What Happened Today, July 12th

At an IBM sales meeting, Thomas J. Watson Jr. predicts that all moving parts in machines would be replaced by electronics within 10 years. Watson's visionary ideals of where the fledgling computer industry might go helped lead his company to dominance in production of all varieties of computers, from workstations to personal computers.

At an IBM sales meeting, Thomas J. Watson Jr. predicts that all moving parts in machines would be replaced by electronics within 10 years. Watson's visionary ideals of where the fledgling computer industry might go helped lead his company to dominance in production of all varieties of computers, from workstations to personal computers.

IBM announced an alliance with Toshiba and Siemens to develop memory chips for computers. The international cooperation marked a shift in the semiconductor industry, which had primarily seen such companies fighting bitterly with each other for control of the market. Experts pointed to the alliance as an example of a new global economy that had little use for borders.

Computer pioneer and MIT professor Jay Forrester was born. With Robert Everett, Forrester led one of the most important early computer projects, the Whirlwind.

Completed in 1951, the Whirlwind could store 2,048 16-digit words with its 4,500 vacuum tubes taking up more than 3,000 square feet of space. Forrester called the computer a reliable operating system, as it was capable of running 35 hours per week at 90-percent utility.

The ENIGMA machine was introduced into the German Army and used for the transmission of coded messages. A simple German machine the size of a portable typewriter, ENIGMA allowed for security in communications by a process in which typed letters were replaced by a cipher text displayed on illuminated lamps. The cipher was symmetrical so entering the cipher text into another ENIGMA reproduced the original message. Security was provided by a set of rotor wheels and a series of patch cables whose arrangement was agreed upon previously.

ENIGMA was used extensively by the German military during World War II to transmit battle plans and other secret information. By December of 1941, however, British codebreakers managed to decipher the code, allowing them to routinely read most ENIGMA traffic.

An ENIGMA machine is on display at The Computer History Museum.

VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin was born in Philadelphia. Bricklin moved from his hometown to Boston to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and study computer science.

The background proved useful during a later turn at Harvard Business School, where Bricklin teamed with Robert Frankston to design the first business spreadsheet program. The result, in 1979, was a visible calculator that automated the recalculation of spreadsheets.

Bricklin and Frankston founded Software Arts Inc. and sold their program to Apple Computer and other companies, selling 100,000 copies in the first year.

A programming error temporarily threw the Internet into disarray in a preview of the difficulties that inevitably accompany a world dependent on e-mail, the World Wide Web, and other electronic communications.

At 2:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time, a computer operator in Virginia ignored alarms on the computer that updated Internet address information, leading to problems at several other computers with similar responsibilities. The corruption meant most Internet addresses could not be accessed, resulting in millions of unsent e-mail messages.

Former Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation colleagues Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore incorporated Intel, a company they built to produce memory chips and, beginning in 1971, the world's first microprocessor available as a component, the Intel 4004. As Japan cemented its dominance on memory chips, Intel pivoted to producing microprocessors, which still dominate PC and data center markets today.

Moore is famous for "Moore's Law," first stated in 1965, which dictates that every 18-24 months, the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double.

On July 19, 1983, Michael W. Vannier (Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology, St. Louis) and his co-workers J. Marsh (Cleft Palate and Craniofacial Deformities Institute, St. Louis Children's Hospital) and J. Warren (McDonnell Aircraft Company) published the first three-dimensional reconstruction of single computed tomography (CT) slices of the human head. Computer-aided aircraft design techniques were adapted to make the cranial imaging possible. Since then, CT imaging has become a cornerstone of the medical profession.