Bushnell and Dabney immediately started work on another game, using the same television set design as Computer Space, as well as founding their own company Atari, Inc. to back their projects. Instead, the project was given to Atari's first employee, Allan Alcorn, and as Bushnell believed the driving game would be too complicated as a first project he suggested a prototype ping-pong game. Alcorn expanded the idea, and designed a game the company immediately seized on. They were unable to find a manufacturer, but on the evidence of the success of their prototype installation, decided to produce the game cabinets themselves. Pong was released in 1972, a year after Computer Space. It was immensely commercially successful, selling over 8,000 units. It inspired copycat games to be sold in America, Europe, and Japan, and led to the popularization of the medium. That same year saw the release of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console which could be connected to a television set.
By the '90s, Sun workstations were popular for rendering in 3D CGI filmmaking-for example, Disney-Pixar's 1995 movie Toy Story used a render farm of 117 Sun workstations. Sun was a proponent of open systems in general and Unix in particular, and a major contributor to open source software. The NFB's French-language animation studio founded its Centre d'animatique in 1980, at a cost of $1 million CAD, with a team of six computer graphics specialists. The unit was initially tasked with creating stereoscopic CGI sequences for the NFB's 3-D IMAX film Transitions for Expo 86. Staff at the Centre d'animatique included Daniel Langlois, who left in 1986 to form Softimage. Also in 1982, the first complete turnkey system designed specifically for creating broadcast-standard animation was produced by the Japanese company Nippon Univac Kaisha ("NUK", later merged with Burroughs), and incorporated the Antics 2-D computer animation software developed by Alan Kitching from his earlier versions. The configuration was based on the VAX 11/780 computer, linked to a Bosch 1-inch VTR, via NUK's own framebuffer.
He manufactured the first integrated circuit or chip. A chip is really a collection of tiny transistors which are connected together when the transistor is manufactured. Thus, the need for soldering together large numbers of transistors was practically nullified; now only connections were needed to other electronic components. In addition to saving space, the speed of the machine was now increased since there was a diminished distance that the electrons had to follow. The 1960s saw large mainframe computers become much more common in large industries and with the US military and space program. IBM became the unquestioned market leader in selling these large, expensive, error-prone, and very hard to use machines. A veritable explosion of personal computers occurred in the early 1970s, starting with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak exhibiting the first Apple II at the First West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. The Apple II boasted built-in BASIC programming language, color graphics, and a 4100 character memory for only $1298.
In computing, multitasking is the concurrent execution of multiple tasks (also known as processes) over a certain period of time. New tasks can interrupt already started ones before they finish, instead of waiting for them to end. As a result, a computer executes segments of multiple tasks in an interleaved manner, while the tasks share common processing resources such as central processing units (CPUs) and main memory. Multitasking automatically interrupts the running program, saving its state (partial results, memory contents and computer register contents) and loading the saved state of another program and transferring control to it. This "context switch" may be initiated at fixed time intervals (pre-emptive multitasking), or the running program may be coded to signal to the supervisory software when it can be interrupted (cooperative multitasking). Multitasking does not require parallel execution of multiple tasks at exactly the same time; instead, it allows more than one task to advance over a given period of time. Even on multiprocessor computers, multitasking allows many more tasks to be run than there are CPUs.
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