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Category Archives: This day in information
The Beatles, Profits, CT Scans, and Waste
Today in 1979, Allan McLeod Cormack and Godfrey Newbold Hounsfield won the Nobel Prize for medicine for developing the theory and technology behind CAT scans.
Posted in Imaging, This day in information
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How Many Spiders it Takes to Make a Web?
Today is the fifth annual OneWebDay, raising “awareness of the importance of maintaining the open-networking principles that have made it the success it is.” Tim Berners-Lee in Weaving the Web: “When I first began tinkering with a software program that eventually … Continue reading
News from the North Pole and the Lonely Mountain
Today in 1897, New York’s Sun published an unsigned editorial (written by Francis Pharcellus Church) in response to eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon question: “Please tell me the truth, is there a Santa Claus?” It read in part: “VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. … Continue reading
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The First Laptop
Today in 1983, the Osborne Computer Corporation declared bankruptcy. The Osborne I, the first portable computer, was designed by company founder Adam Osborne.
Posted in Computer history, Mobile, PCs, This day in information
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21-Year-Old Internet Search Keeps Most Popular Status
Today in 1990, Archie, the first Internet search engine, was launched. The program downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creating a searchable database of file names; however, Archie did not index … Continue reading
Posted in Futures, Search, This day in information, World Wide Web
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“There You Have Electronic Television”
Today in 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth, 21, succeeded in transmitting the image of a line through purely electronic means with a device he called an “image dissector.”
Spinning Disks
Fifty-five years ago today, IBM introduced the disk drive. In 1953, Arthur J. Critchlow, a young member of IBM’s advanced technologies research lab in San Jose, California, was assigned the task of finding a better information storage medium than punch-cards. … Continue reading
“It Shines for All”: Newspapers in America
Today in 1833, the first issue of the The New York Sun was published. Steven Lubar in InfoCulture: “New technology, in fact, came along after (italics mine) the renaissance of the newspaper. The New York Sun was the first ‘penny paper,’ … Continue reading
Posted in News, Newspapers, Social Impact, This day in information
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Cash Flow
Today in 1969, Chemical Bank installed the first ATM in the U.S. at its branch in Rockville Centre, New York. The first ATMs were designed to dispense a fixed amount of cash when a user inserted a specially coded card. A … Continue reading
Posted in Digitization, This day in information
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Copy Rights
Today in 1486, the republic of Venice granted its first privilege to an author for a specific book (a history of Venice), the Decades rerum Venetarum by Marcus Antonius Coccius Sabellicus, securing protection against illegal replication. Sabellico’s privilege set the precedent for the … Continue reading
Posted in Copyrights, This day in information
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