Ceruzzi

was a team of Bell Labs researchers who invented the transistor in the 1940s; two decades later, another Bell Labs team developed the Unix operating system, to mention only the most visible fruits of Bell Laboratories’ research. And it was at Bell Labs where much of the theory of information coding, transmission, and storage was developed.

stored program principle, which has been central to the design of all digital computers ever since. This principle, combined with the invention of high-speed memory devices, provided a practical alternative to the ENIAC’s cumbersome programming.

client-server architecture, an innovation that came from a laboratory located in Silicon Valley and run by the Xerox Corporation. Large, dedicated mainframes, now called servers, store and manipulate massive amounts of data, delivering those data over high-speed networks to powerful personal computers, laptops, and other smart devices, which are nothing like the “dumb” terminals of the initial time-sharing model. These clients do a lot of the processing, especially graphics.