Today in History – May 18, 2004 – Founding of the National Center for Women in Information Technology (NCWIT). Alas women now only represent a small fraction of computer science graduates and are not fully represented in the world of information technology and computing. This is one reason I enthusiastically agreed to co-found and serve as [...]

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Today in History – May 11, 1997 – Garry Kasparov, reigning World Chess Champion, loses tournament to IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer. The event was the twentieth century version of John Henry’s “man against machine”. The triumph of human intelligence was not to happen, however, as in the shocking finale on May 11th World Champion Garry [...]

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Today in History – May 3, 1997 – Garry Kasparov, reigning World Chess Champion, wins first of six chess games against IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer. The event was the twentieth century version of John Henry’s “man against machine”. The event was viewed by millions of chess and computing fans who were able witness the competition [...]

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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 – April 13, 1960 – First U.S. navigational satellite. Transit satellites were used by the US Navy to develop the first operational navigation satellite system The Transit satellites provided an accurate, all-weather navigational aid for ballistic missile submarines and surface vessels and aircraft. The system was designed such that any craft could [...]

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