Computer History aka Tech Time Travelers

This date marks the birth of John Mauchly who, with J. Presper Eckert built the ENIAC, the first large-scale, electronic calculator.

Mauchly received his PhD in physics at Johns Hopkins University and took a position teaching physics at Ursinus College. Because his meteorological work required extensive calculations, he began to experiment with alternatives to mechanical equipment.

In 1941 he went to summer course at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. He was asked to stay as an instructor, which he did.

That year Mauchly wrote a report outlining his ideas for a machine to calculate ballistics tables for the war effort -- a report that helped the Moore School win a contract for the ENIAC.

Mauchly worked on the successor to the ENIAC, the EDVAC, and the commercial UNIVAC 1.

He died January 8, 1980.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mauchly

The Interim Computer Museum strives to preserve and share the history of computing through interactive exhibits using vintage computer hardware with modern enhancements.

We are a non-profit membership organization open to all.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.capebreton.social/post/402719

One of the earliest laws anywhere designed to address computer fraud, the Act resulted from a long debate in the 1980s over failed prosecutions of hackers -- in one well-publicized case, two men hacked into a British Telecom computer leaving messages in the Duke of Edinburgh's private mailbox.

With the release of Mac OS X 10.6, "Snow Leopard," Apple discontinued its support for the AppleTalk local area networking system. Introduced in 1985 as a quick way to connect Apple computers and peripherals to each other, AppleTalk was a low-cost, medium performance network, perfect for homes and many offices.

The basic AppleTalk hardware was built into every Mac computer so networks could be established without any prior setup or need for a centralized router or server. Apple Talk networks could also be connected to each other, forming internets, or use a variety of physical media like Ethernet, Token Ring or Apple’s own LocalTalk.

AppleTalk was ultimately displaced by TCP/IP-based systems, but for most of the 1980s and ‘90s was Apple's main networking technology.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/5467810

In 1997, a contest began to develop a new encryption algorithm to become the Advanced Encryption Standard. After years of debate, one algorithm was chosen as the AES. But how does AES work? And what makes for a secure encryption algorithm?

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Spanning Tree is an educational video series about computer science and mathematics. See more at https://spanningtree.me

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Spanning Tree is created by Brian Yu. https://brianyu.me/

Email me at brian@spanningtree.me to suggest a future topic.

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• 0:00 The Contest
• 1:02 Encryption
• 3:57 Confusion and Diffusion
• 5:44 Block Cipher
• 6:55 KeyExpansion
• 7:34 AddRoundKey
• 8:14 Substitution Cipher
• 8:55 SubBytes
• 11:30 MixColumns
• 12:53 ShiftRows
• 13:21 The Algorithm

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4ATDMIz5wc
• https://piped.video/watch?v=C4ATDMIz5wc

Aug 22, 2023

Hackers (roundtable) "Is Computer Hacking a Crime." first appeared in Harper's Magazine (March 1990: 45- 55, 57.)

Though the editors' introduction to the roundtable is informative, it does not tell enough.

Throughout the discussion, if the reader is aware 0f what has taken place following it, is a great concern for what Bruce Sterling refers to as the "hacker crackdown" (in his book 0f the same title) on the hackers.

A truncated version of the crackdown story goes like this: There was much concern shown by John Perry Harlow and hackers across the country about the number of federal crackdowns, and in December 1989 they were invited by Harper's Magazine to discuss the issue on the WELL. Such hackers (crackers?) as "Phiber Optik" and "Acid Phreak" made their appearance to discuss such questions as whether there is a "hacker ethic" and whether hacking is a crime.

Shortly thereafter, 0n January 24, 1990, the federal government and New York State police raided the homes of Phiber Optik, Acid Phreak, and another hacker. Optik (Mark Abene) was not charged in this raid until a year later and then only with a misdemeanor.

The raids escalated: March 1, 1991, has come to be known as the day of the "Steve Jackson Games" raid in Austin, Texas, and then, on May 7 through 9, came the "Operation Sundevil" raids all across the country.

These raids make up the hacker crackdown, in June of the same year, they led to the creation of the EFF by Barlow and Mitchell Kapor.

Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995, almost three months after the release of Windows NT 3.51.

Windows 95 is the first version of Microsoft Windows to include taskbar, start button, and accessing the internet. Windows 95 merged Microsoft's formerly separate MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows products, and featured significant improvements over its predecessor, most notably in the graphical user interface (GUI) and in its simplified "plug-and-play" features. There were also major changes made to the core components of the operating system, such as moving from a mainly cooperatively multitasked 16-bit architecture to a 32-bit preemptive multitasking architecture, at least when running only 32-bit protected mode applications.

Accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign,Windows 95 introduced numerous functions and features that were featured in later Windows versions, and continue in modern variations to this day, such as the taskbar, notification area, and the "Start" button. It is considered to be one of the biggest and most important products in the personal computing industry.

The Trojan Room coffee pot was a coffee machine located in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, England. Created in 1991 by Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, it was migrated from their laboratory network to the web in 1993 becoming the world's first webcam.

To save people working in the building the disappointment of finding the coffee machine empty after making the trip to the room, a camera was set up providing a live picture of the coffee pot to all desktop computers on the office network. After the camera was connected to the Internet a few years later, the coffee pot gained international renown as a feature of the fledgling World Wide Web, until being retired in 2001.

It went offline on August 22nd, 2001

The patent was granted on August 17, 1966, and seems to be one of the first software patents, establishing the principle that the computer program itself was unpatentable and therefore covered by copyright law, while the computer program embedded in hardware was potentially patentable.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/4431482

It's Debian's 30th anniversary!

Internet Explorer was released on August 16, 1995.

After nearly three decades of being the default web browser for Microsoft's Windows operating system, Internet Explorer was finally retired on February 14, 2023.

The end of Internet Explorer was not unexpected, as Microsoft had been phasing it out in favor of their newer browser, Microsoft Edge, for several years. The decision to retire Internet Explorer was made in part due to its outdated technology and lack of support for modern web standards.

Additionally, since the launch of Google Chrome in 2008, Internet Explorer’s popularity steadily declined. As of last week, Microsoft no longer provides technical support, security updates, or bug fixes for Internet Explorer on any devices. Microsoft Edge has pushed out an update to permanently disable Internet Explorer 11.

The idea of shipping a web browser with Windows 95 was reportedly first suggested on August 15, 1994 — 29 years ago — by Microsoft engineer Benjamin Slivka, who floated the idea of indexing the content of the entire internet in Project Cairo, the codename for an initiative headed by CEO Bill Gates from 1991 to 1996. Although Cairo never shipped in its completed state, its elements made their way to Windows 95 (codename "Chicago") when the operating system shipped in August 1995.

Stephen Gary Wozniak (/ˈwɒzniæk/; born August 11, 1950), also known by his nickname "Woz", is an American technology entrepreneur, electronics engineer, computer scientist, computer programmer, philanthropist, and inventor. In 1976, he co-founded Apple Computer with his late business partner Steve Jobs, which later became the world's largest technology company by revenue and the largest company in the world by market capitalization. Through his work at Apple in the 1970s and 1980s, he is widely recognized as one of the most prominent pioneers of the personal computer revolution.

In 1975, Wozniak started developing the Apple I  into the computer that launched Apple when he and Jobs first began marketing it the following year. He primarily designed the Apple II, introduced in 1977, known as one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers, while Jobs oversaw the development of its foam-molded plastic case and early Apple employee Rod Holt developed its switching power supply. With human–computer interface expert Jef Raskin, Wozniak had a major influence over the initial development of the original Apple Macintosh concepts from 1979 to 1981, when Jobs took over the project following Wozniak's brief departure from the company due to a traumatic airplane accident. After permanently leaving Apple in 1985, Wozniak founded CL 9 and created the first programmable universal remote, released in 1987. He then pursued several other businesses and philanthropic ventures throughout his career, focusing largely on technology in K–12 schools.

As of February 2020, Wozniak has remained an employee of Apple in a ceremonial capacity since stepping down in 1985.

In recent years, he has helped fund multiple entrepreneurial efforts dealing in areas such as GPS and telecommunications, flash memory, technology and pop culture conventions, technical education, ecology, satellites and more.

The year is early 1998, at the height of dot-com era, and a small team of Netscape code writers frantically works to reconstruct the company's Internet browser. In doing so they will rewrite the rules of software development by giving away the recipe for its browser in exchange for integrating improvements created by outside unpaid developers. The fate of the entire company may well rest on their shoulders. Broadcast on PBS, the film capture the human and technological dramas that unfold in the collision between science, engineering, code, and commerce.

On August 9, 1995, Silicon Valley startup Netscape Communications made its stunning market debut and effectively illuminated the emergent World Wide Web for millions of people who, until then, were only vaguely familiar with its potential and promise.

Netscape’s initial public offering of shares stimulated the dot.com boom of the late 1990s and enabled what has been called “the technological, social, and financial tone of the Internet age.”

Dave takes you on a forty-year journey as a software engineer including working on every Microsoft operating system from MS-DOS through Windows XP and Server 2003. He discusses Microsoft Windows features he worked on, such as Task Manager, Zip Folders, Product Activation, the Start Menu, Desktop, Pinball, and MS-DOS.

For info on the book, Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire, check out: https://amzn.to/3DNfQao

This presentation was prepared for VCFWest on Aug 4, 2023. Many thanks to Bil Herd for the invitation! For lots of great Commodore insights, check out his channel at: @bilherd

Today is a significant day in the history of the Internet. On 6 August 1991, exactly 32 years ago, the World Wide Web became publicly available. Its creator, the now internationally known Tim Berners-Lee, posted a short summary of the project on the alt.hypertext newsgroup and gave birth to a new technology which would fundamentally change the world as we knew it.

On 5 August 1857, the expedition got under way. The first portion of cable to be laid was known as the shore cable: heavily reinforced line to guard against strains of waves, currents, rocks, and anchors. But less than 5 miles out, the shore cable got caught in the machinery and broke. The fleet returned to port...

Once, many years ago, I stayed on the 62nd floor of the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, Georgia. This was in the age when the price of a hotel room was directly correlated with the price of the WiFi service, and as a high school student I was not prepared to pay in excess of $15 a day for the internet. As I remember, a Motel 6 that was not blocks away but within line of sight ended up filling the role. But even up there, 62 floors from the ground, there was false promise: Free Public WiFi.

I am not the first person to write on this phenomenon, I think I originally came to understand it as a result of a 2010 segment of All Things Considered. For a period of a few years, almost everywhere you went, there was a WiFi network called "Free Public WiFi." While it was both free and public in the most literal sense, it did not offer internet access. It was totally useless, and fell somewhere between a joke, a scam, and an accident of history. Since I'm not the first to write about it, I have to be the most thorough, and so let's start out with a discussion of WiFi itself.

Microsoft Windows has attained near ubiquity in the computing world today, running on an estimated 3 out of every 4 computers. It decisively won the operating systems battle that raged across the 1980s and early 1990s, and has no significant competitors today, with its greatest rival on the desktop, Apple, having only a 16% market share.

Yet Windows did not win the operating system battle overnight, and its victory was far from assured. It struggled just to get its first release, and spent years facing formidable competition. Few people would have bet on Windows to eventually win, but that is just what eventually happened.

This series will (eventually) explore Windows rise to dominance, starting from its origins all the way to its last big gamble, Windows 8.

Update 2/28/2023 - the script for part 2 is largely complete (70%) and it is the next major video I will be working on once the current video I am editing (Fall of OS/2) is complete

Mainframe computers are often seen as ancient machines—practically dinosaurs. But mainframes, which are purpose-built to process enormous amounts of data, are still extremely relevant today. If they’re dinosaurs, they’re T-Rexes, and desktops and server computers are puny mammals to be trodden underfoot.

It’s estimated that there are 10,000 mainframes in use today. They’re used almost exclusively by the largest companies in the world, including two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, 45 of the world’s top 50 banks, eight of the top 10 insurers, seven of the top 10 global retailers, and eight of the top 10 telecommunications companies. And most of those mainframes come from IBM.

In this explainer, we’ll look at the IBM mainframe computer—what it is, how it works, and why it’s still going strong after over 50 years.