Organize | Wang Qilong
Through "the present in history", the future can be seen from the past, and the future can be changed from the present.
Today is February 14, 2022, and on this day in 1819, Christopher Sholes, the inventor of the typewriter and the first QWERTY layout keyboard, was born. In 1860, Shores, who was still a newspaper editor, began to try out a machine that could automatically number pages in books, and soon he made a wooden model of a typewriter; The model made by Shores was basically the same as the popular typewriter in later generations, with a device that automatically shifted after typing, and the words were also very clear. After the introduction of the typewriter, Shores worked on improving the typewriter and developed the QWERTY keyboard that we are familiar with today. Looking back at February 14 in computer history, what other key events took place on that day that changed the world?
February 14, 1924: International Business Machines Ltd (IBM) is founded
At the end of the 19th century, an American named Herman Hollerith invented the punch card watchmaker, which is widely regarded as the father of modern mechanical data processing, ushering in the era of automatic data processing. Then in 1896, Ho's machine was quickly used in the 1890 U.S. Census, and after his fame grew, he began running his own business, founding the Tabulating Machine Company, which sold his products to census bureaus around the world.
From this period onwards, four powerful companies appeared in the United States: Ho Leley's Watchmaking Machine Company; The World's First Clock Manufacturer Bondi Manufacturing Company; International Times Records, founded in 1900; and American Computing Watchmaking Company founded in Dayton, Ohio, in 1901. In 1911, a financier named Charles Flint merged the four companies into a new holding company, named Computing Tabulating Recording Company, or CTR for short; Flint gathered the founders of the four companies, proposed a merger, and worked for the combined CTR Company until his retirement in 1930.
After the birth of CTR, the company, a merger of four large corporations, rightfully suffered a major problem: diversification was difficult to manage; Flint was overwhelmed by it, so in a critical moment, he turned to a celebrity who had worked as an executive at the National Register Company for help. And this "savior" was the real founder of IBM, Thomas Watson. J. Watson）。
Source: Wikipedia
Thomas Watson, who had worked as a young man selling pianos, pork and securities, had planned to save money to open a butcher shop, but was deceived by the securities salesman and lost all his money. Subsequently, Watson struggled to find a job and was fortunate enough to get a job as a salesman at the National Cash Register (NCR). The learnable Watson quickly became the most successful salesman in the East, earning $100 a week. Bad luck led to a company's conviction for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1912, and Watson's efficient sales practices broke the law, leading to a year in prison. Later, the case was dropped due to insufficient evidence, and Watson left the company.
At this time, Watson was 40 years old, he left NCR, and he still had a newly married wife and a son who was waiting to be fed to take care of; but Watson did not give up, he chose to stay in New York to continue to break through, the reputation of this talented salesman has long been circulated on Wall Street, and finally reached the ears of wall Street's big financiers - that is, Charles Flint. Flint had already heard of Watson's talents and immediately hired him as a manager for CTR.
Watson, who had left a case record, was naturally not popular with other employees of CTR, and from 1914 to 1924, Watson endured humiliation, exerted his sales talent and patience, and used his achievements to persuade people to discriminate against him. Watson borrowed a lot of money to develop the company, adopting a new sales method of renting out the machines,8 and borrowing a lot of money himself to buy the company's stock; eventually, Watson waited for a wonderful opportunity: at the end of the First World War, the demand for watchmakers surged; almost every major insurance company and railroad company used hollelis watchmakers produced by the calculation watchmaking record company, and the government departments also adopted them. Watson timely launched a new type of printing - watchmaking combination machine, which is welcomed by the majority of customers, and the product is in short supply. In 1919, the company had sales of $13 million and profits rose to $2.1 million. In February 1924, Watson, who had risen to general manager, decided to rename the company the International Business Machines Corporation, or IBM. Watson had just turned 50 years old, and since then he has erased the last traces of anyone's connection and begun his 32-year career as one with IBM.
Image source: CSDN Downloaded from The Oriental IC
After the end of World War I, the computer market began to emerge, and IBM took the lead in conquering the computer market and launched the first electronic calculator. In 1952, IBM introduced a commercial stored-program computer, the VACUUM tube-based IBM 701; also in the same year, Thomas Watson stepped down after nearly 40 years at the helm, and his son Thomas Watson Jr. was named president. In 1956, the elder Watson died at the age of 82. His son, Watson Jr., successfully transformed IBM into a computer company, winning the position of the hegemon of the information technology industry.
In the past ninety years, the world economy has continued to develop, modern science is changing with each passing day, IBM has always led the development of the global information industry with advanced technology, excellent management and unique products, ensuring the all-round demand for information processing of users in almost all industries around the world. As early as 1969, the Apollo spacecraft carried three astronauts and shouldered a human mission to land on the moon for the first time; in 1981, the Space Shuttle Columbia successfully flew into space. Both historic spaceflights embody IBM's unparalleled intelligence. As of 2020, IBM has maintained the record for the largest number of U.S. patents generated by enterprises every year for 28 consecutive years, and has achieved high achievements in the fields of materials, chemistry, physics and other sciences.
As early as 1934, during the Republic of China era, IBM installed the first commercial machinery for Peking Union Medical College Hospital. In 1979, nearly 30 years after a break, IBM invested again in China, installed the first IBM medium-sized computer at the Shenyang Blower Factory, and began business in China. In the mid-to-late 1980s, IBM set up offices in Beijing and Shanghai, expanding to 33 cities, and its products entered the Chinese market in the fields of finance, telecommunications, metallurgy, petrochemicals, transportation, and commodity circulation. Have you ever used a computer or other product made by IBM? Join us in this issue and share your old memories of IBM in the comments section.
Source: Wikipedia, Baidu Encyclopedia
February 14, 1943: Larry Constantine, a pioneer in software development, is born
Born on February 14, 1943, Larry Constantine is an American software engineer and a professor at the Centre for Precision Science and Engineering at the University of Madeira in Portugal, considered one of the pioneers in computing. He has contributed many concepts and techniques that have laid the foundation for modern practices in software engineering and application design and development. Konstantin grew up in Anoka, Minnesota, and graduated from Anoka High School in 1961, where he was active in debates, theatrical performances, and other extracurricular activities. Constantine received a Bachelor of Management degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1967, specializing in information systems and psychology.
After graduation, in 1963, Constantine began his career at the MIT Nuclear Science Laboratory as a technical assistant and programmer. He began his tenure as president of the Institute for Information and Systems research in 1966; in 1967, he became a graduate mentor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and joined IBM in 1968. Subsequently, in 2006, Constantine led the Software Engineering Laboratory at the University of Madeira in Portugal, dedicated to the study of the human aspects of modern software engineering.
Constantine specializes in the human aspects of software development, and his publications include the classic Structured Design, co-authored with Ed Yourdon, and the award-winning Software for Use with Lucy Lockwood. His contributions to software development practices began in 1968 and he made groundbreaking contributions to the concept of "modular programming." Constantine proposed the concepts of cohesion (the degree to which the content within a module is relevant) and coupling (the degree to which a module depends on other modules), two concepts that had a significant influence in the development of software engineering and revolutionized the discipline of structural design. Constantine also developed methods that combined human-computer interaction design with software engineering, and today he is still active in computer education, teaching in many human interface courses and universities around the world.
Source: Wikipedia
February 14, 1946: The world's first general-purpose computer, the ENIAC, is born
During World War II, the U.S. military asked Dr. John Mauchly of the University of Pennsylvania and his student Eckert to design an "electronic" computer that replaced relays with vacuum tubes for the purpose of calculating the trajectory of artillery shells. Using 18,800 vacuum tubes, 50 feet long and 30 feet wide, the machine occupies 1,500 square feet and weighs 30 tons; the construction contract was signed on June 5, 1943, and the actual construction began in Secret July under the code name "Project PX" and was carried out by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The completed machine was announced on February 14, 1946, and officially commissioned at the University of Pennsylvania the following day. It cost nearly half a million dollars to build the machine, which was finally shut down on November 9, 1946, and transferred to the Aberdeen Test Site in Maryland in 1947. This machine is the first general-purpose computer of the big name , ENIAC.
ENIAC designer John Mercury owned a patent for the machine, but in 1973, after a court decision, The patent was invalidated because Mokley's design ideas for ENIAC were derived in part from the ABC computer designed by John Attanasoff and Clifford Berry. However, the public still generally recognizes ENIAC as the world's first electronic computer and Mokley as the father of electronic computers. To this end, in the early 1990s, at the age of 87, The inventor of the ABC computer, Attanasoff, wrote to then-US President George W. Bush, hoping that the public would recognize him as the father of the electronic computer. So Bush Sr. presented him with a Gold Medal for Technological Craftsmanship in the United States in recognition of inventing the world's first electronic digital computer.
On February 14, 1996, on the 50th anniversary of the world's first electronic computer, U.S. Vice President Al Gore launched the computer again to commemorate the advent of the information age. That same year, to commemorate ENIAC's 50th anniversary, the University of Pennsylvania sponsored a project called "ENIAC-on-a-Chip" to build a very small silicon computer chip measuring 7.44 mm x 5.29 mm, with comparable performance to ENIAC. In 1987, ENIAC was named an IEEE Milestone. In 1997, the six women responsible for most of ENIAC's programming were inducted into the International Women in Science and Technology Hall of Fame, and none of the six women were invited to a formal dedication ceremony or to a celebratory dinner that followed. It has been 76 years since the birth of ENIAC, during which time computers have developed at an astonishing rate, first with transistors replacing electron tubes, and then with the development of microelectronics technology, so that the exaggerated speed described by Moore's Law can not keep up with the speed of technological development. The birth of ENIAC has opened up a new information age for mankind and brought about tremendous changes in human society.
February 14, 1994: FSSTND, the linux file system standard, is introduced
The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS), which defines the main directories and directory contents in the Linux operating system, was originally released on February 14, 1994, and is maintained by the Linux Foundation. FHS can also be written as FSSTND, which is the abbreviation for Filesystem Standard. In early 1996, a plan to develop a more comprehensive FSSTND that addressed directory hierarchies not only for Linux but also for other Unix-like systems was formally adopted with the assistance of members of the BSD development community. Therefore, the plan focuses on solving the problems that are common on Unix-like systems. To accommodate the expansion of the standard scope, the name of the standard was modified to the file system hierarchy standard.
Most Linux distributions comply with the FHS standard and declare their own policies to maintain the requirements of the FHS. However, as of 2009, the vast majority of distributions, including those developed with the participation of members of the Free Standards Group, do not fully implement the recommended standards. When FHS was created, other UNIX and Unix-like operating systems already had their own standards, and today's Linux distributions include a /sys directory as a virtual file system where it is stored and allows modification of devices connected to the system, whereas many traditional UNIX and Unix-like operating systems use /sys as a symbolic link to the kernel tree. Some Linux systems, such as GoboLinux and Syllable Server, use a completely different approach to file system hierarchy organization than FHS. Today, the latest version of FHS is 3.0, released on June 3, 2015.
February 14, 2012: The programming language Julia is publicly available
We want a free and open source programming language that has both the speed of C and the dynamics of Ruby; it has to have the same imagery, it has macros like Lisp, but the mathematical notation is as prominent and familiar as MATLAB; its versatility is python, statistical functions are like R, string processing is like Perl, linear algebra is similar to MATLAB, and the glue of the program is comparable to shell... It's easy to learn and makes the most rigorous hackers impeccable...
—Julia's designers
Beginning in mid-2009, a group of Matlab advanced users with extensive programming experience in a variety of languages designed the Julia programming language, dissatisfied with the existing scientific computational programming tools. Julia is a general-purpose, high-level dynamic programming language originally designed to meet the needs of high-performance numerical analysis and computational science, without the need for an interpreter, and can also be used for web use on clients and servers, for low-level system programming, or as a specification language. Julia co-designers are Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, Viral B. Shah and Alan Edelman. Julia was officially released on February 14, 2012.
Julia's design is unique in that of a parametric polymorphic type system, types in a fully dynamic language, and its multi-dispatched core programming paradigm. It allows concurrent, parallel, and distributed computation, and calls the C and Fortran libraries directly without using glue code. Julia has a garbage collection mechanism, uses early evaluation, and includes efficient libraries for floating-point calculations, linear algebra, random number generation, and regular expression matching. There are many libraries that can be used, some of which (such as those for fast Fourier transforms) are already pre-bundled in Julia.
Since its launch in 2012, the Julia community has grown and grown, and by 2020, Julia has been downloaded by users of more than 10,000 companies and is in use at more than 1,500 universities. Julia has been downloaded more than 35 million times as of January 2022, and the Julia package ecosystem has over 11.8 million lines of code, including documentation and testing. The JuliaCon Academic Conference has been held annually since 2014, and the 2020 conference welcomed more than 28,900 unique viewers, while the 2021 conference broke all previous records, offering more than 300 free conference presentations on YouTube with 43,000 unique viewers.
【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].
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