IBM COMPUTERS (Practice)

A. REALICE  LA PRACTICA CON LA INFORMACIÓN DEL TEXTO:

IBM INTRODUCES COMPUTERS TO EASE INTERNET COMMERCE
International Business Machines introduced an upgraded line of computers that are aimed at making it easier for small and medium sized companies to do business on the Internet. The IBM AS/400e series of computer servers, with two times the storage and five times the memory of previous models, is backed by World Wide Web programs and has increased Internet security. It's also designed to ease the use of different software programs and languages like Java, Lotus Domino and ActiveX. The computers use new 8-way and 12-way processors. They use a new release of the OS/400 operating system designed to maximize performance according to the users' needs. The machines are divided into two series of models. One designed for interactive processing and another optimized for batch processing. The enhanced security features include a "Firewall" that controls user access to the Internet as well as protecting non authorized users of the public network from using the resources of the internal network. IBM and other companies are seeking to provide servers, which manage networks of PCs, and computers that make it easier to conduct business over the Internet. Business to business commerce over the global network is expected to rise to 327 billion in 2002 from eight billion this year according to research firm Forester Research.

B. PRACTICA. DIGA SI LAS AFIRMACIONES SON VERDADERAS (True) o FALSAS (False):
1) This is a series of modernized and modified computers ............... True – False
2) These computers are completely new ............................................True – False
3) You can store much more information in these computers .........   True - False
4) World Wide Web has nothing to do with these computers ..........   True - False
5) The languages mentioned here will be unnecessary ....................  True – False
6) Servers are larger computers ........................................................  True – False
7) The OS/400 will be adapted to the users' needs .........................    True - False
8) "Firewall" is used for protection .................................................... True - False
9) IBM does business only with PC networks ................................... True – False
10) Forester expect the global network to grow ...............................  True – False

REVIEW 1 - SIMPLE PRESENT: COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE

In computer engineering, computer architecture is the conceptual design and fundamental operational structure of a computer system. It is a blueprint and functional description of requirements (especially speeds and interconnections) and design implementations for the various parts of a computer — focusing largely on the way by which the central processing unit (CPU) performs internally and accesses addresses in memory.
It may also be defined as the science and art of selecting and interconnecting hardware components to create computers that meet functional, performance and cost goals.
Computer architecture comprises at least three main subcategories
Instruction set architecture, or ISA, is the abstract image of a computing system that is seen by a machine language (or assembly language) programmer, including the instruction set, memory address modes, processor registers, and address and data formats.
Microarchitecture, also known as Computer organization is a lower level, more concrete, description of the system that involves how the constituent parts of the system are interconnected and how they interoperate in order to implement the ISA. The size of a computer's cache for instance, is an organizational issue that generally has nothing to do with the ISA.
System Design which includes all of the other hardware components within a computing system such as:
system interconnects such as computer buses and switches memory controllers and hierarchies CPU off-load mechanisms such as direct memory access issues like multi-processing.

EXERCISE N° 1: LINUX

Warm Up To Penguins The Zen Of Xen One of the hottest recent topics in the computer industry at this time is virtualization. Products such as VMware and Microsoft’s Virtual PC are trying to take advantage of the increasing demand to run virtual computers on top of a physical host. There are several reasons to do this. If, for example, you need to run a number of different versions of Linux from time to time, you can run them as virtual systems on top of a stable host without worrying about constantly reinstalling or corrupting your system. For businesses, virtual machines let many users share a single physical host. Because a system rarely runs at 100% load all the time, you can usually load-balance and get more bang for your hardware buck with virtual systems. Linux, of course, has a virtualization application, too: Xen. Xen is an open-source project organized by XenSource which is in turn owned by Citrix, known for GotoMyPC among others. Xen consists of a hypervisor, which is simply a software package that enables virtual hosts to run on Linux, and the virtual hosts themselves. If you’ve ever used VMware, there are some significant differences between how VMware (and Virtual PC) handles virtualization and how Xen does it. For example, VMware runs as a program (or service) that the virtual hosts run inside, but Xen actually is part of the Linux Kernel. The “host” machine is just another virtual machine (or domain, as Xen calls them) running on the hardware. Although this may seem a bit strange conceptually, it seems to pay off performance-wise.

http://www.computerpoweruser.com/

REVIEW 2- SIMPLE PAST: HISTORY OF COMPUTING

HISTORY OF COMPUTING

Computing hardware has been an important component of the process of calculation and data storage since it became useful for numerical values to be processed and shared.

Devices to aid computation changed from simple recording and counting devices to the abacus, the slide rule, analog computers, and more recent electronic computers. Even today, an experienced abacus user using a device hundreds of years old can sometimes complete basic calculations more quickly than an unskilled person using an electronic calculator — though for more complex calculations, computers out-perform even the most skilled human.

This article covers major developments in the history of computing hardware, and attempts to put them in context. For a detailed timeline of events, see the computing timeline article. The history of computing article is a related overview and treats methods intended for pen and paper, with or without the aid of tables.

As early as 1725 Basile Bouchon used a perforated paper loop in a loom to establish the pattern to be reproduced on cloth, and in 1726 his co-worker Jean-Baptiste Falcon improved on his design by using perforated paper cards attached to one another for efficiency in adapting and changing the program. The Bouchon-Falcon loom was semi-automatic and required manual feed of the program.

In 1801, Joseph-Marie Jacquard developed a loom in which the pattern being woven was controlled by punched cards. The series of cards could be changed without changing the mechanical design of the loom. This was a landmark point in programmability.

Herman Hollerith invented a tabulating machine using punched cards in the 1880s.
In 1833, Charles Babbage moved on from developing his difference engine to developing a more complete design, the analytical engine, which would draw directly on Jacquard's punched cards for its programming.

In 1890, the United States Census Bureau used punched cards and sorting machines designed by Herman Hollerith, to handle the flood of data from the decennial census mandated by the Constitution. Hollerith's company eventually became the core of IBM. IBM developed punched card technology into a powerful tool for business data-processing and produced an extensive line of specialized unit record equipment. By 1950, the IBM card had become ubiquitous in industry and government. The warning printed on most cards intended for circulation as documents (checks, for example), "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate," became a motto for the post-World War II era.