Why Does Microsoft Charge So Little for Windows

In the 1950s, the transistor replaced the vacuum tubes that had empowered Eniac, Colossus, and other early computers in the 1940s. In the 1960s and 1970s, computing moved from slow, expensive mainframes to faster mini- and microcomputers and multiprocessors, empowered by chip technology and integrated circuits, and leveraged by increasingly sophisticated operating systems and programming languages. By the 1980s, commercially available programs were able to perform commonly needed computational functions. With the growth of computer capabilities and computer storage capacities, database technology and database management systems gave rise to the development of distributed database systems. Efficient computer-stored databases proved essential to many medical computing applications, making vast amounts of data available to users. Over time computer applications became more numerous and complex, with software claiming a larger fraction of computing costs. Display terminals and clinical workstations offered graphic displays and supported structured data entry and reporting. Devices, such as the mouse, light pens, touch screens, and input technologies, such as speech and handwriting recognition, were developed to ease the user’s tasks and foster physician acceptance. Over the same span of time, computer communications evolved as well, moving from copper wire to fiber optic cable and, most recently, to wireless systems. The Internet and the World Wide Web became the main modes used for local and global communications. By the 2010s laptops replaced desktop computers, and tablets and smart phones were commonplace in health care.

The Development of Digital Computers

Domination in the software application industry has been an issue since its early years. But how do these situations of market domination come into existence? This thesis discusses conventional approaches towards understanding market domination and their inherent weaknesses. As a result a new understanding, based on Actor-Network-Theory and Capital Theory unfolds, which achieves the uncovering of a much deeper complexity on how market domination comes into existence.

Three Tales of Dominant Technological Artifacts : Tracing the Paths from Success to Domination of Software Applications with the Help of Latour's Actor-Network-Theory and Bourdieu's Capital Theory

Databases have sometimes been called data banks, since like money banks that collect, store, use, exchange, and distribute money, data banks and databases collect, store, use, exchange, and distribute data. In this book the term, data, may include a single datum, like the number, 6; or the letter, a; or the symbol +; or combinations of these such as in a collection of facts or statistics; or information stored as textual natural-language data; or analog signals like phonocardiograms, electrocardiograms; or as visual images like x-rays. In this book a database can be more than a collection of data, since it can be an aggregate of information and knowledge, where information is a collection of data, and knowledge is a collection of information. Coltri (2006) wrote that the heart and the brain of a modern information system resides in its databases; and medical databases are especially complex because of the great diversity of medical information systems with their many different activities, their variety of medical services and clinical specialties with their computer-based subsystems; and with all of these actively changing and expanding in the ever-changing health-care environment. A database-management system is required to capture and process all of these data, and to implement all of the required functions of its database (Collen and Ball 1992).

Gary Kildall

Papers

CP/M: A Family of 8- and 16-Bit Computer Operating Systems.