What Happened Today, November 10th

Microsoft announces a new product, Windows, to compete with other graphical environments for computers, such as interface on the Apple Lisa. After several delays, Windows 1.0 finally became available to the public in 1985. Its major features included pull-down menus, tiled windows, mouse support, and cooperative multitasking of the program’s applications. Although Windows 1.0 saw some use, the Windows interface did not gain general acceptance until version 3.0.

Jack Kilby is born in Jefferson City, Missouri. After several years of study at the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin, Kilby began work at Texas Instruments Inc., where he invented the integrated circuit in 1958. With that invention, he proved that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same piece of semiconductor material.

The first integrated circuit consisted of a sliver of germanium with five components linked by wires. It was Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor, however, who made Kilby's invention practical—both men are thus credited with the invention of the IC.

Sometimes abbreviated as FF, Firefox was Mozilla's next generation browser and included such features as tabbed browsing and popup blocking. Mozilla Firefox became a popular alternative for Microsoft Internet Explorer users who sought alternatives that could prevent spyware as well as a host of other Firefox features.

Microsoft announces a new product, Windows, to compete with other graphical environments for computers, such as interface on the Apple Lisa. After several delays, Windows 1.0 finally became available to the public in 1985. Its major features included pull-down menus, tiled windows, mouse support, and cooperative multitasking of the program’s applications. Although Windows 1.0 saw some use, the Windows interface did not gain general acceptance until version 3.0.

Robert Fano, who led Project MAC at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is born in Torino, Italy. Fano built on his studies at MIT when he directed Project MAC, which focused on developments in timesharing and interactive computing.

ILLIAC IV designer Dan Slotnick is born. The ILLIAC IV, a project of the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency and the University of Illinois, was the first large-scale array computer to use semiconductor RAM memory. When it first operated at NASA’s Ames Research Center in 1972, it could compute 200 million instructions per second. The speed of the parallel-processing computer was achieved by its architecture and the overlapping structure of its 64 processing elements.

Alan Turing’s paper entitled On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem appeared on November 12, 1937, somewhat contemporaneously with Konrad Zuse’s work on the first of the Z machines in Germany, John Vincent Atanasoff ‘s work on the ABC, George Stibitz’s work on the Bell Telephony relay machine, and Howard Aiken’s on the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator.

Later renamed the Turing Machine, this abstract engine provided the fundamental concepts of computers that the other inventors would realize independently. So Turing provided the abstraction that would form the basic theory of computability for several decades, while others provided the pragmatic means of computation.

The MIT TX-0, an experimental transistorized computer, is brought back to life for the third (and final) time at The Computer Museum in Marlboro, Massachusetts. The resurrection was achieved under the care of its devoted technician, John McKenzie, MIT Professor Jack Dennis, who was in charge of the machine, and a number of users. The TX-0 was built at Lincoln Laboratories in 1955 then dismantled and moved to MIT in 1956 where it was deemed to be obsolete in two years. The TX-0 is considered to be one the earliest transitorized computers ever designed.

Peter Norton was born on this day in 1943 in Aberdeen, Washington. Norton would first come to note for producing tools that could retrieve erased data from DOS disks that would eventually be compiled into suite called Norton Utilities. Norton founded Peter Norton Computing, which produced both software utilities as well as publishing several manuals and books. In 1990, Norton sold his company to Symantec, which would keep the Norton name alive for more than a decade following the purchase. He currently heads up The Peter Norton Family Foundation, which is a major philanthropic group supporting the arts and human social services.