What Happened Today, October 30th
Today the last remaining Multics installation is shut down at the Canadian Department of National Defense in Halifax. Although the time-sharing operating system was not a huge commercial success, it had a significant impact on the industry.
What Happened This Week
Today the last remaining Multics installation is shut down at the Canadian Department of National Defense in Halifax. Although the time-sharing operating system was not a huge commercial success, it had a significant impact on the industry.
The conference was sponsored by the National Research Council, Subcommittee Z on Calculating Machines and Computation. Attended by the Whirlwind team, it influenced the direction of this computer.
A software error related to a system upgrade halted stock and bond trading on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. Problems came to light before the market's opening at 9 a.m. local time and delayed the start of trading until 1:30 p.m. The glitch was the most serious to hit the exchange since 1999, when floor trading was scrapped so that an all-electronic trading system could be installed.
Adriaan van Wijngaarden was a leader in programming linguistics and language translation and a contributor to Algol 60. He led the recasting of Algol 60 into Algol 68, a vastly different language that was not only state of the art but also incited features that were far ahead of its time. He received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award for this work in 1986. He died in 1987.
George Boole, the British creator of a mathematico-logical system that bears his name, is born in Lincoln, England. He began his career as a schoolteacher, writing articles on mathematics in his spare time. These investigations led to the book Mathematical Analysis of Logic. Queen's University at Cork, Ireland, recognized Boole's contributions and offered him the chair of mathematics in 1848. This opportunity allowed Boole to extend his studies and produce his most significant work An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Dublin and Oxford Universities awarded Boole honorary degrees, and the Royal Society of London elected him as a fellow. Boole was elected as an honorary member of the Cambridge Philosophical Society in 1858. He died of pneumonia on December 8, 1864, at the age of 50.
Howard H. Aiken (Harvard University) writes a letter to J.W. Bryce (IBM) starting a discussion on automatic calculating machinery for use in computing physical problems. This would lead to the creation of the Harvard Mark I, the fifty-one feet long, eight feet high, and weighing nearly five tons Giant Brain. With high-speed electromechanical units for multiplication and division, electromechanical tables of functions, three paper-tape interpolator units, 72 accumulating storage registers and 60 dial-switch constant register, all called into play by commands read from the punched-tape sequence control, the Harvard Mark I was the most powerful calculating machine of its day.
CBS News borrows a UNIVAC computer to make a scientific prediction of the 1952 presidential election, a race between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. The computer’s analysis of early returns showed an easy victory for Eisenhower, but newscasters Walter Cronkite and Charles Collingwood were wary of the machine’s accuracy, as opinion polls predicted a landslide victory for Stevenson. They postponed announcing the UNIVAC prediction until it became clear that Eisenhower would, indeed, win.
According to Internet services company Netcraft Ltd., on this day over 100 million Web sites existed on the Internet. The milestone capped an extraordinary year in which the Internet added 27.4 million sites, easily topping the previous full-year growth record of 17 million from 2005. The Internet doubled in number of sites since May 2004, when the survey hit 50 million. Blogs and small business Web sites drove the explosive growth in 2006, with huge increases in free blogging services at Google and Microsoft. The first Netcraft survey in August 1995 found 18,957 hosts.
Microsoft signs a contract with IBM to create an operating system for the new IBM PC. The PC ignited the personal computer market, making home computers popular among more than just hobbyists. Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed the Microsoft Disk Operating System, commonly known as MS-DOS, using existing software from a Seattle company as a foundation.