What Happened Today, January 7th

Ivan Sutherland introduces the Sketchpad submitting his PhD thesis to MIT. The Sketchpad, one of the earliest programs for the TX-0, allowed direct manipulation of objects on a computer screen. Using the Sketchpad, a user could create and manipulate graphical figures with a light pen. This thesis provided the basis for later graphical user interfaces and is considered one of the seminal papers in computer science.

Hewlett-Packard introduces the HP-35, the first scientific handheld calculator and the final step in ending reliance on slide rules among scientists and students alike. The HP-35 was named for its 35 keys, weighed nine ounces, and sold for $395. One of the tests HP co-founder Dave Packard applied to the device was to throw it across his office and see if it still worked. It did.

The first reference to Simula in writing is made. This early object-oriented language was written by Kristen Nygaard and Ole-John Dahl of the Norwegian Computing Center in Oslo. Simula grouped data and instructions into blocks called objects, each representing one facet of a system intended for simulation.

Using a desktop computer in an academic pursuit that regularly employs multi-million dollar supercomputers, Fabrice Bellard announces he has computed pi to roughly 2.7 trillion digits and reveals his methods used in accomplishing this task. At the time, the feat was a new world record. Faster computers and ambitious mathematicians routinely push computing limits in breaking this record. Computing pi had also been tackled by some of the earliest of electronic computers. In 1949, for example, the ENIAC took the number to over 2,000 places, a process that took nearly 3 days of computing time to complete.

Ivan Sutherland introduces the Sketchpad submitting his PhD thesis to MIT. The Sketchpad, one of the earliest programs for the TX-0, allowed direct manipulation of objects on a computer screen. Using the Sketchpad, a user could create and manipulate graphical figures with a light pen. This thesis provided the basis for later graphical user interfaces and is considered one of the seminal papers in computer science.

Herman Hollerith receives a patent for his Hollerith Tabulating Machine, a punch card system that won a contest for a more efficient means of compiling the 1890 US census. To count an item, a small paper card on which a census taker had punched out holes corresponding to a citizen's census information, was fed through a press that sensed holes. A wire passing through the holes into a cup of mercury closed an electrical circuit and registered the item. In 1924, Hollerith's Tabulating Machine Co., and two other firms were consolidated into International Business Machines.

Erich Bloch, a member of the team that engineered IBM's System/360 family of computers, is born. In 1962, IBM chose Bloch to head its Solid Logic Technology (SLT) program--an alternative technology to integrated circuits (ICs) which, at that time, had not yet been successfully mass produced. SLT was the electronics technology behind the System/360, a family of six mutually compatible computers and forty peripherals that could work together and which provided forward and backward software and hardware compatibility across the family.

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.