Software Timeline

The Banu Musa brothers, three Persian scholars active in the library and translation institute called the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, published the Book of Ingenious Devices. This described and illustrated a number of automata, including some derived from Hero of Alexandria.

Among the original inventions by the Banu Musa brothers were a feedback controller,  and "the earliest known mechanical musical instrument, in this case a hydropowered organ which played interchangeable cylinders automatically. According to Charles B. Fowler, this 'cylinder with raised pins on the surface remained the basic device to produce and reproduce music mechanically until the second half of the nineteenth century.' "

The Banu Musa brothers also invented an automatic flute player, which appears to have been the first programmable machine.

Charles Babbage first conceived the Analytical Engine in 1834. This general-purpose mechanical machine— never completely constructed—embodied in its design most of the features of the general-purpose programmable digital computer. In its conception and design Babbage incorporated ideas and names from the textile industry, including data and program input, output, and storage on punched cards similar to those used in Jacquard looms, a central processing unit called the "mill," and memory called the "store."

American writer, poet, editor, literary critic, and magazinist Edgar Allan Poe published in the Southern Literary Messenger issued from Richmond, Virginia "Maelzel's Chess Player." In this article on automata Poe provided a very closely reasoned explanation of the concealed human operation of von Kempelen's Turk, which Poe had seen exhibited in Richmond by Maelzel a few weeks earlier. 

Poe also briefly compared von Kempelen's Turk to Babbage's Difference Engine No. 1, which was limited to the computation of astronomical and navigation tables, suggesting essentially that if the Turk was fully automated and had the ability to use the results of one logical operation to make a decision about the next one—what was later called "conditional branching" —it would be far superior to Babbage's machine.  This feature was, of course, later designed into Babbage's Analytical Engine. 

Here is Poe's comparison of the two machines:

"But if these machines were ingenious, what shall we think of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage? What shall we think of an engine of wood and metal which can not only compute astronomical and navigation tables to any given extent, but render the exactitude of its operations mathematically certain through its power of correcting its possible errors? What shall we think of a machine which can not only accomplish all this, but actually print off its elaborate results, when obtained, without the slightest intervention of the intellect of man? It will, perhaps, be said, in reply, that a machine such as we have described is altogether above comparison with the Chess-Player of Maelzel. By no means — it is altogether beneath it — that is to say provided we assume (what should never for a moment be assumed) that the Chess-Player is a pure machine, and performs its operations without any immediate human agency. Arithmetical or algebraical calculations are, from their very nature, fixed and determinate. Certain data being given, certain results necessarily and inevitably follow. These results have dependence upon nothing, and are influenced by nothing but the data originally given. And the question to be solved proceeds, or should proceed, to its final determination, by a succession of unerring steps liable to no change, and subject to no modification. This being the case, we can without difficulty conceive the possibility of so arranging a piece of mechanism, that upon starting it in accordance with the data of the question to be solved, it should continue its movements regularly, progressively, and undeviatingly towards the required solution, since these movements, however complex, are never imagined to be otherwise than finite and determinate. But the case is widely different with the Chess-Player. With him there is no determinate progression. No one move in chess necessarily follows upon any one other. From no particular disposition of the men at one period of a game can we predicate their disposition at a different period. Let us place the first move in a game of chess, in juxta-position with the data of an algebraical question, and their great difference will be immediately perceived. From the latter — from the data — the second step of the question, dependent thereupon, inevitably follows. It is modelled by the data. It must be thus and not otherwise. But from the first move in the game of chess no especial second move follows of necessity. In the algebraical question, as it proceeds towards solution, the certainty of its operations remains altogether unimpaired. The second step having been a consequence of the data, the [column 2:] third step is equally a consequence of the second, the fourth of the third, the fifth of the fourth, and so on, and not possibly otherwise, to the end. But in proportion to the progress made in a game of chess, is the uncertainty of each ensuing move. A few moves having been made, no step is certain. Different spectators of the game would advise different moves. All is then dependent upon the variable judgment of the players. Now even granting (what should not be granted) that the movements of the Automaton Chess-Player were in themselves determinate, they would be necessarily interrupted and disarranged by the indeterminate will of his antagonist. There is then no analogy whatever between the operations of the Chess-Player, and those of the calculating machine of Mr. Babbage, and if we choose to call the former a pure machine we must be prepared to admit that it is, beyond all comparison, the most wonderful of the inventions of mankind. Its original projector, however, Baron Kempelen, had no scruple in declaring it to be a "very ordinary piece of mechanism — a bagatelle whose effects appeared so marvellous only from the boldness of the conception, and the fortunate choice of the methods adopted for promoting the illusion." But it is needless to dwell upon this point. It is quite certain that the operations of the Automaton are regulated by mind, and by nothing else. Indeed this matter is susceptible of a mathematical demonstration, a priori. The only question then is of the manner in which human agency is brought to bear. Before entering upon this subject it would be as well to give a brief history and description of the Chess-Player for the benefit of such of our readers as may never have had an opportunity of witnessing Mr. Maelzel's exhibition."

In 1839 weaver Michel-Marie Carquillat, working for the firm of Didier, Petit et Cie, in Lyon, France wove in fine silk a Portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard, The image, including caption and Carquillat’s name, taking credit for the weaving, measures 55 x 34 cm.; the full piece of silk including blank margins measures 85 x 66 cm.

This image, of which only about 10 examples are known, was woven on a Jacquard loom using 24,000 Jacquard cards, each of which had over 1000 hole positions. The process of mis en carte, or converting the image details to punched cards for the Jacquard mechanism, for this exceptionally large and detailed image, would have taken several workers many months, as the woven image convincingly portrays superfine elements such as a translucent curtain over glass window panes.

Once all the “programming” was completed, the process of weaving the image with its 24,000 punched cards would have taken more than eight hours, assuming that the weaver was working at the usual Jacquard loom speed of about forty-eight picks per minute, or about 2800 per hour. More than once this woven image was mistaken for an engraved image. The image was produced only to order, most likely in an exceptionally small number of examples. In 2012 the only recorded examples were those in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Science Museum, London, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California. The image was the subject of the book by James Essinger entitled, Jacquard's Web. How a Hand Loom led to the Birth of the Information Age (2004).

To Charles Babbage the incredible sophistication of the information processing involved in the mis en carte — what we call programming— of this exceptionally elaborate and beautiful image confirmed the potential of using punched cards for the input, programming, output and storage of information in his design and conception of the first general-purpose programmable computer—the Analytical Engine. The highly aesthetic result also confirmed to Babbage that machines were capable of amazingly complex and subtle processes—processes which might eventually emulate the subtlety of the human mind.

“In June 1836 Babbage opted for punched cards to control the machine [the Analytical Engine]. The principle was openly borrowed from the Jacquard loom, which used a string of punched cards to automatically control the pattern of a weave. In the loom, rods were linked to wire hooks, each of which could lift one of the longitudinal threads strung between the frame. The rods were gathered in a rectangular bundle, and the cards were pressed one at a time against the rod ends. If a hole coincided with a rod, the rod passed through the card and no action was taken. If no hole was present then the card pressed back the rod to activate a hook which lifted the associated thread, allowing the shuttle which carried the cross-thread to pass underneath. The cards were strung together with wire, ribbon or tape hinges, and fan-folded into large stacks to form long sequences. The looms were often massive and the loom operator sat inside the frame, sequencing through the cards one at a time by means of a foot pedal or hand lever. The arrangement of holes on the cards determined the pattern of the weave.

“As well as patterned textiles for ordinary use, the technique was used to produce elaborate and complex images as exhibition pieces. One well-known piece was a shaded portrait of Jacquard seated at table with a small model of his loom. The portrait was woven in fine silk by a firm in Lyon using a Jacquard punched-card loom. . . . Babbage was much taken with the portrait, which is so fine that it is difficult to tell with the naked eye that it is woven rather than engraved. He hung his own copy of the prized portrait in his drawing room and used it to explain his use of the punched cards in his Engine. The delicate shading, crafted shadows and fine resolution of the Jacquard portrait challenged existing notions that machines were incapable of subtlety. Gradations of shading were surely a matter of artistic taste rather than the province of machinery, and the portrait blurred the clear lines between industrial production and the arts. Just as the completed section of the Difference Engine played its role in reconciling science and religion through Babbage’s theory of miracles, the portrait played its part in inviting acceptance for the products of industry in a culture in which aesthetics was regarded as the rightful domain of manual craft and art” (Swade, The Cogwheel Brain. Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer [2000] 107-8).

Italian mathematician and politician Luigi Federico Menabrea published "Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage" in Bibliothèque universelle de Genève, nouvelle série 41 (1842): 352–76.

This was the first published account of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine and the first account of its logical design, including the first examples of computer programs ever published. As is well known, Babbage’s conception and design of his Analytical Engine—the first general purpose programmable digital computer—were so far ahead of the imagination of his mathematical and scientific colleagues that few expressed much curiosity regarding it. The only presentation that Babbage made concerning the design and operation of the Analytical Engine was to a group of Italian scientists.

In 1840 Babbage traveled to Torino (Turin) Italy to make a presentation on the Analytical Engine. Babbage’s talk, complete with charts, drawings, models, and mechanical notations, emphasized the Engine’s signal feature: its ability to guide its own operations—what we call conditional branching. In attendance at Babbage’s lecture was the young Italian mathematician Luigi Federico Menabrea (later prime minister of Italy), who prepared from his notes an account of the principles of the Analytical Engine. Reflecting a lack of urgency regarding radical innovation unimaginable to us today, Menabrea did not get around to publishing his paper until two years after Babbage made his presentation, and when he did so he published it in French in a Swiss journal. Shortly after Menabrea’s paper appeared Babbage was refused government funding for construction of the machine.

"In keeping with the more general nature and immaterial status of the Analytical Engine, Menabrea’s account dealt little with mechanical details. Instead he described the functional organization and mathematical operation of this more flexible and powerful invention. To illustrate its capabilities, he presented several charts or tables of the steps through which the machine would be directed to go in performing calculations and finding numerical solutions to algebraic equations. These steps were the instructions the engine’s operator would punch in coded form on cards to be fed into the machine; hence, the charts constituted the first computer programs [emphasis ours]. Menabrea’s charts were taken from those Babbage brought to Torino to illustrate his talks there"(Stein, Ada: A Life and Legacy, 92).

Menabrea’s 23-page paper was translated into English the following year by Lord Byron’s daughter, Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, who, in collaboration with Babbage, added a series of lengthy notes enlarging on the intended design and operation of Babbage’s machine. Menabrea’s paper and Ada Lovelace’s translation represent the only detailed publications on the Analytical Engine before Babbage’s account in his autobiography (1864). Menabrea himself wrote only two other very brief articles about the Analytical Engine in 1855, primarily concerning his gratification that Countess Lovelace had translated his paper.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 60.

Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, translated Menabrea’s paper, "Notions sur la machine analytique de M. Charles Babbage" (1842).

Ada expanded her translation with annotations and software examples that provided further insight into Babbage's proposed Analytical Engine: Sketch of the Analytical Engine Invented by Charles Babbage . . . with Notes by the Translator. (See Reading 6.1.)

Augusta Ada, Countess of Lovelace, composed a letter to Charles Babbage concerning her notes to Menabrea's paper on programming Babbage's planned Analytical Engine. This autograph letter, preserved in the British Library (Add. MS 37192 folios 362v-363), includes the following text:

"I want to put in something about Bernouilli's Numbers, in one of my Notes, as an example of how an implicit function may be worked out by the engine, without  having been worked out by human head & hands first. Give me the necessary data and formulae."

In January 2011 an image of this letter was available on the British Library's cell phone app called Treasures. 

The letter is notable for confirming that Ada's knowledge of mathematics was limited, and that she may have mainly contributed poetic language to her annotations of the English translation of Menabrea's key paper, while incorporating mathematical examples written by Babbage.

Because of Ada's fame as Byron's daughter, and her social position as the Countess of Lovelace, Babbage hoped that Ada's translation and annotation of Menabrea's paper would help promote building the Analytical Engine, a mechanical general purpose programmable computer that he conceived and designed roughly one hundred years ahead of its time.

Charles Babbage’s son Henry Prevost Babbage completed and published his father’s unfinished edition of writings on the Difference Engine No. 1 and the Analytical Engine, together with a listing of his father’s unpublished plans and notebooks. These appear under the title of Babbage’s Calculating Engines.

This work was the principal source of information for the technical operation of Babbage’s Difference and Analytical engines. Toward the end of his life, Babbage began assembling his own and other’s previously published writings on his Difference and Analytical Engines with the intent of publishing a history of his work designing the machines, and descriptions of the way that the machines would operate. However, Babbage died before he could accomplish this task. He had the first 294 pages of this work typeset and printed on slightly varying qualities of paper during his lifetime. The differences in the paper used for portions of the work would suggest that sections were printed intermittently rather than all at one time. It would appear that Babbage’s purpose in producing this work was to collect the most significant published writings on his calculating engines, most of which had appeared as obscure pamphlets or in little-read journals, together with a listing of what remained unpublished, including all of Babbage’s notebooks and engineering drawings (listed on pp. 271-294), in the hope that his unfinished projects might be completed at some future date.

Almost twenty years after Babbage’s death, his youngest son, Major-General Henry Prevost Babbage, to whom Babbage had bequeathed his parts for his calculating engines, and everything else pertaining to them, completed the book, incorporating the printed sheets that Babbage had produced along with concluding material, reflecting his own frustrated efforts to effect realization of Babbage’s engines. Were it not for this volume, and for the bibliography of Babbage’s works published both here (on the last three printed pages of the book) and in Babbage’s autobiography, Babbage’s achievements might have been forgotten. Henry Babbage also completed six small demonstration pieces of the Difference Engine No. 1, and in 1910 at the age of 86, Henry Babbage also completed an experimental four-function calculator for the Mill for the Analytical Engine.  This was the only portion of the Analytical Engine that was ever produced in metal.

As it turned out Babbage’s designs were not implemented until the 20th century because in the era of human computers there was no pressing need for the machines that Babbage envisioned and designed. Yet because of these published works, Babbage’s ambitions and his ideas remained alive in the minds of people working in mechanical computation long after his technology had fallen into obsolescence. When Vannevar Bush suggested in 1936 that electromechanical technology might be the way to realize “Babbage’s large conception” of the Analytical Engine, he cited this volume among his references; and in building the electromechanical Harvard Mark I, Howard Aiken saw himself fulfilling Babbage’s ambition. However, some experts have inferred that Aiken’s knowledge of Babbage’s work may have been limited to what he read in Babbage’s autobiography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, as Aiken did not include conditional branching in the design of the Mark I—a key idea that Babbage designed into the Analytical Engine.

Hyman, Charles Babbage, Pioneer of the Computer, 254. Van Sinderen, Alfred W. "The Printed Papers of Charles Babbage" Annals of the History of Computing, 2 (April 1980) :169-185 mentions in item CB80, that Babbage listed a History of the Analytical Engine as being “in the press” in 1864.

German computer engineer Konrad Zuse developed Plankalkül, the first "high-level" non-von Neumann programming language, in Berlin during World War II. Some of his earliest notes on the topic date to 1941. The language was well-developed by 1945.

Because of war time secrecy, and Zuse's efforts to commercialize the Z3 computer and its sucessors, Zuse did not publish anything on Plankalkühl at the time he developed it. Zuse wrote a book on the subject in 1946 but this remained unpublished until it was edited many years later for Internet publication.

In 1948 Zuse published a summary paper,  "Über den Allgemeinen Plankalkül als Mittel zur Formulierung schematisch-kombinativer Aufgaben", Archiv der Mathematik I (1948) 441-449.  However, this did not attract much attention.

" . . . for a long time to come programming a computer would only be thought of as programming with machine code. The Plankalkül was eventually more comprehensively published in 1972 and the first compiler for it was implemented in 1998. Another independent implementation followed in the year 2000 by the Free University of Berlin" (Wikipedia article on Plankalkühl, accessed 12-04-2011).

In March 1943 quantum physicist and theoretical biologist Erwin Schrödinger delivered a series of lectures at Trinity College Dublin entitled What is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. These lectures popularized ideas about the physical basis of biological phenomena developed by Max Delbrück and N. V. Timofeev-Ressovsky in a paper they published in 1935. Even during wartime in England Schrödinger's lectures gained enough publicity to be reported on in the April 5, 1943 issue of Time magazine. The lectures were published  as a small book in 1944 by Cambridge University Press.  In this form they profoundly influenced James D. Watson and others, such as Francis Crick, whose background was in physics.

Watson wrote: "From the moment I read Schrödinger's What is Life I became polarized toward finding out the secret of the gene" (Watson in Cairns, Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, 239).

In his autobiography molecular biologist Sydney Brenner pointed out a fundamental mistake in Schrödinger’s understanding of how genes would operate:

“Anyway, the key point is that Schrödinger says that the chromosomes contain the information to specify the future organism and the means to execute it. I have come to call this ‘Schrödinger’s fundamental error.’ In describing the structure of the chromosome fibre as a code script he states that. ‘The chromosome structures are at the same time instrumental in bringing about the development they foreshadow. They are code law and executive power, or to use another simile, they are the architect’s plan and the builder’s craft in one.’ [Schrödinger, p. 20,]. What Schrödinger is saying here is that the chromosomes not only contain a description of the future organism, but also the means to implement the description, or program, as we might call it. And that is wrong! The chromosomes contain the information to specify the future organism and a description of the means to implement this, but not the means themselves. This logical difference was made crystal clear to me when I read the von Neumann article [Hixon Symposium, 1948] because he very clearly distinguishes between the things that read the program and the program itself. In other words, the program has to build the machinery to execute itself” (Brenner, My Life, 33-34).

In September 1943 the Bell Labs Relay Interpolator (later called the Model II) was operational for the first time.

Using programs from punched tape, the Relay Interpolator, which used 440 relays, was possibly the first electromechanical computer to run programs in the United States.

Howard Aiken’s Mark I (ASCC) moved from IBM Endicott Labs to Harvard University where it was officially operational. The electromechanical machine solved addition problems in less than a second, multiplication in six seconds, and division in 12 seconds. Grace Hopper wrote some of its first programs, which ran on punched tape.

The ENIAC, the world’s first large-scale electronic general-purpose digital computer, was completed and tested at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

With eighteen thousand vacuum tubes and weighing thirty tons, the ENIAC was about one thousand times faster than the Harvard Mark I, and 10,000 times the speed of a human computer doing a calculation. 

Programming the ENIAC was accomplished by time-consuming plugging of patch cords from buses to panels for each individual problem.

The ENIAC remained the only operational electronic digital computer in the world until the short-lived Manchester “Baby” prototype became operational in 1948.

Mathematician and physicist John von Neumann of Princeton  privately circulated copies of his First Draft on a Report on the EDVAC to twenty-four people connected with the EDVAC project. This document, written between February and June 1945, provided the first theoretical description of the basic details of a stored-program computer: what later became known as the Von Neumann architecture.

To avoid the government's security classification, and to avoid engineering problems that might detract from the logical considerations under discussion, Von Neumann avoided mentioning specific hardware. Influenced by Alan Turing and by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, von Neumann patterned the machine to some degree after human thought processes. (See Reading 8.1.)

In June 2009 I was able to download a PDF of the text of von Neumann's report at this link: http://www.virtualtravelog.net/entries/2003-08-TheFirstDraft.pdf.

Grace Hopper, testing Aiken’s Harvard Mark II Relay Calculator, found that a large dead moth, trapped between points at Relay #70, Panel F,  caused the relay to fail. She removed the bug and entered the dead insect into a log book with the note, "First actual case of bug being found." This was first use of the term “bug” within the context of computing, and also perhaps the origin of the concept of “debugging” within the context of computing.

Alan Turing arrived at the National Physical Laboratory,Teddington, England, to work on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE).

Pres Eckert, John Mauchly, John Brainerd, and Herman Goldstine at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania issued the first confidential published report on the completed ENIAC, discussing how it operated and the methods by which it was programmed. (See Reading 8.2.)

At the Harvard Computation Laboratory Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper published A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. The instruction sequences scattered throughout this volume were among the earliest published examples of digital computer programs. (See Reading 9.1.)

John von Neumann attempted to set up an electronic stored-program computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton.

Von Neumann tried to hire Pres Eckert, but Eckert refused the job, preferring to go into the computer business with John Mauchly.

At Princeton Arthur W. Burks, John von Neumann, and Herman Goldstine issued their Preliminary Discussion of the Logical Design of an Electronic Computing Instrument, discussing ideas to be incorporated into the stored-program computer at the IAS. (See Reading 8.3.)

Working at the Princeton IAS machine, Andrew D. Booth and Kathleen Britten wrote a program for realizing a translation dictionary on an electronic computing machine, provided that the necessary storage capacity was available.

This may be the earliest work leading toward machine or computer translation.

The first part of Herman Goldstine and John von Neumann’s Planning and Coding Problems for an Electronic Computing Instrument was published at Princeton. The remaining two parts appeared on April 15 and August 16, 1948. This was the first theoretical discussion of programming for stored program computers -- none of which yet operated. (See Reading 9.2.)

The Electronic Control Company (Pres Eckert and John Mauchly) in Philadelphia developed the tentative instruction code C-1 for what they called  “a Statistical EDVAC.” This was the earliest document on the programming of an electronic digital computer intended for commercial use. (See Reading 9.3.)

IBM announced its first large-scale digital calculating machine, the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC). The SSEC was the first computer that could modify a stored program. It featured 12,000 vacuum tubes and 21,000 electromechanical relays.

“IBM's Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC), built at IBM's Endicott facility under the direction of Columbia Professor Wallace Eckert and his Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory staff in 1946-47, . . . was moved to the new IBM Headquarters Building at 590 Madison Avenue in Manhattan, where it occupied the periphery of a room 60 feet long and 30 feet wide. . . . [Estimates of the] dimensions of its "U" shape [were] at 60 + 40 + 80 feet, 180 feet in all, (about half a football field!)”

 "Designed, built, and placed in operation in only two years, the SSEC contained 21,400 relays and 12,500 vacuum tubes. It could operate indefinitely under control of its modifiable program. On the average, it performed 14-by-14 decimal multiplication in one-fiftieth of a second, division in one-thirtieth of a second, and addition or subtraction on nineteen-digit numbers in one-thirty-five-hundredth of second... For more than four years, the SSEC fulfilled the wish Watson had expressed at its dedication: that it would serve humanity by solving important problems of science. It enabled Wallace Eckert to publish a lunar ephemeris ... of greater accuracy than previously available... the source of data used in man's first landing on the moon". "For each position of the moon, the operations required for calculating and checking results totaled 11,000 additions and subtractions, 9,000 multiplications, and 2,000 table look-ups. Each equation to be solved required the evaluation of about 1,600 terms — altogether an impressive amount of arithmetic which the SSEC could polish off in seven minutes for the benefit of the spectators" (http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/ssec.html#sources, accessed 03-24-2010).

The SSEC remained sufficiently influential in the popular view of mainframes that it was the subject of a cartoon by Charles Addams published on the cover of The New Yorker magazine in February 11, 1961, in which the massive machine produced a Valentine's Day card for its elderly woman operator!

The Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine or  Manchester "Baby" prototype computer, ran its first program, written by Tom Kilburn.

This small pilot version of a larger computer was the first stored-program electronic digital computer. It operated for only a short time.  The machine was built at the Victoria University of Manchester in England by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill to test the Williams-Kilburn cathode ray tube (CRT) memory (Williams tube).

"The machine was not intended to be a practical computer but was instead designed as a testbed for the Williams tube, an early form of computer memory. Although considered 'small and primitive' by the standards of its time, it was the first working machine to contain all of the elements essential to a modern electronic computer. As soon as the SSEM had demonstrated the feasibility of its design, a project was initiated at the university to develop it into a more usable computer, the Manchester Mark 1. The Mark 1 in turn quickly became the prototype for the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercially available general-purpose computer.

"The SSEM had a 32-bit word length and a memory of 32 words. As it was designed to be the simplest possible stored-program computer, the only arithmetic operations implemented in hardware were subtraction and negation; other arithmetic operations were implemented in software. The first of three programs written for the machine found the highest proper divisor of 218 (262,144), a calculation it was known would take a long time to run—and so prove the computer's reliability—by testing every integer from 218 − 1 downwards, as divisions had to be implemented by repeated subtractions of the divisor. The program consisted of 17 instructions and ran for 52 minutes before reaching the correct answer of 131,072, after the SSEM had performed 3.5 million operations (for an effective CPU speed of 1.1 kIPS)" (Wikipedia article Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine, accessed 10-09-2011).

You can watch a streaming video of a 1948 BBC newsreel about the Manchester "Baby" at this link. [You will need to scroll down the web page.]

Alan Turing wrote a report for the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England, entitled Intelligent Machinery.

In the report Turing stated that a thinking machine should be given the blank mind of an infant instead of an adult mind filled with opinions and ideas. The report contained an early discussion of neural networks. Turing estimated that it would take a battery of programmers fifty years to bring this learning machine from childhood to adult mental maturity. The report was not published until 1968.

Alan Turing joined the computer project at Manchester University Deputy Director and chief programmer.

Grace Hopper left Harvard to join Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in Philadelphia as a senior mathematician/programmer.

Betty Holbertson at Eckert-Mauchly in Philadelphia developed UNIVAC Instructions Code C-10.

C-10 was the first software to allow a computer to be operated by keyboarded commands rather than dials and switches. It was also the first mnemonic code.

Albert A. Auerbach, one of the designers of the BINAC CPU at Pres Eckert and John Mauchly's Electronic Control Company, ran a small test routine for filling memory from the A register. This was the first program run on the first stored-program electronic computer produced in the United States.

The United States Census Bureau wrote test programs for the BINAC. These manuscript programs, dated March 15 and March 21, were possibly among the earliest extant programs for a stored-program computer built in the United States.

Maurice V. Wilkes’s EDSAC, fully operational at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, ran a program written by Wilkes for calculating a table of squares. It also ran a program written by David Wheeler for calculating a sequence of prime numbers. The EDSAC was the first easily used, fully functional stored-program computer to run a program.

John Mauchly conceived the Short Code, the first high-level programming language for an electronic computer, to be used with the BINAC. It was also the first interpreted language and the first assembly language.

The Short Code first ran on UNIVAC I, serial 1, in 1950.

[In 2005 no copies of the Short Code existed with dates earlier than 1952.]

Mathematician John von Neumann delivered lectures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on The Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata. In these lectures von Neumann showed that in theory a program could reproduce itself. The lectures were completed and edited by A. W. Burks and published by the University of Illinois Press in 1966.

Years later one application of this plausibility result in computability theory was the development of what came to be known as malware.

Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Stanley Gill of Cambridge University issued Report on the Preparation of Programmes for the EDSAC and the Use of the Library of Subroutines. This dittoed document, published for private distribution in a very small number of copies, was the first treatise on software written for an operational stored-program computer. The book described “assemblers” and “subroutines”—segments of programs that are frequently used, so they can be kept in “libraries” and reused as needed in many software applications. The Cambridge group thus introduced the concept of reusable code, one of the principal tools for reducing software bugs and improving the productivity of programmers.

In 1951 this work was published as a conventional hard-cover book, with some changes and a new title by the American publishers Addison-Wesley, coincidentally in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Preparation of Programs for an Electronic Digital Computer, with special reference to the EDSAC and the use of a library of subroutines was the first conventionally published book on software. (See Reading 9.4.)

In 1950 Richard W. Hamming of Bell Labs and the City College of New York published Error Detecting and Error Codes.

Claude Shannon published Programming a computer for playing chess, the first technical paper on computer chess. (See Reading 11.3.)

American inventor David Hammond Shepard, a cryptanalyst at AFSA, the forerunner of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), built "Gismo" in his spare time.

Gismo was a machine to convert printed messages into machine language for processing by computer— the first optical character recognition (OCR) system.

"IBM licensed the [OCR] machine, but never put it into production. Shepard designed the Farrington B numeric font now used on most credit cards. Recognition was more reliable on a simple and open font, to avoid the effects of smearing at gasoline station pumps. Reading credit cards was the first major industry use of OCR, although today the information is read magnetically from the back of the cards.

"In 1962 Shepard founded Cognitronics Corporation. In 1964 his patented 'Conversation Machine' was the first to provide telephone Interactive voice response access to computer stored data using speech recognition. The first words recognized were 'yes' and 'no' " (Wikipedia article on David H. Shepard, accessed 02-29-2012).

In February 1951 British computer scientist Christopher Strachey finished a program for the game of draughts, or checkers. The game ran for the first time on the Pilot ACE at the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, on July 30, 1951, but completely exhausted the machine's memory.

"When Strachey heard about the Manchester Mark 1, which had a much bigger memory, he asked his former fellow-student Alan Turing for the manual and transcribed his program into the operation codes of that machine by around October 1951. The program could 'play a complete game of draughts at a reasonable speed' " (Wikipedia article on Christopher Strachey, accessed 09-12-2012).

The second English electronic computer conference was held at the University of Manchester to inaugurate the first Ferranti Mark 1. There Maurice Wilkes introduced the term microprogramming, referring to the design of control circuits. The idea was not widely accepted until the following decade. (See Reading 8.8.)

During August 7 to 9, 1951 Geoff Hill, a computer programmer with perfect pitch, programmed the University of Melbourne CSIR Mk1, the first stored-program computer in Australia, to play a melody, and ran the program at the inaugural Conference of Automatic Computing Machines in Sydney. This was the first demonstration of computer music.

"The CSIR Mk1 operated in Sydney Australia from about November 1949 to June 1955. Geoff Hill was the main programmer at that time and he used the machine to play musical melodies. These melodies, mostly from popular songs, were; 'Colonel Bogey', 'Bonnie Banks', 'Girl with Flaxen Hair' and so on.

"The CSIR Mk1 was dismantled in mid 1955 and moved to The University of Melbourne, where it was renamed CSIRAC. Professor of Mathematics, Thomas Cherry, later Sir Thomas Cherry FRS, had a great interest in programming and music and he created music with CSIRAC. In Melbourne the practice of how CSIRAC was programmed for music was altered and refined somewhat. The program tapes for a couple of test scales still exist, along with the popular melodies 'So early in the Morning' and 'In Cellar Cool', which was a popular drinking song - it appears that the pursuit of computer music and social drinking have been intimately linked since the earliest years. There was also other music on the tape. In about 1957 Cherry wrote a music performance program that would allow a computer user who understood simple standard music notation to enter it easily into CSIRAC for performance, without negotiating all of the timing problems such as was normally required. The music itself may now seem very crude unless it is understood in the context of its creation. It was created by engineers who were not knowledgeable of the latest in musical composition practice and at a time when there was little thought of digital sound. The idea of using a computer, the world's most flexible machine, to create music was a leap of imagination at the time. It is a pity that composers were not invited to use CSIRAC, as they were with the Bell Labs developments, to discover how it could have solved several compositional problems."

LEO I (Lyons Electronic Office) ran a program to "evaluate costs, prices and margins of that week's baked output" at tea shop operator J. Lyons and Company in England.  The LEO adaptation of the EDSAC was the first stored-program electronic computer to run business programs on a routine basis. “LEO’s early success owed less to its hardware than to its highly innovative systems-oriented approach to programming, devised and led by David Caminer.”

Grace Hopper wrote the first compiler (A-0) for UNIVAC.

Grace Hopper published “The Education of a Computer,” in which she described fundamental principles in programming and anticipated future developments. (See Reading 9.5.)

The UNIVAC Short Code II was developed. This was the earliest extant version of a high-level programming language actually intended to be used on an electronic digital computer.

UNIVAC I, serial 8, was installed at General Electric Appliance Park, Louisville, Kentucky. Serial 8 was the first electronic computer sold to a nongovernmental customer in the United States. It ran the "first successful industrial payroll application."

J. H. Laning and Neil Zierler developed an algebraic compiler for the Whirlwind I— the first high-level algebraic language for a computer.

Grace Hopper organized the first symposium strictly on software for the Office of Naval Research in Washington, D.C.

The symposium was attended by over 200 people. The published proceedings were entitled Symposium on Automatic Programming for Digital Computers (1954). (See Reading 9.6.)

In the October 1954 issue of the journal Enounter (pp. 25-31) British computer scientist Christopher Strachey published "The 'Thinking' Machine."  Strachey's paper included two love letters written by the Ferranti Mark I computer at the University of Manchester running a program which he had written. This represented the first use of a computer to write literary texts.

Herzogenrath & Nierhoff-Wielk, Ex Machina-Frühe Computergrafik bis 1979. . . . Ex Machina- Early Computer Graphics to 1979 (2007) 229.

Elmer C. Kubie and John W. Sheldon founded Computer Usage Company, the first independent company to specialize in software.  It declared bankrupcy in 1986.

The first published use of the term "software" in a computing context is often credited to American statistician John W. Tukey, who published the term in "The Teaching of Concrete Mathematics," American Mathematical Monthly, January 9, 1958. Tukey wrote:

"Today the 'software' comprising the carefully planned interpretive routines, compilers, and other aspects of automative programming are at least as important to the modern electronic calculator as its 'hardware' of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like" (http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_7_31_00.html, accessed 02-02-2010).

Note that Tukey referred to computers as "calculators." Up to this time the word "computer" typically referred to people, and the use of the word computer for a machine was just coming into popular use.

However, the priority of Tukey in this context appears to be unjustified. On April 30, 2013 Paul Niquette informed me that Richard R. Carhart used the term in the  Proceedings of the Second National Symposium on Quality Control and Reliability in Electronics: Washington, D.C., January 9-10, 1956. It is, of course, possible – even likely – that others used the word in spoken, rather than printed, context before either Carhart or Tukey. Niquette states that he used the term as early as 1953.

At the 1956 Dartmouth summer session on artificial intelligence, Allen Newell and Herbert Simon demonstrated the first AI program, the Logic Theorist, to find the basic equations of logic as defined in Principia Mathematica by Whitehead and Russell.

For one of the equations, the Logic Theorist surpassed its inventors’ expectations by finding a new and better proof. This was the “the first foray by artificial intelligence research into high-order intellectual processes” (Feigenbaum and Feldman, Computers and Thought [1963]).

American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist Noam Chomsky published "Three Models for the Description of Language" in IRE Transactions on Information Theory IT-2, 113-24.

In the paper Chomsky introduced two key concepts, the first being “Chomsky’s hierarchy” of syntactic forms, which was widely applied in the construction of artificial computer languages.

“The Chomsky hierarchy places regular (or linear) languages as a subset of the context-free languages, which in turn are embedded within the set of context-sensitive languages also finally residing in the set of unrestricted or recursively enumerable languages. By defining syntax as the set of rules that define the spatial relationships between the symbols of a language, various levels of language can be also described as one-dimensional (regular or linear), two-dimensional (context-free), three-dimensional (context sensitive) and multi-dimensional (unrestricted) relationships. From these beginnings, Chomsky might well be described as the ‘father of formal languages’ ” (Lee, Computer Pioneers [1995] 164). 

The second concept Chomsky presented here was his transformational-generative grammar theory, which attempted to define rules that can generate the infinite number of grammatical (well-formed) sentences possible in a language, and seeks to identify rules (transformations) that govern relations between parts of a sentence, on the assumption that beneath such aspects as word order a fundamental deep structure exists. As Chomsky expressed it in his abstract of the present paper,

"We investigate several conceptions of linguistic structure to determine whether or not they can provide simple and “revealing” grammars that generate all of the sentences of English and only these. We find that no finite-state Markov process [a random process whose future probabilities are determined by its most recent values] that produces symbols with transition from state to state can serve as an English grammar. We formalize the notion of “phrase structure” and show that this gives us a method for describing language which is essentially more powerful. We study the properties of a set of grammatical transformations, showing that the grammar of English is materially simplified if phrase-structure is limited to a kernel of simple sentences from which all other sentences are constructed by repeated transformation, and that this view of linguistic structure gives a certain insight into the use and understanding of language" (p. 113).

Minsky, "A Selected Descriptor-Indexed Bibliography to the Literature on Artificial Intelligence" in Feigenbaum & Feldman eds., Computers and Thought (1963) 453-523, no. 484. Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 531.

EDSAC 2, the first large-scale computer with a control unit based on microprogramming, became operational at the University of Cambridge.

Grace Hopper wrote the first English-language data-processing compiler, B-0 (FLOW-MATIC) for the UNIVAC II.

John Backus and his team at IBM shipped FORTRAN for the IBM 704. This software was proprietary to IBM. It became the first high-level programming language to achieve high use.

Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures was published in S-Gravenhage (The Hague), Netherlands, by Mouton & Co. That it did not initially find an American publisher might have been reflective of the advanced nature of the contents. Through its numerous printings Syntactic Structures, a small book of 116 pages, was the vehicle through which Chomsky's innovative ideas first became more widely known.

Chomsky’s text was an expansion of the ideas first expressed in his “Three Models for the Description of Language," in particular the concept of transformational grammar. The cognitive scientist David Marr, who developed a general account of information-processing systems, described Chomsky’s theory of transformation grammar as a top-level computational theory, in the sense that it deals with the goal of a computation, why it is appropriate, and the logic of the strategy used to carry it out (Anderson and Rosenfeld, Neurocomputing: Foundations of Research [1988] 470–72). Chomsky’s work had profound influence in the fields of linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence. 

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 532.

In 1958 Hans Peter Luhn of IBM developed an automatic document indexing program for the production of literature abstracts.

"The complete text of an article in machine-readable form is scanned by an IBM 704 data-processing machine and analyzed in accordance with a standard program. Statistical information derived from word frequency and distribution is used by the machine to compute a relative measure of significance, first for individual words and then for sentences. Sentences scoring highest in significance are extracted and printed out to become the "auto-abstract."

In 1959 German computer scientist Theo Lutz from Hochschule Esslingen created the first digital poetry using a text-generating program called “Stochastiche Text” written for the ZUSE Z22 computer. The program consisted of only 50 commands but could theoretically generate over 4,000,000 sentences.

Working with his teacher, Max Bense, one of the earliest theorists of computer poetry, Lutz used a random number generator to create texts where key words were randomly inserted within a set of logical constants in order to create a syntax. The programme thus demonstrated how logical structures like mathematical systems could work with language.

Funkhouser, Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archaeology of Forms 1959-1995 (2007).

A group representing computer users, manufacturers, universities, and the government met at The Pentagon, Arlington, Virginia, to plan COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language), a non proprietary computer language designed for business use that can be run on all electronic computers. Its specifications were inspired by the FLOW-MATIC language invented by Grace Hopper, and the IBM COMTRAN language.

In 1960 John Horty at the Health Law Center, University of Pittsburgh, pioneered computer-assisted legal research by having the texts of relevant statutes keyed into punched cards and then transferred to computer tapes where they could be searched and retrieved by “key words in combination” (KWIC).

John McCarthy of Stanford University introduced LISP (LISt Processor), the language of choice for artificial intelligence (AI) programming.

Widely considered the first software patent, "Prater-Wei" was about calculating temperatures for petroleum fractionation.  This patent, originally filed by Mobil Oil Corporation in 1960, addressed computerized spectographic analysis. It had many method and apparatus claims that could be performed either on an analog or digital computer, or with pencil and paper. At the time, software was not patentable, so the authors described a non-computer method of choosing the temperatures, using matrix inversion.  However, the description in the patent application used linear algebra notation similar to that of textbooks published late in the 19^th century to disguise the more obvious matrix notation that was invented much later. (adapted from Henry Gladney, Digital Document Quarterly 4.2, and Digital Document Quarterly 7.3, accessed 01-01-2009).

"A Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA) decision is famous because the question "whether computer programs could contain patentable subject matter" was also before the CCPA.  See Application of Charles D. Prater and James Wei, U.S. CCPA, 415 F.2d 1378, November 20, 1968." (Henry Gladney, Digital Document Quarterly 7,3, accessed 01-01-2009).

Initial Specifications for a COmmon Business-Oriented Language  (COBOL) was published in Washington, D.C. in April 1960.  COBOL had its origin in a meeting held at the Pentagon in May 1959, attended by a group representing computer users, manufacturers, universities and the government. This meeting was convened to discuss the possibility of developing a common business-oriented computer language, using English words instead of mathematical codes, which could be used on all computers independent of make and model.

Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace (2002) no. 543.

Colossal Typewriter, a program written by John McCarthy and Roland Silver running on the DEC PDP-1 at Bolt Beranek and Newman, was one of the earliest computer text editors. 

On December 6 and 7, 1960  essentially the same COBOL program was run on two different makes of computers— an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer— demonstrating for the first time that compatibility between computers produced by different manufacturers could be achieved.

Engineers at Compugraphic in Brookline, Massachusetts recognized that a computer could be programmed to handle repetitious typesetter coding automatically. The firm developed a prototype model of the Directory Tape Processor (DTP) which eliminated all operator decisions, and produced a fully coded tape used for typesetting.

Fernando J. Corbató and team at MIT developed one of the first time-sharing operating systems, CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System.)

CTSS had one of the first computerized text formatting utilities, called RUNOFF, the precursor of word processing, and one of the first inter-user messaging implementations, presaging instant messaging and electronic mail.

Expensive Typewriter, a text editing program written for the DEC PDP-1 at MIT by Stephen D. Piner, that could drive an IBM Selectric typewriter, has been called the first word processing program.  It was called "expensive" because the DEC PDP-1, the first minicomputer, then cost $100,000.  The name was also taken in the spirit of a 1960 computer text editor called Colossal Typewriter.

♦ You can download a PDF of a report on the program written by Stephen Piner and dated August 1, 1972 at the Computer History Museum at this link: http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/DEC/pdp-1/DEC.pdp_1.1972.102650079.pdf (accessed 06-22-2011).

A bug in the flight software for the Mariner I space probe caused the rocket to divert from its intended path on launch. Mission control destroyed the rocket over the Atlantic Ocean.

"The investigation into the accident discovered that a formula written on paper in pencil was improperly transcribed into computer code, causing the computer to miscalculate the rocket's trajectory."

In 2005 Wired Magazine characterized this bug as the first of the "ten greatest software bugs of all time."

Demonstration of DAC-1 (Design Augmented by Computers), a joint development effort between General Motors in Detroit, and IBM, which began development in 1959. This was the first computer-assisted design (CAD) program.

The ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) standard was promulgated, specifying the pattern of seven bits to represent letters, numbers, punctuation, and control signals in computers.

"Historically, ASCII developed from telegraphic codes. Its first commercial use was as a seven-bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on ASCII formally began October 6, 1960, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published during 1963, a major revision during 1967, and the most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes, the proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists, and added features for devices other than teleprinters. ASCII includes definitions for 128 characters: 33 are non-printing control characters (now mostly obsolete) that affect how text and space is processed; 94 are printable characters, and the space is considered an invisible graphic. The most commonly used character encoding on the World Wide Web was US-ASCII until 2008, when it was surpassed by UTF-8" (Wikipedia article on ASCII, accessed 01-29-2010).

In 1963 Ivan Sutherland, a student at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, working on the experimental TX- 2 computer, created the first graphical user interface, or first interactive graphics program, in his Ph.D. thesis, Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System. 

Sketchpad was an early application of vector graphics.

As a result of Engelbart's 1962 report, J. C. R. Licklider, the first director of the US Defense Department's Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO), funded Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center at Stanford Research Institute in early 1963. The first experiments done there included trying to connect a display at SRI to the massive and unique AN/FSQ-32 computer at System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California.

In 1963, Kenneth C. Knowlton, working at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, developed the BEFLIX (Bell Flicks) programming language for bitmap computer-produced movies, using an IBM 7094 computer and a Stromberg-Carlson 4020 microfilm recorder. Each frame contained eight shades of grey and a resolution of 252 x 184.  Using this technique, Knowlton in 1963 created a 10 minute 16mm silent film entitled A Computer Technique for the Production of Animated Movies.   At the Spring Joint Computer Conference of AFIPS, on April 21-23, 1964 Knowlton delivered a paper entitled, appropriately enough, "A computer technique for producing animated movies." This was published in the Proceedings on pp. 67-87. The paper reproduced some images from Knowlton's film and indicated that the film could be borrowed from Bell Labs. Most of the paper reproduced programming code in Beflix.

In January 2013 Knowlton's 1963 silent film could be viewed on YouTube at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lmi6cmrq0w

RCA announced the Spectra series of computers, which could run the same software as IBM’s 360 machines. The Spectra computers were also the first commercial computers to use integrated circuits.

SABRE (Semi-Automatic Business-Related Environment), an online airline reservation system developed by American Airlines and IBM, and based on two IBM mainframes in Briarcliff Manor, New York, became operational.

SABRE worked over telephone lines in “real time” to handle seat inventory and passenger records from terminals in more than 50 cities.

At Dartmouth Thomas E. Kurtz and John G. Kemeny invented BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).

IBM introduced the Magnetic Tape/Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST).

"With this, for the first time, typed material could be edited without having to retype the whole text or chop up a coded copy. On the tape, information could be stored, replayed (that is, retyped automatically from the stored information), corrected, reprinted as many times as needed, and then erased and reused for other projects.

"This development marked the beginning of word processing as it is known today. It also introduced word processing as a definite idea and concept. The term was first used in IBM's marketing of the MT/ST as a 'word processing' machine. It was a translation of the German word textverabeitung, coined in the late 1950s by Ulrich Steinhilper, an IBM engineer. He used it as a more precise term for what was done by the act of typing. IBM redefined it 'to describe electronic ways of handling a standard set of office activities -- composing, revising, printing, and filing written documents.' "

Woodbrow W. "Bledsoe, along with Helen Chan and Charles Bisson of Panoramic Research, Palo Alto, California, researched programming computers to recognize human faces (Bledsoe 1966a, 1966b; Bledsoe and Chan 1965). Because the funding was provided by an unnamed intelligence agency, little of the work was published. Given a large database of images—in effect, a book of mug shots—and a photograph, the problem was to select from the database a small set of records such that one of the image records matched the photograph. The success of the program could be measured in terms of the ratio of the answer list to the number of records in the database. Bledsoe (1966a) described the following difficulties:

" 'This recognition problem is made difficult by the great variability in head rotation and tilt, lighting intensity and angle, facial expression, aging, etc. Some other attempts at facial recognition by machine have allowed for little or no variability in these quantities. Yet the method of correlation (or pattern matching) of unprocessed optical data, which is often used by some researchers, is certain to fail in cases where the variability is great. In particular, the correlation is very low between two pictures of the same person with two different head rotations.'

"This project was labeled man-machine because the human extracted the coordinates of a set of features from the photographs, which were then used by the computer for recognition. Using a GRAFACON, or RAND TABLET, the operator would extract the coordinates of features such as the center of pupils, the inside corner of eyes, the outside corner of eyes, point of widows peak, and so on. From these coordinates, a list of 20 distances, such as width of mouth and width of eyes, pupil to pupil, were computed. These operators could process about 40 pictures an hour. When building the database, the name of the person in the photograph was associated with the list of computed distances and stored in the computer. In the recognition phase, the set of distances was compared with the corresponding distance for each photograph, yielding a distance between the photograph and the database record. The closest records are returned.

"This brief description is an oversimplification that fails in general because it is unlikely that any two pictures would match in head rotation, lean, tilt, and scale (distance from the camera). Thus, each set of distances is normalized to represent the face in a frontal orientation. To accomplish this normalization, the program first tries to determine the tilt, the lean, and the rotation. Then, using these angles, the computer undoes the effect of these transformations on the computed distances. To compute these angles, the computer must know the three-dimensional geometry of the head. Because the actual heads were unavailable, Bledsoe (1964) used a standard head derived from measurements on seven heads.

"After Bledsoe left PRI [Panoramic Research, Inc.] in 1966, this work was continued at the Stanford Research Institute, primarily by Peter Hart. In experiments performed on a database of over 2000 photographs, the computer consistently outperformed humans when presented with the same recognition tasks (Bledsoe 1968). Peter Hart (1996) enthusiastically recalled the project with the exclamation, 'It really worked!' " (Faculty Council, University of Texas at Austin, In Memoriam Woodrow W. Bledsoe, accessed 05-15-2009).

Bledsoe, W. W. 1964. The Model Method in Facial Recognition, Technical Report PRI 15, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W., and Chan, H. 1965. A Man-Machine Facial Recognition System-Some Preliminary Results, Technical Report PRI 19A, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1966a. Man-Machine Facial Recognition: Report on a Large-Scale Experiment, Technical Report PRI 22, Panoramic Research, Inc., Palo Alto, California.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1966b. Some Results on Multicategory Patten Recognition. Journal of the Association for Computing Machinery 13(2):304-316.

Bledsoe, W. W. 1968. Semiautomatic Facial Recognition, Technical Report SRI Project 6693, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California.

IBM announced the System/360 family of compatible machines.  All IBM System/360 products ran the same operating system—OS/360. Previously products developed by different divisions of IBM were incompatible.

IBM System/360 products were the first IBM computers capable of both commercial and scientific applications that were offered at what was considered a “reasonable price.” Their architecture incorporated Microprogramming.

Computer scientist Jerome H. Salzer of MIT wrote TYPESET and RUNOFF, memorandum editor and type-out commmands. RUNOFF was the first computer text formatting program to see significant use. It's formatting commands derived from the commands used by typesetters to manually format documents.

"It actually consisted of a pair of programs, TYPSET (which was basically a document editor), and RUNOFF (the output processor). RUNOFF had support for pagination and headers, as well as text justification (TJ-2 appears to have been the earliest text justification system, but it did not have the other capabilities).

"RUNOFF is a direct predecessor of the runoff document formatting program of Multics, which in turn was the ancestor of the roff and nroff document formatting programs of Unix, and their descendants. It was also the ancestor of FORMAT for the IBM System/360, and of course indirectly for every computerized word processing system.

"Likewise, RUNOFF for CTSS was the predecessor of the various RUNOFFs for DEC's operating systems, via the RUNOFF developed by the University of California, Berkeley's Project Genie for the SDS 940 system.

"The name is alleged to have come from the phrase at the time, I'll run off a copy" (Wikipedia article on TYPESET and RUNOFF, accessed 01-31-2010).

Though its exact history is murky, email (e-mail) began as a way for users on time-sharing mainframe computers to communicate.

Among the first systems to have an email facility were System Development Corporation of Santa Monica's programming for the AN/FSQ-32  (Q32) built by IBM for the United States Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC), and MIT's Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS).  The authors of the first email program for CTSS were American software engineer Tom Van Vleck and American computer scientist Noel Morris. The two men created the program in the summer of 1965.

"A proposed CTSS MAIL command was described in an undated Programming Staff Note 39 by Louis Pouzin, Glenda Schroeder, and Pat Crisman. Numerical sequence places the note in either Dec 64 or Jan 65. PSN 39 proposed a facility that would allow any CTSS user to send a message to any other. The proposed uses were communication from "the system" to users informing them that files had been backed up, and communication to the authors of commands with criticisms, and communication from command authors to the CTSS manual editor.

"I was a new member of the MIT programming staff in spring 1965. When I read the PSN document about the proposed CTSS MAIL command, I asked "where is it?" and was told there was nobody available to write it. My colleague Noel Morris and I wrote a version of MAIL for CTSS in the summer of 1965. Noel was the one who saw how to use the features of the new CTSS file system to send the messages, and I wrote the actual code that interfaced with the user. The CTSS manual writeup and the source code of MAIL are available online. (We made a few changes from the proposal during the course of implementation: e.g. to read one's mail, users just used the PRINT command instead of a special argument to MAIL.)  

"The idea of sending "letters' using CTSS was resisted by management, as a waste of resources. However, CTSS Operations did need a faclility to inform users when a request to retrieve a file from tape had been completed, and we proposed MAIL as a solution for this need. (Users who had lost a file due to system or user error, or had it deleted for inactivity, had to submit a request form to Operations, who ran the RETRIEVE program to reload them from tape.) Since the blue 7094 installation in Building 26 had no CTSS terminal available for the operators, one proposal for sending such messages was to invoke MAIL from the 7094 console switches, inputting a code followed by the problem number and programmer number in BCD. I argued that this was much too complex and error prone, and that a facility that let any user send arbitrary messages to any other would have more general uses, which we would discover after it was implemented" (http://www.multicians.org/thvv/mail-history.html, accessed 06-20-2011).

♦ In June 2011 writer and filmmaker Errol Morris published a series of five illustrated articles in The New York Times concerning the roles of his brother Noel and Tom Van Vleck in the invention of email. The first of these appeared at this link: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/did-my-brother-invent-e-mail-with-tom-van-vleck-part-one/?hp#ftn6.  The articles, in an usual dialog form, captured some of the experience of programming time-sharing mainframes and what it was like to send and receive emails at this early date.

Self-styled "systems humanist" Ted Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson) published "Complex Information Processing: A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate," ACM '65 Proceedings of the 1965 20th national conference, 84-100. 

In this paper Nelson coined the terms hypertext and hypermedia  to refer to features of a computerized information system.  He used the word "link" to refer the logical connections that came to be associated with the word "hyperlink."  

Nelson is also credited with inventing the word hyperlink, though its published origin is less specific:

"The term "hyperlink" was coined in 1965 (or possibly 1964) by Ted Nelson and his assistant Calvin Curtin at the start of Project Xanadu. Nelson had been inspired by "As We May Think", a popular essay by Vannevar Bush. In the essay, Bush described a microfilm-based machine (the Memex) in which one could link any two pages of information into a "trail" of related information, and then scroll back and forth among pages in a trail as if they were on a single microfilm reel. The closest contemporary analogy would be to build a list of bookmarks to topically related Web pages and then allow the user to scroll forward and backward through the list.

In a series of books and articles published from 1964 through 1980, Nelson transposed Bush's concept of automated cross-referencing into the computer context, made it applicable to specific text strings rather than whole pages, generalized it from a local desk-sized machine to a theoretical worldwide computer network, and advocated the creation of such a network. Meanwhile, working independently, a team led by Douglas Engelbart (with Jeff Rulifson as chief programmer) was the first to implement the hyperlink concept for scrolling within a single document (1966), and soon after for connecting between paragraphs within separate documents (1968)" (Wikipedia article on Hyperlink, accessed 08-29-2010). 

Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort, the NewMedia Reader (2003) 133-45.

In 1965 the U. S. Postal Sevice introduced OCR software to sort mail.

Paul Tenczar developed the TUTOR programming language for use in developing electronic learning programs called "lessons" for the PLATO system at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It has "powerful answer-parsing and answer-judging commands, graphics and features to stimulate handling student records and statistics by instructors." This also made it suitable for the creation of many non-educational lessons— that is, games—including flight simulators, war games, role-playing, such as Dungeons and Dragons (dnd), card games, word games, and Medical lesson games.

The first documentation of the TUTOR language, under this name, appears to be The TUTOR Manual, CERL Report X-4, by R. A. Avner and P. Tenczar, January 1969.

American mathematician James W. Cooley of IBM Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York,  and American statistician John W. Tukey published "An algorithm for the machine calculation of complex Fourier series", Mathematics of  Computation 19, 297–301. This paper enunciated the Cooley-Tukey FFT algorithm, the most common fast Fourier transform algorithm.

"The motivation for it [FFT algorithm] was provided by Dr. Richard L. Garwin at IBM Watson Research who was concerned about verifying a Nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union for the SALT talks. Garwin thought that if he had a very much faster Fourier Transform he could plant sensors in the ground in countries surrounding the Soviet Union. He suggested the idea of how Fourier transforms could be programmed to be much faster to both Cooley and Tukey. They did the work, the sensors were planted, and he was able to locate nuclear explosions to within 15 kilometers of where they were occurring" (Wikipedia article on James Cooley, accessed 03-06-2012).

Maurice Wilkes introduced memory caching.

In October 1965 Lawrence G. Roberts did the first actual network experiment, tying MIT Lincoln Labs’ TX-2 in Lexington, Massachusetts to System Development Corporation's Q32 in Santa Monica, California.

This was the first time that two computers talked to each other, and the first time that packets were used to communicate between computers.

Richard Gering's Data Corporation of Beavercreek, Ohio, contracted with the U.S. Air Force to develop a computer-assisted, full-text system to keep track of procurement contracts and equipment inventory.

Roger K. Summit, "the father of online search," had the DIALOG online information retrieval system operational for Lockheed Aircraft in Burbank, California.

The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, England developed the NPL Data Network under Donald Watts Davies.

This was an experiment in packet switching.

Data Corporation of Beavercreek, Ohio,  contracted with the Ohio Bar Automated Research Corporation to create a full-text, interactive research service for Ohio statutes.

Ted Nelson (Theodor Holm Nelson), Andries van Dam, and students at Brown University collaborated on the first hypertext editing system, based on Nelson's concept of hypertext.

They developed the project on an IBM 360/50 mainframe.

Directors of fifteen New York-area museums formed the Museum Computer Network to create a prototype system for a shared museum data bank.

The project recruited curators and registrars to develop a data dictionary that  accommodated the diverse methods used to describe museum collections. The resulting tagged record format allowed for the description of individual objects with separate records for artist biographical information and reference citations. Jack Heller's GRIPHOS (General Retrieval and Information Processor for Humanities Oriented Studies) system provided the information storage, search, and retrieval infrastructures for the records.

While a professor at UCLA, Italian-American electrical engineer and businessman Andrew Viterbi developed the Viterbi algorithm,  "as an error-correction scheme for noisy digital communication links, finding universal application in decoding the convolutional codes used in both CDMA and GSM digital cellular, dial-up modems, satellite, deep-space communications, and 802.11 wireless LANs. It is now also commonly used in speech recognition, keyword spotting, computational linguistics, and bioinformatics. For example, in speech-to-text (speech recognition), the acoustic signal is treated as the observed sequence of events, and a string of text is considered to be the "hidden cause" of the acoustic signal. The Viterbi algorithm finds the most likely string of text given the acoustic signal" (Wikipedia article on Viterbi algorithm, accessed 12-29-2009).

In 1964 American educational psychologist at the University of Connecticut (Storrs) Ellis Batten Page, inspired by developments in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence, began research on automated essay scoring. Page published his initial research in 1967 as "Statistical and linguistic strategies in the computer grading of essays," Coling 1967: Conférence Internationale sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues, Grenoble, France, August 1967.  The same year he also published "The imminence of grading essays by computer," Phi Delta Kappan, 47 (1967) 238-243. The following year he published, with Dieter H. Paulus  The analysis of essays by computer (Final report, Project No. 6-1318). Washington, D. C.: Department of Health, Education, and Welfare; Office of Education; Bureau of Research. That year he published his successful work with a program he called Project Essay Grade (PEG) in "The Use of the Computer in Analyzing Student Essays," International Review of Education, 14(3), 253-263. Page's work is considered the beginning of automated essay scoring, the development of which could not become cost effective until computing became far cheaper and more pervasive in the 1990s. 

Later at Duke University, Page renewed his development and research in automated scoring and, in 1993, formed Tru-Judge, Inc., anticipating the potential for commercial applications of the software. In 2002, and in declining health, Page sold the intellectual property assets of Tru-Judge to Measurement Incorporated, educational company that provides achievement tests and scoring services for state governments, other testing companies and various organizations and institutions.

Welsh computer scientist Donald W. Davies of the National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, England, introduced the use of the term “packet” to describe discrete blocks of data sent over networks in his paper called “A Digital Communications Network for Computers.”

IBM adopted a new marketing policy of charging separately for most systems engineering activities, future computer programs, and customer education courses. This “unbundling” gave rise to the software and services industry.

The Museum Computer Network and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with funding from IBM, organized the first U.S. conference on museum computing.

The term “software engineering” was coined at a NATO conference, in Garmisch, Germany, in response to the perception that computer programming had not kept up with advances in computer hardware.

Douglas Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California, demonstrated at the San Francisco Convention Center an “oNLine System” (NLS), the features of which included hypertext, text editing, screen windowing, and email. To make this system operate, Engelbart used the mouse which he had invented the previous year.

In 1969 Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie developed the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. This was the first operating system designed to run on computers of all sizes, making open systems possible. UNIX became the foundation for the Internet.

IBM introduced the Generalized Markup Language, GML, developed by Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher and Raymond Lorie, whose surname initials were used by Goldfarb to make up the term GML. 

GML was "a set of macros that implemented intent-based markup tags for the IBM text formatter, "'SCRIPT.' SCRIPT was the main component of IBM's Document Composition Facility (DCF). A starter set of tags in GML was provided with the DCF product.

"GML simplifies the description of a document in terms of its format, organization structure, content parts and their relationship, and other properties. GML markup (or tags) describes such parts as chapters, important sections, and less important sections (by specifying heading levels), paragraphs, lists, tables, and so forth." (Wikipedia article on IBM Generalized Markup Language, accessed 12-21-2008).

in Network Working Group Request for Comment: 1 Steve Crocker at UCLA embodied peer to peer architecture (P2P) as one of the key concepts of the ARPANET.

In 1970 Xerox opened the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC became the incubator of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), the mouse, the WYSIWYG text editor, the laser printer, the desktop computer, the Smalltalk programming language and integrated development environment, Interpress (a resolution-independent graphical page description language and the precursor to PostScript), and Ethernet.

Edgar F. Codd of IBM published "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks," Communications of the ACM, 13 (6) 377–387.

Codd’s model became widely accepted as the definitive model for relational database management systems. Codd postulated that data should be stored independently from hardware and that a programmer should use a nonprocedural language for accessing data. The crux of Codd’s solution was that data, rather than being stored in a hierarchical structure, would be stored in simple tables composed of rows and columns in which columns of like data would relate tables to one another. A database user or application, in Codd’s way of thinking, would not need to know the structure of the data in order to query that data.

IBM’s first operational application of speech recognition enabled customer engineers servicing equipment to “talk” to and receive “spoken” answers from a computer that could recognize about 5,000 words.

In 1971 Dennis M. Ritchie of Bell Labs wrote the C programming language for use in the UNIX operating system.

The Creeper worm,  an experimental self-replicating program written by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies, Cambridge, Massachusetts (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman), is generally considered the first computer virus.

"Creeper infected DEC PDP-10 computers running the TENEX operating system. Creeper gained access via the ARPANET and copied itself to the remote system where the message, "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can!" was displayed. The Reaper program was created to delete Creeper" (Wikipedia article on Creeper virus, accessed 01-18-2010).

Henri Gouraud of the University of Utah published the Gouraud shading method for polygon smoothing, a scheme for continuous shading in computer graphics, in his paper “Computer display of curved surfaces,” in IEEE Transactions in Computers. The effect makes a surface composed of discrete polygons appear to be continuous.

Lawrence G. Roberts of ARPA in Arlington, Virginia, wrote the first email management program, RD, to list incoming messages and support forwarding, filing, and responding to them.

Harris Corporation introduced editing terminals for newspapers, which were quickly followed by terminals from Raytheon, Atex, Digital Equipment Corporation and others. The terminals output strips of type on film from phototypesetters.

American computer scientist and microcomputer entrepreneur Gary Kildall, one of the first people to view microprocessors as full-featured computers rather than equipment controllers, developed the operating system, CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) through his company, Digital Research, in Pacific Grove, California.

". . .Kildall originally developed CP/M during 1973-74, as an operating system to run on an Intel Intellec-8 development system, equipped with an Shugart Associates 8-inch floppy disk drive interfaced via a custom floppy disk controller. It was written in Kildall's own PL/M (Programming Language for Microcomputers). Various aspects of CP/M were influenced by the TOPS-10 operating system of the DECsystem-10 [PDP-10] mainframe computer, which Kildall had used as a development environment" (Wikipedia article on CP/M, accessed 02-06-2010).

"By 1981, at the peak of its popularity, CP/M ran on 3,000 different computer models and DRI had $5.4 million in yearly revenues" (Wikipedia article on Gary Kildall, accessed 02-06-2010).

In Seattle, Washington, high school students Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and Paul Gilbert founded a partnership called Traf-O-Data. 

The objective was to read the raw data from roadway traffic counters and create reports for traffic engineers. Even though this initial project was not a success, the experience that Gates and Allen gained in writing software for a non-existent computer they applied shortly thereafter in writing software for the MITS Altair, leading to the creation of Microsoft.

"Bill Gates and Paul Allen were high school students at Lakeside School in Seattle. The Lakeside Programmers Group got free computer time on various computers in exchange for writing computer programs. Gates and Allen thought they could process the traffic data cheaper and faster than the local companies. They recruited classmates to manually read the hole-patterns in the paper tape and transcribe the data onto computer cards. Gates then used a computer at the University of Washington to produce the traffic flow charts. (Paul Allen's father was a librarian at UW.) This was the beginning of Traf-O-Data.

"The next step was to build a device to read the traffic tapes directly and eliminate the tedious manual work. The Intel 8008 microprocessor was announced in 1972 and they realized it could read the tapes and process the data. Allen had graduated and was enrolled at Washington State University. Since neither Gates nor Allen had any hardware design experience they were initially stumped. The computer community in Seattle at that time was relatively small. Gates and Allen had a friend, Paul Wennberg who like them had hung around CDC Corporation near the University of Washington cadging open time on the mainframe. Wennberg, founder of the Triakis Corporation, was then an electrical engineering student at the University of Washington. In the course of events Gates and Allen mentioned they were looking for somebody to build them a computer for free. They needed somebody good enough to build a computer from parts and the diagrams found in a computer magazine. It was Wennberg who came up with the man to do just that. After discussion with another friend, Wes Prichard, Prichard suggested to Wennberg that Gates and Allen head over UW Physics building to where Gilbert, another EE student worked in the high-energy tracking lab. It was there that Paul Gilbert was approached by the duo to become a partner in Traf-O-Data. That year Gilbert, piece by piece, wire wrapped, soldered and, assembled from electrical components the (world's first?) working microcomputer. Miles Gilbert, Paul Gilbert's brother, a graphic designer and draftsman, helped the fledgling company by designing the company's logo. Gates and Allen started writing the software. To test the software while the computer was being designed, Paul Allen wrote a computer program on WSU's IBM 360 that would emulate the 8008 microprocessor.

"The computer system was completed and Traf-O-Data produced a few thousand dollars of revenue. Later the State of Washington offered free traffic processing services to cities, ending the need for private contractors, and all three principals moved on to other projects. The real contribution of Traf-O-Data was the experience that Gates and Allen gained developing software for computer hardware that did not exist. Paul Gilbert, sometimes referred to as "the hardware guy", was the man who made Traf-O-Data work. Without his efforts in the construction of this computer, and the day-to-day running of this pioneering company, the rise of what became Microsoft might have been delayed" (Wikipedia article on Traf-O-Data, accessed 07-13-2011).

My thanks to Chris Morgan for drawing my attention to this precursor venture to Microsoft.

IBM announced Systems Network Architecture (SNA), a networking protocol for computing systems. SNA was a uniform set of rules and procedures for computer communications to free computer users from the technical complexities of communicating through local, national, and international computer networks.

Donald D. Chamberlin and Raymond F. Boyce of IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, California, developed a Structured English Query Language (“SEQUEL”) to apply Edgar F. Codd’s model of relational databases. SEQUEL later became SQL, presumably because trademark conflicts caused IBM to switch from the original name.

Chamberlin & Boyce's original paper on SEQUEL may be downloaded at http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/people/chamberlin/sequel-1974.pdf, accessed 02-06-2010).

American computer scientist Gerald J. Popek of UCLA and Robert P. Goldberg published Formal Requirements for Virtualizable Third Generation Architectures, a set of conditions sufficient to support system virtualization efficiently in computer architecure. 

"Even though the requirements are derived under simplifying assumptions, they still represent a convenient way of determining whether a computer architecture supports efficient virtualization and provide guidelines for the design of virtualized computer architectures."

In 1974 Raymond Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and developed the first omni-font optical character recognition system— a computer program capable of recognizing text printed in any normal font.

"Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a few fonts. He decided that the best application of this technology would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud. However, this device required the invention of two enabling technologies—the CCD [charge-coupled device] flatbed scanner and the text-to-speech synthesizer. Development of these technologies was completed at other institutions such as Bell Labs, and on January 13, 1976, the finished product was unveiled during a news conference headed by him and the leaders of the National Federation of the Blind. Called the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the device covered an entire tabletop" (Wikipedia article on Ray Kurzweil, accessed 03-08-2012).

Working at IBM's Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California, Charles F. Goldfarb developed the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML).

SGML became an ISO accepted standard on October 15, 1986.  

Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn published “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication” in which they described the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). (See Reading 13.8.)

Bill Gates, Paul G. Allen, and Monte Davidoff wrote a version of the Basic programming language that ran on the MITS Altair 8800.

"After reading the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics that demonstrated the Altair 8800, Gates contacted Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the creators of the new microcomputer, to inform them that he and others were working on a BASIC interpreter for the platform.  In reality, Gates and Allen did not have an Altair and had not written code for it; they merely wanted to gauge MITS's interest. MITS president Ed Roberts agreed to meet them for a demo, and over the course of a few weeks they developed an Altair emulator that ran on a minicomputer, and then the BASIC interpreter. The demonstration, held at MITS's offices in Albuquerque, was a success and resulted in a deal with MITS to distribute the interpreter as Altair BASIC." (Wikipedia article on Bill Gates, accessed 07-13-2011).

Called Altair Basic, or in its first iteration, MITS 4K Basic, the program was written without access to an Altair computer or even an 8080 CPU.

Altair Basic was the first computer language written for a personal computer, and the first product of "Micro-Soft," which in 1976 was renamed Microsoft.

Robert Metcalfe of Xerox PARC invented Ethernet.

Initially the speed of Ethernet was three megabits per second. Ethernet evolved "into the most widely implemented physical and link layer protocol."

At Evans & Sutherland in Salt Lake City, Utah, John Warnock and John Gaffney developed the "The Evans and Sutherland Design System" for producing 3-dimensional graphical databases both for the Evans & Sutherland CAD/CAM Picture System and for custom-built simulation machines. 

These graphics systems used a graphics model, developed by Ivan Sutherland and others, based on coordinate system transformations and line drawing.

"John Warnock joined Xerox PARC in 1978 to work for Charles "Chuck" Geschke. There he teamed up with Martin Newell in producing an interpreted graphics system called JAM. "JAM" stands for "John And Martin". JAM had the same postfix execution semantics as Gaffney's Design System, and was based on the Evans and Sutherland imaging model, but augmented the E&S imaging model by providing a much more extensive set of graphics primitives. Like the later versions of the Design System, JAM was "token based" rather than "command line based", which means that the JAM interpreter reads a stream of input tokens and processes each token completely before moving to the next. Newell and Warnock implemented JAM on various Xerox workstations; by 1981 JAM was available at Stanford on the Xerox Alto computers, where I first saw it.  

"In the meantime, various people at Xerox were building a series of experimental raster printers. The first of these was called XGP, the Xerox Graphics Printer, and had a resolution of 192 dots to the inch. Xerox made XGP's available to certain universities, and by 1972 they were in use at Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, and the University of Toronto. Each of those organizations produced its own hardware and software interfaces. The XGP is historically interesting only because it is the first raster printer to gain substantial use by computer scientists, and was the arena in which a lot of mistakes were made and a lot of lessons learned.  

"To replace the XGP, Xerox PARC developed a new printer called EARS, and then another newer printer called Dover. After the agony of converting software from XGP to EARS, various Xerox people realized that applications programs generating files for the XGP or for EARS should not be tied to the device properties of the printer itself. Bob Sproull and William Newman, of Xerox PARC, developed a relatively device-independent page image description scheme, called "Press format", which was used to instruct raster printers what to print.  

"As part of an extensive grant program to selected universities, Xerox donated Dover printers and made documentation of the Press format available under a nondisclosure agreement. As far as I know, that nondisclosure agreement has never been lifted, though information about Press format has been widely enough distributed that by 1982 researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) at Lausanne had given conference papers about their own independent implementation of Press format.  

"Press format was a smashing success; it revolutionized laser printing technology in the academic and research communities, and stimulated a large number of people to think about issues of device-independent print graphics. Nevertheless, Press format had its limitations, and various people felt the need to revise the basic design.  

"Sproull left Xerox in 1978 to become a professor of computer science at CMU. Newman returned home to England to become an independent consultant. Martin Newell left Xerox to join Cadlinc Corp. Warnock and Geschke remained at Xerox.  

"While at CMU, Sproull began making plans for a new version of Press that would combine the graphics model of JAM with the page image description properties of Press. Sproull returned to Xerox for a sabbatical leave in 1982, and enlisted the help of Butler Lampson in the creation of the new page image description language that Warnock dubbed "Interpress". The name caught on.  

"While it is difficult to separate the contributions made by Sproull and Lampson, it is not incorrect to say that Lampson and Warnock produced the execution model of Interpress while Sproull and Warnock produced the imaging model. It is also approximately correct to characterize this first version of Interpress as being derived from the graphics model and execution model of JAM with additional protection and security mechanisms derived from experience with programming languages like Euclid and Cedar, and a careful silence on the issue of fonts. The trio worked under Geschke's direction, and Geschke was responsible for refereeing disagreements and for making certain that the resulting design was acceptable to the rest of Xerox" (Brian Reid, http://groups.google.com/group/fa.laser-lovers/msg/5d0df32a0e91f1fa?rnum=2&pli=1, accessed 01-07-2009).

The first two-network demonstration of the Internet Protocol Suite, TCP/IP was performed between Stanford and University College London (UCL).

In November 1977, a three-network TCP/IP test was conducted between sites in the US, UK, and Norway.

Spelunker and programmer at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, William Crowther wrote the first computer text adventure game, Adventure.

Adventure was originally called ADVENT because a filename could only be six characters long in its operating system.  The game was renamed Colossal Cave Adventure, as it was based on part of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky.

"Crowther had explored the Mammoth Cave in the early 1970s, and created a vector map based on surveys of parts of the real cave, but the text game is a completely separate entity, created during the 1975-76 academic year and featuring fantasy elements such as an axe-throwing dwarf and a magic bridge."

"Crowther's original game consisted of about 700 lines of Fortran code, with about another 700 lines of data, written for BBN's PDP-10. (See the original source code) The program required about 60K words (nearly 300KB) of core memory in order to run, which was a significant amount for PDP-10/KA systems running with only 128K words." (Wikipedia article on Colossal Cave Adventure, accessed 04-14-2009).

"In early 1977, Adventure spread across ARPAnet,  and has survived on the Internet to this day. The game has since been ported to many other operating systems, and was included with the floppy-disk distribution of Microsoft's MS-DOS 5.0 OS. The popularity of Adventure led to the wide success of interactive fiction during the late 1970s and the 1980s, when home computers had little, if any, graphics capability. Many elements of the original game have survived into the present, such as the command 'xyzzy', which is now included as an Easter Egg in games such as Minesweeper" (Wikipedia article on Interactive fiction, accessed 04-15-2009).

The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene—a "community" specializing in the distribution of pirated content—started emerging around this time. It was used by predecessors of software cracking and reverse engineering groups who made their work public on privately run BBS systems.

"The first BBSes were located in the USA, but similar boards started appearing in the UK, Australia and mainland Europe. At the time setting up a machine capable of distributing data was not a trivial matter and required a certain amount of technical skill. The reason it was usually done was for the technical challenge. The BBS systems typically hosted several megabytes of material. The best boards had multiple phone lines and up to one hundred megabytes of storage space, which was very expensive at the time. Releases were mostly games and later applications" (Wikipedia article on the Warez scene, accessed 07-20-2009).

Software engineer and computer scientist Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., founder and chair of computer science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, a book on software engineering and project management.

Brooks's book described what became known in software development as Brooks's Law: "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later".

"According to Brooks himself, the law is an 'outrageous oversimplification', but it captures the general rule. Brooks points to two main factors that explain why it works this way:

"1. It takes some time for the people added to a project to become productive. Brooks calls this the "ramp up" time. Software projects are complex engineering endeavors, and new workers on the project must first become educated about the work that has preceded them; this education requires diverting resources already working on the project, temporarily diminishing their productivity while the new workers are not yet contributing meaningfully. Each new worker also needs to integrate with a team composed of multiple engineers who must educate the new worker in their area of expertise in the code base, day by day. In addition to reducing the contribution of experienced workers (because of the need to train), new workers may even have negative contributions – for example, if they introduce bugs that move the project further from completion. 

"2. Communication overheads increase as the number of people increase. The number of different communication channels increases along with the square of the number of people; doubling the number of people results in four times as many different conversations. Everyone working on the same task needs to keep in sync, so as more people are added they spend more time trying to find out what everyone else is doing."

"Compared with traditional software development, open source projects follow a different methodology. Large scale open source projects leverage the power of vast amount of participants which take care of coding and QA, using cheap communication channels (such as email) to coordinate the work. Such projects scale well, despite Brooks's Law, due to several reasons:

* Management concepts such as "manpower," "team size" and "delivery schedule" are not analogous in open source and internal corporate projects; applying Brooks's Law to both is thus misleading.

* Large scale open source projects have the ability to leverage the large number of testers to find bugs faster (also known as Linus's Law);

* Testers can read and analyze the source code, helping developers to track down bugs more efficiently;

* Efficient parallelization of work, reducing the communication overhead;

* A social context where the contributors are voluntary, associated with a leadership style that does not use coercion;

* Less reliance on traditional management methods to reduce duplication efforts.

* A more efficient allocation of labor to tasks . . .

"Some of these reasons, such as the parallelization of work could theoretically apply to both open source and closed projects" (Wikipedia article on Brooks's Law, accessed 08-08-2009).

Bill Gates and Paul Allen officially founded Micro-Soft (Microsoft) in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with Gates as CEO. Allen invented the original  company name, "Micro-Soft." 

"Within a year, the hyphen was dropped, and on November 26, 1976, the trade name "Microsoft" was registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico." (Wikipedia article on Bill Gates, accessed 07-13-2011).

Semi-retired filmmaker and Altair programmer Michael Shrayer wrote The Electric Pencil Word Processor, the first word processing program for a personal computer.

Raymond Kurzweil introduced the Kurzweil Reading Machine, the first practical application of OCR technology.

The Kurzweil Reading Machine combined omni-font OCR, a flat-bed scanner, and text-to-speech synthesis to create the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. It was the first computer to transform random text into computer-spoken words, enabling blind and visually impaired people to read any printed materials. 

Dr. Dobbs' Journal of Tiny Basic Calisthenics and Orthodontia was first published from Menlo Park, California, with the computing/orthodontic subtitle, "Running Light without Overbyte."

As irrelevant as the title might have been, Dr. Dobbs' Journal was the first journal focused on software for personal computers. It evolved into the non-orthodontic Dr. Dobbs' Software Tools for the Professional Programmer.

William Henry Gates III (Bill Gates), in his role as "General Partner Micro-Soft", Alubquerque, New Mexico, wrote An Open Letter to Hobbyists, making the distinction between proprietary and open-source software.

Wang Laboratories, Tewksbury, Massachusetts,  introduced the first CRT based word processor, the Wang WPS.

Inspired by Edgar F. Codd's 1970 paper on relational database systems called "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks," Lawrence Ellison founded Software Development Laboratories, in Santa Clara, California. Renamed Relational Software in 1979, the company introduced its first Relational Database Management System (RDBMS), Oracle V2. To give the impression of reliability there was no version 1.

Wang Laboratories, Lowell, Massachusetts, introduced its VS minicomputer system, which became, for a time, one of the most popular office systems, "inaugurating the concept of office automation."

Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling at MIT wrote the interactive fiction text adventure game Zork in the MDL programming language on a DEC PDP-10.

"Zork" was originally MIT hacker jargon for an unfinished program. The implementors named the completed game Dungeon, but by that time the name Zork had already stuck.

Zork was the first text adventure game to see widespread commercial release.

Between 1977 and 1979 computer scientist Donald E. Knuth of Stanford University created the TeX page-formatting language and the Metafont character shape specification language, originally as a way of improving the typography of his own publications. These he described in four publications in 1979:

1. "Mathematical Typography," Bulletin (New Series) of the American Mathematical Society, March 1979, Vol. 1, No. 2, 337-72. Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture, January 4, 1978.

2. TEX, a system for technical text.  A manual published by the American Mathematical Society, June, 1979.

3. Metafont, a system for alphabet design, September, 1979.

4. In December 1979 Digital Press in Bedford, Massachusetts, a division of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), together with the American Mathematical Society issued these three documents in book form as TEX and Metafont. New Directions in Typesetting, with a Foreward by C. Gordon Bell, then Vice President of Engineering at DEC, and a Preface by Knuth.

Preceding the development and wide-acceptance of PostScript (1984) and TrueType (1991), expectations for the impact of TeX and Metafont were appropriately great within the computer community. As a reflection of this, I quote Gordon Bell's 1979 introduction in full:

"Don Knuth's Tau Epison Chi (TeX) is potentially the most significant invention in typesetting in this century. It introduces a standard language for computer typography and in terms of importance could rank near the introduction of the Gutenberg press. The TeX system:

"•understands typography from individual charcters to page design;

"•permits any typewriter, word processing system, computer-based editor, or TeX system editor to be used as an input device with a standard language;

"•can typeset various formats and languages;

"•is structured to be user-extendable to virtually all applications.

"These improvements are benchmarks in typesetting and text creation. To date, computer-based typesetting systems have simply facilitated typesetting. Moreover, the proliferation of word processing systems makes possible the widespread direct transmission of text to typesetting without the intervening typesetting process—provided we use the standard language that TeX offers.

"A direct link between text input and typesetting will permit a drastic restructuring of the journal- and book-publishing industry, allowing it to be oriented substantially more toward the author. Unitl now, even authors with word processing equipment have been unable to participate in the representation of their message in print. Prior to Gutenberg's invention, manuscripts were conceived and designed simultaneously, and often the author's hand shaped the entire final product. The results were beautiful and varied, in contrast to the manufacture of most modern books, which vary only in cover design. With TeX, moreover not only can the author influence his own format and representation, but he also can produce more accurate material than can be rapidly mass-produced, shortening the time between idea and dissemination.

"TeX is significant as a standard language because of the way it understands typography using a framework of boxes and glue in a hierarchical fashion so that any font, page layout, or other typesetting parameter can be set. This is in striking contrast to most typesetting systems, which are built with no generality. Finally, the input form is user-defined by means of a macroprocessor so that virutally any text can be input and can control the typography part of the program. It is this generality and segmentation of function that makes TeX significant.

"This book is about much more than just the Tex system. The Gibbs Lecture presents the twin themes of how typography can help mathematics and how mathematics can help typography, and the material on METAFONT is intriguing and useful in its description of the use of mathematics in type design.

"While the emphasis of TeX is on mathematics, the system is equally applicable to and will no doubt be used in many other domains. Don Knuth, in fact, shows us precisely how the system can humanize basic communciations.

"At Digital, we hope to use TeX immediately, I urge others to adopt and use it so that the language standard can be established.

My copy of the first printing of TeX and Metafont was presented to the San Francisco book designer and book historian Adrian Wilson in February, 1980. Wilson worked in both letterpress and offset and designed many prize-winning books. On the first page of Bell's Foreward Wilson made pencil notes in the margin, taking issue with three points in the third paragraph. It is not clear that Wilson read past the Foreward; however, the points that Wilson made remain valid:

1. "Prior to Gutenberg's invention, manuscripts were conceived and designed simultaneously, and often the author's hand shaped the entire final product." Here Wilson commented, "Very rarely!"  I am unaware of any manuscripts prior to printing, except perhaps for author's manuscripts or the extremely few autograph manuscripts that survived, where it can be demonstrated that the author "shaped the final product" in the sense of its physical appearance on the page rather than in the textual sense. In addition, the process of manuscript copying by different scribes tended to make each manuscript copy different in subtle, or not so subtle ways, from each other.

2. "The results were beautiful and varied, in contrast to the manufacture of most modern books, which vary only in cover design." Here Wilson commented, "not so."  Bell's statement ignored, of course, the incredible diversity of all aspects of the design of "modern books" in addition to their covers.

3. "With TeX, moreover, not only can the author influence his own format and representation. . . ." Here Wilson commented, "author as designer! no." Before desktop publishing (1984-85) the ability of authors who were not programmers to design an acceptable looking book was, of course, highly limited. Even in 2012, when I wrote this database entry, few authors without expert knowledge of book design or graphic arts expertise could produce a genuinely attractively designed book.

Knuth continued his typographic work, issuing a second and larger volume entitled Digital Typography in 1999. This contains a remarkable collection of stories and technical papers concerning the continuation of his work in typography. In 2012 TeX and Metafont remained niche products for composing and scientific books and papers with the market dominated by PostScript and TrueType. As Richard Southall commented in Printer's type in the twentieth century. Manufacturing and design methods (2005) 224, footnote 6, "Donald Knuth's Metafont language, with its radically different approach to the specification of character image configurations, might have provided an alternative, and many ways a better, approach to typemaking if the interface it presented to designers had not been so forbidding."

On March 12, 2013 at a meeting of the Colophon Club in Berkeley, California I heard Knuth deliver a fascinating presentation on how and why he developed TeX and Metafont.  From this I gathered more general understanding of Knuth's system, which from the very beginning he placed in the public domain, and from which he never intended to profit. A more technical explanation of why TeX and Metafont remained niche products may be found in this posting from the Typophile.com website on December 15, 2004: 

"Metafont can only produce bitmap fonts which is a severe limitation. Nowadays, people usually create outline fonts since they are scalable and usable in different resolutions. There are tools that convert .mf to Type 1 or TrueType but this is done by autotracing which results in rather poor quality.

"There is a related product called Metapost, created by John Hobby, which allows parametric creation of PostScript graphics. This was later extended by Boguslaw Jackowski, Piotr Strzelczyk and Janusz Nowacki to MetaType1, an outline-based parametric font creation system. However, just like many other parametric font creation systems (e.g. Font Chameleon, Infinifont, LiveType), it never gained the necessary momentum. With no professional support and no solid user interface, the tools for creating these sorts of fonts were never able to reach a broad user base. Even Multiple Master fonts that had good user interface tools (Fontographer, FontLab) were dropped because handling them turned out to be too complicated and the revenues were too limited.

"Developing mature applications is a long and laborous effort. The commercial market is difficult, which is visible with the fact that numerous efforts such as Fontographer, FontStudio , TypeDesigner or RoboFog "died". The open source community is too weak to develop a good specialty tool of that sort (open source projects work well with mass products such as Mozilla or OpenOffice, with hundreds of engineers working in their spare time or on government/organizational funding).

"Today, with the exception of DTL FontMaster and FontForge (which is free), FontLab is the only font creation application that is actively being developed. First version of FontLab was created 12 years ago and in that process, we have learned that a good user interface is crucial to a success.

"Font creators are mostly designers, not engineers. They need visual tools. Also, type is often too subtle to rely on parametric creation. While it would be tempting to re-use the exactly same shape of a serif on n, m, i and l, often, subtle changes need to be made for best effect. The more subtle and refined the letterforms get, the less the parametric approach is useful. Donald Knuth's Computer Modern isn't a particularly well-designed typeface and frankly, I have never seen a good typeface made with Metafont.

"When people make a profession out of creating type, i.e. they make their living on type design, the issue of a tool being free becomes less relevant. Also, tools such as Metafont are only nominally free. There are no licensing costs but there are substantial costs of maintenance, support and learning. The learning curves are steep, the user communities are small and not integrated, there is no professional support. Therefore, if you work with tools such as Metafont, you're often left on your own. This is a fact often overlooked by those who advertise free or open source software.

"There is a good selection of links about parametric font creation at: http://www.myfonts.com/activity/parametric-fonts/" (accessed 03-13-2013).

C. Wayne Ratliff, working as a contractor at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, wrote a database program he called "Vulcan" (after Mr. Spock of Star Trek) to help him win the office football pool.

Written for his kit-built IMSAI 8080 microcomputer running PTDOS, Ratliff based the program on JPLDIS (Jet Propulsion Laboratory Display Information System), a mainframe (Univac 1108) database product. 

In early 1980, Ratliff and George Tate entered into a marketing agreement.

"Ratliff had given up trying to sell copies of the software for $50 each. Tate thought the product would sell better at $695, so they made a deal and dBASE II was the result. The program was renamed dBASE II because of a belief that a product called "version one" wouldn't sell. The software originally ran on a CP/M computer and then was ported to the IBM PC. In mid-1983 Ashton-Tate purchased the dBASE II technology and copyright from Ratliff, and he joined Ashton-Tate as vice president of new technology."

dBase II became the first best-selling database program for the PC.

Researchers at Xerox PARC wrote a computer worm program that searched out other computer hosts, then copied itself and self destructs after a programmed interval.

Ward Christensen founded the Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS), the first dial-up bulletin board system (BBS) ever brought online, as a program to allow Christensen and other hobbyists in Chicago to exchange information. This was distinct from Community Memory, a BBS established in Berkeley in 1973, that used hard-wired terminals placed around the town.

"In January 1978, Chicago was hit by the Great Blizzard of 1978, which dumped record amounts of snow throughout the midwest. Among those caught in it were Christensen and Randy Suess, who were members of CACHE, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists' Exchange. They had met at that computer club in the mid 1970s and become friends.

"Christensen had created a file transfer protocol for sending binary computer files through modem connections, which was called, simply, MODEM. Later improvements to the program motivated a name change into the now familiar XMODEM. The success of this project encouraged further experiments. Christensen and Suess became enamored of the idea of creating a computerized answering machine and message center, which would allow members to call in with their then-new modems and leave announcements for upcoming meetings.

"However, they needed some quiet time to set aside for such a project, and the blizzard gave them that time. Christensen worked on the software and Suess cobbled together an S-100 computer to put the program on. They had a working version within two weeks, but claimed soon afterwards that it had taken four so that it wouldn't seem like a "rushed" project. Time and tradition have settled that date to be February 16, 1978.

"Because the Internet was still small and not available to most computer users, users had to dial CBBS directly using a modem. Also because the CBBS hardware and software supported only a single modem for most of its existence, users had to take turns accessing the system, each hanging up when done to let someone else have access. Despite these limitations, the system was seen as very useful, and ran for many years and inspired the creation of many other bulletin board systems.

"Ward & Randy would often watch the users while they were online and comment or go into chat if the subject warranted. Sometime online users wondered if Ward & Randy actually existed.

"The program had many forward thinking ideas, now accepted as canon in the creation of message bases or "forums" (Wikipedia article on CBBS, accessed 04-27-2009).

Dan Bricklin, a student at Harvard Business School, and Bob Frankston wrote Visicalc, the first spreadsheet program, for the Apple II. It helped dispel the notion that the Apple II was only a toy for hobbyists. The PC version of Visicalc was called "the first killer app" for the PC.

Robert Metcalf, inventor of Ethernet, founded 3Com. Metcalf convinced DEC, Intel, and Xerox

"to work together to promote Ethernet as a standard, the so-called 'DIX' standard, for 'Digital/Intel/Xerox'; it standardized the 10 megabits/second Ethernet, with 48-bit destination and source addresses and a global 16-bit type field. The standard was first published on September 30, 1980. It competed with two largely proprietary systems, token ring and ARCNET, but those soon found themselves buried under a tidal wave of Ethernet products."

Andrew Economos founded Radio Computing Services. RCS's first product was Selector, a music scheduling system.

"The original Selector was developed on a PDP-11/03 under RT-11 and was programmed in Fortran and FMS-11. The goal of Selector is to help music directors of radio stations to handle day-to-day operations such as daily schedule generation, maintenance of music library and format hours" (Wikipedia article on Radio Computing Services).

Roberta and Ken Williams wrote Mystery House for the Apple II. Containing 70 simple two-dimensional drawings by Roberta Williams,  Mystery House was the first computer adventure game with graphics.  

The game was also eventually released into the public domain.

♦ In the iTunes Store for iPhone and iPod Touch you could buy version 1.0.2 of the program at this link (accessed 12-30-2009):

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=307511510&mt=8

In 1979 Danish American computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup at  the Computer Science Research Center of Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, began developing "C with Classes" as an enhancement to the C programming language developed by Dennis Ritchie for Unix. "C with Classes" was renamed C++ in 1983.

Stroustrup "invented C++, wrote its early definitions, and produced its first implementation. . . chose and formulated the design criteria for C++, designed all its major facilities, and was responsible for the processing of extension proposals in the C++ standards committee" (Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language, 10).

Engineering student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Bruce A. Artwick released A2-FS1 Flight Simulator for the Apple II personal computer through his subLOGIC Corporation. This was the first flight simulator program for a personal computer. 

Artwick began the project by writing a series of articles on flight simulation using computer graphics during 1976. When a magazine editor told him that subscribers were interested in purchasing such a program Artwick founded subLOGIC Corporation to commercialize his ideas. At first the company sold simulators by mail order, but that changed with the related of Flight Simulator FS1, for the Apple II, followed by a release in March 1980 for the TRS-80 with lower quality graphics.

♦ You can view a dynamic simulation of the original program at the Wikipedia at this link.

IBM hired Paul Allen and Bill Gates of Microsoft, then in Bellevue, Washington, to create an operating system (OS) for the new IBM personal computer under development.

Because Microsoft had no OS at the time, they purchased a non-exclusive license to sell a CP/M clone called QDOS ("Quick and Dirty Operating System") from Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products for $25,000.

American computer game and video game designer Eddie Dombrower created the DOM system, the first dance notation software, on an Apple II computer.

DOM allowed choreographers to use a simple system of codes to enter their work. The resulting dance movements were then performed by a figure on screen.

D. C. Wells, E. W. Greisen, and R. H. Harten developed the open source FITS (Flexible Image Transport System), which was first standardized in 1981. It is

"a digital file format used to store, transmit, and manipulate scientific and other images. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy. Unlike many image formats, FITS is designed specifically for scientific data and hence includes many provisions for describing photometric and spatial calibration information, together with image origin metadata.

"A major feature of the FITS format is that image metadata is stored in a human readable ASCII header, so that an interested user can examine the headers to investigate a file of unknown provenance. Each FITS file consists of one or more headers containing ASCII card images (80 character fixed-length strings) that carry keyword/value pairs, interleaved between data blocks. The keyword/value pairs provide information such as size, origin, coordinates, binary data format, free-form comments, history of the data, and anything else the creator desires: while many keywords are reserved for FITS use, the standard allows arbitrary use of the rest of the name-space" (Wikipedia article on FITS, accessed 03-24-2010).

Because of its special features FITS became a very useful format for the long term preservation of digital images. It was also adopted by NASA as a standard, and was also adopted by the Vatican Library.

Writer and computer entrepreneur Adam Osborne and Osborne Computer Corporation, Hayward, California, produced the first commercially successful "portable" computer, the Osborne 1. It weighed twenty-three pounds, ran the CP/M operating system, and sold for $1795, with $2000 worth of software included. Its main deficiencies were a tiny 5 inch (13 cm) display screen and use of single sided, single density floppy disk drives which could not contain sufficient data for practical business applications. Its 23 pound weight meant that the computer was more "luggable" than portable.

Microsoft bought all rights to 86-DOS, otherwise known as QDOS, for Quick and Dirty Operating System, from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000 or $75,000, depending on how the cost is calculated. They renamed it MS-DOS. 

"IBM PC-DOS (and the separately sold MS-DOS, which was licensed therefrom), and its predecessor, 86-DOS, were loosely inspired by CP/M (Control Program / [for] Microcomputers) from Digital Research, which was the dominant disk operating system for 8-bit Intel 8080 and Zilog Z80 based microcomputers. However, PC-DOS never ran on less than an 8088 (16-bit).

"When IBM introduced their first microcomputer in 1980, built with the Intel 8088 microprocessor, they needed an operating system. Seeking an 8088-compatible build of CP/M, IBM initially approached Microsoft CEO Bill Gates (possibly believing that Microsoft owned CP/M due to the Microsoft Z-80 SoftCard, which allowed CP/M to run on an Apple II. IBM was sent to Digital Research, and a meeting was set up. However, the initial negotiations for the use of CP/M broke down—Digital Research wished to sell CP/M on a royalty basis, while IBM sought a single license, and to change the name to 'PC DOS'. DR founder Gary Kildall refused, and IBM withdrew.

"IBM again approached Bill Gates. Gates in turn approached Seattle Computer Products. There, programmer Tim Paterson had developed a variant of CP/M-80, intended as an internal product for testing SCP's new 16-bit Intel 8086 CPU card for the S-100 bus. The system was initially named "QDOS" (Quick and Dirty Operating System), before being made commercially available as 86-DOS. Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for $50,000. This became Microsoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS, introduced in 1981.

"Microsoft also licensed their system to multiple computer companies, who supplied MS-DOS for their own hardware, sometimes under their own names. Microsoft later required the use of the MS-DOS name, with the exception of the IBM variant. IBM continued to develop their version, PC DOS, for the IBM PC. Digital Research became aware that an operating system similar to CP/M was being sold by IBM (under the same name that IBM insisted upon for CP/M), and threatened legal action. IBM responded by offering an agreement: they would give PC consumers a choice of PC DOS or CP/M-86, Kildall's 8086 version. Side-by-side, CP/M cost almost $200 more than PC DOS, and sales were low. CP/M faded, with MS-DOS and PC DOS becoming the marketed operating system for PCs and PC compatibles" (Wikipedia article on DOS, accessed 02-05-2010).

On August 12, 1981 IBM introduced their open architecture personal computer (PC) based on the Intel 8088 processor. The IBM PC  ran PC-DOS, the IBM-branded version of the 16-bit operating system, MS-DOS, provided by Microsoft. The machine was originally designated as the IBM 5150, putting it in the "5100" series, though its architecture was not directly descended from the IBM 5100.

On August 1, 1981 a review of the IBM PC appeared on USENET (accessed 10-16-2009).

Mitchell Kapor, previously head of development at Visicorp, and Jonathan Sachs, with backing from Ben Rosen, founded Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Kapor, who had been a teacher of Transcendental Meditation, named the company after 'The Lotus Position' or "Padmasana.''

IBM introduced the IBM DB2 relational database management system for mainframe computers.

DCA (Defense Communications Agency) and ARPA established the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and IP (Internet Protocol), as the protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, for ARPANET. This led to one of the first definitions of an “internet” as a connected set of networks, specifically those using TCP/IP, and the “Internet” as connected TCP/IP internets.

"A program called 'Elk Cloner' is credited with being the first computer virus to appear 'in the wild'—that is, outside the single computer or lab where it was created." Written by Rich Skrenta, it attached itself to the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system and spread by floppy disk.

In June 1982 Columbia Data Products (CDP) of Columbia, Maryland, introduced the MPC 1600 "Multi Personal Computer," an exact functional copy of the IBM PC model 5150 except for the BIOS, which was developed by a "clean room" reverse engineering process, thus avoiding copyright infringement. IBM had published the bus and BIOS specifications, wrongly assuming that this would be enough to encourage the add-on market, and prevent unlicensed copying of the design.

"As the first IBM PC clone, the MPC was actually superior to the IBM original. It came with 128 KiB RAM standard, compared to the IBM's 64 KiB maximum. The MPC had eight PC expansion slots, with one filled by its video card. Its floppy disk drive interface was built into the motherboard. The IBM PC, in contrast, had only five expansion slots, with the video card and floppy disk controller taking two of them. The MPC also included two floppy disk drives, one parallel and two serial ports, which were all optional on the original IBM PC. The MPC was followed up with a portable PC, the 32 pound (15 kg) "luggable" Columbia VP in 1983" (Wikipedia article on Columbia Data Products, accessed 01-01-2013).

Commodore International, West Chester, Pennsylvania, issued the Commodore 64 — "the first cheap home computer" at the price of $595.

The Commodore 64 looked like a bulky keyboard, but included color graphics, and excelled at playing early video games. Between 1982 and 1984 30,000,000 units were sold, making it the best-selling personal computer model of this era. Roughly 10,000 commercial programs were produced for this computer.

Having obtained a license from subLOGIC Corporation to port Flight Simulator FS-1 to IBM PCs and compatibles, Microsoft in Bellevue, Washington, released the program as Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0. 

♦ You can download films on the history of subLOGIC/Microsoft Flight Simulator made in 2010 and 2006 from the Wikipedia article on the History of Microsoft Flight Simulator (accessed 11-30-2010).

American computer scientist John Warnock and Chuck Gerschke founded Adobe Systems.  At Adobe Warnock developed the PostScript page description language, a simplified version of the InterPress language that he developed at Xerox PARC.

Lawrence Ellison's Relational Software, Menlo Park, California, renamed itself Oracle Systems to align itself with its flagship relational database management system (DBMS), Oracle version 3. This was the first RDBMS with a portable codebase that allowed companies to run their DBMSs on a range of hardware and operating systems, including mainframes, mincomputers, workstations and personal computers.

Work began on computerizing the text of the Oxford English Dictionary, defining "414,825 words backed by five million quotations, of which some two million were actually printed in the dictionary text." This required retyping the entire text into a database.

"And so the New Oxford English Dictionary (NOED) project began. More than 120 keyboarders of International Computaprint Corporation in Tampa, Florida, and Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, USA, started keying in over 350,000,000 characters, their work checked by 55 proof-readers in England. Retyping the text alone was not sufficient; all the information represented by the complex typography of the original dictionary had to be retained, which was done by marking up the content in SGML. A specialized search engine and display software were also needed to access it. Under a 1985 agreement, some of this software work was done at the University of Waterloo, Canada, at the Centre for the New Oxford English Dictionary, led by F.W. Tompa and Gaston Gonnet; this search technology went on to become the basis for the Open Text Corporation. Computer hardware, database and other software, development managers, and programmers for the project were donated by the British subsidiary of IBM; the colour syntax-directed editor for the project, LEXX, was written by Mike Cowlishaw of IBM. The University of Waterloo, in Canada, volunteered to design the database."

The second edition of the OED was published on paper in 1989. 

Japanese software engineer Ryoichi Mori invented a digital products distribution system called superdistribution, incorporating one of the earliest forms of digital rights management.

Mori's  "Software Service System (SSS) took the form of a peer-to-peer-architecture with the following components:

◊"a cryptographic wrapper for digital products that cannot be removed and remains in place whenever the product is copied

◊"a digital rights management system for tracking usage of the product and assuring that any usage of the product or access to its code conforms to the terms set by the product's owner.

◊"an arrangement for secure payments from the product's users to its owner" (Wikipedia article on Superdistribution, accessed 01-03-2010).

During 1983 and the first part of 1984 Phoenix Technologies, then in Boston, Massachusetts, created the first commercially available IBM PC compatible ROM Bios. Licensability of this firmware interface, which would allow a computer to run the same operating system and the same applications as the IBM PC, enabled the rapid expansion of the IBM PC compatible computer industry. 

To defend against the inevitable copyright infringement suits expected to be brought by IBM, Phoenix engineers reverse-engineered the Bios using clean-room design, in which the software engineers had never read IBM's reference manuals: 

"Phoenix developed a 'clean room' technique that isolated the engineers who had been contaminated by reading the IBM source listings in the IBM Technical Reference Manuals. The contaminated engineers wrote specifications for the BIOS APIs and provided the specifications to 'clean' engineers who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code. Those 'clean' engineers developed code from scratch to mimic the BIOS APIs. This technique provided Phoenix with a defensibly non-infringing IBM PC-compatible ROM BIOS. Because the programmers who wrote the Phoenix code had never read IBM's reference manuals, nothing they wrote could have been copied from IBM's code, no matter how closely the two matched" (Wikipedia article on Phoenix Technologies, accessed 01-01-2013).

In Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., 714 F.2d 1240 (3d Cir. 1983) an appellate level court in the United States held for the first time that a computer's operating system could be protected by copyright.

"Franklin Computer Corporation [Burlington, New Jersey] introduced the Franklin Ace 100, a clone of Apple Computer's Apple II, in 1982. Apple quickly determined that substantial portions of the Franklin ROM and operating system had been copied directly from Apple's versions, and on May 12, 1982, filed suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. It cited the presence of some of the same embedded strings, such as the name "James Huston" (an Apple programmer), and "Applesoft," on both the Apple and Franklin system disks.

"Franklin admitted that it had copied Apple's software but argued that it would have been impractical to independently write its own versions of the software and maintain compatibility, although it said it had written its own version of Apple's copy utility and was working on its own versions of other software. Franklin argued that because Apple's software existed only in machine-readable form, and not in printed form, and because some of the software did not contain copyright notices, it could be freely copied. The Apple II firmware was likened to a machine part whose form was dictated entirely by the requirements of compatibility (that is, an exact copy of Apple's ROM was the only part that would "fit" in an Apple-compatible computer and enable its intended function), and was therefore not copyrightable.

"The district court found in favor of Franklin. However, Apple appealed the ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit which, in a separate case decided three days after Franklin won at the lower level, determined that both a program existing only in a written form unreadable to humans (e.g. object code) and one embedded on a ROM were protected by copyright. (See Williams Elec., Inc., v. Artic Int'l, Inc., 685 F.2d 870 (1982)). The Court of Appeals overturned the district court's ruling in Franklin by applying its holdings in Williams and going further to hold that operating systems were also copyrightable" (Wikipedia article on Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., accessed 01-01-2013).

In January 1983 Mitch Kapor's Lotus Development Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts released Lotus 1-2-3. An integrated spreadsheet, graphics package, and database manager, it became the first "killer app" for the PC. In 1983 sales of 1-2-3 reached $54,000,000, making Lotus the largest independent software vendor in the world.

ARPANET required that all connected machines use TCP/IP. TCP/ IP became the core Internet protocol and replaced NCP (Network Control Program) entirely.

Microsoft,  Bellevue, Washington, introduced Microsoft Word 1.0 for MS-DOS. This was the first word processor to make extensive use of the computer mouse.

Richard Stallman of MIT announced the GNU free software project on the net.unix-wizards and net.usoft newsgroups.

Paul V. Mockapetris of the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California, designed and introduced the Domain Name System (DNS), for ARPANET.  The six original domains were .edu, .gov, .com, .mil, .org, .net, and .int.

At Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Frederick Cohen demonstrated a virus-like program on a VAX11/750 system. The program was able to install itself to, or infect, other system objects.

In 1984 Cohen used the phrase "computer virus" – as suggested by his teacher Leonard Adleman – to describe the operation of such programs in terms of "infection". He defined a 'virus' as "a program that can 'infect' other programs by modifying them to include a possibly evolved copy of itself.”

American scientist and inventor Bob Doyle, his wife Holly, and son Rob introduced the first Desktop Publishing program, MacPublisher, for the Macintosh.  

"MacPublisher introduced WYSIWYG layout for multi-column text and graphics, but it would not have been possible without graphics primitives like QuickDraw that Bill Atkinson had originally developed for the Apple Lisa computer. QuickDraw was incorporated in the PASCAL toolbox for the new Macintosh and was the basis for MacPaint." (Wikipedia article on MacPublisher).

In 1984 John Warnock and Charles Geschke of Adobe Systems, San Jose, California, marketed the PostScript page description language by releasing releasing PostScript Level 1, enabling scalable PostScript digital type fonts and desktop publishing.

In 1984 American writer and programmer William Chamberlain of New York published The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed, a volume of prose and poetry that, except for Chamberlain's introduction, was entirely written by a computer program called RACTER that had been developed by Chamberlain with Thomas Etter. The program was given credit for authorship on the title page which read: The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructed. Computer Prose and Poetry by Racter. Illustrations by Joan Hall. Introduction by William Chamberlain. The bright red cover of the paperback stated that this was "The First Book Ever Written by a Computer." It also called it "A Bizzare and Fantastic Journey into the Mind of a Machine." The blurb stated that the book contained:

"• Poetry and limericks

"• Imaginatige Dialogues

"• Aphorisms

"• Interviewss

"• The published short story , "Soft Ions" and more.

"You are about to enter a strange, deranged, and awesome world of images and fantasies– the 'thoughts' of the most advanced prose-creating computer program today."

The program, the name of which was an abbreviation for raconteur, could generate grammatically consistent sentences with the help of a pre-coded grammar template. Although certainly readable in the sense that each sentence displayed a competent grammar, any anxiety that the program could replace human authors would have been put to rest after a single glance at the computer-generated narrative:

"At all events my own essays and dissertations about love and its endless pain and perpetual pleasure will be known and understood by all of you who read this and talk or sing or chant about it to your worried friends or nervous enemies. Love is the question and the subject of this essay. We will commence with a question: does steak love lettuce? This question is implacably hard and inevitably difficult to answer. Here is a question: does an electron love a proton, or does it love a neutron? Here is a question: does a man love a woman or, to be specific and to be precise, does Bill love Diane? The interesting and critical response to this question is: no! He is obsessed and infatuated with her. He is loony and crazy about her. That is not the love of steak and lettuce, of electron and proton and neutron. This dissertation will show that the love of a man and a woman is not the love of steak and lettuce. Love is interesting to me and fascinating to you but it is painful to Bill and Diane. That is love!" 

According to Chamberlain's introduction to the book, RACTER ran on a CP/M machine. It was written in "compiled BASIC on a Z80 micro with 64K of RAM." 

The book was imaginatively published by Warner Books, extensively illustrated with black and white collages combining 19th century imagery with computer graphics by New York artist Joan Hall.

Describing the "author," the book stated on its first preliminary page:

"The Author: Racter (the name is short for raconteur) is the most highly developed artificial writer in the field of prose synthesis today. Fundamentally different from artifical intelligence programming, which tries to replicate human thinking, Racter can write original work without promptings from a human operator. And according to its programmer, 'Once it's running, Racter needs no input from the outside world. It's just cooking by itself.' Racter's work has appeared in OMNI magazine and in 1983 was the subject of a special exhibit at the Whitney Museum in New York. Now at work on a first novel, Racter operates on an IMS computer in New York's Greenwich Village, where it shares an apartment with a human computer programmer."

Ray Ozzie left Lotus Development Corporation to found Iris Associates, Littleton, Massachusetts, the purpose of which was to develop groupware, or collaborative software, called "Notes."

[In 2004, nearing the 20th anniversary of the founding of Iris Associates, IBM reported that Notes had over 110 million users.]

Apple, Cupertino, California, introduced the LaserWriter laser printer. It cost $6,995. The Mac's ability to run PageMaker for "desktop publishing" in association with Apple's LaserWriter printer caused sales of the Mac to take off.

Richard Stallman of MIT published the GNU Manifesto in Dr. Dobbs' Journal of Software Tools. This was an outgrowth of the GNU Project, the goal of which was to develop "a sufficient body of free software [...] to get along without any software that is not free."

Quantum Computer Services, Vienna, Virginia, launched an online bulletin-board service, Quantum Link (Q-Link), for users of Commodore-64 and 128 personal computers. The company renamed itself America Online (AOL) in 1991.

Paul Brainerd, founder of Aldus Corporation, Seattle, Washington, introduced PageMaker, the first widely-used WYZIWIG page layout program for personal computers.

Initially PageMaker ran exclusively on the Apple MacIntosh, but a PC version followed in 1986, running under Windows 1.0.

To assist in marketing the software Brainerd coined the term “desktop publishing.”

Aldus Corporation was purchased by Adobe Systems in 1994.

Richard Stallman of MIT founded the Free Software Foundation to support the free software movement.

Microsoft, Bellevue, Washington, introduced Windows 1.0 for the PC. Windows 1.0 was a graphical user interface (GUI) multi-tasking operating environment extension of MS-DOS rather than a completely new operating system.

The Brain boot sector virus (aka Pakistani flu) was released. Brain is considered the first IBM PC compatible virus, and the program responsible for the first IBM PC compatible virus epidemic. Also known as Lahore, Pakistani, Pakistani Brain, the virus was created in Lahore, Pakistan by 19 year old Pakistani programmer, Basit Farooq Alvi, and his brother, Amjad Farooq Alvi.

The Standard Generalized Markup Language (ISO 8879:1986 SGML) was accepted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Geneva, Switzerland.

SGML was:

"an ISO-standard technology for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 defines generalized markup:

"Generalized markup is based on two novel postulates:

"Markup should describe a document's structure and other attributes, rather than specify the processing to be performed on it, as descriptive markup need be done only once, and will suffice for future processing. Markup should be rigorous so that the techniques available for processing rigorously-defined objects like programs and data bases, can be used for processing documents as well.

"SGML descended from IBM's Generalized Markup Language (GML) that Charles Goldfarb, Edward Mosher, and Raymond Lorie developed in the 1960s. Goldfarb, editor of the international standard, coined the 'GML' term using their surname initials. As a document markup language, SGML was originally designed to enable the sharing of machine-readable large-project documents in government, law, and industry. Many of these documents must remain readable for several decades — a long time in the information technology field. SGML also was extensively applied by the military, and the aerospace, technical reference, and industrial publishing businesses. The advent of the XML profile has made SGML suitable for widespread application for small-scale, general-purpose use" (Wikipedia article on Standard Generalized Markup Language. accessed 12-29-2009).

In 1987, American software engineer Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, which he called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an employee at Industrial Light & Magic, who urged Thomas to turn Display into a fully-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six-month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with John on the program, after which Thomas renamed the program ImagePro. But since the name ImagePro was already taken, Thomas renamed the program Photoshop, and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner.  Roughly 200 copies were shipped under that arrangement.  

During this time, John Knoll gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple in Cupertino, and to Russell Brown, art director at Adobe Systems in San Jose. In September 1988 Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute. In February 1990 Adobe releated Photoshop 1.0 for the Macintosh.

Programmer and photographer Bill Atkinson wrote HyperCard for Apple Computer. HyperCard was one of the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web. "It combined database capabilities with a graphical, flexible, user-modifiable interface. HyperCard also featured HyperTalk, written by Dan Winkler, a powerful and easy-to-learn programming language for manipulating data and the user interface. HyperCard users often employed it as a programming system for Rapid Application Development of different kinds of applications, database and otherwise."

Lotus Development, Cambridge, Massachusetts, introduced Lotus Notes developed by Ray Ozzie at Iris Associates. Lotus Notes was the first commercial networked-based communications and collaboration, or groupware, program. Ozzie derived the Notes concept from his experience working with PLATO Notes at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Physicist and mathematician Stephen Wolfram and Wolfram Research, Champaign, Illinois, introduced Mathematica 1.0, "a computational software program used in scientific, engineering, and mathematical fields and other areas of technical computing" with powerful two dimensional and three dimensional visualization tools.

Mathematica evolved from Symbolic Manipulation Program, usually called SMP, "a computer algebra system designed by Chris A. Cole and Stephen Wolfram at Caltech circa 1979 and initially developed in the Caltech physics department under Wolfram's leadership . . . . It was first sold commercially in 1981 by the Computer Mathematics Corporation of Los Angeles which later became part of Inference Corporation; Inference Corp. further developed the program and marketed it commercially from 1983 to 1988. SMP was essentially Version Zero of the more ambitious Mathematica system.

"SMP was influenced by the earlier computer algebra systems Macsyma (of which Wolfram was a user) and Schoonschip (whose code Wolfram studied)" (Wikipedia article on Symbolic Manipulation Program, accessed 05-16-2009).

Joseph D. Becker of Xerox Corporation, Rochester, New York, Lee Collins (also at Xerox) and Mark Davis of Apple developed a universal character set. Becker coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project in his report, Unicode 88:

"1.1. Abstract

"This document is a draft proposal for the design of an international/multilingual text character coding system, tentatively called Unicode.

"Unicode is intended to address the need for a workable, reliable world text encoding. Unicode could be roughly described as 'wide-body ASCII' that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the world's living languages. In a properly engineered design, 16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose.

"In the Unicode system, a simple unambiguous fixed-length character encoding is integrated into a coherent overall architecture of text processing. The design aims to be flexible enough to support many disparate (vendor-specific) implementations of text processing software.

"A general scheme for character code allocations is proposed (and materials for making specific individual character code assignments are well at hand), but specific code assignments are not proposed here. Rather, it is hoped that this document will evoke interest from many organizations, which could cooperate in perfecting the design and in determining the final character code assignments" (http://www.unicode.org/history/unicode88.pdf, accessed 01-29-2010).

The first computer worm to attract wide attention, the Morris worm or Internet worm, written by Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student at Cornell, quickly infected a great number of computers on the Internet.

"It propagated through a number of bugs in BSD Unix and its derivatives. Morris himself was convicted under the US Computer Crime and Abuse Act and received three years probation, community service and a fine in excess of $10,000."

At CERN Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first web page on a NeXT workstation.

During the Christmas holiday Tim Berners-Lee wrote the software tools necessary for a working World Wide Web:

1, The first web browser called WorldWideWeb.

2. A WYSIWYG HTML editor

3. The first Web server, CERN httpd. It was operational on Christmas Day 1990.

Adobe, San Jose, California, introduced the Portable Document Format (PDF) to aid in the transfer of documents across platforms. PDF is a file format used to represent a document in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system used to create it.

Apple introduced TrueType in competition with Adobe's PostScript. The first TrueType fonts available were Times Roman, Helvetica and Courier.

Linus Torvalds, a 21-year-old student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, wrote the Linux kernel.  This was the origin of a software development project that brought the open-source movement into the mainstream. Torvalds started with a task switcher in Intel 80386 assembly language and a terminal driver. Then, on August 26, 1991, he posted the following to comp.os.minix, a newsgroup on Usenet:

"Hello everybody out there using minix-

"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing since April, and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat (same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other things).

"I've currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to work. This implies that I'll get something practical within a few months, and I'd like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are welcome, but I won't promise I'll implement them :-)

Linus (torva...@kruuna.helsinki.fi)

"PS. Yes - it's free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is NOT protable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have :-(."

After that, many people contributed code to the project. By September 1991, Linux version 0.01 was released. It had 10,239 lines of code.

WorldWideWeb - Executive Summary by Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, posted on the alt.hypertext newsgroup, gave a short summary of the World Wide Web project, explained where to download a web server and line mode browser, and made it available all over the world at no cost.

"The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system."

"The project started with the philosophy that much academic information should be freely available to anyone. It aims to allow information sharing within internationally dispersed teams, and the dissemination of information by support groups."

Marc Andreesen of the Software Development Group,  National Center for Supercomputing Applications,  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced on Usenet the creation of the NCSA Mosaic browser 0.10, and the introduction of the image tag.

In April 1993 AT&T introduced the AT&T EO Personal Communicator, the first tablet computer with wireless connectivity via a cellular phone. The device, which provided wireless voice, email, and fax communications, was developed by GO/Eo, a subsidiary of GO Corporation, both of which were acquired by AT&T in 1993. As advanced as it was, the AT&T Personal Communicator was probably far ahead of the market. EO Inc., 52% owned by AT&T, failed to meet its revenue targets and shut down on July, 1994.

"Two models, the Communicator 440 and 880 were produced and measured about the size of a small clipboard. Both were powered by the AT&T Hobbit chip, created by AT&T specifically for running code from the C programming language. They also contained a host of I/O ports - modem, parallel, serial, VGA out and SCSI. The device came with a wireless cellular network modem, a built-in microphone with speaker and a free subscription to AT&T EasyLink Mail for both fax and e-mail messages.

"Perhaps the most interesting part was the operating system, PenPoint OS, created by GO Corporation. Widely praised for its simplicity and ease of use, the OS never gained widespread use. Also equally compelling was the tightly integrated applications suite, Perspective, licensed to EO by Pensoft" (Wikipedia article on EO Personal Communicator, accessed 02-03-2010).

Ken Maki, The AT&T EO Travel Guide. (1993).

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign introduced Mosaic, the first graphics-based Web browser, designed and programmed for Unix's X Window System by Marc Andreesen and Eric Bina.

On April 30, 1993 CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, published documents which released the World Wide Web software into the public domain.

Martijn Koster developed ALIWEB, (Archie Like Indexing for the Web). Along with the World Wide Web Wanderer, this is a candidate for the first web search engine. It was demonstrated at the First International World-Wide Web Conference in May 1994.

"Aliweb allowed users to submit their webpages and add the page description with which they wanted them to be indexed. This empowered webmasters, who could define the terms that would lead users to their pages and also avoided setting bots (as the Wanderer) which used up bandwidth. Aliweb was not very successful as not many people submitted their sites."

HTTP (Web) packets surpassed FTP traffic as the largest-volume Internet protocol.

Marc Andreesen, one of the programmers of Mosaic, and James H. Clark of Silicon Graphics founded Mosaic Communications Corporation in Mountain View, California. Mosaic Communications was the first company to exploit the potential of the Mosaic web browser, and the first company to exploit the economic potential of the World Wide Web.

The first "full text" crawler-based web search engine, Web Crawler, created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, became operational.

"Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any web page, which became the standard for all major search engines since. It was also the first one to be widely known by the public."

Louis J. "Lou" Montulli II at Netscape Communications Corporation invented the HTTP cookie.

"Together with John Giannandrea, Montulli wrote the initial Netscape cookie specification the same year. Version 0.9beta of Mosaic Netscape, released on October 13, 1994, supported cookies. The first actual use of cookies (out of the labs) was made for checking whether visitors to the Netscape Web site had already visited the site. Montulli applied for a patent for the cookie technology in 1995, and US patent 5774670 was granted in 1998. Support for cookies was integrated in Internet Explorer in version 2, released in October 1995.

"The introduction of cookies was not widely known to the public, at the time. In particular, cookies were accepted by default, and users were not notified of the presence of cookies. Some people were aware of the existence of cookies as early as the first quarter of 1995, but the general public learned about them after the Financial Times published an article about them on February 12, 1996. In the same year, cookies received lot of media attention, especially because of potential privacy implications. Cookies were discussed in two U.S. Federal Trade Commission hearings in 1996 and 1997" (Wikipedia article on HTTP cookie, accessed 05-09-2009).

San Francisco entrepreneur Ariel Poler founded Internet Profiles Corporation ( I/PRO), the first commercial web analytics vendor, producer of the first log analyzer.

"The company emerged as the early market leader in the developing field of web usage measurement, partly because of its partnership with the venerable Neilsen Media Research . . . and Neilsen Media Services in . . . 1995." (Peters, Computerized Monitoring and Online Privacy [1999] 343).

Marc Andreesen of Mosaic Communications Corporation released Mosaic Netscape 0.9, beta on USENET: 

"Mosaic Communications Corporation is a making a public version of Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta available for anonymous FTP. Mosaic Netscape is a built-from-scratch Internet navigator featuring performance optimized for 14.4 modems, native JPEG support, and more.

"You can FTP Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Beta from the following locations:

"ftp.mcom.com in /netscape

"gatekeeper.dec.com in /pub/net/infosys/Mosaic-Comm

"lark.cc.ukans.edu in /Netscape

"ftp.meer.net in /Netscape doc.ic.ac.uk in /packages/Netscape

"archie.au in /pub/misc/netscape

"ftp.cica.indiana.edu in /pub/pc/win3/winsock/nscape09.zip (PC only) mac.archive.umich.edu in /mac (Mac only)

"Please make sure to read the README and LICENSE files.  

An up-to-date listing of mirror sites can be obtained at any time by sending email to rele...@mcom.com.  

"Subject to the timing and results of this beta cycle, Mosaic Communications will release Mosaic Netscape 1.0, also available free for personal use via the Internet. It will be subject to license terms; please review them when and if you obtain Mosaic Netscape 1.0.  

"A commercial version of Mosaic Netscape 1.0, including technical support from Mosaic Communications, will be available upon completion of the beta cycle. Contact us at i...@mcom.com for more information.

"Have fun!

"Marc and the gang

i...@mcom.com, http://mosaic.mcom.com/"

One month later, in November 1994 the company renamed itself Netscape Communications Corporation.

Sony launched its first PlayStation game console in Japan.

WebtraffIQ.com developed the first commercial web page tagging system.

Robert McCool, author of the original NCSA HTTPd web server, and a group of collaborative software developers initially known as the Apache Group, made the first official public release (0.6.2) of the Apache HTTP Server software in April 1995. McCool wrote the first version of NCSA HTTPd as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, while working on the original NCSA Mosaic team.

"Since April 1996 Apache has been the most popular HTTP server software in use. As of September 2009 Apache served over 54.48% of all websites and over 66% of the million busiest."

"There have been two explanations of the project's name. According to the Apache Foundation, the name was chosen out of respect for the Native American tribe of Apache (Indé), well-known for their endurance and their skills in warfare. However, the original FAQ on the Apache Server project's website, from 1996 to 2001, claimed that The result after combining [the NCSA httpd patches] was a patchy server. The first explanation was supported at an Apache Conference and in an interview in 2000 by Brian Behlendorf, who said that the name connoted 'Take no prisoners. Be kind of aggressive and kick some ass'. Behlendorf then contradicted this in a 2007 interview, stating that 'The Apache server isn't named in honor of Geronimo's tribe' but that so many revisions were sent in that 'the group called it 'a patchy Web server' '. Both explanations are probably appropriate" (Wikipedia article on Apache HTTP server, accessed 02-02-2010).

Netscape Communications, Mountain View, California, had a very successful IPO.

The stock, initially intended to be offered at $14 per share, was offered at double that for the IPO, and reached $75 on the first day of trading.

This was later considered the beginning of the "dot-com bubble."

IBM announced the DB2 Universal Database, the first fully scalable, Web-ready database management system. It was called “universal” because it could sort and query alphanumeric data as well as text documents, images, audio, video and other complex objects.

In 1996 IBM databases managed about 70 percent of the world’s business information.

IBM introduced continuous speech recognition technology for Mandarin Chinese. In developing the product, researchers identified and classified thousand of vocal tones and homonyms, created an algorithm that deconstructed syllables into parts, and developed a new language model to transform spoken words into the right combination drawn from 6,700 Chinese characters.

IBM also announced software that gave people a hands-free way to dictate text and navigate the desktop with the power of natural speech.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, students of computer science at Stanford, began collaboration at on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website.

"Larry, who had always enjoyed tinkering with machinery and had gained some notoriety for building a working printer out of Lego™, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines. Afflicted by the perennial shortage of cash common to graduate students everywhere, the pair took to haunting the department's loading docks in hopes of tracking down newly arrived computers that they could borrow for their network."

"Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed BackRub, the predecessor to the Google search engine, while working on an early library digitization project at Stanford that was funded in part by the National Science Foundation’s Digital Libraries Initiative. And PageRank, Google’s core search algorithm, which orders sites in search results based on the number of other sites that link to them, is simply a computer scientist’s version of citation analysis, long used to rate the influence of articles in scholarly print journals" Roush, "The Infinite Library Does Google's plan to digitize millions of print books spell the death of libraries; or their rebirth?" (Technology Review.com, May 2005, http://www.technologyreview.com/web/14408/, accessed 03-19-2009).

Nettracker.com produced the first web log analyzer with "drill-down and ad-hoc analysis."

W3C released the eXtensible Markup Language (XML) specification, allowing web pages to be tagged with descriptive labels.

The short range wireless networking standard, Bluetooth, was announced.

Keyhole, Inc., a software development firm in Mountain View, California, specializing in geospatial data visualization applications, was founded. The name "Keyhole" paid homage to the original KH reconnaissance satellites, also known as Corona satellites, which were operated by the U.S. between 1959 and 1972.  Google acquired the company in 2004.

"Keyhole's marquee application suite, Earth Viewer, emerged as the highly successful Google Earth application in 2005; other aspects of core technology survive in Google Maps, Google Mobile and the Keyhole Markup Language" (Wikipedia article on Keyhole, Inc., accessed 11-29-2010).

American computer programmer Bram Cohen of San Francisco released the first implementation of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol for distributing large amounts of data.

Microsoft launched the Xbox game console, its first entry into the gaming console market.

"According to the book Smartbomb, by Heather Chaplin and Aaron Ruby, the remarkable success of the upstart Sony PlayStation worried Microsoft in late 1990s. The growing video game market seemed to threaten the PC market which Microsoft had dominated and relied upon for most of its revenues. Additionally, a venture into the gaming console market would diversify Microsoft's product line, which up to that time had been heavily concentrated on software."

Programmer Bram Cohen, author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol, and entrepreneur Ashwin Navin founded BitTorrent, Inc. in San Francisco.

In 2005 the FBI replaced Carnivore with commercially available network monitoring software such as NarusInsight, produced by Narus, a subsidiary of Boeing, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.

"Features of NarusInsight include:

"♦ Scalability to support surveillance of large, complex IP networks (such as the Internet)

"♦ High-speed Packet processing performance, which enables it to sift through the vast quantities of information that travel over the Internet.

"♦ Normalization, Correlation, Aggregation and Analysis provide a model of user, element, protocol, application and network behaviors, in real-time. That is it can track individual users, monitor which applications they are using (e.g. web browsers, instant messaging applications, email) and what they are doing with those applications (e.g. which web sites they have visited, what they have written in their emails/IM conversations), and see how users' activities are connected to each other (e.g. compiling lists of people who visit a certain type of web site or use certain words or phrases in their emails).

"♦ High reliability from data collection to data processing and analysis.

"♦ NarusInsight's functionality can be configured to feed a particular activity or IP service such as security, lawful intercept or even Skype detection and blocking.

"♦ Compliance with CALEA and ETSI.

"♦ Certified by Telecommunication Engineering Center (TEC) in India for lawful intercept and monitoring systems for ISPs.

"The intercepted data flows into NarusInsight Intercept Suite. This data is stored and analyzed for surveillance and forensic analysis purposes.

"Other capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Narus partner products, such as Pen-Link, offer the ability to quickly analyze information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules.

"A single NarusInsight machine can monitor traffic equal to the maximum capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 DSL lines or 195,000 telephone modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of one NarusInsight installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million broadband users.

"According to a company press release, the latest version of NarusInsight Intercept Suite (NIS) is "the industry's only network traffic intelligence system that supports real-time precision targeting, capturing and reconstruction of webmail traffic... including Google Gmail, MSN Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gawab Mail (English and Arabic versions)."

"It can also perform semantic analysis of the same traffic as it is happening, in other words analyze the content, meaning, structure and significance of traffic in real time. The exact use of this data is not fully documented, as the public is not authorized to see what types of activities and ideas are being monitored" (Wikipedia article on Narus [company], accessed 01-14-2012). 

Sony's PlayStation and PS 1 reached "a combined total of 102.49 million units shipped", becoming the first video game console to reach the 100 million mark.

Alluding to Wolfgang von Kempelen's eighteenth-century automaton, The Turk, which purported to automate chessplaying when this was impossible, Amazon.com launched the Amazon Mechanical Turk:

"a crowdsourcing marketplace that enables computer programs to co-ordinate the use of human intelligence to perform tasks which computers are unable to do."

This was  the first business application using Collaborative Human Interpreter, a programming language "designed for collecting and making use of human intelligence in a computer program. One typical usage is implementing impossible-to-automate functions."

Using object detection technology, researchers at the University of Buffalo, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the Adaptive Information Cluster at Dublin City University, in association with Google, developed software for scanning historical manuscripts in a way that recognized handwriting to make electronic texts of these manuscripts searchable.

In August 2006 Google began introduction of web-based Google Apps productivity software.

Physicist and software engineer Blaise Agüera y Arcas, architect of Seadragon, and co-creator of Photosynth, demonstrated Photosynth in a video dowloadable at the TED website at this link.

Using techniques of computational bibliography, in collaboration with Paul Needham at Princeton's Scheide Library, Agüera y Arcas also did significant original research in the technology of the earliest printing from movable type.

Arun Kumar and others at IBM Research - India, New Delhi,  published "WWTW: The World Wide Telecom Web", an Internet designed for illiterate populations:

"our vision of a voice-driven ecosystem parallel to that of the WWW. WWTW is a network of interconnected voice sites that are voice driven applications created by users and hosted in the network. It has the potential to enable the underprivileged population to become a part of the next generation converged networked world. We present a whole gamut of existing technology enablers for our vision as well as present research directions and open challenges that need to be solved to not only realize a WWTW but also to enable the two Webs to cross leverage each other."

"An innovative tool to analyse and identify computer file formats has won the 2007 Digital Preservation Award. DROID, developed by The National Archives in London, can examine any mystery file and identify its format. The tool works by gathering clues from the internal 'signatures' hidden inside every computer file, as well as more familiar elements such as the filename extension (.jpg, for example), to generate a highly accurate 'guess' about the software that will be needed to read the file. . . .

"Now, by using DROID and its big brother, the unique file format database known as PRONOM, experts at the National Archives are well on their way to cracking the problem. Once DROID has labelled a mystery file, PRONOM's extensive catalogue of software tools can advise curators on how best to preserve the file in a readable format. The database includes crucial information on software and hardware lifecycles, helping to avoid the obsolescence problem. And it will alert users if the program needed to read a file is no longer supported by manufacturers.

"PRONOM's system of identifiers has been adopted by the UK government and is the only nationally-recognised standard in its field."

Apple opened its online iTunes App Store. At launch it contained 522 Apps for the iPhone, including 135 free programs.

On September 23, 2008 T-Mobile, headquartered in Bonn, Germany, announced the first cell phone powered by the Android operating system, developed by Google in association with the Open Handset Alliance.

Apple's iTunes App Store reported on October 21, 2008  that it had sold 200,000,000 million downloads sinces its opening on July 10, 2008. By this time the store iTunes App Store had 5500 Apps available for purchase.

Ipoque, based in Leipzig, Germany, estimated that in February 2009 BitTorrent, based in San Francisco, California, was responsible for more than 45-78% of all P2P traffic and 27-55% of all Internet traffic, depending on geographical location.

At the Google IO Developers Conference in San Francisco Google demonstrated Google Wave, "an ambitious, if incomplete, attempt to reinvent email and Internet communication in general" developed by Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who previously developed Google Maps.  The opensource program would be available to developers worldwide.

The Google Wave demonstration is available on a 1.5 hour video available on YouTube. When I accessed the video on June 1, 2009 it had already been downloaded 1,173,600 times and had already received 3,225 ratings.

Solid Oak Software Inc, developer of CyberSitter, alleged that an Internet-filtering program called Green Dam Youth Escort produced in China and mandated by the Chinese government, contained stolen portions of the company's code.

"Solid Oak Software, the developer of CyberSitter, claims that the look and feel of the GUI used by Green Dam mimics the style of CyberSitter. But more damning, chief executive Brian Milburn said, was the fact that the Green Dam code uses DLLs identified with the CyberSitter name, and even makes calls back to Solid Oak's servers for updates" (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2348705,00.asp, accessed 06-13-2009).

Solid Oak Software Inc. said it will try to stop PC makers from shipping computers with the software.

"Solid Oak said Friday that it found pieces of its CyberSitter filtering software in the Chinese program, including a list of terms to be blocked, instructions for updating the software, and an old news bulletin promoting CyberSitter. Researchers at the University of Michigan who have been studying the Chinese program also said they found components of CyberSitter, including the blacklist of terms.

"Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., the Chinese company that made the filtering software, denied stealing anything. "That's impossible," said Bryan Zhang, Jinhui's founder, in response to Solid Oak's charges.

"The allegations come as PC makers such as Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are sorting through a mandate by the Chinese government requiring that all PCs sold in China as of July come with the filtering software. Representatives of the two big U.S. companies said they are working with trade associations to monitor new developments related to the Chinese software" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124486910756712249.html, accessed 06-13-2009).

In November 2009 more than 100,000 apps were available for download from Apple's App Store, making it the largest such retailer in the world.

"The App Store launched in July 2008 with just 500 applications. The store is now available in 77 countries, which has contributed to what Apple said Wednesday is well over 2 billion downloads" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10390454-37.html)

On January 5, 2010 Apple announced that more than three billion apps were downloaded from its App Store by iPhone and iPod touch users worldwide.  

" 'Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months—this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before,' said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. 'The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon ' " (http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/01/05appstore.html, accessed 01-05-2010).

"Exploit code for the zero-day hole in Internet Explorer linked to the China-based attacks on Google and other companies has been released on the Internet, Microsoft and McAfee warned on Friday.

"Meanwhile, the German federal security agency issued a statement on Friday urging its citizens to use an alternative browser to IE until a patch arrives.  

" 'We still only see limited targeted attacks affecting Internet Explorer 6,' Jerry Bryant, senior security program manager lead at the Microsoft Security Response Center, said in a statement. 'While newer versions of Internet Explorer are affected by this vulnerability, mitigations exist that make exploitation much more difficult.'

"McAfee researchers have seen references to the code on mailing lists and confirmed that it has been published on at least one Web site, the company's Chief Technology Officer George Kurtz wrote in his blog. 'The exploit code is the same code that McAfee Labs had been investigating and shared with Microsoft earlier this week,' he said.

" 'The public release of the exploit code increases the possibility of widespread attacks using the Internet Explorer vulnerability,' Kurtz wrote. 'The now-public computer code may help cybercriminals craft attacks that use the vulnerability to compromise Windows systems. Popular penetration testing tools are already being updated to include this exploit.' Microsoft issued a warning on Thursday about the new hole and said it was working on a patch. The vulnerability affects IE 6, 7 and 8 on all the modern versions of Windows, including Windows 7, according to Microsoft's advisory. Microsoft said IE 6 was the browser version being used on the computers that were targeted in the attacks. Google disclosed the attacks targeting it and other U.S. companies on Tuesday and said the attacks originated in China. Human rights activists who use Gmail also were targeted, Google said.

"The company said it discovered the attacks in mid-December and while it did not specifically implicate the Chinese government, it says that as a result of the incidents, it may withdraw from doing business in China. Sources familiar with the attack code say the attacks are similar to previous attacks on U.S. corporations that were linked to the Chinese government or proxies operating for the government. Source code was stolen from some of the more than 30 Silicon Valley companies targeted in the attack, sources said. Adobe has confirmed that it was targeted by an attack, and sources have said Yahoo, Symantec, Juniper Networks, Northrop Grumman, and Dow Chemical also were targets.

"McAfee says references in the IE-related attack code it analyzed indicate that the attackers called the operation 'Aurora' and that the attack was extremely sophisticated" (http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10436083-245.html, accessed 01-16-2010).

In U.S. Federal Court in Oakland, California Oracle Corporation, based in Redwood Shores, California, won a $1,300,000,000 copyright infringement judgment against SAP AG, headquartered in Walldorf, Germany.

The judgment—an indication of the size and scale of the software industry— was a result of a lawsuit filed by Oracle in 2007 claiming that a unit of SAP U.S. made hundreds of thousands of illegal downloads and several thousand copies of Oracle’s software to avoid paying licensing fees, and in an attempt to steal customers. 

"The verdict, which came after one day of deliberations, is the biggest ever for copyright infringement and the largest U.S. jury award of 2010, according to Bloomberg data. The award is about equal to SAP’s forecasted net income for the fourth quarter, excluding some costs, according to the average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. . . .

"The verdict is the 23rd-biggest jury award of all time, according to Bloomberg data. The largest jury award in a copyright-infringement case previously was $136 million verdict by a Los Angeles jury in 2002 in a Recording Industry Association of America lawsuit against Media Group Inc. for copying and distributing 1,500 songs by artists including Elvis Presley, Madonna and James Brown, according to Bloomberg data" (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-11-24/oracle-wins-1-3-billion-from-sap-in-downloading-case.html, accessed 11-24-2010).

On July 13, 2011, SAP filed a motion seeking judgment that actual damages should not be based on hypothetical licenses, and for a new trial for the amount of damages.

"On September 1, 2011, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton granted the judgment as a matter of law on the hypothetical license damages, and vacated the $1.3 billion award amount. In her ruling Judge Hamilton stated:

" 'Oracle’s suggestion – that upon proof of infringement, copyright plaintiffs are automatically entitled to seek “hypothetical” license damages because they are presumed to have suffered harm in the form of lost license fees – has no support in the law.'

"SAP's motion for a new trial was granted, conditioned on Oracle rejecting a remittitur of $272 million, the 'maximum amount of lost profits and infringer’s profits sustainable by the proof.' Judge Hamilton further stated:

" 'Determining a hypothetical license price requires an 'objective, not a subjective” analysis, and '[e]xcessively speculative' claims must be rejected.' " (Wikipedia article on Oracle Corporation v. SAP AG, accessed 04-24-2013).

Photos and messages sent through an app called Snapchat, developed in Venice Beach, California, vanish in seconds. In a world where users know that any image or message posted in social media, or sent through email, may be preserved forever, Snapchat's feature of automatically deleting information rather than preserving it found a growing niche. The feature was popular enough for Facebook to develop a competing ap called Facebook Poke.

"Although Snapchat says that it cannot see or store copies of content, the service still allows nimble-fingered users to capture screenshots of photos. Mr. Murphy calls that mechanism a 'feature, not a vulnerability' of the service. Each time a screenshot of a Snapchat is taken, the sender is alerted that the image has been captured. There have also been reports of loopholes and hacks that let people save videos and screenshots. 'Nothing ever goes away on the Internet,' Mr. Spiegel acknowledged.  

"Snapchat has its origins at Stanford, where Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy first met as fraternity brothers. Mr. Spiegel presented a prototype of Snapchat in spring 2011 to one of his classes, but it was greeted as impractical and silly by his classmates.  

"Undeterred, Mr. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy shared an updated version for the iPhone with about 20 friends in September 2011. A few weeks in, they started seeing an influx of new users, paired with unusual spikes in activity, peaking between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.  

"It turned out the activity was centered around a high school in Orange County. Mr. Spiegel’s mother had told his cousin, who was a student at the school, about the app, which then spread throughout the school.

"Other high school students in Southern California picked it up, with the number of daily active users climbing from 3,000 to 30,000 in a month in early 2012. Mr. Spiegel took a leave from Stanford last June and Mr. Murphy quit his job and the pair raised a small round of financing and moved to Los Angeles to work on the application full time.  

"Since the overwhelming majority of Snapchat’s users are age 13 to 25, the application has provoked concerns from parents. The company acknowledges that the service can be misused, but does not dwell on it. 'We are not advertising ourselves as a secure platform,' Mr. Spiegel said. 'It’s a communication platform. It’s not our job to police the world or Snapchat of jerks' (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/technology/snapchat-a-growing-app-lets-you-see-it-then-you-dont.html, accessed 02-09-2013).

On January 22, 2011 the Apple App Store completed its countdown for its Ten Billionth App downloaded from the Apple App Store.

Confession: A Roman Catholic App by Little i Apps, LLC, South Bend, Indiana:

"Designed to be used in the confessional, this app is the perfect aid for every penitent. With a personalized examination of conscience for each user, password protected profiles, and a step-by-step guide to the sacrament, this app invites Catholics to prayerfully prepare for and participate in the Rite of Penance. Individuals who have been away from the sacrament for some time will find Confession: A Roman Catholic App to be a useful and inviting tool.  

"The text of this app was developed in collaboration with Rev. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Executive Director of the Secretariat for Doctrine and Pastoral Practices of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and Rev. Dan Scheidt, pastor of Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Mishawaka, IN. The app received an imprimatur from Bishop Kevin C. Rhodes of the Diocese of Fort Wayne – South Bend. It is the first known imprimatur to be given for an iPhone/iPad app.

From one of our users which we stand by:

=============================

"it does not and can not take the place of confessing before a validly ordained Roman Catholic priest in a Confessional, in person, either face to face, or behind the screen. Why? Because the Congregation on Divine Worship and the Sacraments has long ruled that Confessions by electronic media are invalid and that ABSOLUTION BY THE PRIEST must be given in person because the Seal of the Confessional must be Protected and for the Sacrament to be valid there has to be both the matter and the form which means THE PRIEST.

============================ -

"Custom examination of Conscience based upon age, sex, and vocation (single, married, priest, or religious)

"- Multiple user support with password protected accounts

"- Ability to add sins not listed in standard examination of conscience - Confession walkthrough including time of last confession in days, weeks, months, and years

"- Choose from 7 different acts of contrition

"- Custom interface for iPad

"- Full retina display support" (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/confession-a-roman-catholic/id416019676?mt=8#, accessed 02-11-2011)

Cost: $1.99

"Armies of Expensive Lawyers Replaced by Cheaper Software," an article by John Markoff published in The New York Times, discussed the use of "e-discovery" (ediscovery) software which uses artificial intelligence to analyze millions of electronic documents from the linguistic, conceptual and sociological standpoint in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of the hundreds of lawyers previously required to do the task.

"These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.  

"David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the United States economy is being 'hollowed out.' New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.  

" 'There is no reason to think that technology creates unemployment,' Professor Autor said. 'Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.'

"Automation of higher-level jobs is accelerating because of progress in computer science and linguistics. Only recently have researchers been able to test and refine algorithms on vast data samples, including a huge trove of e-mail from the Enron Corporation. 

“ 'The economic impact will be huge,' said Tom Mitchell, chairman of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. 'We’re at the beginning of a 10-year period where we’re going to transition from computers that can’t understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language.'

Author and inventor T. J. Waters developed a program for signing and inscribing ebooks called autography.  Because the autography inscription is sent over the Internet the inscription can be done remotely or in person.

"Word Wizard ($3.99) turns your iPad into a talking typewriter, and a powerful language-learning tool that is ideal for a child learning to read.

"To build a word, you simply touch a letter and drag it next to another letter. It snaps into place and pronounces the result in clear speech. This is an important breakthrough in reading instruction, because it leverages the iPad’s size, powerful speech synthesis abilities and touchscreen, so that every letter can be a building block of phonetically accurate sound.

"There are two modes: Movable Alphabet, for free exploration of word combinations; and Spelling Quiz, a talking spelling test with 173 built-in word lists (e.g., nature words, or 1,000 most frequently used words). In the spelling tests, you hear the word, and must spell it using the same alphabet strip used in the Movable Alphabet. Because the letters are arranged alphabetically, this is not good for typing or fast text entry. There’s a British voice mode, plus the ability to change the speed or tone of the voice, uppercase or lowercase letters, and two backgrounds. And yes, even vulgarities are read out loud, in clear speech. Consider yourself warned" (http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/speak-n-spell-for-the-ipad-generation/?nl=technology&emc=cta3, accessed 08-18-2011).

"L'Escapadou is a family design studio dedicated to creating fun, creative and entertaining apps for iPad and iPhone, with a focus on educational apps for kids.  

"We are a homeschooling family, and watching our children - 4 and 7 years old - learn has always been a great inspiration for the educational tools we make. Most have also been inspired by the Montessori method. We also have a strong belief that creativity is essential to a kid’s development and well-being, which led us to create toys such as Draw with Stars !  

"All the family is working to create great user experience for kids. Design and graphics are done by Dad and Mum, Programming is done by Dad, and testing and feedback is done by our two daughters !  

"L'Escapadou was created after the launch of the iPad, with the belief that the iPad is a great tool for kids to learn and be creative. “Dad” has developped and designed applications on Apple computers since Apple IIe and holds a PhD in computer Science, and “Mom” is a translator currently busy home-educating her daughters" (http://lescapadou.com/LEscapadou_-_Fun_and_Educational_applications_for_iPad_and_IPhone/About.html, accessed 03-26-2012).

♦ http://blog.lescapadou.com/2011/10/how-ive-made-200000-in-ios-education.html?spref=bl, accessed 03-26-2012.

“ 'Where am I?' and 'What's around me?' are two questions that cartographers, and Google Maps, strive to answer. With Google Maps’ 'My Location' feature, which shows your location as a blue dot, you can see where you are on the map to avoid walking the wrong direction on city streets, or to get your bearings if you’re hiking an unfamiliar trail. Google Maps also displays additional details, such as places, landmarks and geographical features, to give you context about what’s nearby. And now, Google Maps for Android enables you to figure out where you are and see where you might want to go when you’re indoors.

"When you’re inside an airport, shopping mall or retail store, a common way to figure out where you are is to look for a freestanding map directory or ask an employee for help. Starting today, with the release of Google Maps 6.0 for Android, that directory is brought to the palm of your hands, helping you determine where you are, what floor you're on, and where to go indoors.

"Detailed floor plans automatically appear when you’re viewing the map and zoomed in on a building where indoor map data is available. The familiar 'blue dot' icon indicates your location within several meters, and when you move up or down a level in a building with multiple floors, the interface will automatically update to display which floor you’re on. All this is achieved by using an approach similar to that of ‘My Location’ for outdoor spaces, but fine tuned for indoors." (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/new-frontier-for-google-maps-mapping.html, accessed. 12-1-2011)

According to the Official Google Blog, app downloads from the Android Market at the beginning of December 2011 exceeded 10 billion downloads, with a growth rate of one billion app downloads per month.

On October 26, 2012 Microsoft released the Windows 8 operating system to the general public. Development of Windows 8 started in 2009 before the release of its predecessor, Windows 7, the last iteration of Windows designed primarily for desktop computers. Windows 8 introduced very significant changes primarily focused toward mobile devices, tablets and cell phones which use touch screens, and:

"to rival other mobile operating systems like Android and iOS, taking advantage of new or emerging technologies like USB 3.0, UEFI firmware, near field communications, cloud computing and the low-power ARM architecture, new security features such as malware filtering, built-in antivirus capabilities, a new installation process optimized for digital distribution, and support for secure boot (a UEFI feature which allows operating systems to be digitally signed to prevent malware from altering the boot process), the ability to synchronize certain apps and settings between multiple devices, along with other changes and performance improvements. Windows 8 also introduces a new shell and user interface based on Microsoft's "Metro" design language, featuring a new Start screen with a grid of dynamically updating tiles to represent applications, a new app platform with an emphasis on touchscreen input, and the new Windows Store to obtain and/or purchase applications to run on the operating system" (Wikipedia article on Windows 8, accessed 12-14-2012).

On December 13, 2012 MIT's technologyreview.com published an interview with Julie Larson-Green, head of product development at Microsoft, in which Larson-Green explained why Microsoft decided it was necessary to rethink and redesign in a relatively radical manner the operating system used by 1.2 billion people:

Why was it necessary to make such broad changes in Windows 8?

"When Windows was first created 25 years ago, the assumptions about the world and what computing could do and how people were going to use it were completely different. It was at a desk, with a monitor. Before Windows 8 the goal was to launch into a window, and then you put that window away and you got another one. But with Windows 8, all the different things that you might want to do are there at a glance with the Live Tiles. Instead of having to find many little rocks to look underneath, you see a kind of dashboard of everything that’s going on and everything you care about all at once. It puts you closer to what you’re trying to get done. 

Windows 8 is clearly designed with touch in mind, and many new Windows 8 PCs have touch screens. Why is touch so important? 

"It’s a very natural way to interact. If you get a laptop with a touch screen, your brain clicks in and you just start touching what makes it faster for you. You’ll use the mouse and keyboard, but even on the regular desktop you’ll find yourself reaching up doing the things that are faster than moving the mouse and moving the mouse around. It’s not like using the mouse, which is more like puppeteering than direct manipulation. 

In the future, are all PCs going to have touch screens? 

"For cost considerations there might always be some computers without touch, but I believe that the vast majority will. We’re seeing that the computers with touch are the fastest-selling right now. I can’t imagine a computer without touch anymore. Once you’ve experienced it, it’s really hard to go back.

Did you take that approach in Windows 8 as a response to the popularity of mobile devices running iOS and Android? 

"We started planning Windows 8 in June of 2009, before we shipped Windows 7, and the iPad was only a rumor at that point. I only saw the iPad after we had this design ready to go. We were excited. A lot of things they were doing about mobile and touch were similar to what we’d been thinking. We [also] had differences. We wanted not just static icons on the desktop but Live Tiles to be a dashboard for your life; we wanted you to be able to do things in context and share across apps; we believed that multitasking is important and that people can do two things at one time. 

Can touch coexist with a keyboard and mouse interface? Some people have said it doesn’t feel right to have both the newer, touch-centric elements and the old-style desktop in Windows 8. /

"It was a very definite choice to have both environments. A finger’s never going to replace the precision of a mouse. It’s always going to be easier to type on a keyboard than it is on glass. We didn’t want you to have to make a choice. Some people have said that it’s jarring, but over time we don’t hear that. It’s just getting used to something that’s different. Nothing was homogenous to start with, when you were in the browser it looked different than when you were in Excel."

On January 17, 2013 the Philadelphia Tribune announced that Zora Ball, a seven year old first grader at the Harambee Institute of Science and Technology Charter School in Philadelphia, was the youngest person ever to create a full version of a mobile game app. Zora created the app using the Bootstrap programming language. She unveiled the app at the University of Pennsylvania’s “Bootstrap Expo.”

A much-anticipated new smartphone by Samsung, the South Korean multinational conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, purports to incorporate a radically new interactive reading device:

"Samsung’s next big smartphone, to be introduced this month, will have a strong focus on software. A person who has tried the phone, called the Galaxy S IV, described one feature as particularly new and exciting: Eye scrolling.

"The phone will track a user’s eyes to determine where to scroll, said a Samsung employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. For example, when users read articles and their eyes reach the bottom of the page, the software will automatically scroll down to reveal the next paragraphs of text.

"The source would not explain what technology was being used to track eye movements, nor did he say whether the feature would be demonstrated at the Galaxy S IV press conference, which will be held in New York on March 14. The Samsung employee said that over all, the software features of the new phone outweighed the importance of the hardware.

"Samsung’s booth at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Indeed, Samsung in January filed for a trademark in Europe for the name “Eye Scroll” (No. 011510674). It filed for the “Samsung Eye Scroll” trademark in the United States in February, where it described the service as “Computer application software having a feature of sensing eye movements and scrolling displays of mobile devices, namely, mobile phones, smartphones and tablet computers according to eye movements; digital cameras; mobile telephones; smartphones; tablet computers" (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/samsungs-new-smartphone-will-track-eyes-to-scroll-pages/?hp, accessed 03-05-2013).

When I wrote this entry in March 2013 the Wikipedia article on Samsung stated that Samsung Electronics was the "world's largest information technology company" measured by 2012 revenues. It had retained the number one position since 2009. It was also the world's largest producer of mobile phones, and the world's second largest semiconductor producer after Intel Corporation.

On April 30, 1993 CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, published documents which released the World Wide Web software into the public domain.

"To mark the [twentieth] anniversary of the publication of the document that made web technology free for everyone to use, CERN is starting a project to restore the first website and to preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web. To learn more about the project and the first website, visit http://first-website.web.cern.ch"

"This project aims to preserve some of the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web. For a start we would like to restore the first URL - put back the files that were there at their earliest possible iterations. Then we will look at the first web servers at CERN and see what assets from them we can preserve and share. We will also sift through documentation and try to restore machine names and IP addresses to their original state. Beyond this we want to make http://info.cern.ch - the first web address - a destination that reflects the story of the beginnings of the web for the benefit of future generations."