Alienware is
an American computer hardware company and a wholly-owned subsidiary of
Dell, Inc. It mainly produces desktops and laptops specialized for
video editing, audio editing, and gaming. Alienware
is also a producer of computer peripherals, such as headsets and
keyboards. The company is based in Miami, Florida, and was founded in
1966 by its CEO, Nelson Gonzalez, and COO, Alex Aguila.
Established in 1996, Alienware manufactures desktop, notebook, media center, and enterprise systems. According to employees, the Alienware name was chosen because of the founders' fondness for the hit television series The X-Files hence the theme to their products, with names such as Area-51 and Aurora.
Alienware was originally established to tap a niche in the high performance game market, which back then was not on the radar of the major PC manufacturers such as Dell. Since high-end game hardware was not widely distributed, the company's founders formed an OEM which sold personal computers with the highest performing hardware and settings according to benchmarks.
Established in 1996, Alienware manufactures desktop, notebook, media center, and enterprise systems. According to employees, the Alienware name was chosen because of the founders' fondness for the hit television series The X-Files hence the theme to their products, with names such as Area-51 and Aurora.
Alienware was originally established to tap a niche in the high performance game market, which back then was not on the radar of the major PC manufacturers such as Dell. Since high-end game hardware was not widely distributed, the company's founders formed an OEM which sold personal computers with the highest performing hardware and settings according to benchmarks.
Alienware
established its EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa) headquarters
in Athlone, Ireland in October 2002. As of FY 2005, Alienware brought
in upwards of $170 million USD in annual sales, while undertaking an
international expansion initiative launched in 2003 to maintain a
presence in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, United Kingdom, and
Costa Rica. Alienware has had a call center in Costa Rica to handle all sales and support calls for a number of years. Additionally, Alienware allows you to send in old computer hardware in exchange for credit towards new hardware.
HISTORY OF COMPUTERS - continued (PREV) (PAGE 1)
In 1623, Wilhelm Schickard built the first digital mechanical calculator and thus became the father of the computing era. Since his machine used techniques such as cogs and gears first developed for clocks, it was also called a 'calculating clock'. It was put to practical use by his friend Johannes Kepler, who revolutionized astronomy.
An original calculator by Pascal (1640) is preserved in the Zwinger Museum. Machines by Blaise Pascal (the Pascaline, 1642) and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1671) followed. Around 1820, Charles Xavier Thomas created the first successful, mass-produced mechanical calculator, the Thomas Arithmometer, that could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It was mainly based on Leibniz's work. Mechanical calculators, like the base-ten addiator, the comptometer, the Monroe, the Curta and the Addo-X remained in use until the 1970s.
Leibniz also described the binary numeral system, a central ingredient of all modern computers. However, up to the 1940s, many subsequent designs (including Charles Babbage's machines of the 1800s and even ENIAC of 1945) were based on the harder-to-implement decimal system.1801: punched card technology
Punched card system of a music machine.
Also referred to as Book music, a one-stop
European medium for organs.
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.
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