Today in History – July 22, 1975 – Bill Gates and Paul Allen sign Microsoft’s first official contract licensing their BASIC to MITS, the makers of the Altair kit computer. The young entrepreneurs had hit upon a revolutionary new concept—the idea that a company could make money selling software for microcomputers. As Bill puts it [...]

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Today in History – July 13, 2006 – AI@50 celebrates the fifty year anniversay of the coining of “artificial intelligence” at Dartmouth. John McCarthy, in Dartmouth’s mathematics department in 1956, chose the name to make it clear that the objective of this new scientific field was to simulate human intelligence. Fifty years later, the 2006 [...]

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Today in History – July 6, 1997 – the Sojourner Rover (above), carried by the Pathfinder spacecraft, rolled onto the Mars’ surface. Click on the image above right to see a video of its initial positioning. Sojourner was designed as a six-wheeler that used a rocker-bogie suspension system; each wheel having its own drive motor, [...]

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Today in History – June 29, 2007 -The first Apple iPhone is sold. The initial price tag of $600 limited sales to early adapters and Apple fans, of which there were many  (photo of waiting line upper left). The price was reduced to $400 soon afterwards and in 2008 the iPhone 3G at $200  released [...]

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Today in History – June 5, 1977 – Apple II goes on sale. Steve Wozniak designed the Apple II personal computer that was released in 1977, featuring a central processing unit (CPU), keyboard, floppy disk drive, and a $1,300 price tag. The Apple II launched the personal computer revolution. He left Apple in 1981 and [...]

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