Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. How would you use it if it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents

The first large scale electronic computers were built in connection with university projects sponsored by government military and research organizations. Many established companies, as well as new companies, entered the computer field during the first generation, 1947-1959, in which the vacuum tube was almost universally used as the active component in the implementation of computer logic. The second generation was characterized by the transistorized computers that began to appear in 1959 ~ Some of the computers built then and since are considered super computers; they attempt to go to the limit of current technology in terms of size, speed, and logical complexity. From 1965 onward, most new. computers belong to a third generation, which features integrated circuit technology and multiprocessor multiprogramming systems. Key words and phrases: electronic computers, computer history, time-sharing, vacuum tube computers, transistorized computers, super computers, magnetic drum computers, university computer projects CR categories: 1.2, 1.3 A complete history of electronic comput-

When dealing with dynamic, untrusted content, such as on the Web, software behavior must be sandboxed, typically through use of a language like JavaScript. However, even for such speciallydesigned languages, it is difficult to ensure the safety of highlyoptimized, dynamic language runtimes which, for efficiency, rely on advanced techniques such as Just-In-Time (JIT) compilation, large libraries of native-code support routines, and intricate mechanisms for multi-threading and garbage collection. Each new runtime provides a new potential attack surface and this security risk raises a barrier to the adoption of new languages for creating untrusted content. Removing this limitation, this paper introduces general mechanisms for safely and efficiently sandboxing software, such as dynamic language runtimes, that make use of advanced, lowlevel

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It is commonly held in current computer architecture literature that stack-based computers were entirely superseded by the combination of pipelined, integrated microprocessors and improved compilers. While correct, the literature omits a second, new generation of stack computers that emerged at the same time. In this thesis, I develop historical, qualitative, and quantitative distinctions between the first and second generations of stack computers. I present a rebuttal of the main arguments against stack computers and show that they are not applicable to those of the second generation. I also present an example of a small, modern stack computer and compare it to the MIPS architecture. The results show that second-generation stack computers have much better performance for deeply nested or recursive code, but are correspondingly worse for iterative code. The results also show that even though the stack computer’s zero-operand instruction format only moderately increases the code density, it significantly reduces instruction memory bandwidth.

effort to create a large-scope-and-range software system in 3-4 orders of magnitude less code than current practice. The detailed STEPS proposal can be found at