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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 16, 2021, in 1998 today, the "Window of the Capital" site was officially opened, becoming China's first large-scale "government network"; from this day 23 years ago, Sina, Sohu and other portals gradually appeared, people began to communicate directly with the mayor through the online mayor's mailbox, and the Internet officially entered the life of the Chinese people. Looking back at December 16 in the history of technology, what other key events occurred on that day?
December 16, 1917: Arthur C. Clarke, a well-known science fiction writer, is born
Arthur Charles Clarke was born on December 16, 1917, a well-known British writer and inventor known for writing science fiction novels. Clarke's best-known science fiction work is 2001: A Space Odyssey; the book was made by director Stanley Kubrick in 1968 as a film of the same name, which became a classic of science fiction films. Clark died in Sri Lanka on March 19, 2008, at the age of 90. Just before his death, he finished proofreading his last book, The Last Theorem, which was published in 2008. Liu Cixin, the author of "The Three-Body Problem", once said personally that "Clark made me embark on the road of science fiction, and the shock it brought is still unforgettable", and it is precisely because of Clark's influence and inspiration that he is often able to create a magnificent but extremely simple science fiction world in his works.
Source: Wikipedia
Born in Somerset, England, Clark loved looking up at the stars and reading old American science fiction magazines as a child. After secondary school, he was offered a job as an auditor in the pensions department of the Board of Trustees because he could not afford to pay for college; later, in 1934 Clark joined the British Interstellar Society.
During World War II, Clark joined the RAF as a radar technician and was involved in the development of early warning radar defense systems. Wartime Clark primarily operated the entry radar, and his early non-science fiction novels, the semi-autobiographical Glide Path, were set in this context. Clark served as a corporal instructor at the Royal Air Force's Radio School No.9 and retired in 1946 with the rank of Captain in the Air Force, attending King's College London, where he graduated with honours with a Bachelor of Mathematics and Physics.
In 1945, Clark proposed the idea of geostationary satellites for long-distance communications. He began working as a full-time writer in 1952, devoting himself to science fiction, and in 1986 Clark won the Nebula Master of Science Fiction Award, a symbol of lifelong achievement, and established the Arthur Clark Award, which was awarded to the best science fiction published in the United Kingdom.
It is often said that the world in the eyes of programmers is divided into two, part of the real world, part of the world of code, and science fiction is one of the ways to express their whimsy; early science fiction has been conceiving cosmic life and artificial intelligence, and now these imaginations are becoming a reality step by step. Do you usually read science fiction? Do you believe that there are alien civilizations depicted in science fiction novels such as "The Three-Body Problem"? Feel free to vote in this issue and share your insights in the comments section.
Source: Wikipedia, Baidu Encyclopedia
December 16, 1947: The world's first transistor is born
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify or convert electrical signals and power and is one of the basic building blocks of modern electronics; transistors are made up of semiconductor materials and typically have at least three terminals for connecting to electronic circuits. On December 16, 1947, John Bardeen, Walter Bratton, and William Shockley co-invented the world's first transistor; Bardeen and Bratton invented the semiconductor transistor, and Shockley invented the PN diode, and they won the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their research on semiconductors and transistor effects.
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The invention of the transistor can be traced back to 1929, when the engineer Lillianfeld had already patented a transistor. However, limited to the technical level at that time, the materials used to make this device could not reach sufficient purity, making it impossible to manufacture such transistors. During the Second World War, many laboratories also made many achievements in the manufacture and theoretical research of silicon and germanium materials, which laid the foundation for the invention of the transistor.
Today, in 1947, a team of researchers from Bell Labs in the United States, Shockley, Bardeen and Bratton, developed a point-contact germanium transistor. In the first decade of the 20th century, communication systems began to use semiconductor materials; by the first half of the 20th century, ore radios, which were widely popular among radio enthusiasts, used ore as a semiconductor material for detection. The electrical properties of semiconductors are also being applied in telephone systems.
Considered one of the greatest inventions of modern history, and perhaps even the most important of the twentieth century, the transistor has made radios, calculators, computers, and related electronics smaller and cheaper, comparable in importance to inventions such as printing, the automobile, and the telephone. Transistors are the key devices of all modern appliances, mainly because of their ability to mass-produce using highly automated processes, and thus can achieve incredibly low unit costs.
December 16, 2003: The United States establishes the first national standard for sending commercial e-mail
E-mail is an extremely important and effective means of communication, used by tens of millions of people every day for personal and business purposes. However, its convenience and efficiency are often affected by spam; spam currently accounts for more than half of all email traffic, and most spam is fraudulent or deceptive in nature. The growth of spam has also imposed significant costs on internet service providers (ISPs), businesses, and other organizations, as they can only process a limited number of emails without further investment in their infrastructure.
On December 16, 2003, Bush signed the 2003 Can-SPAM Act to Control Unsolicited Pornography and Marketing Attacks, which established a framework of administrative, civil, and criminal tools to help U.S. consumers, businesses, and households combat unsolicited commercial e-mail, or spam.
The CAN-SPAM Act, which finally entered into force on January 1 of the following year, applies to all "commercial e-mail messages" and is defined as "any e-mail message whose primary purpose is a commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service." Do you usually receive a lot of spam in your mailbox? How do you organize your email boxes? Feel free to share your insights in the comments section.
Source: Wikipedia
December 16, 2004: Microsoft acquires SPY SOFTWARE developer GIANT Company Software
On December 16, 2004, Microsoft announced that it had acquired GIANT Company Software, a top provider of anti-spyware and Internet security products; Microsoft would use the acquired intellectual property and technology assets to provide new tools for Windows customers to help protect them from spyware and other deceptive software. In addition, key personnel from GIANT will join Microsoft's security efforts.
In 2004, spyware was a new type of malware that ranged from unwanted pop-up ads to invisible programs that recorded keystrokes or took over personal PCs. Spyware and other unwanted software can slow down PC performance, change computer configuration, and steal passwords and personal information. An IDC study in November 2004 estimated that 67 percent of consumer PCs were infected with some form of spyware. Microsoft plans to provide Windows customers with a beta version of the SPY PROTECTION, Detection, and Removal Tool based on the GIANT AntiSpyware product within a month; the tool can be configured to prevent known spyware and other unwanted software from being installed on computers, and will be available for the latest Microsoft Windows 2000 and later versions at the time.
In the October 24 column, we introduced Microsoft's 2006 release of Windows Defender, which was formerly microsoft Anti Spyware developed after the acquisition of GIANT Company Software, which is essentially a repackaged version of GIANT anti-spyware software. On November 4, 2005, Microsoft announced that Microsoft AntiSpyware was renamed Windows Defender, using a C++ rewrite (the original GIANT software used Visual Basic) and running as a Service for Windows ever since. In recent years, starting with Windows 10, Microsoft has begun to transfer control of Windows Defender out of its original user interface and eventually changed its name to Microsoft Defender Antivirus.
December 16, 2005: IBM stops selling its operating system OS/2
OS/2 (Operating System/2) is a family of computer operating systems originally created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As the two companies argued over how to position OS/2 relative to Microsoft's new Windows 3.1 operating environment, they eventually broke off relations in 1992, and the development of OS/2 fell entirely to IBM. The first version of OS/2 was released in December 1987 to serve as the successor to PC DOS.
The basic system call for OS/2 is modeled after an MS-DOS call. Their names even begin with "Dos" and can create "home-mode" applications (text-mode applications that can run on both systems); os/2 has many similarities with Unix, Xenix, and Windows NT because of this tradition. IBM began discontinuing OS/2 on December 16, 2005, and ended support for OS/2 on December 31, 2006.
Development of OS/2 began in August 1985, when IBM signed a Joint Development Agreement with Microsoft. After the great success of DOS on the PC, and under the influence of the trend of GUI graphical interfaces, IBM and Microsoft jointly developed and launched OS/2; initially the development work was mainly taken care of by Microsoft, and Microsoft eventually abandoned OS/2 and turned to the development of Windows systems.
After IBM went it alone and released several releases, the largest release, OS/2 Warp 3.0, came out in 1994 and took its name from the Warp drive in the Starship Trek movie to express its stable and fast features. This version was the first 32-bit operating system to run on a PC on the X86 architecture, predate Microsoft's Windows 95 release.
In the race against Windows, OS/2 ultimately failed. Then, in 1999, Serenity Systems International acquired an OEM contract from IBM to recreate eComStation 1.0, which was so well received that many older OS/2 systems were upgraded to eComStation. Eventually, IBM announced that it would no longer sell and support OS/2 systems. Proponents of OS/2 asked IBM to make OS/2 source open, but IBM refused. In November 2007, proponents of OS/2 again demanded open source, but IBM refused; IBM refused to open source mainly because OS/2 contained third-party code that IBM did not copyright, most of which came from Microsoft.
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