Computers

February 10, 1996

World chess champion Garry Kasparov loses a game to the computer Deep Blue during a match set up using standard championship rules. This was the first time a computer defeated a world chess champion using these rules (although chess computers had been kicking my butt since the 1980’s). Kasparov went on to defeat Deep Blue 4-2 during this match. However, he lost to Deep Blue a year later, marking the first time a computer defeated a world chess champion in a match.

February 8, 1945

A calculator patent is filed for the Automatic Sequence Control Calculator, commonly known as the Harvard Mark I, an early computer. The Mark I was a large electro-mechanical computer that could perform the four basic arithmetic functions and handle 23 decimal places. A multiplication took about five seconds.

February 7, 2003

After losing a chess match to the computer Deep Blue in 1997, world chess champion Gary Kasparov and the computer Deep Junior battle to a draw.

February 6, 1998

The V.90 modem standard is announced and agreed upon. This ended a couple of years of customer confusion, as two competing 56k modem protocols (K56Flex and X2) were in common use at the time. The V.90 standard unified the protocols and was crafted specifically to allow both types of modems to be upgraded via firmware. V.90 was also called V.last by some, as it was expected to be the last possible upgrade to modem technology. It virtually was, because even though V.92 later supplanted V.90, it didn’t increase the top-end speed of modem bandwidth and by that time, broadband access was already eating away at dial-up marketshare.