What Happened Today, March 18th
The New York Times reports that a 17-year-old student in New Jersey had tracked the launch of the new Soviet space station, Mir, before the Soviet government formally announced it. With a group of friends, Phillip Naranjo tracked transmissions between space vessels and control centers on Earth. Just before the Russians announced Mir on February 20, the teens had picked up some Cyrillic code.
What Happened This Week
Apple Computer sues Microsoft for copyright infringement over the graphical user interface (GUI) of its operating system. After Apple developed the highly successful Macintosh GUI in 1984, Microsoft released their Windows operating system, which had some similarities in its GUI’s look and feel. Under terms of a confidential agreement signed between the two companies in 1985, Microsoft consented to acknowledging that their GUI was derived from that of the Macintosh. In return, Apple gave Microsoft license to use the design in its software. A judge eventually decided Apple had only limited rights to the design.
The New York Times reports that a 17-year-old student in New Jersey had tracked the launch of the new Soviet space station, Mir, before the Soviet government formally announced it. With a group of friends, Phillip Naranjo tracked transmissions between space vessels and control centers on Earth. Just before the Russians announced Mir on February 20, the teens had picked up some Cyrillic code.
Edmund Berkeley, founder of the Association of Computing Machinery, is born. A graduate of Harvard University, Berkeley participated in the development of Harvard's Mark II while enlisted in the Navy during World War II. In addition to co-founding the ACM in 1947, he wrote one of the first books on computers intended for a general audience, Giant Brains, or Machines that Think.
The origins of Twitter came out of a brainstorming session at the podcasting company Odeo. The initial concept was to share short messages via SMS text messaging with a small group. Jack Dorsey was the primary designer of what was then code-named “twttr” and sent the first message at 9:50am on March 21st, 2006 - "just setting up my twttr." Twitter would be released to the public that July and found its first major success at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in 2007, shortly after it had been spun-off as its own company, Twitter, Inc.
Intel announces it is shipping its Pentium microprocessor. Engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor, and Masatoshi Shima, an engineer from the Japanese firm of Busicom, invented the world's first commercial microprocessor at Intel in 1971 -- the Intel 4004.
Jean Sammet, an early pioneer of computing, is born in New York. Sammet attended Mount Holyoke College and the University of Illinois, where she launched a teaching career. Trained in math, she moved into industry in 1961, developing the language FORMAC at IBM. The language was the first commonly used language for manipulating non-numeric algebraic expressions. She also wrote one of the classic histories of programming languages in her book, Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals. Sammet passed away May 20, 2017.