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Author Archives: GilPress
Self-Driving Cars Just Around the Corner: 1958, 1969 and 2016
IEEE Spectrum: (also here and here) In the late 1950s, the Radio Corporation of America thought it had a lock on the self-driving car. The January 1958 issue of Electronic Age, RCA’s quarterly magazine, featured its vision of the “highway … Continue reading
The Surprising Story of the First Microprocessors
You thought it started with the Intel 4004, but the tale is more complicated By Ken Shirriff Posted 30 Aug 2016 Transistors, the electronic amplifiers and switches found at the heart of everything from pocket radios to warehouse-size supercomputers, … Continue reading
The Web Goes Public, First Email From Space, Grace Murray Hopper and COBOL
August 1, 1967 The US Navy recalls Grace Murray Hopper to active duty. From 1967 to 1977, Hopper served as the director of the Navy Programming Languages Group in the Navy’s Office of Information Systems Planning and was promoted to … Continue reading
Posted in Computer history, email, IBM, Programming, World Wide Web
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The Eighth Wonder of the World
July 27, 1866 The Atlantic Cable is successfully completed. The first working cable, completed in 1858, failed within a few weeks. Before it did, however, it prompted the biggest parade New York had ever seen and accolades that described the … Continue reading
Posted in Computer history, Social Impact, Television, Wireless
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A history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook
Don’t Touch That Dial! By Vaughan Bell A respected Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, might have been the first to raise the alarm about the effects of information overload. In a landmark book, he described how the modern world overwhelmed people … Continue reading
Posted in Social Impact
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The VCR Story
Revisiting the VCR’s Origins By Tekla S. Perry Posted 26 Jul 2016 | 19:00 GMT Photo: iStockphoto 1975: The VCR JVC and Sony transformed an ingenious concept pioneered by Ampex into a major industry (The following article was published in … Continue reading
Birth of Intel and First Robot-Related Death
July 18, 1968 Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore found microprocessor manufacturer NM Electronics in Santa Clara, California. In deciding on a name, Moore and Noyce quickly rejected “Moore Noyce,” homophone for “more noise” – an ill-suited name for an electronics company. Instead they used … Continue reading
Posted in Computer history, Robots, This day in information, Typewriters
Tagged Intel, Texas Instruments
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Milestones in the History of Technology: Week of February 29, 2016
February 29, 1939 The klystron vacuum tube, the first significantly powerful source of radio waves in the microwave range, is set up at the Boston airport and a plane successfully blind-lands before a group of top military officials. The klystron, … Continue reading
Posted in Computer history, Radar, Telegraph, Uncategorized, World Wide Web
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Milestones in the History of Technology: Week of January 25, 2016
January 25, 1839 William Henry Fox Talbot displays his five-year old pictures at the Royal Society, 18 days after the Daguerreotype process was presented before the French Academy. In 1844, Talbot published the first book with photographic illustrations, The Pencil … Continue reading
Posted in Computer history, Uncategorized
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Milestones in the History of Technology: Week of January 18, 2016
January 19, 1983 Apple introduces Lisa, a $9,995 PC for business users. Many of its innovations such as the graphical user interface, a mouse, and document-centric computing, were taken from the Alto computer developed at Xerox PARC, introduced as the … Continue reading
The Story of Information 