In honor of  National Manufacturing Week, the Engineering Pathway highlights Manufacturing Engineering Education in September. Check out our Manufacturing Engineering Education Disciplinary Community and related manufacturing engineering educational resources, such as NIST’s Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory (MEL) or the Manufacturing Video Library. Find out How Everyday Things are Made with courseware hosted by Stanford’s Alliance for [...]

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Today in History – September 20, 1954 – the first FORTRAN program is run at IBM. The first public release of the FORTRAN programming language was not until April 19, 1957. FORTRAN is an acronym for FORmula TRANslation, named so because it was designed to allow easy translation of math formulas into code. Developed by [...]

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Today in History – September 19, 1982 – Invention of the Smiley Face emoticon by Scott E. Fahlman. A lot of people have asked me about this, so I put together this account, which I am reprinting for the Engineering Pathway educational digital library. Yes, I am the inventor of the sideways “smiley face” (sometimes [...]

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Today in History – September 15, 1997 – Google registered as a domain name. Larry Page and Sergey Brin met as students at  Stanford and collaborated on a search engine called BackRub. They decided that the BackRub name doesn’t quite have the buzz needed and came up with  Google – a play on the word [...]

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Today in History – September 12, 1958 – Kilby builds first working prototype of the integrated circuit. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at the small Fairchild Semiconductor start-up company were both working on the concept of an integrated circuit in 1958. Prior to this invention, only parts of a circuit – such [...]

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