Computers
The First Computer “Bug”
September 9, 1945
Operators of the Harvard Mark II find a moth trapped in relay #70 in panel F. The bug is taped to their troubleshooting log where it was written, “First actual case of bug being found”. This was not the first use of the term “bug” for computer problems, but this was the first time the term “debug” was used.
Last IBM “Stretch” Computer Shut Down
September 5, 1980
The last IBM 7030 “Stretch” mainframe in active use is decommissioned at Brigham Young University. The first Stretch was delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1961, giving the model almost 20 years of operational service. The Stretch was famous for many things, but perhaps most notably it was the first IBM computer to use transistors instead of vacuum tubes, it was the first computer to be designed with the help of an earlier computer, and it was the world’s fastest computer from 1961 to 1964.
Aldus – Adobe Merger Finalized
August 31, 2004
Aldus, the company that created PageMaker – considered the world’s first desktop publishing application – merges with Adobe, the company that created PostScript – which was the page description language powering many early laser printers. The combination of Pagemaker running on Apple’s Macintosh and printing to the Apple’s PostScript-powered LaserWriter sparked the desktop publishing revolution in the 1980’s.
The Birth of Linux
August 25, 1991
Linus Torvalds posts a message to the Internet newsgroup comp.os.minix with the subject line “What would you like to see most in minix?” This is the first announcement that he is working on an operating system that will one day become Linux.