1994: Wired.com, then known as HotWired, invents the web banner ad. Go ahead, blame us.
The Mosaic browser was just morphing into Netscape in 1994. And if you think ads slow down page loads now, readers had to download the first banner ads over thin dial-up connections.
Despite those handicaps, the gaudy banner ad took over the [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Computers and IT’
Oct. 14, 1985: C++ Adds to Programming
October 14th, 2010 |
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1985: The first official reference guide for the C++ programming language is published. The author, Bjarne Stroustrup, is also the language’s creator.
Stroustrup had been hacking away at his replacement for the C programming language at AT&T Bell labs since 1979, where he and his colleagues in the research department were given free reign to experiment [...]
October 7, 1954: IBM Gets Transistorized
October 7th, 2010 |
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1954: IBM builds the first calculating machine to use solid-state transistors instead of vacuum tubes.
IBM already had a business selling calculating machines, and it was humming along quite nicely. The IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch, which IBM introduced in 1948, was a desk-sized cabinet that ate and spat out punch cards in its single-minded mission [...]
Sept. 16, 1985: Jobs Quits AppleSept. 16, 1997: Jobs Rejoins Apple
September 16th, 2010 |
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Sept. 16: It’s an auspicious day in the history of Steve Jobs. It’s the day he quit Apple and the day he returned.
Jobs resigned as chairman of Apple Computer on Sept. 16, 1985, after losing a boardroom battle for control of the company with then-CEO John Sculley.
Jobs had co-founded Apple seven years earlier with [...]
Aug. 3, 1977: The TRS-80 Is Bad, and That Ain’t Trash Talk
August 3rd, 2010 |
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1977: In a New York City news conference Tandy Corp of Texas announces that it will manufacture the first mass-produced personal computer. The TRS-80 — lovingly called the “Trash 80†— would be an early rock star in the PC era and give the flagging Radio Shack franchise bragging rights as “biggest name in [...]
June 23, 1912: Computer Pioneer Alan Turing Born
June 23rd, 2010 |
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1912: Alan Turing, who will go on to become one of the 20th century’s greatest mathematicians, computer scientists and philosophers, is born.
Turing is probably best known to Wired readers as the inventor of the “Turing test,” a way of measuring a computer’s ability to simulate intelligent human conversation.
But he’s more significant as one of [...]
May 28, 1959: Inventing a New Language for Business
May 28th, 2010 |
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1959: A meeting at the Pentagon lays the foundations for the computer language that will later be known as COBOL, which goes on to become a mainstay of business computing for the next four decades.
COBOL, short for Common Business-Oriented Language, was one of the earliest computer languages. It was also, along with Fortran, one of [...]
May 26, 1995: Gates, Microsoft Jump on ‘Internet Tidal Wave’
May 26th, 2010 |
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1995: Microsoft CEO Bill Gates throws his company wholeheartedly into supporting, enhancing and profiting from the internet. He calls the growing phenomenon “the internet tidal wave.”
Playing catch-up with other big tech companies, Gates wrote that the internet is “crucial to every part of our business” and “the most important single development to come along [...]
May 17, 1902: Ancient Antikythera Calculating Mechanism Discovered
May 17th, 2010 |
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1902: A diver exploring a shipwreck off the coast of Antikythera, an island between the Greek mainland and Crete, brings up a heavily encrusted mechanism that turns out to be the world’s first known scientific instrument.
The Antikythera mechanism plotted the positions of celestial bodies 19 years into the future — and as an added [...]
May 11, 1951: RAM Is Born
May 11th, 2010 |
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1951: Jay Forrester files a patent application for the matrix core memory.
Back when computers still weighed hundreds of pounds and were primarily used by the military, computer memory relied on cathode rays to retrieve information. But the Navy needed a faster computer that could run flight simulations in real time.
In stepped a team at the [...]
May 7, 1952: The Integrated Circuit … What a Concept!
May 7th, 2010 |
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1952: British radar engineer Geoffrey Dummer introduces the concept of the integrated circuit at a tech conference in the United States. The world is about to change.
At the heart of every electronic device today — from computers to aircraft navigation systems — is a little circuit that has changed computing and ushered in [...]
May 4, 2000: Tainted ‘Love’ Infects Computers
May 4th, 2010 |
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2000: The “I Love You” virus spreads to 55 million computers around the world. The damage reaches billions of dollars.
It was the love letter heard round the world. A little over a year after the Melissa Virus shattered the internet’s innocence, a student in the Philippines got the idea to craft a Visual Basic script [...]
April 30, 1939: The Future Arrives at New York World’s Fair
April 30th, 2010 |
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1939: The New York World’s Fair opens in Flushing Meadow Park. It will give visitors a glimpse of “the world of tomorrow” and shape industrial design, pop culture and the way the future would envision the future.
See also:
April 19, 1965: How Do You Like It? Moore, Moore, Moore
April 19th, 2010 |
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1965: Gordon Moore publishes a pithy four-page analysis of the integrated-circuit business, in which he correctly predicts that chip complexity will regularly double for the foreseeable future.
Moore was, at the time, the chief of research and development for Fairchild Semiconductor, a seminal Silicon Valley startup. He later went on to co-found Intel. His prediction turned [...]
April 14, 1996: JenniCam Starts Lifecasting
April 14th, 2010 |
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College student Jennifer Kaye Ringley turns on her “JenniCam” for the first time and begins uploading pictures of herself to the web. Refreshed every three minutes, JenniCam.org displays black-and-white images that track Ringley’s daily activities, which ranges from mundane tasks and chitchat to stripteases and sexual activity.
Raised as a nudist, 19-year old Ringley installed the [...]
April 12, 1994: Immigration Lawyers Invent Commercial Spam
April 12th, 2010 |
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1994: Members of more than 6,000 Usenet discussion groups find themselves the recipients of a message imploring them to use the legal services of Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel to ensure their place in line for a green card from the U.S government.
It didn’t matter that most recipients had no need for such services. They’d [...]
April 2, 1973: Lexis Launches Computerized Legal Searching
April 2nd, 2010 |
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1973: The law goes electronic, as the private computer-information service Lexis launches publicly.
The original Lexis product was limited to full-text searching of all cases in Ohio and New York. It took the company seven years to finally complete its manual indexing of all federal and state cases in the United States. That same year, [...]
March 26, 1999: ‘Melissa’ Wreaks Havoc on Net
March 26th, 2010 |
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1999: The “Melissa” worm makes a sudden appearance, screwing up specific e-mail programs by clogging them with infected e-mails issuing from the worm. It is the first successful mass-mailing worm.
Melissa was first distributed in alt.sex, a Usenet discussion group, hidden inside a file that contained the passwords to 80 pornographic websites. The worm was then [...]