one who calculates'; this is an "agent noun from compute (v.)". The Online Etymology Dictionary states that the use of the term to mean " 'calculating machine' (of any type) is from 1897." The Online Etymology Dictionary indicates that the "modern use" of the term, to mean 'programmable digital electronic computer' dates from "1945 under this name; [in a] theoretical [sense] from 1937, as Turing machine ". The name has remained, although modern computers are capable of many higher-level functions. Devices have been used to aid computation for thousands of years, mostly using one-to-one correspondence with fingers . The earliest counting device
10004-409: The form of conditional branching and loops , and integrated memory , making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete . The machine was about a century ahead of its time. All the parts for his machine had to be made by hand – this was a major problem for a device with thousands of parts. Eventually, the project was dissolved with
10126-413: The historic traditional county , except for two designated county boroughs at Dudley and Worcester. Birmingham's continuous expansion has been a major cause of Worcestershire's fluid boundary changes and associated housing issues. The district of Balsall Heath , which had originally constituted the most northerly part of the parish of King's Norton , was the first area of the county to be added to
10248-450: The historic border, so a new Malvern Hills district was constituted which straddled the pre-April 1974 county boundary to the west, south-west and north-west. The remaining parts of the former Hereford and Worcester district of Leominster, returned to Herefordshire. These settlements were historically part of the county as noted above, that now fall under the counties of Warwickshire and West Midlands . The Malvern Hills , which run from
10370-462: The integrated circuit in July 1958, successfully demonstrating the first working integrated example on 12 September 1958. In his patent application of 6 February 1959, Kilby described his new device as "a body of semiconductor material ... wherein all the components of the electronic circuit are completely integrated". However, Kilby's invention was a hybrid integrated circuit (hybrid IC), rather than
10492-411: The integration. In 1876, Sir William Thomson had already discussed the possible construction of such calculators, but he had been stymied by the limited output torque of the ball-and-disk integrators . In a differential analyzer, the output of one integrator drove the input of the next integrator, or a graphing output. The torque amplifier was the advance that allowed these machines to work. Starting in
10614-513: The jurisdiction of the queen mother. In 1642, the Battle of Powick Bridge was the first major skirmish of the English Civil War . The county suffered from being on the Royalist front line, as it was subject to heavy taxation and the pressing of men into the Royalist army, which also reduced its productive capacity. The northern part of the county, which was already a centre of iron production,
10736-569: The machine did make use of valves to generate its 125 kHz clock waveforms and in the circuitry to read and write on its magnetic drum memory , so it was not the first completely transistorized computer. That distinction goes to the Harwell CADET of 1955, built by the electronics division of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell . The metal–oxide–silicon field-effect transistor (MOSFET), also known as
10858-526: The main geographical area of Worcestershire and completely surrounded by the nearby counties of Warwickshire, Staffordshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire and Oxfordshire . The most notable islands were Dudley, Evenlode, Blockley and the area around Shipston-on-Stour. Herefordshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire and Shropshire had their own exclaves within the main part of Worcestershire at Rochford , Broome , Clent, Tardebigge ( Tutnall and Cobley ) and Halesowen respectively. Tardebigge's history outside
10980-452: The modern computer was proposed by Alan Turing in his seminal 1936 paper, On Computable Numbers . Turing proposed a simple device that he called "Universal Computing machine" and that is now known as a universal Turing machine . He proved that such a machine is capable of computing anything that is computable by executing instructions (program) stored on tape, allowing the machine to be programmable. The fundamental concept of Turing's design
11102-403: The more famous Sir William Thomson. The art of mechanical analog computing reached its zenith with the differential analyzer , built by H. L. Hazen and Vannevar Bush at MIT starting in 1927. This built on the mechanical integrators of James Thomson and the torque amplifiers invented by H. W. Nieman. A dozen of these devices were built before their obsolescence became obvious. By the 1950s,
11224-511: The north and north-east, Warwickshire to the east and Gloucestershire to the south. The western border with Herefordshire includes a stretch along the top of the Malvern Hills . At the southern border with Gloucestershire, Worcestershire meets the northern edge of the Cotswolds . Two major rivers flow through the county: the Severn and the Avon . The geographical area now known as Worcestershire
11346-486: The practical use of MOS transistors as memory cell storage elements, leading to the development of MOS semiconductor memory , which replaced earlier magnetic-core memory in computers. The MOSFET led to the microcomputer revolution , and became the driving force behind the computer revolution . The MOSFET is the most widely used transistor in computers, and is the fundamental building block of digital electronics . The next great advance in computing power came with
11468-613: The resources of each burhs ' outlying estates. It was a separate ealdormanship briefly in the 10th century before forming part of the Earldom of Mercia in the 11th century. The last known Anglo-Saxon Sheriff of Worcestershire was Cyneweard of Laughern . During the Middle Ages , much of the county's economy was based on the wool trade. Many areas of its dense forests, such as Feckenham Forest , Horewell Forest and Malvern Chase , were royal hunting grounds subject to forest law. After
11590-482: The results of operations to be saved and retrieved. 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 [ sic ] read the truest computer of Times, and
11712-575: The same time that digital calculation replaced analog. The engineer Tommy Flowers , working at the Post Office Research Station in London in the 1930s, began to explore the possible use of electronics for the telephone exchange . Experimental equipment that he built in 1934 went into operation five years later, converting a portion of the telephone exchange network into an electronic data processing system, using thousands of vacuum tubes . In
11834-754: The south in Washford , and GKN (it has the second largest turnover in the West Midlands) is in Riverside . Mettis Aerospace are in Enfield, north Redditch, and make light metal components ( former High Duty Alloys , which made most of the forged pistons for Britain's aircraft engines in WWII). Phoenix Group (non-public life assurance schemes) is in the north-east of the county near the Warwickshire boundary, at Wythall , and has
11956-467: The south of the county into Herefordshire, are made up mainly of volcanic igneous rocks and metamorphic rocks , some of which date from more than 1,200 million years ago. They are designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). The Worcestershire Beacon , which at 425 metres (1,394 ft) is the highest point in the county, lies in this range. The rest of the county consists of undulating hills and farmland stretching either side of
12078-478: The stored-program computer was laid out by Alan Turing in his 1936 paper. In 1945, Turing joined the National Physical Laboratory and began work on developing an electronic stored-program digital computer. His 1945 report "Proposed Electronic Calculator" was the first specification for such a device. John von Neumann at the University of Pennsylvania also circulated his First Draft of a Report on
12200-443: The success of digital electronic computers had spelled the end for most analog computing machines, but analog computers remained in use during the 1950s in some specialized applications such as education ( slide rule ) and aircraft ( control systems ). Claude Shannon 's 1937 master's thesis laid the foundations of digital computing, with his insight of applying Boolean algebra to the analysis and synthesis of switching circuits being
12322-553: The third civil war. There was little enthusiasm or local participation in the mostly Scottish Royalist army, whose defeat was widely welcomed. Nevertheless, Parliamentarian forces ransacked the city of Worcester , causing heavy damage, looting and destruction of property. Around 10,000 mostly Scottish prisoners were sent into forced labour in the New World or fen drainage schemes. The small bands of Scots that fled into Worcestershire's countryside were attacked by local forces and killed. In
12444-587: The total number of people in every ethnic group increased between 2001 and 2011, the White British share of Worcestershire's population decreased from 95.5% to 92.4%, as did the share of White ethnic groups as whole, which went from 97.5% to 95.7%. Worcestershire is still much more ethnically homogeneous than the national average. In 2011, 79.8% of the population of England identified as White British; much lower than Worcestershire's figure of 92.4%. 95.7 0.4 1.2 0.2 100 In Redditch are Halfords , to
12566-412: The versatility and accuracy of modern digital computers. The first modern analog computer was a tide-predicting machine , invented by Sir William Thomson (later to become Lord Kelvin) in 1872. The differential analyser , a mechanical analog computer designed to solve differential equations by integration using wheel-and-disc mechanisms, was conceptualized in 1876 by James Thomson , the elder brother of
12688-406: Was a 16-transistor chip built by Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA in 1962. General Microelectronics later introduced the first commercial MOS IC in 1964, developed by Robert Norman. Following the development of the self-aligned gate (silicon-gate) MOS transistor by Robert Kerwin, Donald Klein and John Sarace at Bell Labs in 1967, the first silicon-gate MOS IC with self-aligned gates
12810-614: Was an early example. Later portables such as the Osborne 1 and Compaq Portable were considerably lighter but still needed to be plugged in. The first laptops, such as the Grid Compass , removed this requirement by incorporating batteries – and with the continued miniaturization of computing resources and advancements in portable battery life, portable computers grew in popularity in the 2000s. The same developments allowed manufacturers to integrate computing resources into cellular mobile phones by
12932-530: Was built with 2000 relays , implementing a 22 bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz . Program code was supplied on punched film while data could be stored in 64 words of memory or supplied from the keyboard. It was quite similar to modern machines in some respects, pioneering numerous advances such as floating-point numbers . Rather than the harder-to-implement decimal system (used in Charles Babbage 's earlier design), using
13054-501: Was delivered to the University of Manchester in February 1951. At least seven of these later machines were delivered between 1953 and 1957, one of them to Shell labs in Amsterdam . In October 1947 the directors of British catering company J. Lyons & Company decided to take an active role in promoting the commercial development of computers. Lyons's LEO I computer, modelled closely on
13176-489: Was developed by Federico Faggin at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968. The MOSFET has since become the most critical device component in modern ICs. The development of the MOS integrated circuit led to the invention of the microprocessor , and heralded an explosion in the commercial and personal use of computers. While the subject of exactly which device was the first microprocessor is contentious, partly due to lack of agreement on
13298-825: Was developed in the late 16th century and found application in gunnery, surveying and navigation. The planimeter was a manual instrument to calculate the area of a closed figure by tracing over it with a mechanical linkage. The slide rule was invented around 1620–1630, by the English clergyman William Oughtred , shortly after the publication of the concept of the logarithm . It is a hand-operated analog computer for doing multiplication and division. As slide rule development progressed, added scales provided reciprocals, squares and square roots, cubes and cube roots, as well as transcendental functions such as logarithms and exponentials, circular and hyperbolic trigonometry and other functions . Slide rules with special scales are still used for quick performance of routine calculations, such as
13420-486: Was established as an administrative and defensive unit in the early tenth century. Its purpose was to take into account and defend the estates within the northern area of the historic See of Worcester , held by the Episcopus Hwicciorum and Worcester Priory , along with the Abbots of Pershore , Westminster and Evesham . The shires and its sub-divisions known as hundreds , formed a framework for administering
13542-623: Was first populated at least 700,000 years ago. The area became predominantly agricultural in the Bronze Age , leading to population growth and more evidence of settlement. By the Iron Age , hill forts dominated the landscape. Settlement of these swiftly ended with the Roman occupation of Britain. The Roman period saw establishment of the villa system in the Cotswolds and Vale of Evesham. Droitwich (Salinae)
13664-450: Was important for military supplies. Parliamentarian raids and Royalist requisitioning both placed a great strain on the county. There were tensions from the participation of prominent Catholic recusants in the military and civilian organisation of the county. Combined with the opposition to requisitioning from both sides, bands of Clubmen formed to keep the war away from their localities. The Battle of Worcester in 1651 effectively ended
13786-449: Was invented by Abi Bakr of Isfahan , Persia in 1235. Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī invented the first mechanical geared lunisolar calendar astrolabe, an early fixed- wired knowledge processing machine with a gear train and gear-wheels, c. 1000 AD . The sector , a calculating instrument used for solving problems in proportion, trigonometry , multiplication and division, and for various functions, such as squares and cube roots,
13908-477: Was made of germanium . Noyce's monolithic IC was fabricated using the planar process , developed by his colleague Jean Hoerni in early 1959. In turn, the planar process was based on Carl Frosch and Lincoln Derick work on semiconductor surface passivation by silicon dioxide. Modern monolithic ICs are predominantly MOS ( metal–oxide–semiconductor ) integrated circuits, built from MOSFETs (MOS transistors). The earliest experimental MOS IC to be fabricated
14030-630: Was most likely a form of tally stick . Later record keeping aids throughout the Fertile Crescent included calculi (clay spheres, cones, etc.) which represented counts of items, likely livestock or grains, sealed in hollow unbaked clay containers. The use of counting rods is one example. The abacus was initially used for arithmetic tasks. The Roman abacus was developed from devices used in Babylonia as early as 2400 BCE. Since then, many other forms of reckoning boards or tables have been invented. In
14152-434: Was not Turing-complete. Nine Mk II Colossi were built (The Mk I was converted to a Mk II making ten machines in total). Colossus Mark I contained 1,500 thermionic valves (tubes), but Mark II with 2,400 valves, was both five times faster and simpler to operate than Mark I, greatly speeding the decoding process. The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first electronic programmable computer built in
14274-460: Was originally written in BCPL (an ancestor of the C programming language ), the same language used to write TRIPOS. AmigaDOS would later be rewritten in C from AmigaOS 2.x onwards, retaining backwards compatibility with 1.x up until AmigaOS 4 (completely rewritten in C) when AmigaDOS abandoned its BCPL legacy. TRIPOS provided features such as pre-emptive multi-tasking (using strict-priority scheduling),
14396-566: Was part of a wider campaign by the De Montforts and their allies in the run-up to the Second Barons' War , aimed at undermining Henry III. Worcestershire was the site of the Battle of Evesham in which Simon de Montfort was killed on 4 August 1265. A few years later, in 1275, the Jews that were still living in Worcester were forced to move to Hereford , as they were expelled from all towns under
14518-500: Was probably the most important settlement in the county in this period, due to its product of salt. There is also evidence for Roman settlement and industrial activity around Worcester and King's Norton. The area which became Worcestershire formed the heartland of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of the Hwicce . It was absorbed by the Kingdom of Mercia during the 7th century and became part of the unified Kingdom of England in 927. Worcestershire
14640-536: Was the last Anglo-Saxon bishop in England, and remained in post until his death in 1095. Under his tenure Worcester Cathedral began major reconstruction, and he opposed political interventions against William and the Normans. He was later made a saint. During Henry III 's disputes and wars with his Barons, in 1263 Worcester 's Jewish residents were attacked by a baronial force led by Robert Earl Ferrers and Henry de Montfort . Most were killed. The massacre in Worcester
14762-632: Was the last major engagement of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms . During the Industrial Revolution the north of the county was part of the Black Country , a major manufacturing centre, Kidderminster became famous for carpet production, and Worcester for porcelain . The county borders Herefordshire to the west, Shropshire to the north-west, Staffordshire only just to the north, West Midlands to
14884-569: Was to build the Priory Estate , a large new council estate on which construction began in 1929. The boundaries of Worcestershire were altered to include all of the proposed new housing estate in Dudley. During the Local Government reorganisation of April 1966, Dudley expanded beyond its historical boundaries and took in the bulk of Sedgley , Brierley Hill and the south of Coseley as well as
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