Recognized for their adaption of the nu metal genre into a radio-friendly style in Hybrid Theory and Meteora, the band moved away from this and explored a variety of other genres in their latest studio album, Minutes to Midnight.

The album topped the Billboard Charts and had the third best debut week of any album that year. They are also known for their several collaborations, most notably with rapper Jay-Z in their mash-up album Collision Course, and many other artists on Reanimation.

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BINAC

BINAC, the Binary Automatic Computer, was an early electronic computer designed for Northrop Aircraft Company by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1949. Eckert and Mauchly, though they had started the design of EDVAC at the University of Pennsylvania, choose to leave and start EMCC, the first computer company. BINAC was their first product and the first stored-program computer in the US.

The BINAC was a bit-serial binary computer with two independent CPUs, each with its own 512- word acoustic mercury delay line memory. The CPUs continuously compared results to check for errors caused by hardware failures. It used approximately 700 vacuum tubes. The 512-word acoustic mercury delay line memories were divided into 16 channels each holding 32 words of 31 bits, with an additional 11-bit space between words to allow for circuit delays in switching. The clock rate was 4.25 MHz (1 MHz according to one source) which yielded a word time of about 10 microseconds. The addition time was 800 microseconds and the multiplication time was 1200 microseconds. New programs or data had to be entered manually in octal using an eight-key keypad. BINAC was significant for being able to perform high-speed arithmetic on binary numbers, with no provisions to store characters or decimal digits.

The BINAC ran a test program (consisting of 23 instructions) in March 1949, although it wasn't fully functional at the time. Here are early test programs that BINAC ran:

February 7, 1949 - Ran a five-line program to fill the memory from register A.
February 10, 1949 - Ran a five-line program to check memory.
February 16, 1949 - Ran a six-line program to fill memory.
March 7, 1949 - Ran 217 iterations of a 23-line program to compute squares. It was still running correctly when it stopped.
April 4, 1949 - Ran a fifty-line program to fill memory and check all instructions. It ran for 2.5 hours before encountering an error. Shortly after that it ran for 31.5 hours without error.
Northrop picked up BINAC in September 1949. Northrop employees said that BINAC never worked properly after it was delivered, although it worked at the Eckert-Mauchly workshop. It was able to run some small problems but didn't work well enough to be used as a production machine. The failures were attributed to it not being properly shipped when Northrop picked it up.

Macintosh, or for newer models, Mac, is a brand name which covers several lines of personal computers designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. The original Macintosh was released on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface (GUI) rather than a command line interface.

The idea for a personal computer appropriate for the ordinary consumer dates to the late 1970s and an Apple development team was established in 1979. After the success of the original Macintosh in 1984, the company quickly established market share only to see it dissipate in the 1990s as Microsoft came to monopolize personal computing. Apple consolidated multiple, consumer-level desktop models into the 1998 iMac, which sold extremely well and saw the brand name revitalized. Current Mac systems are mainly targeted at the home, education, and creative professional markets. They are the upgraded iMac and the entry-level Mac mini desktop models, the workstation-level Mac Pro tower, the MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro laptops, and the Xserve server.

Production of the Mac is based on a vertical integration model in that Apple facilitates all aspects of its hardware and creates its own operating system that is pre-installed on all Macs. Apple exclusively produces Mac hardware, choosing internal systems, designs, and prices. Apple does use third party components, however; current Macintosh CPUs use Intel's x86 architecture (formerly the AIM alliance's PowerPC and originally Motorola's 68k). Apple also develops the operating system for Macs, currently Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard". This is in contrast to most IBM compatible PCs, where multiple vendors create hardware intended to run another company's software. The modern Mac, like other personal computers, is capable of running alternative operating systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, and Microsoft Windows, which is considered to be the Mac's biggest competitor.

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Throughout time, humans have invented ingenious calculating machines. One of the earliest was the abacus. It's about 5,000 years old. Mechanical calculators that could add and multiply (but not subtract!) were invented in the 1600s. In 1820, Charles Xavier Thomas de Colman invented the arithometer, a machine that could add, subtract, multiply and divide. It was Charles Babbage though, in the early 1800s, who designed mechanical calculating machines (see photo) that were the true ancestor of today's computers. Ada Byron King (Countess of Lovelace) was his programmer and today is considered the mother of computer programming.

Babbage's design for his ultimate calculator, the Analytical Engine, was never produced. It did anticipate the four components essential to modern computing. These components are input, storage, processing and output.

The problem with Babbage's and other mechanical calculators was just that—they were mechanical. The moving parts they relied on were slow and subject to breakdown.

What made modern computers possible was the invention of something that could do calculations and other information processing with no moving parts and do it very fast. That something was electronic components. With electronic components, a fast and efficient machine such as Babbage proposed could be built with all four components essential to modern computing.

Definitions of Computer
1. Also called processor. an electronic device designed to accept data, perform prescribed mathematical and logical operations at high speed, and display the results of these operations. Compare analog computer, digital computer.
2. A person who computes; computist.

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