Panasonic is an international brand name for Japanese electric products manufacturer Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Under this brand Matsushita sells plasma and LCD display panels, DVD recorders and players, Blu-ray players, telephones, microwave ovens, projectors, digital cameras, batteries, laptop computers (under the sub-brand Toughbook), and portable CD and analog tape decks and home stereo equipment, all of which are marketed under their slogan "Ideas for Life."

The brand Panasonic was created by Matsushita in 1955 for the US, Canada and Mexico because the National brand was already registered by others.
Though not widely advertised before, in recent years its notebook computer line (Toughbook) has gained popularity and commercials for it are being aired on television.

Other brand names associated with Panasonic include its Viera televisions and Lumix digital cameras.

The company's management style and corporate culture have been often compared to that of competitor Sony. When Sony is doing well, the number of books that praise Sony management increases, when conditions reverse, then more books that praise Panasonic management style are displayed in bookstores. Regardless of favorable sales and conditions, Sony and Panasonic are often viewed as rivals. This view probably arose from the videotape format wars between VHS (supported by Panasonic) and Betamax (supported by Sony).

The largest direct competition between Sony and Panasonic is currently in the segment of audio products; Panasonic is also considered as Sony’s rival in sales of flat panel TVs, digital cameras and DVD recorders—areas where Panasonic is focusing its production, marketing and sales efforts.




HISTORY OF COMPUTERS - continued (PREV) (PAGE 1)
First-generation von Neumann machine and the other works
Even before the ENIAC was finished, Eckert and Mauchly recognized its limitations and started the design of a new computer, EDVAC, which was to have stored-program. John von Neumann wrote a widely-circulated report describing the EDVAC design in which both the programs and working data were stored in a single, unified store. This basic design, which became known as the von Neumann architecture, would serve as the basis for the development of the first really flexible, general-purpose digital computers.

In this generation, temporary or working storage was provided by acoustic delay lines, which used the propagation time of sound through a medium such as liquid mercury (or through a wire) to briefly store data. As series of acoustic pulses is sent along a tube; after a time, as the pulse reached the end of the tube, the circuitry detected whether the pulse represented a 1 or 0 and caused the oscillator to re-send the pulse. Others used Williams tubes, which use the ability of a television picture tube to store and retrieve data. By 1954, magnetic core memory was rapidly displacing most other forms of temporary storage, and dominated the field through the mid-1970s.
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