What Happened Today, March 15th

Aldus Corporation and Adobe Systems Inc. announce they will merge. Aldus revolutionized desktop publishing (DTP) when founder Paul Brainerd released the PageMaker program in 1985. Computer scientists John Warnock and Charles Geschke applied knowledge learned in their graduate work to similar products and founded Adobe in 1982.

For the first time ever, an internet entry wins Bob Levey's Washington Post neologism contest. Contestants were charged with creating a new word to describe a negative reaction to Washington. Scott Burroughs' suggestion, sqwashington, arrived 11 minutes before an identical entry.

The MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory hosted its first symposium on digital fire control, featuring Whirlwind, a large-scale electronic stored-program vacuum tube computer originally designed as a flight simulator for the US Navy. On the second day of the meeting, March 9, a program called "Director" was demonstrated by project leader Douglas Ross. Director could be considered a rudimentary operating system since it allocated and controlled system resources (like memory, storage, and printing) automatically during execution of a user's program.

Apple Computer Inc., Motorola Inc., IBM Corp. and four other computer companies form the PowerOpen Association Inc., intended to promote new computer chip technology in preparation for the release of the next generation of personal computers. The association also tested conformance to the PowerOpen environment, which led to computers such as Apple's PowerPC.

Netscape Communications Corp. announces a third generation of its World Wide Web browser software to compete with Microsoft Corp. The new software focused on extranets, or private Internet connections between companies. The competition between the two companies has increased since then, culminating in a mandate by a federal judge that Microsoft make its Windows operating system available without its Internet Explorer browser.

Pre-World War II computer pioneer Vannevar (pronounced "Van-ee-ver") Bush is born in Everett, Massachusetts. Bush, who also was deeply involved with wartime computer projects, invented an electromechanical differential analyzer that used mechanical integrators to help solve differential equations. Bush was a co-founder of Raytheon, a military contractor. He also became very interested in information retrieval, which led him to imagine a machine he called "memex" -- an electronic extension of an individual's mind and memory base -- that mimicked human associative linking of information, and anticipated hypertext research. He died on June 28, 1974.

National Semiconductor Corp. completes the sale of its Fairchild Semiconductor business. Many consider Fairchild the "original" Silicon Valley company for its profound and diverse institutional legacy: a survey of over 100 large Silicon Valley companies in the 1980s found that almost all of them had links to Fairchild, mostly through ex-Fairchild employees who had spun off and started these companies on their own.

Fairchild had been founded by Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and six others who left en masse from Shockley Semiconductor, after that firm's founder and co-inventor of the transistor, William Shockley, struggled with a confrontational management style. Noyce and Moore later co-founded Intel Corporation.

Nearly eleven years after its founding, Microsoft began trading stock on the NASDAQ stock exchange. The initial share price was set at $28 dollars a share, raising almost 61 million dollars in a single day. If you had purchased a share on March 13th, 1986 at $21, your investment would be worth approximately $4,000 as of 2012.

AT&T Bell Laboratories announces the completion of the first fully transistorized computer, TRADIC. TRADIC contained nearly 800 transistors, which replaced the standard vacuum tube and allowed the machine to operate on fewer than 100 watts -- or one-twentieth the power required by a comparable vacuum tube computer.

Aldus Corporation and Adobe Systems Inc. announce they will merge. Aldus revolutionized desktop publishing (DTP) when founder Paul Brainerd released the PageMaker program in 1985. Computer scientists John Warnock and Charles Geschke applied knowledge learned in their graduate work to similar products and founded Adobe in 1982.