The First Electronic Computer Unveiled

ENIACFebruary 14, 1946

The much-anticipated ENIAC is unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania. Considered the first fully electronic computer (as compared to electro-mechanical designs) ENIAC calculated 5,000 operations per second — 1,000 times faster than its contemporaries. ENIAC occupied over 1,500 square feet of space, weighed 30 tons, and used 18,000 vacuum tubes. However, it couldn’t get YouTube.

1234567890 Day!

1234567890 DayFebruary 13, 2009

Unix time passed 1,234,567,890 seconds at exactly 23:31:30 (UTC). Hey, geeks gotta have a reason to party too!

Apollo Computer Incorporated

Apollo WorkstationFebruary 13, 1980

Apollo Computer is incorporated in Chelmsford, MA. From 1980 to 1987, Apollo was the largest manufacturer of network workstations. In 1989, Hewlett-Packard Company acquired Apollo in a $476 million deal.

She Was Also Famous for Tennis

Anna Kournikova VirusFebruary 12, 2001

Jan de Wit sends out an email stating that it is a picture of the famous tennis player Anna Kournikova. Rather than being a picture of the Russian known more for her looks than her play (although she was ranked as high as #8 in the world in singles and #1 in doubles), it was a malicious script that tried to send itself to every address in a user’s address book and e-mail inbox (Windows users only, of course). The malware was so efficient, it was known to be spreading twice as fast as the “Love Bug” virus that devastated corporate networks a year earlier. The moral of the story is that men are easily manipulated.

A Computer Defeats a World Chess Champion

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.

A Patent is Filed for the Harvard Mark I

Harvard Mark I ComputerFebruary 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.

Kasparov Redeems Himself … Sort Of

Garry KasparovFebruary 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.

V.90 Announced

ModemFebruary 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.

Genesis of “Vaporware”

VaporwareFebruary 3, 1986

The term “vaporware” is first used by Philip Elmer-DeWitt in a TIME magazine article. The term is now commonly used to describe software that has been long announced but hasn’t actually been released. At the time, many experts believed Microsoft was guilty of using vaporware announcements to keep customers from purchasing software from other companies (by convincing them that a Microsoft version was just around the corner).

TRS-80 Born

TRS-80February 2, 1977

The prototype of the TRS-80 computer is shown to Charles Tandy, the CEO of the Tandy Corporation, owner of the Radio Shack chain of stores. He agrees to begin production based on this demonstration and the computer goes on sale in August. “TRS” stood for Tandy Radio Shack. The relatively inexpensive TRS-80 helped to spur the acceptance of the personal computer in the home.