What Happened Today, December 8th

The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation is incorporated. After a dispute with the administration at the University of Pennsylvania over ENIAC patent rights, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly started the company that, after several mergers, produced the BINAC for Northrop Aircraft and the UNIVAC. Grace Murray Hopper joined Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. as a senior mathematician in 1949. In 1950, before completing the UNIVAC, the company became a division of Remington Rand, IBM’s main challenger throughout the 1970s.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) files a lawsuit against Napster, alleging that the music file sharing service is enabling the theft of multi-million dollar profits from the record labels. Shawn Fanning, the face of Napster, had co-founded the peer-to-peer file sharing service only several months before with Sean Parker and John Fanning. The court case directed significant attention to the company, and millions of users increasingly shared and transferred copyrighted MP3 music files, fueling the ire of the music industry. Although very popular, Napster went bankrupt, and the RIAA and Big Music focused their attention on Bertelsmann, the German media group that had purchased Napster’s assets after it had filed for bankruptcy. Bertelsmann settled with the plaintiffs for several multi-million dollar payments.

The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation is incorporated. After a dispute with the administration at the University of Pennsylvania over ENIAC patent rights, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly started the company that, after several mergers, produced the BINAC for Northrop Aircraft and the UNIVAC. Grace Murray Hopper joined Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. as a senior mathematician in 1949. In 1950, before completing the UNIVAC, the company became a division of Remington Rand, IBM’s main challenger throughout the 1970s.

Grace Murray Hopper, one of the first women to work on the computer, is born in New York City. Hopper, a rear admiral in US Navy, did significant work on the Harvard Mark II, where she discovered the first computer bug -- a moth -- and coined the term to mean a problem with a program. Hopper went on to develop the first compiler, A-0, and the programming language COBOL. She died on January 1, 1992.

Grace Hopper was honored by having an advanced US Navy warship named after her, the USS Hopper, launched in mid-1997.

Augusta Ada King, Lady Lovelace, is born. Her father was Lord Byron, the famous poet. She was educated by private tutors including advanced study in mathematics being provided by the famous mathematician Augustus De Morgan. Ada worked with Charles Babbage writing extensive comments on his Difference Engine and Analytical Engine, and programming for the last one. She died on November 27, 1852.

A century later, in the 1970s, the computer language ADA was developed and named after Ada, Lady Lovelace. Based on the language PASCAL, ADA is a general-purpose language designed to be readable and easily maintained.

A patent is issued for Sir Frederick Williams' device for random-access memory. The Williams tube was a modified cathode-ray tube that painted dots and dashes of phosphorescent electrical charge on a screen representing binary ones and zeros. It became the primary memory for vacuum tube machines such as the IBM 701. Williams developed his device at Manchester University.

Apple's initial public offering was the largest IPO since the Ford Motor went public in 1956. Nonetheless, it sold out in minutes. Originally priced to sell at $14 a share, the stock opened at $22 and all 4.6 million shares were sold almost immediately. The stock rose almost 32% that day to close at $29, giving the company a market evaluation of $1.778 billion. The three founders of Apple Computer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula weren’t only ones who did well that day. More than 40 of Apple’s 1,000 employees became instant millionaires thanks to the stock options.

The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) put up the first Web site outside Europe. It let physicists browse the full text of pre-publication scientific papers on SLAC's SPIRES database directly over the Web. This was a radical improvement over the old system, which involved submitting requests and waiting for fax or email versions to be sent back. As a vital service for the international physics community, the SLAC site became an important early step in helping the World Wide Web live up to its ambitious name

David Wheeler, born February 9, 1927, was Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Cambridge University and a computer science pioneer. He worked on the original Cambridge EDSAC computer and wrote the first computer program to be stored in a computer’s memory. He pioneered the use of subroutines and data compression. He earned his PhD in 1951 from Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. He spent time at the University of Illinois where he made contributions to the architecture of the ILLIAC system there. He later returned to the Cambridge Computer Laboratory and invented the Cambridge Ring and advanced methods of computer testing. He continued to work there until his death, a decade after he had officially retired.