Historical events

Pascal is 50 years old

Hard to believe it’s 50 years. Suppose C will be hitting the big 50 soon too. 50 Years of Pascal https://m-cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021/3/250705-50-years-of-pascal/fulltext In the early 1960s, the languages Fortran (John Backus, IBM) for scientific, and Cobol (Jean Sammet, IBM, and DoD) for commercial applications dominated. Programs were written on paper, then punched on cards, and one

Pac-Man at 40

Pac-Man is a maze arcade game developed and released by Namco in 1980. The original Japanese title of Puck Man was changed to Pac-Man for international releases. Pac-Man was a widespread critical and commercial success, and has an enduring commercial and cultural legacy that has been featured in many computer games. It was also featured

Inventor of copy, cut, or paste

Did you copy, cut, or paste today? Use a WYSIWIG interface with a mouse? Then take a moment to thank Larry Tesler, the influential computer scientist who died earlier this week at age 74. He was vice president of user experience and design at Yahoo, after he spent nearly two decades at Apple. Read more

The Improbable Origins Of Powerpoint – IEEE Spectrum

Here’s the surprising story behind the software that conquered the world, one slide at a time https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/cyberspace/the-improbable-origins-of-powerpoint PowerPoint is so ingrained in modern business life that the notion of it having a history at all may seem odd. But it does have a very definite lifetime as a commercial product that came onto the scene

Sony PlayStation Teardown

Celebrating the console’s 25th birthday in style, iFixit makes PlayStation teardown,breaks out the DualShock controllers and the screwdrivers reports https://www.hackster.io/news/ifixit-tears-down-a-launch-model-sony-playstation-to-celebrate-the-console-s-25th-anniversary-38f7d4522bbd The detailed tear-down is available now on the iFixit website. For those interested in the inner workings of the original PlayStation the company also has a service guide.

The 50th anniversary of ARPANET, the internet’s predecessor

https://www.fastcompany.com/90423457/50-years-ago-today-the-internet-was-born-in-room-3420 Here’s the story of the creation of ARPANET, the groundbreaking precursor to the internet—as told by the people who were there. At the same time: RIPE NIC: ‘In Five Weeks We’ll Run Out of IPv4 Internet Addresses’ https://m.slashdot.org/story/362674 The RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC), which manages regional distribution of internet addresses for the

Stibitz demonstrates remote computing, September 11, 1940

Interesting historical facts according to https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4395946/Stibitz-demonstrates-remote-computing–September-11–1940: George Stibitz of Bell Telephone Laboratories used his Complex Number Calculator (CNC) to demonstrate remote computing for the first time on September 11, 1940. Stibitz was among a handful of engineers across the globe designing machines that involved using relays to implement binary logic at the time. You can

150th anniversary of the first transatlantic subsea cable

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/hearts-content-transatlantic-subsea-cable-150-anniversary-1.3695418 150 years ago a single cable forever changed the way the world communicated, as the first successful transatlantic subsea cable, able to send and receive telegraphed information, solidified a link between the old world and the new for the first time.