What Happened Today, December 21st
Douglas T. Ross is born in Canton, China. He received an AB from Oberlin College in 1951 and an SM from MIT in 1954. He worked with John Ward on the Cape Cod Air Defense System Project, held many positions at MIT, including head of the Computer Applications Group at the Electronic System Laboratory, and was project engineer for the MIT Computer-Aided Design project. He developed APT (Automatically Programmed Tools)--now an international standard--and AED (Automated Engineering Design) projects which were early precursors of the languages and systems of modern CAD and CAM systems. These projects were run in close connection with the Whirlwind, TX-0, TX-2, Project MAC, and CTSS.
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was responsible for guidance, navigation, and control computations in the Apollo space program. The AGC was the first computer to use integrated circuit logic and occupied less than 1 cubic foot of the spacecraft. It stored data in 15 bit words (with one parity bit) and had a memory cycle time of 11.7 microseconds. Astronauts communicated with the AGC using the "DSKY" (Display Keyboard). It used digital displays and communicated with astronauts using verb and noun buttons, and a two-digit operation and operand code.
The AGC and DSKY form part of The Computer History Museum permanent collection.
What Happened This Week
Douglas T. Ross is born in Canton, China. He received an AB from Oberlin College in 1951 and an SM from MIT in 1954. He worked with John Ward on the Cape Cod Air Defense System Project, held many positions at MIT, including head of the Computer Applications Group at the Electronic System Laboratory, and was project engineer for the MIT Computer-Aided Design project. He developed APT (Automatically Programmed Tools)--now an international standard--and AED (Automated Engineering Design) projects which were early precursors of the languages and systems of modern CAD and CAM systems. These projects were run in close connection with the Whirlwind, TX-0, TX-2, Project MAC, and CTSS.
The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was responsible for guidance, navigation, and control computations in the Apollo space program. The AGC was the first computer to use integrated circuit logic and occupied less than 1 cubic foot of the spacecraft. It stored data in 15 bit words (with one parity bit) and had a memory cycle time of 11.7 microseconds. Astronauts communicated with the AGC using the "DSKY" (Display Keyboard). It used digital displays and communicated with astronauts using verb and noun buttons, and a two-digit operation and operand code.
The AGC and DSKY form part of The Computer History Museum permanent collection.
The FINAC, the Italian Mark I*, is inaugurated in Rome. The Mark I*, the commercial prototype of Manchester's Mark I, was built by English Ferranti Ltd., for UNESCO's International Computational Center in Rome.
John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrate the point-contact transistor, made from strips of gold foil on a plastic triangle, pushed down into contact with a slab of germanium. To measure the amplification they hooked up a microphone to one end of the device and a loudspeaker to the other. One by one, the men picked up the microphone and whispered, “Hello.” The loudspeaker at the other end of the circuit shouted, “HELLO!”. Although William Shockley had played a smaller role in the invention of the point-contact transistor, he was inspired by its promise, and devoted his time and efforts for more than a month to improving upon the device. By early 1948 he had devised the junction transistor, a device that shaped the design of nearly all transistors to follow.
Sun Microsystems wins a major antitrust victory against Microsoft when a federal judge ordered Microsoft to distribute Sun's Java programming language in its Microsoft Windows operating system. Another provision of the decision required that Microsoft cease the shipment of a version of Java that Sun contended was outdated and could discourage programmers from using it for software development. The court case was one of many that Microsoft had contended with in the face of anti-trust allegations by both corporate competitors and federal and state government agencies.
A new Stuxnet-style computer virus attacks an electric utility company in southern Iran, but Iranian officials claim to have successfully contained and mitigated any major damage. This attack came in the wake of the Stuxnet worm that was made public by Tehran in 2010, and crippled a portion of the Iranian uranium enrichment infrastructure. That worm caused damaging speed variances and interruptions in the spinning centrifuges used in uranium enrichment facilities. Undetected before causing this damage, it spread surreptitiously over networks and via flash drives and other removable storage devices.
Charles Babbage is born in London. The son of a wealthy banker, he became a prominent figure in London’s social and scientific circles. In 1821, he designed the Difference Engine to calculate mathematical tables—replacing the unreliable human "computers" doing the calculations at the time. Politics and funding issues, however, brought the project to an end. Undeterred, in 1834, Babbage began working on an even more ambitious invention, his "Analytical Engine." This invention was to be a general-purpose programmable computing machine. Ultimately, neither Engine was completed in Babbage’s lifetime.
More than 150 years later, however, the London Science Museum, under the direction of Dr. Doron Swade, constructed two identical Difference Engines, faithful to Babbage’s original drawings. Remarkably, they operate precisely as Babbage envisioned.
One of the two Difference Engines is on display at the Computer History Museum, where it is demonstrated daily.
Time magazine's editors selected the Personal Computer for "Machine of the Year," in lieu of their well-known "Man of the Year" award. The computer beat out US President Ronald Reagan, UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin. The planet Earth became the second non-human recipient for the award in 1988. The awards have been given since 1927. The magazine's essay reported that in 1982, 80% of Americans expected that "in the fairly near future, home computers will be as commonplace as television sets or dishwashers." In 1980, 724,000 personal computers were sold in the United States, according to Time. The following year, that number doubled to 1.4 million.
France concludes a series of nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific. In a controversial move, French President Jacques Chirac had lifted a moratorium on testing. Most countries test weapons with computer simulations instead of actual bomb drops, but France claimed that tests that had been suspended several years earlier left the country without sufficient data to conduct future tests on computers.
John von Neumann is born in Budapest, Hungary. His prodigious abilities were recognized in his early childhood. He obtained a degree in chemical engineering while attending the University of Berlin from 1921 to 1923 and the Technische Hochschule in Zurich from 1923 to 1926. Well known for penning the seminal First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, von Neumann also developed the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) computer while at Princeton. The IAS computer and its “von Neumann architecture,” first described in the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, served as the model for a number of computers built at governmental and scientific institutions. Von Neumann architecture standardized the way programs and data were stored in a computer’s common memory.