Back in April, Alice and I discussed the founding date issue. It is absolutely obvious that Microsoft started out in 1975. It is absolutely impossible to pick a specific date within that year as “the” date. Imagine yourself as a 19-year-old, with your 22-year-old friend, starting out in a new business venture. You haven’t hired a venture fund manager, or a PR firm, and your sister ends up doing your tax forms for the year. You see a magazine article which sparks an idea for a product. You make an oral agreement with a company to deliver that product, and you give it to them when it’s done. A couple of months later it gets written up in a newsletter or two. Somebody likes your new product enough to lift a copy of your paper tape out of your marketing van and starts passing out copies. Eventually, you write up a formal agreement, and then backdate it. Meanwhile, you’re working out of your apartment, and hiring friends to contract part-time. I don’t think the average person would think, “In 33 years this new company will have revenues topping $60 billion, and I should probably make a note that the company started today.”

We did find an outdated Microsoft Fast Facts document that gave the April 4^th date, so it’s very possible that the wrong information originated with us. To me this just illustrates the fact that history is only an interpretation of what we perceive from the documentary evidence, and that archives are hugely important in making sure that evidence is available to be re-examined with fresh perspective when the need arises.

For more information on the early years, you’ll find some great new material on the Bill Gates Transition site on Microsoft PressPass, including the reunion shot of the original employees from the classic “Albuquerque Group” photo.

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 conference at Dartmouth commemorates those pioneering efforts by examining AI’s present status and its future. The major goal of AI@50 was to “define and measure future prospects for AI in society that is increasingly served by computer intellect”.

An historic gathering on July 12, just before the conference, honored the five surviving founders of AI. A plaque commemorating the original Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence that created AI as a research discipline in 1956 was presented to John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Selfridge, Ray Solomonoff, and Trenchard More.

Of course, credit must be given to the original inspiration – Alan Turing and his 1950 publication “Computing Machinery and Intelligence“, Mind, 59, 1950, pp. 433-460.

Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on artificial intelligence, Alan Turing, the Turing Test and history of computing. For more educational resources, see our computer science education community. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.

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, and the corner wheels also have independent steering motors.

Launched on December 4, 1996, Pathfinder impacted the surface of Mars earlier on July 4, 1997 at a velocity of  18 m/s (40 mph) and then bounced into the air 15 times at a maximum height of  15 meters (50 feet), before rolling and coming to rest  1 km from the initial impact site. The lander and landing site was named the Carl Sagan Memorial Station.  Pathfinder was designed, built and operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for NASA.

The project ended on March 10, 1998 when the lander failed to respond to communicate with controllers at JPL. The mission operated three times longer than its original 30-day planned lifetime.

The images from Pathfinder-Sojourner are spectacular, ranging from videos of Martian sunsets (click on image above left to see movie), data on the composition of the Martian rocks and the role of water on Mars. Quoting from a NASA press release of June 29, 1998:

The current assessment of data from this instrument suggests that all of the rocks studied by the rover resemble a type of volcanic rock with a high silicon content known on Earth as andesite, covered with a fine layer of dust. All of the rocks appear to be chemically far different from meteorites discovered. on Earth that are believed to have come from Mars.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s  currently active Mars rovers – twin rovers called Spirit and Opportunity – landed on January 4, 2004 and January 25, 2004, respectively. They were originally scheduled to operate for three months, but are now in their sixth year of hard work.  The rovers have set the longevity record for broadcasting to Earth from a distant planet.   Although  Spirit got stuck in sand, Opportunity has been traveling towards the Endeavour crater on Mars since August 2008.

The next Mars rover Curiosity is planned to launch in 2011 and will be a six-wheeler much like  Spirit, Opportunity and Sojourner. Unlike these earlier Mars rovers, however, Curiosity will also use its mobility system as a landing gear when rocket-powered down to the Martian surface on a tether in August 2012.

I was honored to have served on the Advisory Board for the Engineering Division at JPL and was impressed with their “faster, better, cheaper” approach to space exploration.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway‘s resources on the Pathfinder mission, Mars rovers and space exploration. For related educational resources, visit the Aerospace Engineering Education, Engineering Mechanics Engineering Education, Computer Engineering Education or the Mechatronics Engineering Education Community sites.

Also on this date in 1885, Pasteur first tests rabies vaccination. See our related resources on viruses and vaccines. or visit our Biomedical Engineering Education community site.

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 the flood gates of demand. Apple sold over 10 million iPhone 3G units worldwide within five months of its release.

Three years later there is competition from other vendors, but the release of Apple’s iPhone 4 sales still topped 1.7 million in a few days after its launch on June 24, 2010. “This is the most successful product launch in Apple’s history,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “Even so, we apologize to those customers who were turned away because we did not have enough supply.”

Photo caption (upper right): “Wearing iPhone placards on their heads, two Japanese customers show off their iPhone 4 at a mobile phone store in Tokyo on June 24. Hundreds of Apple fans braved sweltering humidity to form giant queues in an upscale Tokyo district in a race to be among the first in the world to get their hands on the latest iPhone.”

I do have an older iPhone and am still learning the features on this one. I think I’ll wait for more before I get an upgrade. I am reminded though of HP’s first pocket calculator, the HP35 released on February 1, 1972. I was an undergraduate engineering student and my parents bought me the next version, the HP45. I still carried both it and my slide rule around on my belt – really. Primates love our gadgets. Did you know that the the first ball point pen went on sale in 1945 at a price tag equivalent to $150 in today’s money? 8,000 people are reported to have swarmed a New York Department story to by them on the first day of sale.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on iPhones, smart phones and cell phones. For related educational resources, visit the Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Design, and Engineering Management education disciplinary communities.

Also on this date in 1995, the US Shuttle docks with the Russian Space Station. This is the first time in 20 years that American and Russian spacecraft have successfully docked in orbit.

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 went back to the University of California at Berkeley and finished his degree in electrical engineering and computer science there. Since then, he has been involved in various business and philanthropic ventures, including improving computer capabilities in schools.

So how do you build one of the first personal computers? Wozniak says when he teaches Personal Computer 101 he asks students to go to the Apple I Owners Club, founded in 1977 by Joe Torzewski. The site contains over 120 pages detailing the Apple I computer. It shows you what it was like to actually buy and assemble one. If you’ve never seen an Apple I or II, check this site out and see how the personal computer revolution began. Want to know more, read Wozniak’s book: iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It.

Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on Apple computers and history of computing. For more educational resources, see our electrical engineering education, computer science education and computer engineering education community pages. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.

Today in History – May 28, 1936 – “Turing Machine” paper submitted, his first paper on decidability. Turing’s achievements at Cambridge had been on account of his work in probability theory. However, he had been working on the decidability questions since attending Max Newman‘s course on the foundations of mathematics. In 1936 he published “On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” It is in this paper that Turing introduced an abstract machine, now called a “Turing machine”, which moved from one state to another using a precise finite set of rules (given by a finite table) and depending on a single symbol it read from a tape.

This is a classic paper that I hand out every year to students in my automata theory class to read about and write a summary. Turing machines are abstract, however, today students can get hands-on experience with Turing machines in a number of ways. First there are many simulation tools available for experimenting with Turing machines. I’ll name just a few such as Turing’s World (now out of print), Deus Ex Machina used in Taylor’s book “Models of Computation and Formal Languages, and JFLAP. JFLAP is an extensive tool for building and simulating finite state machines, pushdown automata, and several versions of Turing machines. In addition one can experiment with LL and SLR parsing, L-Systems, and several construction proofs such as converting a NFA to a DFA to a minimal state DFA, or converting an NPDA to a CFG.

For example, shown below is a snapshot of a Turing machine for a^nb^nc^n built in JFLAP. With such tools, one can watch a trace of an input string being processed in the Turing machine.

A second way students can experience Turing machines is to build an edible Turing machine out of blueberry muffins and icing. Here is an example of such a Turing machine built in 2003 for the language ww, where the alphabet is a and b. Don’t worry about the muffins being stale, they all got eaten.

Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the Turing Machine, Alan Turing, and history of computing. For more educational resources, see our computer science education and computer engineering education community pages. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.

Today in History -  May 20, 1899 – the American Physical Society (APS) is founded for the advancement and diffusion of the knowledge of physics. It was originally formed at Columbia University by 36 scientists from 17 institutions who elected Henry Rowland as their first president and A.A. Michelson as the first vice-president. It has since grown to a membership of more than 46,000 and publishes some of the most prestigious physics journals in the world. As the APS has grown, it has become ever more involved in issues of public outreach and education. For more information on educational resources in physics, see the APS Education web pages, search the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on applied physics, or visit the comPADRE Digital Library for physics and astronomy education, a partnership of the American Association of Physics Teachers, the APS, the American Astronomical Society, the American Institute of Physics, and the Society for Physics Students.

Also on this date in 1790, Charles Lindbergh makes the first solo flight across the Atlantic. For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the history of flight or view our Aerospace Engineering Education community site.

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 founding CEO of the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) with the overarching goal to achieve parity in the professional information technology (IT) workforce and to educate, disseminate, and advocate a national, multi-year implementation plan that generates tangible progress within 20 years.

Why is this issue important? Innovation thrives with a diversity of ideas and input. As IT becomes pervasive in our lives, we need women’s full participation in the the creation of the technology upon which our society increasingly depends. Further, U.S. Department of Labor projections forecast that our economy will add 1 million professional IT jobs by 2014. In the aftermath of the dot-com bust, however, the perception of a job shortage has caused a sharp decline in enrollment at 4 year computer science programs. Women’s lack of participation results in ideas not realized, products not implemented and jobs going unfilled.

It was in May 2004 that NCWIT held our first meetings in Boulder, Colorado, and announced our formation and funding from the National Science Foundation. What started as a collective passion to ensure that women are fully represented in computing and IT has become a movement involving the work of over 170 organizations, spanning K-12 to faculty and non-profits to corporations, working in areas spanning from outreach to entrepreneurship to institutional reform.  At our May 2009 annual meeting we celebrated our fifth birthday (see me introducing the keynote speaker at the start of conference below,  Jessica Jackley, Cofounder of Kiva). Jessica’s story is a fantastic inspiration for us all!!

NCWIT is now a coalition of over 100 universities, corporations and non-profits who all feel we can and must do a better job of attracting women to computing. We have developed interventions across the entire educational and career pipeline, including new ideas in curriculum, outreach, recruiting and retention. We are also studying women’s participation in key innovation metrics such as IT patenting, open source and entrepreneurship.

The history of computing owes much to contributions of talented women. Ada Byron Lovelace is credited first envisioning programming with her statement: “The analytical engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves”. Six of the ENIAC programmers were womenonline casino at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II who had been calculating ballistics trajectories by hand. Admiral Grace Hopper, inventor of the first computer compiler, coined the term “computer bug” and is the namesake for the Grace Hopper Conference – Celebration of Women in Computing.

See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the ENIAC, history of computing, Ada Lovelace and women in information technology. For curricular resources, visit the Computer Science Education, Information Science Education, Information Technology Education,  Computer Engineering Education of Software Engineering Education community sites. Or check out our new Broadening Participation in Computing community.

Also on this date Mount St. Helen erupts after 130 years of dormancy. See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the volcanoes and geological engineering.

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 Kasparov resigned 19 moves into Game 6 and lost in little more than an hour. This was the first time a current world champion had lost a tournament match to a computer. Match commentator Yasser Seirawan was stunned: “What we just witnessed was a landmark achievement in chess . . . I absolutely didn’t expect this to happen.”

The event was viewed by millions of chess and computing fans who were able witness the competition live on this Web site, which now serves as the official archive.

Unlike earlier chess playing programs that relied on artificial intelligence (AI) as the primary technology, Deep Blue’s strength coupled AI with advanced storage and compute power. The massively parallel RS/6000 SP-based IBM computer system was designed to play chess at the grandmaster level in a way that could consistently store and analyze many more moves ahead than human players.

Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the Kasparov and Deep Blue, artificial intelligence and history of computing. For more educational resources, see our electrical engineering education, computer science education and computer engineering education community pages. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.

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 live on this Web site, which now serves as the official archive.

The triumph of “man against machine” was not to happen, however, as in the shocking finale on May 11th World Champion Garry Kasparov resigned 19 moves into Game 6 and lost in little more than an hour. This was the first time a current world champion had lost a tournament match to a computer. Match commentator Yasser Seirawan was stunned: “What we just witnessed was a landmark achievement in chess . . . I absolutely didn’t expect this to happen.”

Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the Kasparov and Deep Blue, artificial intelligence and history of computing. For more educational resources, see our electrical engineering education, computer science education and computer engineering education community pages. The Engineering Pathway also hosts Engineering Education communities in all ABET-accredited disciplines.