What Happened Today, February 9th

David Wheeler, who in 1951 introduced the concept of the subroutine to computer programming, is born. He concentrated his work on assembly programming language and invoked the subroutine in his "Wheeler jump" technique. For this work Wheeler received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award.

C.D Lake, H.H. Aiken, F.E. Hamilton, and B.M. Durfee file a calculator patent for the Automatic Sequence Control Calculator, commonly known as the Harvard Mark I. The Mark I was a large automatic digital computer that could perform the four basic arithmetic functions and handle 23 decimal places. A multiplication took about five seconds.

David Wheeler, who in 1951 introduced the concept of the subroutine to computer programming, is born. He concentrated his work on assembly programming language and invoked the subroutine in his "Wheeler jump" technique. For this work Wheeler received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award.

In the first game of a six game match, IBM's Deep Blue chess computer defeated world champion Garry Kasparov. No computer had ever won a game against a world champion in chess. Kasparov would eventually win the series 4-2, but would lose to Deep Blue in a re-match a year later.

Enjoying a change of climate in Florida, IBM's Thomas Watson, Sr. sends a directive to IBM headquarters to begin planning "a machine of the same type as the Harvard Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) to meet the requirements of the ordinary businesses we serve." The resulting machine, the Selective Sequence Controlled Calculator (SSEC) was completed on January 27, 1948, and contained 21,400 relays and 12,500 vacuum tubes.

The RAND Corporation takes the Johnniac Open Shop System (JOSS) out of service. JOSS was a conversational time-sharing service that eased the bottleneck experienced by programmers in the batch environment--typical of the time--in which long delays existed between sending information to the computer and getting results back. Timesharing aimed to bring the user back into contact with the machine for online debugging and program development.

Young computing enthusiast Jonathan Rotenberg founds the Boston Computer Society. Four people attended the first meeting of this group, whose membership eventually reached several thousand. Early topics of discussion for the society included Community Use of Personal Computers and The Minicomputer Goes to the Racetrack.

Apollo Computer is incorporated in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. Apollo helped create the original workstations, small but powerful computers mostly used for engineering. In 1989, Hewlett-Packard Company acquired Apollo in a $476 million deal.

John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert unveil the much-anticipated ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania. The ENIAC calculated 5,000 operations per second -- 1,000 times faster than its contemporaries. Impressive in size as well as strength, the machine occupied over 1,500 square feet of space, weighed 30 tons, and used 18,000 vacuum tubes.