What Happened on December 13th

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.