What Happened Today, September 8th
Star Trek, the science fiction television series, was created by Gene Roddenberry. Set in the 23rd century, the original Star Trek follows the adventures of the starship Enterprise and its crew, led by Captain James T. Kirk (played by William Shatner), his First Officer Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and his Chief Medical Officer Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley). Star Trek was not an immediate hit and was initially broadcast for only three seasons (a total of 79 episodes). Many of the technologies shown in the series, including the “Tricorder” and personal communicator, influenced a generation of technologists working in portable communications and computing. The last episode aired on September 2, 1969.
What Happened This Week
The USS Grace Murray Hopper was commissioned by the US Navy in San Francisco. Hopper, a rear admiral in the US Navy, enjoyed successful careers in academia, business, and the military while making history in the computer field. She helped program the Harvard Mark I and II and developed the first compiler, A-0. Her subsequent work on programming languages influenced the COBOL programming language.
The first large parallel processing computer, ILLIAC IV, ends its nearly decade-long life at the University of Illinois. In 1966, the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contracted the University of Illinois to build the ILLIAC IV, which did not operate until 1972 at NASA's Ames Research Center.
ILLIAC IV achieved a computation speed of 200 million instructions per second, about 300 million operations per second, and 1 billion bits per second of I/O transfer via a unique combination of parallel architecture and the overlapping or pipe-lining structure of its 64 processing elements.
Star Trek, the science fiction television series, was created by Gene Roddenberry. Set in the 23rd century, the original Star Trek follows the adventures of the starship Enterprise and its crew, led by Captain James T. Kirk (played by William Shatner), his First Officer Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and his Chief Medical Officer Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley). Star Trek was not an immediate hit and was initially broadcast for only three seasons (a total of 79 episodes). Many of the technologies shown in the series, including the “Tricorder” and personal communicator, influenced a generation of technologists working in portable communications and computing. The last episode aired on September 2, 1969.
On September 9, 1947, a team of computer scientists and engineers reported a moth caught between the relay contacts of the Harvard Mark II computer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They taped the dead moth into the logbook for the computer. “First actual case of bug being found,” one of the team members wrote in the log. Programmer Grace Hopper -- a CHM Fellow (1987) -- was present and made the incident famous later on in her many public lectures. Originating with Thomas Edison in the 1800s, the term “bug” is still used widely to describe a mistake or failure in a technical system.
Charles Simonyi, whose work as chief architect of Microsoft Word is born in Budapest, Hungary. After moving to the United States for study at the University of California, Berkeley, Simonyi took a job at the Xerox PARC in Palo Alto, developing the first WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word-processing editor. Later, at Microsoft, he integrated such theories into Word and Multiplan, the predecessor of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
The first public demonstration of remote computation occurs during a meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Dartmouth College. Bell Laboratories researcher George Stibitz set up a terminal that allowed conference attendees to perform remote calculations over telephone lines with Bell Labs’ Complex Number Calculator in New York City. Stibitz had first tested the connection on September 9, an event memorialized by a plaque in front of McNutt Hall at Dartmouth College.
Jack Kilby successfully tests the first integrated circuit at Texas Instruments to prove that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same piece of semiconductor material. His circuit consisted of a sliver of germanium with five components linked by wires. Along with Bob Noyce, he is considered the inventor of the integrated circuit (IC).