Multitech, which was founded by Stan Shih, his wife Carolyn Yeh, and a group of five others in 1976, and renamed Acer in 1987. It began with eleven employees and $25,000 in capital. Initially, it was primarily a distributor of electronic parts and a consultant in the use of microprocessor technologies. The global headquarters is in Hsichih City, Taiwan.
In 2000, Acer spun off its manufacturing operation (as Wistron
Corporation) to focus itself on branding business. In deciding to
support the sales of its product lines through specific marketing
activities that best utilise distribution channels, Acer grew worldwide
while its labour force contracted. In 2002, the pan Acer Group employed
39,000 people supporting dealers and distributors in more than 100
countries. Revenues reached US$12.9 billion that year.
By 2005, Acer employed 7,800 people throughout the world while maintaining a global sales and service network. Revenues were US$4.9 billion in 2003 and US$11.31 billion in 2006. Acer's North American market share slipped over the past few years while the European market share has gone up
HISTORY OF COMPUTERS - continued (PREV) (PAGE 1)
There were three parallel streams of computer development in the World War II era, and two were either largely ignored or were deliberately kept secret. The first was the German work of Konrad Zuse. The second was the secret development of the Colossus computer in the UK. Neither of these had much influence on the various computing projects in the United States. The third stream of computer development, the led by team of Eckert and Mauchly, produced ENIAC and EDVAC. These designs were both Turing-complete and worked at electronic speeds. They were widely publicized and influenced every machine to follow.
Konrad Zuse's Z-series: the first program-controlled computers
Working in isolation in Germany, Konrad Zuse started construction in 1936 of his first Z-series calculators featuring memory and (initially limited) programmability. Zuse's purely mechanical, but already binary Z1, finished in 1938, never worked reliably due to problems with the precision of parts.
Zuse's subsequent machine, the Z3, was finished in 1941. It was based on telephone relays and did work satisfactorily. The Z3 thus became the first functional program-controlled, all-purpose, digital computer. In many ways it was quite similar to modern machines, pioneering numerous advances, such as floating point numbers.
Replacement of the hard-to-implement decimal system (used in Charles Babbage's earlier design) by the simpler binary system meant that Zuse's machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable, given the technologies available at that time. This is sometimes viewed as the main reason why Zuse succeeded where Babbage failed.
(CONT)
