Today in History – January 24, 1984 – Apple Computer unveils the Macintosh personal computer. Apple introduced “the Mac” through its famous “1984″ television commercial that was played at the 1984 Super Bowl. The imagery pitted Apple’s new generation of the people’s personal computer against the Orwellian IBM. The Mac was an innovation breakthrough in computer design with the introduction of the mouse and a graphical user interface at a relatively low price.  It was first sold with only a 400kb floppy drive to load the operating system and files, with no hard drive. Less than 50,000 units were sold after its introduction because of the limited memory and radical features. Sales got a big boost when the LaserWriter printer was introduced along with third party publishing software. The early Mac users provided an enthusiastic customer base of early adopters who formed community groups, participated in early testing and developed third part software using Apple’s user-friendly developer’s kit. My husband and I each bought one of the first offerings and have upgraded to new Apple models ever since. The summer of 1984 I accepted a faculty position at the University of California at Berkeley and my husband became an Apple developer and created software for astronomy enthusiasts.

A decade earlier on April 1, 1976, the Apple Computer Company was formed and released the Apple I computer, the first computer with a single circuit board. There was no assembly line as each Apple I was hand-built by Steve Wozniak in Steve Jobs’ parents’ home and required further assembly by the purchaser, including providing AC input voltages, wiring an ASCII keyboard to a DIP connector and wiring the video output pins to a monitor or to an RF modulator if a TV was used. Steve Wozniak showed the first one to the Homebrew Computer Club to get sales going. He had to sell his Volkswagen bus to help keep the company afloat.

Steve Wozniak designed the Apple II personal computer that was released on April 16, 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 the first personal computer? 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, 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 – January 23, 1996 – The first version of the Java programming language is released. Java was developed independently of the Web, starting in 1991 with a small group of Sun engineers called the “Green Team”. Their vision was that the next wave in computing was the union of digital consumer devices and computers. James Gosling led the team and worked around the clock to release this first version originally called Oak. The Green Team’s first demonstration of their new language was for an interactive, hand-held home-entertainment controller that was originally targeted at the digital cable television industry. The worked focused on business models and end users. They subscribed to what Bill Joy called “Hammer Technology”: taking a bunch of existing stuff and hammering it together. Learning by doing. We built things you can hold and use. This is why we chose as deliverables a set of working prototypes and a business plan.”

Alas it was technology ahead of its time and it didn’t take off immediately. Coincidentally, however, the World Wide Web was also being launched and the Green Team saw its potential  and announced in 1995 that the new Netscape Navigator internet browser would incorporate Java technology. The Java language is now the major programming language for the Web and for many other applications, including robotics, mechatronics, and embedded computing.

I highly recommend that interested readers watch the video introduced by Scott McNealy at the 2009 JavaOne general session. James Gosling narrates this humorous Gospel of Java According to James.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on the Java programming language and the history of computing. For related educational resources, visit the Computer Science Education, Information Systems Education, Information Technology Education, Computer Engineering Education or Software Engineering Education disciplinary communities.

Today in History – December 26, 1982 – TIME’s Person of the Year is a computer. History has always pondered whether the future was propelled by the movement of the masses, the fine control of the elite, or the inevitable flow of society. However, before now no one ever questioned whether history was centered around people. Then comes the great electrical “thinking device”: The Computer. Matured beyond the initial fascinations with the Samuel’s Checkers Program and 2001′s Hal, personal computers finally made the power of computers familiar to the masses. The Apple II first made waves with the hobbyist and then IBM introduced them to world business. Soon the universality of computers became clear to everyone. On Dec 26th Time Magazine saw for the first time, that instead of people, computers were controlling the future and named the computer “Person of the Year.”

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on personal computers and computation. For curricular resources, visit the Computer Science Education, the Computer Engineering Education or the Software Engineering Education community sites.

Today in History – December 8, 1968 – Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of all Demos” introduces the computer mouse, hyperlinks and window at a demonstration in San Francisco. The demonstration offered a peek at the future of computing. “No one has ever before or since seen such a collection of great ideas in one demonstration,” said SRI President and CEO Curt Carlson. Engelbart is “the Moses of computers,” writes Steven Levy in his history of the Macintosh.

In 1970, a U.S. patent was issued for the computer mouse – an “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System” (No. 3541541). Doug Engelbart’s invention changed the way humans were to work with computers. The invention transformed computers from specialized tools for technologists to user-friendly computational systems that anyone can use. Engelbart and his colleagues called this invention the “mouse,” after its long tail-like cable. The first mouse was a simple hollowed-out wooden block, with a single push button on top, designed to select and manipulate text. The “mouse” was part of a larger project called the NLS (oN Line System) based on work at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which allowed two or more users to work on the same document from different workstations. This work built on Engelbart’s overarching visions for augmenting human intellect, improvement infrastructure, co-evolution of artifacts with social-cultural language-practices, and bootstrapping. Christina Engelbart, Doug Engelbart’s daughter and co-founder of the Bootstrap Institute, maintains an in-depth biography of Engelbart and his inventions. I was struck by the vision, passion and humbleness inherent in this quote from the site: “He remains bewildered as to why it has taken so long for society to catch up to him. “The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate. I have tolerated a lot,” says Engelbart of his life. Reader’s Digest paid Engelbart $35 to publish that quote, more than he was paid for many of his revolutionary inventions.” Doug Englebart was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2000.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on Doug Engelbart and the computer mouse. For related educational resources, visit the Computer Engineering Education, the Electrical Engineering Education or the Computer Science Education disciplinary communities.

Today in History – November 17, 1970 – Invention of the computer mouse. In 1970, a U.S. patent was issued for the computer mouse – an “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System” (No. 3541541). Doug Engelbart’s invention changed the way humans were to work with computers. The invention transformed computers from specialized tools for technologists to user-friendly computational systems that anyone can use. Engelbart and his colleagues called this invention the “mouse,” after its long tail-like cable. The first mouse was a simple hollowed-out wooden block, with a single push button on top, designed to select and manipulate text. The “mouse” was part of a larger project called the NLS (oN Line System) based on work at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), which allowed two or more users to work on the same document from different workstations. This work built on Engelbart’s overarching visions for augmenting human intellect, improvement infrastructure, co-evolution of artifacts with social-cultural language-practices, and bootstrapping. Christina Engelbart, Doug Engelbart’s daughter and co-founder of the Bootstrap Institute, maintains an in-depth biography of Engelbart and his inventions. I was struck by the vision, passion and humbleness inherent in this quote from the site: “He remains bewildered as to why it has taken so long for society to catch up to him. “The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate. I have tolerated a lot,” says Engelbart of his life. Reader’s Digest paid Engelbart $35 to publish that quote, more than he was paid for many of his revolutionary inventions.” Doug Englebart was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 2000.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on Doug Engelbart and the computer mouse. For related educational resources, visit the Computer Engineering Education, the Electrical Engineering Education or the Computer Science Education disciplinary communities.

Today in History – November 10, 1983 – Fred Cohen presented to a security seminar the results of his test on the first documented virus, created as an experiment in computer security.

The first virus in the wild was found earlier in 1981 on the Apple II, spread on floppy disks containing the operating system. The author of the Elk Cloner virus was Rich Skrenta, a ninth grade student at the time.

Created while he was studying for a PhD at the University of Southern California, Cohen was the first to demonstrate a working example on a computer system and present the results in a public forum. A year later, his research was published in a paper where he defined a virus as “a program that can ‘infect’ other programs by modifying them to include a … version of itself”.

This experiment in creating a hazard in order to prevent an even worse one provides an interesting case in computer privacy, security, responsibility and engineering ethics. A well designed virus can have a devastating effect on society, disrupting work, communications and causing billions of dollars in damages. Their success shows how interconnected human beings have become on the Internet and how dependent we have become on its stable operations.

See the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on computer viruses and internet security. For more on related curricular programs and educational resources visit the Software Engineering Education, the Computer Science Education, the Information Systems Education or the Information Technology Education community sites. We also have an interdisciplinary community in Engineering Ethics Education.

Also on this day in history in 1903, Granville T. Woods, a famous black American inventor, received a patent for an “Electric Railway” (U.S. No. 729,481). Woods held numerous other patents relating to the electric railway, electrical devices, brakes, and telegraphy for railways.

Today in History – September 4, 1998 – Google files for incorporation. 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 “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google says that the use of the term “reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.”

The door to Google’s original Menlo Park office (left photo above) came with a remote control because it was attached to the garage of a friend,  Susan Wojcicki,  who sublet space to the new corporation’s staff of three – Larry and Sergey hired Craig Silverstein as their first employee, a fellow computer science grad student at Stanford. Google moved to its current world headquarters in January of 2004 – the Googleplex, an office complex with cafeterias with free food, laundry machines,  bicycles, and a creative work environment (right photo above). Google went public on August 18, 2004 with a market capitalization of $23 billion. Some of its employees became instant  paper millionaires (center photo above).

Google Earth was launched on June 28, 2005.  The verb, to “google” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary on June 15, 2006. Fortune Magazine names Google as the best company to work for in 2007. Google’s new Green Initiatives include clean energy, reducing our footprint, efficient computing, employee programs and tools for users.  Google Labs continues to test out a wide range of innovative approaches, strategies and algorithms that define the future of media.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on Google and  internet search engines. For related educational resources, visit the computing disciplinary communities.

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 IBM PC would be a commercial success. Others questioned whehter IBM, as a company, had the agility to produce a consumer computer in a reasonable period of time. IBM’s website quotes one analyst with saying that “IBM bringing out a personal computer would be like teaching an elephant to tap dance.” Lowe was up to the challenge by putting together a development team that borke all of the rules at IBM. They operated like a small business and went ouside IBM’s traditional vendors and software developers. When they announced the IBM PC one year later, its delopemnt had been faster than any other product in IBM’s history. Customer response was overwhelming and PCs flew off of the shelves, leading to shortages and backlogs in most stores.

History has always pondered whether the future was propelled by the movement of the masses, the fine control of the elite, or the inevitable flow of society. However, before now no one ever questioned whether history was centered around people. Then comes the great electrical “thinking device”: The Computer. Matured beyond the initial fascinations with the Samuel’s Checkers Program and 2001′s Hal, personal computers finally made the power of computers familiar to the masses. The Apple II first made waves with the hobbyist and then IBM introduced them to world business. Soon the universality of computers became clear to everyone. On Dec 26th 1982, Time Magazine broadcast for the first time that computers, and not people, were controlling the future and named the computer their “Person of the Year” in 1982.

For more information, see the Engineering Pathway’s resources on history of computing and personal computers and computation. For curricular resources, visit the Computer Science Education, the Computer Engineering Education or the Software Engineering Education community sites.

_

Today in History -August 7, 1944 – Largest electromechanical calculator ever built. The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC) (also called the Harvard Mark I) was the largest electromechanical calculator ever built and the first automatic digital calculator in the United States. Its size was 51 feet wide and eight feet high and weighted nearly five tons. Inspired by Babbage’s vision of the analytical engine, it also added important new features. The upper left photo shows the assembly of the ASCC at Harvard in February 1944 with workers wearing the suits and ties typical of IBM even today.

IBM reports that it linked 78 adding machines and calculators together, using 765,000 parts, 3,300 relays, over 500 miles of wire and more than 175,000 connections. Using the calculators in synchronous parallel, it could perform table lookup and the four fundamental arithmetic operations, in any specified sequence, on numbers up to 23 decimal digits in length. It used punched cards, paper tape and manually set switches as input. For internal and intermediate results it had 60 switch registers for constants, 72 storage counters, a central multiplying-dividing unit, functional counters for computing transcendental functions, and three interpolators for reading functions punched into perforated tape. Electric typewriters or punched cards were used for output.

Howard H. Aiken, a graduate student in theoretical physics at Harvard University in the 1930′s originally proposed a large-scale digital calculator to the faculty of Harvard’s physics department. As funding was a major issue, he later took his idea to the Monroe Calculating Machine Company and then to IBM where James Bryce championed the idea and obtained funding from IBM President Thomas J. Watson in 1939 at IBM’s North Street Laboratory in Endicott, N.Y. Although progress was slowed by wartime demands, the calculator parts were eventually shipped to Harvard in February 1944 and assembled on site. It was completed and presented on August 7, costing IBM approximately $200,000 on the project. IBM donated an additional $100,000 to Harvard to cover its operating expenses. It was used for 15 years, originally for use by the Navy during the war to run repetitive calculations for the production of mathematical tables. Many of its electromechanical counters and parts are now on exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

It was only a few years later on February 14, 1946 that the world’s first fully digital computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), was unveiled. Six of the ENIAC programmers were the women seen in the second photo, above left. See Lucy Sanders February 14th blog on this event and its connection to women in computing.

Thank goodness for HP’s vision in launching the first hand-held calculator, the HP-35, on February 1, 1972. See my February 1 blog on this event for more details. And check out Gordon Bell’s blog on the introduction of the PDP-11 minicomputer on March 13, 1970.

Check out the Engineering Pathway’s educational resources on the 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 – 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.