Organize | Wang Qilong
Exhibiting | CSDN（ID：CSDNnews）
Through "the present in history", the future can be seen from the past, and the future can be changed from the present.
Today is December 8, 2021, 160 years ago today, the early French film artist Méliès was born. Méliès was a stage magician who used his magician's intuition to discover and pioneer the basic techniques of photography: stop-and-shoot, slow motion, darkening, fade-out, overprinting, and two exposures; Mélières pioneered the film industry and art film, and his Journey to the Moon was the world's first science fiction film and the first artwork to be used in computer restoration techniques. Looking back at computer history, December 8 also saw many key events that had a lot of impact on the course of our technology.
December 8, 1947: The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company is founded
Image source: CSDN Downloaded from The Oriental IC
On December 8, 1947, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company was founded. The company was founded by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who lost the "Father of Computers Scramble" on September 30; however, they had not officially lost their ENIAC patents, but had only quarreled with the administration of the University of Pennsylvania.
Before founding Eckert-Mauchly Computer, Mauchly studied the computing needs of the company's potential customers. For six months in 1944, he prepared a memorandum and detailed every conversation he had with potential customers; for example, Mauchly met with William Madow, a U.S. Census Bureau official, to discuss the computing equipment the government wanted: The Census Bureau was particularly keen to reduce the number of punch cards that had to be managed at each census. Mauchly also met with Solomon Kullback, an officer in the Army Signal Corps, to discuss passwords and ciphers; the officer said he needed many "faster, more flexible" computers. Mauchly carefully analyzed EDVAC's encryption and decryption capabilities and agreed with Eckert that the government is in great demand for their future products.
By the spring of 1946, Eckert and Mauchly had secured a U.S. Army contract for the University of Pennsylvania and had designed the EDVAC computer, ENIAC's successor, at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. However, the new university policy forced Eckert and Mauchly to sign up to transfer intellectual property to their inventions, leading to their resignation, which led to a long delay in EDVAC's design work; after trying to join IBM and John von Neumann's team at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, they decided to start their own company in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company.
After several divisional mergers, Eckert and Mauchly's computer company began producing BINACs for Northrop aircraft and UNIVAC until Grace Murray Hopper joined Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company as a senior mathematician in 1949. In 1950, before UNIVAC was completed, the company became a division of the Lander Company of Remington and was a major challenger to IBM throughout the 1970s.
Source: Wikipedia
December 8, 2001: D language released
On December 8, 2001, the D language was released. The D language is a general-purpose programming language that supports multiple programming paradigms such as object orientation. The D language is derived from C++ and incorporates some features of languages such as Java, C#, and Eiffel. The D language was released by Digital Mars, developed by CEO Walter Bright, and added by Alexandre Rescu after version D 2.0. Walter Bright is an expert in the compiler field and founder of Digital Mars; he also developed the early strategy game Empire, implementing the first compiler to compile C++ source code directly into machine code; Bright worked at Facebook and now focuses on D.
The design of D comes from practical lessons learned in C++ usage, not from a theoretical point of view. D follows many C/C++ concepts while discarding some concepts, so D is not fully compatible with C/C++ code. D implements the functionality of C++, implementing design by contract, unit testing, true modularity, automated memory management (garbage collection), first class arrays, associative arrays, dynamic arrays, array slices, nested functions (nested functions), internal categories, restriction forms of closures, anonymous functions, compile-time function execution, lazy computation, and innovative template syntax. D preserves the performance of C++ for low-end programming and adds full inline assembler support. Multiple inheritance in C++ was replaced by a java single inheritance and interface hybrid style. The syntax for declarations, statements, and expressions for D is almost the same as in C++.
The inline assembler symbolizes the difference between D and application languages such as Java and C#. Inline assemblers let programmers enter machine-specific assembly language code, like standard D code—techniques typically used by system programmers to access the processor's low-end functions and execute programs such as operating systems and drivers directly in a hardware interface. D Has built-in support for file annotations, but so far only the Digital Mars implementation has a file generator.
The D language is not popular in China, nor does it have a complete ecology; the birth of the D language is based on the definition of a system-level language, and its initial competitor is C++. However, the official D language did not expect today in 2021, the separation of front and back ends, the dominance of the mobile Internet, and the rise of cloud services. Will you learn a new language without going with the flow? Feel free to write down your thoughts and share your insights in the comments section.
Source: Wikipedia, Baidu Encyclopedia
December 8, 2004: IBM sells computing to Lenovo Group
On December 8, 2004, IBM sold its $12 billion annual computer business PSG to Lenovo, china's largest personal computer manufacturer at the time. This is no ordinary deal, it has gone through 13 months of negotiations and negotiations, and at the beginning of the cooperation, the operational efficiency of the two sides is still not comparable to the direct sales model of rival Dell, because Lenovo still produces PCs based on predictions and delivers products to consumers through the dealer channel.
After the acquisition of IBM's PC division, Lenovo's international headquarters will be moved to New York, managed by IBM executives, and IBM will also hold a portion of Lenovo's shares; legally speaking, this is a merger or joint venture, but in fact, the deal is a win-win for both parties. Under the partnership at that time, IBM retained the personal computer business, but did not retain the personal computer division; on the other hand, Lenovo could further expand the international market. Phillip De Marcillac, an analyst at IDC, once commented: "Lenovo and IBM both got what they wanted from this deal, so it's a win-win situation." ”
For IBM, getting rid of the PC business was the biggest benefit it could get out of the deal. In the first half of 2004, IBM's Personal Systems division had sales of $9.4 billion and pretax profit of just $70 million; industry analysts had previously argued that IBM could boost the company's overall operating profit margins by selling its PC business. Moreover, IBM can make a profit by reselling PCs. Seventeen years ago, this incident made Lenovo officially enter the international market, and gradually formed today's computer giant; do you think that the cooperation with IBM is the origin of lenovo's current situation? Feel free to share your insights in the comments section.
December 8, 2005: Renren was founded
On December 8, 2005, the intranet was established, and the intranet is now known as the Renren Network, which was once regarded as a Chinese SNS website similar to Facebook, and was also one of the earliest campus social network platforms in Chinese mainland; the previous intranet used student users as the main user group, but after changing its name to Renren, it has changed its strategy of completely focusing on student groups, and more attempts to expand the user base to the off-campus society, with the intention of expanding its target user group. With the rise of the WeChat circle of friends, Renren's traffic has fallen sharply and is declining, and now Renren has transformed into a live broadcast platform; users can also communicate on Renren, share information, and user-created content, and can also play online games, participate in group buying, listen to music and so on.
Founded on December 8, 2005, the intranet was founded by several university students, including Wang Xing, Wang Huiwen, Lai Binqiang and Tang Yang from Tsinghua University and Tianjin University. The intranet was acquired by Thousand Oaks Interactive in October 2006, and at the end of the same year, Thousand Oaks Interactive's 5Q campus network and intranet were merged. On August 14, 2009, the intranet was renamed Renren. The basic concept of the original intranet is to restrict the registration of users with specific university IP addresses or university email addresses (after changing the name to Renren, it is no longer specifically limited), and users can upload their own photos, write logs, sign messages, etc. after registration.
In July 2008, intranet officially launched an open platform strategy that allows third-party developers to create and publish application plug-ins using the Renren API. There is also an additional app tab bar on the home page. In a sense, the platform borrows from Facebook's experience, and some popular plugins have long been widely used on Facebook. However, the poor performance of some renren interfaces has also caused dissatisfaction among developers. When the intranet first launched the open platform protocol, it was questioned by many industry insiders. Critics mainly argue that the protocol is not open enough and that there is not enough respect for the rights and interests of participating developers. The first article of the agreement is that the program of restricting developers must not conflict with the intranet business, and the subsequent provisions limit all applications to the intranet, limiting the possibility of third-party websites promoting on the intranet. Since then, the intranet has said it has received similar feedback from users and will make changes to some of the terms of the open agreement.
With the rise of WeChat, Renren's traffic has declined sharply since 2015, so Renren gradually abandoned its original social functions and began to dabble in live broadcasting in 2016. In August of the same year, renren's app was redesigned into a live video broadcasting platform. "Live broadcast" instead of "new things" as the first screen, after the user opens the Renren App, the first thing they see is not the latest developments of their friends, but the popular anchors who are live broadcasting. In 2017, renren's PC side also changed the homepage content from a social platform to a live broadcast for everyone. The original social Timeline page was moved to the "What's New" page, which required the user to manually click to open it. In 2021, what social platforms are you using now? Feel free to share in the comments section.
December 8, 2018: Evelyn Berezin, the inventor of the first computer word processor, passes away
Evelyn Berezin, born in 1925, was an American computer programmer who designed the first computer word processor in history and assisted in the design of the first computer aviation reservation system. Her inventions liberated secretarial clerks from repetitive work and laid the foundation for document editing software such as Word. Modern people use mobile phones and computers every day, if there is no "copy and paste" function, what will happen when processing text? It's hard to imagine.
In an era when computers were still in their infancy and few women were involved in their development, Aveline Bereson didn't just design the first real word processor; in 1969, she served as founder and president of Redactron Corporation, the world's first company specializing in manufacturing and selling revolutionary machines. For secretaries who made up 6 percent of the U.S. workforce at the time, word processors appeared in offices like magic boxes, freeing people from the shackles of having to retype and eliminating the need for monotonous repetitive typing. These machines are bulky, slow, and noisy, but they can easily edit, delete, cut, and paste text.
During nearly a decade at Teleregister, Bereeson used the then new transistor technology to develop a flight booking system for airline United Airlines. The system could communicate with 60 cities with a response time of just 1 second, making it one of the largest computer systems in the world at the time and had been running for 11 years without problems. She also participated in the development of the first computerized banking system, the weapons target calculator used by the U.S. Department of Defense, and the system for calculating the amount of bets placed per horse on the racetrack.
Source: Wikipedia
"Why is this woman not famous?" British writer and entrepreneur Gwyn Headley asked in a blog post in 2010. "Without Ms. Bereeson, there would be no Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, the Internet, word processors, spreadsheets; without her, there would be nothing that could connect business to the 21st century."
Over time, praise for Aveline Bereeson's early accomplishments seems to have faded, perhaps because of the speed of technological change, the growing focus on corporate competitors, and the tendency of the tech world to undermine women's achievements. In 2015, in an interview with the media, Bereson told the reasons for her entrepreneurship at that time. She said that even though she excelled in the computer field, she was still subject to gender discrimination at the time and could not be promoted to management. At the same time, she believed that the typewriter had become an important office tool, but these tedious and repetitive typing tasks were still quite inefficient, so she decided to set her own portal.
Aveline Bereson held 9 computer-related patents in her lifetime. Her most famous product is the Data Secretary, a screenless device, as big as a small refrigerator, including a keyboard for typing; the entire product is preset with 13 basic document editing functions such as deleting, copying, pasting, cutting, etc., and later iterations of data secretary have gradually joined the display. Today, the final data secretary is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
On December 8, 2018, Aveline Bereson, who died of illness in New York, USA at the age of 93, introduced copy-paste functionality to word processing computers until the 1970s, when word processors faced obsolescence with the advent of personal computers. In her own words: "When word processing became an application on the computer desktop, the era of word processors came to an end." "However, the concept of copying and pasting did not disappear with the advent of computers, but became indispensable with the development of the times.
【Welcome to contribute】Taking history as a mirror, you can know the rise and fall. Computer science development so far, there are many crucial events, people, welcome all friends to build together to build "today in history", submission email: [email protected].