Remington Rand employees, Harold E. Sweeney (left) and J. Presper Eckert (center) demonstrate the U.S. Census Bureau’s UNIVAC for CBS reporter Walter Cronkite (right).
Today in 1952, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected U.S. President, taking over 55% of the popular vote and winning 39 of the 48 states. It was the first time two of the major television networks used computers to predict the election results.
“The radio and TV networks hope to end the suspense as quickly as possible on election night …. CBS has arranged to use Univac, an all-electronic automatic computer known familiarly as the ‘Giant Brain.’ Because it is too big (25,000 lbs.) to be moved to Manhattan, CBS will train a TV camera on the machine at Remington Rand’s offices in Philadelphia …. NBC has its own smaller electronic brain … Monrobot …. Says ABC’s News Director John Madigan, professing a disdain for such electronic gimmicks: ‘We’ll report our results through Elmer Davis, John Daly, Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson—and about 20 other human brains.’” –“Univac & Monrobot,” Time Magazine, October 27, 1952.
“When CBS hired a newly minted Univac to analyze the vote in the 1952 presidential election, network officials thought it a nifty publicity stunt. But when the printout appeared, an embarrassed Charles Collingwood reported that the machine couldn’t make up its mind. It was not until after midnight that CBS confessed the truth: Univac had correctly predicted Dwight Eisenhower would swamp Adlai Stevenson in one of the biggest landslides in history, but nobody believed it.” –Philip Elmer-Dewitt, “Television Machines That Think,” Time Magazine, April 6, 1992
Today in 1983, Fred Chen writes, “the first virus was conceived of as an experiment to be presented at a weekly seminar on computer security. The concept was first introduced in this seminar by the author, and the name ‘virus’ was thought of by Len Adleman. After 8 hours of expert work on a heavily loaded VAX 11/750 system running Unix, the first virus was completed and ready for demonstration. Within a week, permission was obtained to perform experiments, and 5 experiments were performed. On November 10, the virus was demonstrated to the security seminar.”
In 1984 Fred Cohen published his paper “Computer Viruses – Theory and Experiments,” the first paper to explicitly call a self-reproducing program a “virus”, a term introduced by Cohen’s mentor Leonard Adleman.
Letter from Samuel Adams to James Warren, 4 November 1772 in which Adams informs Warren of the establishment of the Committee of Communication and Correspondence in Boston (Mass Hist. Soc.)
Today in 1772, the town of Boston established a Committee of Correspondence as an agency to organize a public information network in Massachusetts; the Committee drafted a pamphlet and a cover letter which it circulated to 260 Massachusetts towns and districts, instructing them in current politics and inviting each to express its views publicly; in each town, community leaders read the pamphlet aloud and the town’s people discussed, debated, and chose a committee to draft a response which was read aloud and voted upon. When 140 towns responded and their responses published in the newspapers, “it was evident that the commitment to informed citizenry was widespread and concrete” according to Richard D. Brown (in Chandler and Cortada (eds.), A Nation Transformed by Information). But why this commitment? In Liah Greenfeld‘s words (in Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity), “Americans had a national identity, the English national identity… The English idea of the nation implied the symbolic elevation of the common people to the position of an elite, which in theory made every individual the sole legitimate representative of his own interests and equal participant in the political life of the collectivity. It was grounded in the values of reason, equality, and individual liberty.”
The Internet is not “inherently” democratizing. Believing in and upholding the right values for a long period of time is what makes societies democratic.
See also InfoStory Quotes: The Internet Will Abolish War and Topple Tyrants
U.S. War Department, U.S. Army Signal Service Weather Map, September 1, 1872 (Courtesy of NOAA Photo Library)
Today in 1870, the U.S. Weather Bureau made its first meteorological observations using 24 locations that provided reports via telegraph. For the first time, weather observations from distant points could be “rapidly” collected, plotted, and analyzed at one location. It’s a great example of how the value of information increases when it’s shared or what Metcalfe’s Law should have been about. Instead, Metcalfe’s Law tries to capture the increase in the value of the network as more users join it. What flows over the network is more important and interesting than the network itself. Of course, what Metcalfe was selling when he used the formula (later called Metcalfe’s Law by George Gilder) was a network card and the pioneering idea of local-area-networks. At that time, the major perceived benefit of networking PCs was not sharing information, but sharing a printer…
See also Big Data in the Age of the Telegraph and “What Has God Wrought?”: A Love Story and Bob Metcalfe, October 2009
In the third quarter of 2013, Netflix reached 31 million subscribers in the U.S., compared with 28.7 million domestic subscribers for HBO, according to SNL Kagan.
Today in 1888, Thomas Edison filed a patent for the first movie projector, the “Optical Phonograph,” which projected images just 1/32-inch across. Steven Lubar in InfoCulture: “Thomas Edison was thinking about the phonograph when he decided to invent a moving picture machine. He was used to working by analogy with earlier inventions: the movie camera and projector would just be a phonograph for pictures. The phonograph had recorded sound vibrations on tracks around the edges of a cylinder, and Edison thought that the pictures could be recorded in the same way. In his early drawing he suggested ways of putting a series of tiny photographs onto a cylinder recording. ‘I am experimenting upon an instrument which does for the Eye what the phonograph does for the Ear,’ he wrote in a patent caveat.”
Dennis Ritchie (standing) and Ken Thompson in 1972
40 years ago today (October 15, 1973), Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson presented their first paper on Unix at the fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) held at Purdue University. The paper will later be published in the July 1974 issue of Communications of the ACM (here is the revised 1978 version). Dennis Ritchie passed away on October 12, 2011. John Naughton in The Guardian: “It’s funny how fickle fame can be. One week Steve Jobs dies and his death tops the news agendas in dozens of countries. Just over a week later, Dennis Ritchie dies and nobody – except for a few geeks – notices. And yet his work touched the lives of far more people than anything Steve Jobs ever did. In fact if you’re reading this online then the chances are that the router which connects you to the internet is running a descendant of the software that Ritchie and his colleague Ken Thompson created in 1969… what Apple really did was to give Unix a pretty face. I’ve often wondered what Dennis Ritchie would have made of that. Now that he’s gone, we’ll never know. What we do know, though, is that we owe him more than we realised.”
The Story of Information 