What Happened Today, September 3rd

Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak had taken a leave of absence from Apple following a plane crash in 1981. During this period, Woz started the US Festival, an outdoor concert and technology expo held in San Bernadino in southern California. The first festival was held on Labor Day weekend, 1982, featuring large, air-conditioned tents to host The US Festival Technology Exposition and a state-of-the-art stage for the musical acts. Temperatures peaked at over 100 degrees all three days of the festival. The line-up for opening day included The B-52s, Talking Heads, The English Beat, and headliners, The Police. The US Festival returned in 1983, but in total would end up losing more than $20 million.

One of the earliest laws anywhere designed to address computer fraud, the Act resulted from a long debate in the 1980s over failed prosecutions of hackers -- in one well-publicized case, two men hacked into a British Telecom computer leaving messages in the Duke of Edinburgh's private mailbox.

This date marks the birth of John Mauchly who, with J. Presper Eckert built the ENIAC, the first large-scale, electronic calculator. Mauchly received his PhD in physics at Johns Hopkins University and took a position teaching physics at Ursinus College. Because his meteorological work required extensive calculations, he began to experiment with alternatives to mechanical equipment. In 1941 he went to summer course at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He was asked to stay as an instructor, which he did. That year Mauchly wrote a report outlining his ideas for a machine to calculate ballistics tables for the war effort -- a report that helped the Moore School win a contract for the ENIAC. Mauchly worked on the successor to the ENIAC, the EDVAC, and the commercial UNIVAC 1. He died January 8, 1980.

Aldus Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. finalized their merger. The two companies hoped to combine forces in creating powerful desktop publishing software, building on the field Aldus founder Paul Brainerd had created in 1985 with his PageMaker software. Pagemaker was one of three components to the desktop publishing revolution. The other two were the invention of Postscript by Adobe and the LaserWriter laser printer from Apple. All three were necessary to create a desktop publishing environment.

The United States Library of Congress holds the first of several meetings to plan a project to convert its materials to digital form so they will be accessible via computer networks to students and researchers around the world. The "virtual library" project could also save rare materials that are degrading or have been vandalized, as well as saving space for the library, whose holdings, in 2014, filled up 838 miles of shelving. At the time of the initial meeting -- at which librarians and technical experts from several major computer companies discussed strategy and funding -- the library hoped to have its most vulnerable materials digitized by the year 2000.

After its Deep Blue chess-playing computer defeated human world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a closely watched match in May, the pioneering computer company decided to make the machine even faster and stronger. On September 2, IBM announced that its RS/6000 SP model, a parallel supercomputer, was now 58 percent faster thanks to a new microprocessor and some software refinements. Kasparov was not available for comment.

Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak had taken a leave of absence from Apple following a plane crash in 1981. During this period, Woz started the US Festival, an outdoor concert and technology expo held in San Bernadino in southern California. The first festival was held on Labor Day weekend, 1982, featuring large, air-conditioned tents to host The US Festival Technology Exposition and a state-of-the-art stage for the musical acts. Temperatures peaked at over 100 degrees all three days of the festival. The line-up for opening day included The B-52s, Talking Heads, The English Beat, and headliners, The Police. The US Festival returned in 1983, but in total would end up losing more than $20 million.

John McCarthy, whose many contributions to the field of computer science included the language LISP, is born in Boston. After attending Cal Tech and Princeton University, McCarthy developed LISP -- the first computer language designed for writing Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs -- while a professor at MIT. He taught at Stanford University for most of his career.

LISP made great strides in providing a flexibility of information essential for AI programming, a result that pleased McCarthy, who once said: “We should try to make AI systems as good as children.”

McCarthy is a 1999 Computer History Museum Fellow.