Today in History – November 21, 1877 – Edison announces the invention of his “talking machine”, the phonograph. Also on this date in 1995, Disney releases “Toy Story”, the first full-length movie created entirely by computer animation. Thomas Alva Edison, nicknamed the “Wizard of Menlo Park”, had 1,093 patents to his name. Some of Edison’s [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 -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 [...]

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