In the realm of artificial intelligence, SHRDLU stands as a pioneering example of early attempts to imbue machines with natural language understanding and reasoning capabilities. Developed by Terry Winograd in the late 1960s and early 1970s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), SHRDLU marked a significant milestone in the...
Before the invention of the clock, people relied on various methods to measure time. One of the most common tools used in the past was the alarm candle, a special type of candle designed to burn for a set amount of time before extinguishing itself, thus signalling the passage of...
The month of Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, and it is considered the holiest month for Muslims. It is a time of fasting, prayer, and spiritual reflection, observed by Muslims worldwide. During Ramadan, Muslims refrain from eating or drinking from sunrise to sunset. Instead, they focus...
A tape library is a storage device that contains one or more tape drives, a number of slots to hold tape cartridges, a barcode reader to identify tape cartridges, and an automated method for loading tapes. It is also sometimes referred to as a tape silo, tape robot, or tape...
The mercury delay line was a method for representing binary zeros and ones as pulses of acoustic energy that relied on sound waves flowing through a tube of mercury. At the very least, in principle, the pulses could travel through the delay line unbrokenly if they were to capture the...
Magnetic-core memory, also known as core memory or ferrite core memory, was one of the first types of random access memory (RAM) used in computers. It was developed in the late 1940s and remained in use until the 1970s. Core memory was important because it allowed computers to store data...
In the early 19th century, the world was abuzz with a new form of transportation that would change the way people moved around forever: the velocipede. Also known as the “bone shaker,” the velocipede was a precursor to the modern bicycle and was invented in France in the 1860s. The...
