What Happened Today, December 7th
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.
What Happened This Week
The first two IBM 7090 computers are delivered. Along with the faster version, which IBM released three years later, the series was a popular family of transistorized mainframes. Designed for scientific research and large-scale technological application, the computers were used in such projects as the Mercury and Gemini space flights and the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System.
W.W. Chandler is born in Bridport, England. He obtained his BSc from London University in 1938 by private study while working as a telephone engineer at the British Post Office Research Department. During the war he was responsible for the installation and maintenance of the Colossus at Bletchley Park. The Colossus represented the first electronic computer, however it was programmed by a mechanical switchboard. It was used to crack the German Fish codes which guarded the highest levels of German communication. Winston Churchill characterized the Bletchley Park team as the geese who laid the golden eggs but never cackled.
After the war, Chandler participated in the development and installation of the MOSAIC computer and worked on optical character recognition. He died on September 11, 1989.
Dr. Federico Faggin is born in Vicenza, Italy. He graduated from Instituto Industriale at Vicenza in 1960. He received a doctorate in physics from the University of Padua in 1965. In 1968 he came to the US to join Fairchild in Palo Alto where he developed the original silicon gate technology. The 4004 project brought him to Intel in 1970. In 1974 he founded Zilog, Inc. which produced a new chip design for the fledgling personal computer industry. After a short stint with Exxon, he co-founded Cygnet Technologies in 1982 and Synaptics, Inc. in 1986 where he was president. He is a recipient of the Marconi Fellowship and IEEE W. Wallace McDowell awards.
The US Navy dedicates its Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) at the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia. John von Neumann was the keynote speaker. The machine was built at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory under the direction of Wallace Eckert.
This computer was in demand by many organizations, including two different Navy facilities and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Physicist Edward Teller had been trying to receive NORC arguing that the LLNL's nuclear calculations were more important than Dahlgren's ballistic calculations. The Navy won and NORC was delivered to Dahlgren, following the Mark II (1948) and the Mark III (1951).
Control Data Corporation announces its 7600 model, considered by some to be the first true supercomputer. The CDC 7600 calculated at a speed of nearly 40 megaflops. Seymour Cray designed this computer, as well as its predecessor, the 6600 that was popular with scientific researchers, and a successor, the 8600, which the company never marketed.
John Warner Backus is born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1949 he graduated from Columbia University and immediately joined IBM as a programmer. Backus led a team that created FORTRAN, the first successful high-level programming language which became commercially available in 1957. In 1959 he invented the Backus Naur Form (BNF), a standard notation to describe the syntax of a high level programming language. His third major contribution to computer science was to develop a functional programming language called FP, which advocates a mathematical approach to programming. Backus received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980, and in 1994 was awarded the National Academy of Engineers’ Draper Award.
The Cray X-MP/48 started operation at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. The X-MP was popular for generating computer graphics, especially for movies. It nearly doubled the operating speed of competing machines with its parallel processing system, which ran at 420 million floating-point operations per second, or megaflops. An even faster speed could be achieved by arranging two Crays to work together on different parts of the same problem. Other applications included the defense industry and scientific research.
Richard L.Wexelblat was the first candidate in a computer science program to complete a dissertation. Many PhD candidates had performed computer-related work, but Wexelblat’s diploma, presented by the University of Pennsylvania - the home of the ENIAC - was the first one to carry the designation "computer science."
J. Barkley Rosser is born in Jaksonville, Florida. In 1934 Rosser received a PhD in logic from Princeton under the supervision of Alonso Church. Rosser was able to anticipate the potential of early computers in many areas of mathematics as well as the ultimate impact of logic on the future of computing. He contributed to the Church-Rosser theorem that identifies the outer limit of what is achievable in automated theorem proving and, therefore, plays the same role in computing science as the second law of thermodynamics in engineering.
Rosser taught at Cornell and the University of Wisconsin, served as a president of the Association of Symbolic Logic and SIAM. He died on September 5, 1989.
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.