What Happened Today, January 17th

Amidst pressure from investors and other board members, Jerry Yang resigns from the board of Yahoo!, a company he co-founded. Yang, who served as the company’s CEO from June 2007 to January 2009, started Yahoo! with David Filo in 1994 while both were graduate students at Stanford University. Initially created as a web directory, Yahoo! grew quickly and became one of the most popular web portals in the late 1990s. In a move supported by Yang, Yahoo! rejected a multi-billion offer from Microsoft to take over the faltering corporation. A few years later, Yahoo! was worth less than half of Microsoft’s acquisition offer.

Donald Ervin Knuth, best known for his ongoing multi-volume book series The Art of Computer Programming, is born. Knuth's books provide surveys of the software field, comparing algorithms for performing some of the most fundamental computer science procedures. The book project, which is expected to last his entire lifetime, was born out of a desire to eliminate duplication of effort by programmers. Knuth also took a decade-long diversion from the book series to create the language TeX, when he received galley-proofs of one of his books and noticed how poor the state of technical typesetting was. Knuth has based much of his writing on his theory that programming a computer is an art form, like the creation of poetry or music.

The ACM/GAMM committee, a team of computer industry luminaries, convenes to develop Algol 60, the first block-structured language and one that eventually led to the more widely used Pascal. Algol (Algorithmic Language) and Algol 60 were designed to solve scientific computations and were meant to be more portable than most languages in existence at the time. Alan Perlis described Algol as the lingua franca of computer science.

Charles Antony Richard (Tony) Hoare is born. He received an MA from University of Oxford in 1959. During 1960 - 1968 he had worked at Elliot Bros. (London) Ltd. During 1968 - 1977 Hoare taught at the University of Belfast. Beginning in 1977, he was James Martin Professor of Computing at Oxford. He was a major contributor to the understanding of the logic of programs, and in particular was the developer of the Axiomatic Approach to program description. He received the 1980 ACM Turing Award.

The fictional HAL 9000 computer becomes operational, according to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the 1968 movie adaptation, the computer's statement, "I am a HAL 9000 computer, Production Number 3. I became operational at the HAL Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997," put his birthdate in 1992. Both dates have now passed with no super-intelligent, human-like HAL computer in sight.

The US Patent Office issues a patent for the Spalding Adding Machine. The precursor of calculators and computers, mechanical adding machines could do simple arithmetic and were popular in businesses until supplanted by computers in the 1960s.

The chief architect of IBM's first scientific computer, the 701, is born. Nathaniel Rochester also developed the prototype for the IBM 702, the growing company's first commercial computer. Both machines signaled IBM’s slow transition from its lucrative punch card accounting business to markets based on developments in electronics resulting from World War II research and development.

The National Science Foundation opens the National Center for Supercomputer Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, a national “Center of excellence” for research into high-performance computing. Its most famous alumnus, Marc Andreessen, invented his Mosaic browser for the network known as the World Wide Web while a student there, an effort he later transformed into the Netscape browser company.

The US government's Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) is disclosed to the public. SAGE, an air defense system, linked hundreds of radar stations in the United States and Canada in the first large-scale computer communications network. With the increasing possibility of a large-scale bomber attack on the United States in the mid-1950s, it became evident that further improvements in the nation's defense capability were needed. MIT's Lincoln Laboratory was commissioned to develop an automated nationwide computer-based air defense system. SAGE was completed in the early 1960s, revolutionizing air defense and civilian air traffic control. In 1979, SAGE was replaced by Regional Operations Control Centers (ROCC).

Amidst pressure from investors and other board members, Jerry Yang resigns from the board of Yahoo!, a company he co-founded. Yang, who served as the company’s CEO from June 2007 to January 2009, started Yahoo! with David Filo in 1994 while both were graduate students at Stanford University. Initially created as a web directory, Yahoo! grew quickly and became one of the most popular web portals in the late 1990s. In a move supported by Yang, Yahoo! rejected a multi-billion offer from Microsoft to take over the faltering corporation. A few years later, Yahoo! was worth less than half of Microsoft’s acquisition offer.