Iceni Blog | Iceni Technology Ltd

Posted June 4, 2013, 9:54 a.m. - 11 years, 6 months ago

Events in Computing History – June

The month of June also had significant events that changed the world of computing and technology, here is a look at both the old and recent history the month of June brought us

June 1^st

Year: 1944

Event: Colossus Mark 2 Computer, in 1943 Colossus Mark 1 was the world’s first electronic digital computer used in the World War II, then 6 months later the Colossus Mark 2 was the improved version of the Mk 1 which was used at Bletchley Park.

Interesting Facts

The Colossus, used by British codebreakers during World War II was created to obtain very valuable intelligence from the German High Command and their army by reading encrypted high-level telegraphic messages which significantly helped out the Allies in the Cryptanalysis of the Lorenz Cipher and the Normandy Landings.
Ten Colossus computers were used by the end of the war, the computer was used from June 1^st 1944 to June 8^th 1945.

June 1^st

Year: 1956

Event: Tim Paterson was born on this date 57 years ago. Tim is a computer programmer from America who is best known for inventing 86-DOS and MS-DOS. Tim graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Computer Science in June 1978.

Interesting Facts:

Tim Paterson created the 86-DOS because sales of the Seattle Computer Products were dropping rapidly due to computers had no operating systems.
MS-DOS was an improved version of the 86-DOS and was used for 19 years from August 1981 till it was discontinued in September 2000. MS-DOS was created to meet IBM’s specifications of PC’s.

June 1^st

Year: 2009

Event: Bing was created by Microsoft this date 3 years ago as a search engine to rival the almighty Google. Microsoft changed the look and feel of a standard search engine by adding dynamic and high resolutions pictures of places and wildlife, making the Bing homepage a very pretty search engine visually to look at.

Interesting Facts:

Before Bing, MSN Search was launched in early 1999 which was changed to Windows Live Search in March 8^th 2006, but only lasted a year till it was shortened to just Live Search in 2007, but in 2009 Microsoft decided it was time for a change, and agreed on the new search engine name to be Bing.
Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that Yahoo Search would be powered by Bing as part of a deal they made a month after Bing was released.

June 3^rd

Year: 1952

Event: Alan Cooper’s 61^st birthday, he was born in San Francisco, California, USA and is the creator of a computer visual programming language which was code-named “Ruby”. This allowed Windows users to build their own “Finder”-like shells.

Interesting Facts:

The Ruby idea was demonstrate to Bill Gates which he commented the innovation was a profound effect on their entire range, the idea was bought by Microsoft but rather than a product as a shell for users it was turned into a professional development tool which was created as Visual Basic.

June 7th

Year: 1924
Event: Donald Davies’ birthday. Donald was born in Treorchy, Wales this date 89 years ago, but he sadly died 28^th May 2000 aged 75. Donald was a computer scientist who was one of the inventors of the packet switched computer networking which is what local area networks (LAN) is based on.
He was also the originator of the term, “and the internet itself can be traced directly back to his work”.

Interesting Facts:

Packet switching was developed for military use in the early 60’s and then was implemented on small networks in 1968 which became a fundamental networking technology behind the internet and local area networks

June 8^th

Year: 1955

Event: Tim Berners-Lee was born 58 years ago, and is the creator of the World Wide Web (www). The internet already existed but only as data transfer between computers, but Tim implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and the internet. These brought the world whole new possibilities

Interesting Facts:

Tim was knighted by the Queen in 2004 for his pioneering work
Tim was honoured as the inventor of the World Wide Web during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony.

June 8^th

Year: 1993

Event: Cello internet browser was first introduced on this date 20 years ago. It was made by Thomas R. Bruce for the use of Microsoft Windows on the Windows NT 3.5 but only lasted 11 months before it was discontinued in April 1994.

Interesting Facts:

Cello was the first Web browser for Windows and was the first free winsock browser.

June 8^th

Year: 1995

Event: PHP (Hypertext Pre-processor) is a server-side scripting language designed for web development and is also used as a general-purpose programming language. A PHP is a code that is interpreted by a web server which generates the resulting web page, it can also be embedded directly into an HTML source document.

Interesting Facts:

PHP is now used on more than 244 million websites and over 2 million web servers worldwide

June 11^th

Year: 2007

Event: Apple Inc. Safari web browser was released to computer competitors, Microsoft Windows, which was supported for Windows XP Service Pack 2 and higher operating systems. Safari is Apple’s very own version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

Interesting Facts:

Safari was discontinued on Windows on May 9^th 2012 as Microsoft revamped the whole look and build of its own web browser, Internet Explorer.
Net Applications results state that Safari accounted for 62.17% of mobile web browsing traffic and 5.43% of desktop traffic in October 2011.

June 13^th

Year: 1934

Event: Leonard Kleinrock born in New York City, and graduated with a master’s degree and a Ph.D in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute. He is best known for the development of the ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network).

Interesting Facts:

The ARPANET is the world’s first network to implement TCP/IP protocols, this is what was to become the global internet.
ARPANET was based on Donald Davies Packet Switching designs.

June 15^th

Year: 1993

Event: Adobe Acrobat/Reader was released for Apple Macintosh computers. It later became available for Windows 3.1 and DOS.
Adobe Reader is a software used for viewing and printing PDF documents, but prevents users from editing the file which means this is very useful for viewing presentations and important documents without people altering the information.
Interesting Facts:

Originally Acrobat Reader was only available as an extra on purchase of a computer, the software wasn’t always free either, and it would cost 50 dollars on top of the purchase of a Macintosh or Windows computer.

June 16^th

Year: 1896

Event: Murray Leinster was born in Norfolk, Virginia. Murray is an award-winning American writer of science fiction and alternate history and author of the 1946 short story ‘A Logic Named Joe’, which envisioned a future of mass computing linked through “tanks” (servers) in which comms, commerce etc. was easily accessible, at a time when computing was in its infancy.

Interesting Facts:

Murray wrote and published over 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.

June 16^th

Year: 1911

Event: IBM the American multinational technology and consulting corporation was founded by Charles Ranlett Flint. The main headquarters is located in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM is one of the world’s largest marketing and manufacturer of computer hardware and software, offering infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in a vast range of areas from mainframe computers to nanotechnology.

Interesting Facts:

When the company was first founded it started out as Computer Tabulating Recording Company (CTRC) through a merge of companies: the Tabulating Machine Company, the International Time Recording Company and the Computing Scale Company. Charles later changed the name of the company to International Business Machines (IBM) in 1924.
In 2012 IBM was ranked the second largest company in terms of number of employees in the whole U.S with 433,362 on the Fortune rankings.
IBM employees have garnered many awards from Nobel Prizes’, National Medals of Technology, National Medals of Science and many more.

June 17^th

Year: 1937

Event: American sociologist, philosopher, and pioneer of IT, Ted Nelson was born in Chicago, Illinois, United States.

Interesting Facts:

Ted created the terms “Hypertext” and “hypermedia” in 1963 and published them in 1965.
Hypertext is text that is displayed on a computer screen (usually highlighted) that links to another page with information explaining about the keyword clicked on.
He also founded Project Xanadu which key goal was to create a computer network which had a user friendly interface.

June 21^st

Year: 1948

Event: The Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) which was nicknamed “Baby”, was the world’s first stored-program computer. It was created at the Victoria University of Manchester by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill.

Interesting Facts:

The first program was ran on the computer on this date when the build was finished.
It wasn’t built to be a practical computer, instead it was intended to act as a testbed for the Williams tube, an early form of computer memory.
The SSEM was designed to be the simplest possible stored-program computer so had the capability of a 32-bit word length and a memory of 32 words.

June 22^nd

Year: 1910

Event: Konrad Zuse was born in Berlin, Germany, he was a civil engineer and computer pioneer. Konrad was best known for the world’s first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3 first became operational in May 1941.

Interesting Facts:

In the World War II Konrad was given resources by Nazi German government as most of his work went largely unnoticed in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Turing-complete is a system of data-manipulation rules, it can be used to simulate any single-taped Turing machine.
The Z3 computer was designed by Konrad, it was an electromechanical computer and was the world’s first working programmable computer.

June 22^nd

Year: 1995
Event: The Norwegian software company, Opera Software ASA was founded. Opera Software is best known for its family of web browsers. Opera is also involved in promoting Web standards through participation in the W3C.
Interesting Facts:

Opera family of web browsers has over 300 million users worldwide.
Opera Software has offices based all over the world from Sweden, USA, Poland India, Japan, South Korea and many more.
Opera Software has a part to play in every computer Web browser and mobile phone browser worldwide.

June 23^rd

Year: 1912
Event: The British mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst and computer scientist, Alan Turing was born. Alan is considered to be the “father” of computer science and artificial intelligence. Alan was highly influential in the development of computer science, giving a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with Turing Machine which he invented in 1936
Interesting Facts:

During World War II Alan worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre.
Alan’s “Turing” machine helped computer scientists understand the limits of mechanical computation.

June 23^rd

Year: 1937
Event: Philip Don Estridge was born in Jacksonville, Florida, United States. Philip is known as the “father of the IBM PC” for his lead development of the original IBM Personal Computer which was introduced in August 12^th 1981.
Interesting Facts:

Philip completed a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Florida.
He worked for the army, designing a radar system using computers.
Philip and his wife sadly died on August 2^nd 1985 aged just 48 as the flight they were travelling on crashed landed at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

June 24^th

Year: 2010
Event: The famous Apple touchscreen smartphone, the iPhone 4 was introduced to the world. The iPhone 4 is the fourth generation iPhone and the successor to the iPhone 3GS.
Interesting Facts:

The iPhone 4 images and information was leaked out on the internet 1 month before the initial release of the product. It was reported that a gadget website “Gizmodo” purchased an iPhone prototype for 5000 dollars to be the first to show off the new Apple product.

June 25^th

Year: 1998
Event: Microsoft released Windows 98 operating system to the world. Windows 98 was the second major operating system release after Windows 95.
Interesting Facts:

Windows 98 was going to be originally codenamed “Memphis”.
The operating system lasted less than 2 years before it was replaced by Windows ME in 2000.

June 26^th

Year: 1949
Event: The Birth of Ward Cunningham who is an American computer programmer who developed the first ever wiki. Ward is a pioneer in both design patterns and extreme programming, he created the programming for the software WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on the website of his software consultancy.
Interesting Facts:

Wiki, Ward’s creation is a website which allows users to add, modify or delete their own content through the web browser.
Cunningham came up with the name WikiWikiWeb because he remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee who told him to take the Wiki Wiki Shuttle, a shuttle bus line that runs between the airport’s terminals.

June 27^th

Year: 1957
Event: Geir Ivarsøy, born in Norway he was the lead programmer at Opera Software. Geir was part of a research group at the Norwegian state phone company better known as Telenor where they developed browsing software called MultiTorg Opera.
Interesting Facts:

The original development of MultiTorg was abandoned by Telenor, so Geir obtained the rights to the project and fromed his own company, where he developed Opera.
Opera Software grew to more than 500 employees within the first few years of launching.

Image credits

http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6114/6246433861_aec8292f0c_o.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/Colossus.jpg/300px-Colossus.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/MS-DOS_install_welcome.gif

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bing_%28search_engine%29_homepage_screenshot.png

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/AlanCooper.jpg

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lycejnya9w1qz6mrqo1_500.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/0/0b/Cello7.gif/250px-Cello7.gif

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/PHP-logo.svg

https://devimages.apple.com.edgekey.net/programs/safari/images/safari-logo-lg.png

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bf/Arpanet_logical_map,_march_1977.png

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Adobe_Acrobat_v8.0_icon.svg