This week’s milestones in the history of technology include the introduction of IBM’s first large computer in 1944 and its first PC in 1981, Netscape IPO and the start of the dot-com bubble, the first email from space, and the invention of the mimeograph and the pay phone.
August 7, 1944
The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC)–also known as the Harvard Mark I—the largest electromechanical calculator ever built—is officially dedicated at Harvard University. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray in Computer:
The dedication of the Harvard Mark I captured the imagination of the public to an extraordinary extent and gave headline writers a field day. American Weekly called it “Harvard Robot Super-Brain” while Popular Science Monthly declared “Robot Mathematician Knows All the Answers.”… The significance of this event was widely appreciated by scientific commentators and the machine also had an emotional appeal as a final vindication of Babbage’s life.
In 1864 [Charles] Babbage had written: “Half a century may probably elapse before anyone without those aids which I leave behind me, will attempt so unpromising a task.” Even Babbage had underestimated how long it would take…. [The ASCC] was perhaps only ten times faster than he had planned for the Analytical Engine. Babbage would never have envisioned that one day electronic machines would come into the scene with speeds thousands of times faster than he had ever dreamed. This happened within two years of the Harvard Mark I being completed.
IBM applied the lessons it learned about computer development in its own Selective Sequence Controlled Calculator (SSEC), a project undertaken when Howard Aiken angered IBM’s Thomas Watson Sr. at the ASCC announcement by not acknowledging IBM’s involvement and financial support (which included commissioning the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes to give the calculator an exterior suitable to a “Giant Brain”). Thomas and Martha Belden in The Lengthening Shadow:
Few events in Watson’s life infuriated him as much as the shadow cast on his company’s achievement by that young mathematician. In time, his fury cooled to resentment and desire for revenge, a desire that did IBM good because it gave him an incentive to build something better in order to capture the spotlight.
August 7, 1970
The first all-computer chess championship is held in New York and won by CHESS 3.0, a program written by Atkin and Gorlen at Northwestern University. Six programs had entered. The World Computer Chess Championship (WCCC) is today an annual event organized by the International Computer Games Association (ICGA).
August 8, 1876
Thomas Edison receives a patent for a “method of preparing autographic stencils for printing.” The term “mimeograph” to describe this duplicating machine was first used by Albert Blake Dick when he licensed Edison’s patents in 1887.
Hillel Schwartz in The Culture of the Copy, 1996:
The revolution in copying, taken broadly, had begun in the 1920s, when copying was already in the air. In the airwaves–as the Radio Corporation of America in 1926 began transatlantic radio facsimile service for transmitting news photos. In the rarefied air of national libraries and archives–as the Library of Congress, British Library, and Bibliothèque nationale used photostat cameras to acquire rare materials or create catalogs, and as scholars and curators microfilmed manuscripts for research or preservation. In the most rarefied air, out past Saturn, around that new planet, Pluto, located in 1930 near the star o-Geminorum, close upon the stars named Castor and Pollux–where the A. B. Dick Company of Chicago saw ‘NEW WORLDS TO CONQUER’ for their Mimeograph machine: ‘Anything that can be written, typewritten or drawn in line, it reproduces at the rate of thousands every hour.’
August 9, 1991
The first email message was sent from space to earth. Using an Apple Macintosh computer and the AppleLink online service, Atlantis astronauts Shannon Lucid and James C. Adamson sent the following message:
“Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first AppleLink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here,…send cryo and RCS! Hasta la vista, baby,…we’ll be back!”
August 9, 1995
Netscape Communications Corp. goes public. Netscape was co-founded by Marc Andreessen who had earlier co-developed the Mosaic web browser at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.
4,250,000 of the shares were offered, becoming the third largest NASDAQ offering ever. Another 750,000 shares are offered internationally. The stock was initially valued at $14 a share, but at the last minute, the price of the initial offering was set at $28. The stock opens at $71, closing at $58 on the first day of trading. It was the best opening day for a stock in Wall Street history for an issue of its size.
The success of the offering inspired numerous startups, benefiting from the 1989 invention of the Web by Tim Berners-Lee and the hype about “the new economy” and “disruptive innovations,” to make their own IPO during a period that will come to be known as the dot-com bubble. The Netscape IPO is commonly regarded as the start of the bubble, ending on March 10, 2000.
A couple of weeks after the Netscape IPO, Bob Metcalfe wrote in InfoWorld:
In the Web's first generation, Tim Berners-Lee launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and HTML standards with prototype Unix-based servers and browsers.
A few people noticed that the Web might be better than Gopher.
In the second generation, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina developed NCSA Mosaic at the University of Illinois.
Several million then suddenly noticed that the Web might be better than sex.
In the third generation, Andreessen and Bina left NCSA to found Netscape...
August 10, 2004
The iTunes Music Store, released January 9, 2001, adds the millionth song to its library.
August 11, 1996
Microsoft releases the Internet Explorer web browser to compete with Netscape’s popular Navigator browser.
August 12, 1981
IBM announces the IBM Personal Computer, model 5150. The first IBM PC featured a 4.77MHz Intel 8088 CPU containing 29,000 transistors, 16KB RAM (64KB standard, expandable to 256KB), 40KB ROM, one or two 5.25-inch floppy drives (160KB capacity), a mono display, and an optional cassette drive. The base price was $1,565 but a fully loaded version with color graphics retailed for $6,000. Over 65,000 units were sold in the first four months.
The IBM Archives puts this in perspective:
Two decades earlier, an IBM computer often cost as much as $9 million and required an air-conditioned quarter-acre of space and a staff of 60 people to keep it fully loaded with instructions. The new IBM PC could not only process information faster than those earlier machines but it could hook up to the home TV set, play games, process text and harbor more words than a fat cookbook.
Kevin Maney in Making the World Work Better:
Within two years of its introduction, the IBM PC took over the Apple II as the best-selling PC. By 1985, IBM’s PC division had grown to 10,000 people and was grossing $4.5 billion a year… As the power of computing dispersed into the hands of individuals, computing changed profoundly. Computing kept moving inexorably outward, from the experts to the masses.
August 13, 1889
William Gray of Hartford, Connecticut, receives a patent for a coin-operated telephone. He developed the device after a foreman had refused to let him call his sick wife from the company phone. He will sell the device through the Gray Telephone Pay Station Company, founded in 1891.
