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Category Archives: This day in information
Junction Transistor Announced
Sixty years ago today, the bipolar junction transistor was announced by its inventor, William Shockley. It was an improvement over the bipolar point-contact transistor which was invented four years earlier by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain and became the device … Continue reading
Project Gutenberg Born
Forty years ago today, Michael Hart keyed in The United States Declaration of Independence to the mainframe he was using, all in upper case, because there was no lower case yet. Hart was a student at the University of Illinois … Continue reading
Posted in Books, Digitization, This day in information
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Typesetting, Counting, Sensing
Today in 1886, the first Linotype machine in the U.S. was installed at the Tribune newspaper in New York City. Invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler, a Linotype machine could produce five lines per minute compared to the one line per minute typically … Continue reading
Posted in Computer history, Print, This day in information
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Storage Bottleneck Born
Today in 1945, John von Neumann published “A First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.” Campbell-Kelly and Aspray call it in Computer “the technological basis for the worldwide computer industry.” In The History of Modern Computing, Paul Ceruzzi says … Continue reading
Posted in Computer history, This day in information
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First Classical Music Recording
Today in 1888, Edison’s foreign sales agent, Colonel George Gouraud, made a wax cylinder recording in the Crystal Palace, London, of a 3016-person choir performing Handel’s Israel in Egypt at a distance of more than one hundred yards from the … Continue reading
Posted in music, This day in information
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Hot News Becomes Cold in a Nanosecond in the Modern World
Today in 1846, the first telegraph link was established between New York City and Boston. From the AP Archives: “In the spring of 1846, Moses Yale Beach (1800-68), publisher of The New York Sun, establishes a pony express to deliver … Continue reading
The Internet of Things Launched
Today in 1974, a Universal Product Code (UPC) label was used to ring up purchases at a supermarket for the first time. The first UPC ever scanned is on a package of Wrigley’s chewing gum (now on display at the Smithsonian’s National … Continue reading
Posted in Big Data, IBM, Internet of things, This day in information
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The Talking Telegraph Demonstrated
Today in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell gave a public demonstration of his new invention, the telephone, at the Centennial Exhibition, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Steven Lubar in InfoCulture: “Bell demonstrated three induction telephones to a select jury that included Sir William Thomson, perhaps … Continue reading
Posted in Telephone, This day in information
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The “Manchester baby” finally spits out the expected answer
Today in 1948, the world’s first stored-program electronic digital computer successfully executed its first program. F.C. Williams who designed and built (with Tom Kilburn) the Small Scale Experimental Machine (later nicknamed “Baby”), described the first successful run: “A program was laboriously … Continue reading
What’s the Big Idea? IBM @100
Today in 1911, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company was incorporated. It changed its name to IBM in 1924. Many commentators on IBM’s centenary attribute its longevity to the power of idea or ideas.
Posted in Computer history, IBM, This day in information
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The Story of Information 