What Happened Today, April 4th
Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark found Mosaic Communications Corp., later renamed Netscape Communications Corp. Andreessen developed the software used for browsing the World Wide Web while working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. Clark co-founded high-performance computer maker Silicon Graphics Inc.
What Happened This Week
In one of the earliest developments in treating the AIDS epidemic, which had only recently begun making headlines, a team from Roche Laboratories in New Jersey publishes an article in Science magazine that discussed the theoretical basis for the HIV protease molecule. Designing molecules with which to target viruses is one of the many ways pharmaceutical researchers have come to use computers.
Pixar wins an Academy Award for Tin Toy, the first entirely computer-animated work to win in the best animated short film category. Pixar, now a division of Disney, continued its success with a string of shorts and the first entirely computer-animated feature-length film, the best-selling Toy Story.
The US Census Bureau receives the first UNIVAC I computer, the first commercial computer to attract widespread public attention. Although the Census Bureau began using it at the end of March it was not actually moved to the Census Bureau until a few months later. The UNIVAC was capable of completing 1,905 operations per second, which it stored on magnetic tape. The Census Bureau had helped drive the development of devices that eventually led to computers, beginning with Herman Hollerith's 1890 punch card machine.
Harvard and IBM sign an agreement to build the Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). Project leader Howard Aiken developed the original concept of the machine: a series of switches, relays, rotating shafts and clutches. The Mark I weighed about five tons and contained more than 750,000 components. It read instructions from paper tape and data from punch cards.
Alan J. Perlis is born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Perlis received his undergraduate degree in Chemistry (1942) from Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon University) and a PhD from MIT in 1950. Perlis went on to establish and head Carnegie's Graduate Department of Computer Science. A longtime developer of programming languages and techniques, as well as an educator, many of Perlis' graduate students have become world leaders in Computer Science themselves. He taught at Carnegie, Purdue, and Yale over his career and is fondly remembered as the author of classic one-liners that grew into poems. He died in New Haven, Connecticut on February 7, 1990.
Microsoft Corporation announces the Z80 SoftCard--their first and (for many years) only hardware product--a microprocessor on a printed circuit board that plugged into the Apple II personal computer. It retailed for $349.00. The SoftCard allowed programs running under the CP/M operating system (included with the card, as was Microsoft BASIC) to run on the 6502-based Apple II with only minor modifications. In particular, the word processor WordStar was so popular that people bought the SoftCard and a companion "80-column card" just to run it. At one time, SoftCard brought in about half of Microsoft's total revenue. It was discontinued in 1986.
John Napier--a Scottish mathematician most famous for inventing logarithms and an early calculating device called Napier's Bones--dies at age 67. Napier's Bones consisted of multiplication tables inscribed in strips of wood or bone, making for quick calculations. (They were called "bones" because of the material used to make the better quality versions--bone or ivory.). His logarithmic system provided the basis for the invention of the slide rule around the same time and logarithms were the principal means by which calculation was performed until the advent of the digital computer. Napier was born in Merchiston, Scotland in 1550.
Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark found Mosaic Communications Corp., later renamed Netscape Communications Corp. Andreessen developed the software used for browsing the World Wide Web while working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. Clark co-founded high-performance computer maker Silicon Graphics Inc.