Today in History – August 12, 1981 – IBM introduces the first PC personal computer for $1,600 base price. The IBM PC was introduced only one year after Bill Lowe, Director of IBM’s Boca Raton division in Florida, was given the go ahead to begin operations. The project was controversial as few believed that an [...]

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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 – 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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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 [...]

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