Sony.
In 1945, after World War II, Masaru Ibuka started a radio repair shop
in a bombed-out building in Tokyo. The next year he was joined by his
colleague Akio Morita, and they founded a company called Tokyo Tsushin
Kogyo K.K, which translates in English to Tokyo Telecommunications
Engineering Corporation. The company built Japan's first tape recorder
called the Type-G.
The name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mix of the Latin word sony or son(us) and also a little boy sonny, which is the root of sonic and sound as well as familiar word of everybody called a boy in February 1955, and company name changed to SONY in January 1958. Morita pushed for a word that does not exist in any language so that they could claim the word "Sony" as their own (which paid off when they sued a candy producer using the name, who claimed that "Sony" was an existing word in some language).
At the time of the change, it was extremely unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters instead of kanji to spell its name. The move by Sony was not without opposition: TTK's principal bank at the time, Mitsui, had strong feelings about the name. They pushed for a name such as Sony Electronic Industries, or Sony Teletech. Akio Morita was firm, however, as he did not want the company name tied to any particular industry. Eventually, both Ibuka and Mitsui Bank's chairman gave their approval.
The name "Sony" was chosen for the brand as a mix of the Latin word sony or son(us) and also a little boy sonny, which is the root of sonic and sound as well as familiar word of everybody called a boy in February 1955, and company name changed to SONY in January 1958. Morita pushed for a word that does not exist in any language so that they could claim the word "Sony" as their own (which paid off when they sued a candy producer using the name, who claimed that "Sony" was an existing word in some language).
At the time of the change, it was extremely unusual for a Japanese company to use Roman letters instead of kanji to spell its name. The move by Sony was not without opposition: TTK's principal bank at the time, Mitsui, had strong feelings about the name. They pushed for a name such as Sony Electronic Industries, or Sony Teletech. Akio Morita was firm, however, as he did not want the company name tied to any particular industry. Eventually, both Ibuka and Mitsui Bank's chairman gave their approval.
HISTORY OF COMPUTERS - continued (PREV) (PAGE 1)
Alan Turing’s1936 paper proved enormously influential in computing and computer science in two ways. Its main purpose was to prove that there were problems (namely the halting problem) that could not be solved by any sequential process. In doing so, Turing provided a definition of a universal computer, a construct that came to be called a Turing Machine, a purely theoretical device that formalizes the concept o algorithm execution, replacing Kurt Godel’s more
cumbersome universal language based on arithmetics. 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 a universal Turing machine. This limited type of Turing completeness is sometimes viewed as a threshold capability separating general-purpose computers from their special-purpose predecessors.
For a computing machine to be a practical general-purpose computer, there must be some convenient read-write mechanism, punched tape, for example. For full versatility, the uses the same memory both to store programs and data; Von Neumann architecture virtually all contemporary computers use this architecture (or some variant). While it is theoretically possible to implement a full computer entirely mechanically (as Babbage's design showed), electronics made possible the speed and later the miniaturization that characterize modern computers.
(CONT)
