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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 January 4, 2022, and on this day in 1643, the English physicist, mathematician and astronomer Isaac Newton was born; Newton's most remarkable contribution to science was the creation of calculus and classical mechanics, and less well known, Newton also served as director of the Royal Mint, who linked the value of the pound sterling to gold, laying the foundation for the development of European capitalism for the next two hundred years, and enabling Britain to take the lead in modern industrialization. Looking back at January 4 in computer history, what other key events occurred on that day?
January 4, 1972: HP introduces the world's first scientific calculator
Image source: CSDN Downloaded from The Oriental IC
In the past, books such as abacuses, bones, mathematical tables (including logarithmic tables, trigonometric tables, etc.), engineering slide rules, or adding machines played a supporting role in numerical calculations. The term calculator originally referred to professionals who performed mathematical calculations with pen and paper, and such semi-manual calculations were both heavy and error-prone. Modern calculators are electrically powered and come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from simple credit card-sized devices to special calculators with printing capabilities.
On January 4, 1972, HP introduced the HP-35, the world's first handheld scientific calculator and a boon to end the reliance of scientists and students on the slide rule. The HP-35 is named after its 35 buttons, weighs 9 ounces, and sells for $395. One test of the device by HP co-founder Dave Packard at the time was toss it on his office floor to see if it still worked, and it worked. On April 15, 2009, the IEEE announced the IEEE Milestone Award for Electronic Engineering and Computing for the HP-35 Model Calculator.
Source: Wikipedia, Baidu Encyclopedia
January 4, 1995: Apple opens the Macintosh license
On January 4, 1995, Apple announced that it would license the Macintosh operating system to companies such as Power Computing and Radius, allowing the two companies to produce "cloned versions" of Mac computers, sometimes referred to as Clonintosh; there is no doubt that Apple hopes to expand its market share through this move. Unfortunately, the Clonintosh is more powerful and less expensive than the Mac; apple sales continue to decline, even if it gets a portion of the licensing fee. In 1998, Apple's annual revenue was $5.9 billion, down from $9.8 billion in 1996, and its market share fell to 4.1 percent.
Jobs, who terminated his cloning licensing program after returning to Apple in 1997, personally tried to renegotiate licenses that were more favorable to Apple five times in three weeks, "hitting a wall every time," in his words; a series of events that made Jobs resistant to open source and shared operating systems. Support for the Clonintosh first appeared in System 7.5.1, the first version to include the "Mac OS" logo (a variant of the original Happy Mac startup icon), and Mac OS 7.6 was the first system to be named "Mac OS" instead of "System". The changes were intended to separate the operating system from Apple's own Macintosh model.
All other manufacturers' Macintosh cloning contracts were completely terminated at the end of 1997, either together or in the face of closure. The intense phone conversation between Jobs and Motorola CEO Christopher Calvin reportedly led to the termination of Motorola's cloning contract, and Apple, which has long been favored by Motorola, was relegated to a "secondary customer" that was mainly used for PowerPC CPUs.
In 1999, Jobs had a discussion with Ben Rosen, then compaq chairman and interim CEO, to get the world's largest Wintel PC maker to license Mac OS; it was a great trick for Apple, but in the end there was no agreement because Compaq did not want to offend Microsoft, which had been working with it since its founding in 1982. By 2007, five years after Compaq merged with HP, Rosen told Jobs that he had switched to Mac.
Source: Wikipedia
January 4, 2000: Bill Gates announces that Windows CE is renamed Pocket PC
On January 4, 2000, Bill Gates officially renamed Windows CE 3.0 to Windows for Pocket PC, or Pocket PC for short, at Microsoft's Consumer Electronics Show. In short, it's about incorporating Pocket Versions of everyday office software like Pocket Word and Pocket Excel into pocket PCs, while dramatically enhancing entertainment performance. According to Microsoft, the Pocket PC is "a handheld device that can be used to send, receive and store emails, serve as address books, schedules, work schedules, multimedia file playback, gaming, exchanging text messages with MSN, browsing the web, and other functions." ”
After Gates announced the news, many manufacturers joined the Pocket PC camp, including HP, Compaq, Casio and other well-known manufacturers. Marked by the birth of Compaq's iPAQ 3630, more and more vendors supported and joined the Pocket PC camp. Another common handheld operating system contemporaneous with Pocket PCs is Palm OS, and the corresponding handheld is called Palm. There are also a small number of handheld computers that use the Linux operating system.
With the continuous development of the Windows Mobile system and mobile phones, many mobile phones have begun to use Windows Moblie as the operating system, and Windows Moblie itself has also added support for mobile phones. For a time, mobile phones based on the Windows Mobile operating system became the symbol of high-end smartphones. After 2007, the market share of Pocket PCs and mobile phones with Windows Moblie as the operating system began to decline continuously, more and more mobile phones used Android as the operating system, and Apple's IOS operating system also occupied a large share of the market. After the Windows Mobile system, Microsoft released the Windows Phone 7 operating system with a significantly improved UI as its successor. This was followed by the release of the Windows Phone 8 operating system. However, at present, mobile phones from Microsoft's operating system occupy a very small global mobile phone market share.
January 4, 2001: Linus releases version 2.4 of the Linux kernel source code
Version 2.4.0 of the Linux kernel, released on January 4, 2001, added support for Pentium 4 and Itanium (the latter introduced the ia64 ISA jointly developed by Intel and HP to replace the old PA-RISC) and a newer 64-bit MIPS processor; IA64 was Intel's next-generation workhorse server-side product at the time, and Linux, as the earliest operating system to support IA64, proved Linux in itself Strong vitality, and this has become an opportunity for Linux to enter the enterprise market in the future. In addition, 2.4 adds support for full resource managers, making the allocation of resources such as PCI more intelligent in the Linux kernel, which makes Plug and Play devices better supported on Linux. The 2.4 kernel also opens up support for Bluetooth devices, as well as some fixes on legal issues.
The Linux 2.4.0 kernel also has some ties to Linux's General Public License (GPL), starting with Linus Torvalzi's attitude towards Linux commercialization. At first, Linus placed Linux under a regulation prohibiting any commercial practices, but after version 0.12 switched to the second version of the GNU General Public License. The agreement allows anyone to make modifications or distributions to the software, including commercial practices, and all Linux-based software must also be published in the form of the agreement and provide source code as long as it complies with the agreement. Linus has publicly claimed that placing Linux under the GNU General Public License was the "best decision" he had made in his lifetime.
The Linux kernel is explicitly published only under the second version of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and does not provide licensees with the option to select "any later version" (this is a common GPL extension). There was considerable debate about how easily the license could be changed to use later versions of the GPL (including version 3) and whether such a change was desirable. Linus himself made it clear in the release of version 2.4.0 that his own code was only released under version 2. However, the GPL stipulates that if no version is specified, then any version can be used; and Alan Cox points out that few other Linux contributors have specified a specific version of the GPL.
In September 2006, a survey of 29 core programmers showed that 28 of them preferred to use the second version of the GPL (GPLv2) than the draft third version (GPLv3) of the GPL at that time. Linus commented on this: "I think some outsiders ... Believe me to be the weird and unsociable guy because I'm not a big fan of GPLv3 with such fanfare. Linus, who decided not to adopt GPLv3 as a Linux kernel license, even reiterated his criticism of GPLv3 a few years later.
January 4, 2009: Satoshi Nakamoto creates the Genesis Block
A blockchain is a serial transcript (also known as a block) that connects and protects content through cryptography. Each block contains the cryptographic hash of the previous block, the corresponding timestamp, and transaction data, which makes the block content difficult to tamper with. A distributed ledger connected using blockchain technology allows both parties to effectively record a transaction and permanently inspect the transaction. Blockchain technology is a major technological innovation in the fintech space and the IT sector as a whole.
At present, the biggest application of blockchain technology is digital currency, such as the invention of Bitcoin. Because the essence of the payment is "to increase the reduced amount in account A to account B". If one has a public ledger that records all transactions from all accounts to date, then for any one account one can calculate the amount of money it currently has. Blockchain is precisely the public ledger used to achieve this purpose, which holds all the transaction records. In the Bitcoin system, a Bitcoin address is equivalent to an account and the number of Bitcoins is equivalent to an amount.
On January 4, 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of the Bitcoin protocol and its associated software, created the Genesis block, the first block in the blockchain and the common ancestor of all blocks, meaning that starting with any block and going backwards, it will eventually reach the genesis block. Genesis blocks do not need to be verified, so data in Genesis blocks can be written at will, while other data needs to be written according to specific rules. Because the Genesis block was programmed into Bitcoin's client software by Satoshi Nakamoto, each node starts with a blockchain containing at least one block, which ensures that the Genesis block is not changed.