BLOG

• Posted June 28, 2013, 12:18 p.m. - 11 years, 5 months ago

Events in Computing History – July

Another month, another set of significant events in the history of computing and web browsing.

July 2nd

Year: 1950
Event: The co-founder of Logitech, Pierluigi Zappacosta was born.
Interesting Facts:
•    Pierluigi co-founded Logitech in 1981 alongside Daniel Borel and  Giacomo Marini
•    Logitech went on to become the world’s largest manufacturer of computer mice.

July 9th

 

Year: 1971
Event: Marc Andreessen was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa; he is now the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser.
Interesting Facts:
•    At the age of 9 he taught himself basic programming from books in a library.
•    On January 23rd 1993, Mosaic was released to the public for general use; it turned out to be the most popular web browser of its time.

July 16th

 

Year: 1906
Event: Reynold Johnson was born – in later years, he was nicknamed ‘the father of the disk drive’, as his work in the 1950’s at IBM helped to develop disk data storage technology, eventually leading to the release of the IBM 305 RAMAC disk drive.
Interesting Facts:
•    In 1937, Reynold Johnson invented a machine known as the ‘test scoring machine’ which sensed pencil marks electronically. He was a high teacher in Michigan at the time, but IBM bought the rights to his invention, and then hired him to work in their NY lab as an engineer.
•    When he retired from IBM in 1971, he had obtained more than 90 patents and retirement didn’t stop him from going on to develop the microphonograph technology used in the “Talk to Me” books released by Fisher Price.

 

July 16th

Year: 1968
Event: Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia was born in Bellevue, Washington
Interesting Facts:
•    He launched ‘Citizendium’ a free access to an encyclopaedia on the 25th of March 2007, 5 years after he left Wikipedia – this has gone on to represent a free-access encyclopaedia that has more accountability and credibility than Wikipedia, although has yet to gain the same worldwide success.
•    Larry no longer works on Citizendium, and is currently working on educational projects behind WatchKnowLearn, a non-profit community online that is devoted to the organisation of short videos and other media into one huge directory. The idea is that these are available to school children, all in one place, and includes a rating system.

July 18th

 

Year: 1968
Event: On this day ‘Intel’ was founded by Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce. It is now the world’s largest valued semiconductor chip makers.
Interesting Facts:
•    Intel invented the first microcomputer in 1972, following on from their success the previous year with the Intel 4004 microprocessor, the first to be commercial available.
•    Intel’s low-cost notebook computer has won many awards including the iF (International Forum Design) 2008 China Award, the 2008 Spark Award and the Appliance Design EID Award.

July 22nd

Year: 1992
Event: The Lynx browser announced to the public for Beta release on a range of OS, including Windows, DOS and Unix-like.
Interesting Facts:
•    Lynx was originally made by students Lou Montulli, Charles Rezac and Micheal Grobe at the University of Kansas.
•    Lynx still exists today but is still loyal to it’s text-only roots, and doesn’t support features such as JavaScript, graphics and Flash.

July 22nd

Year: 2009
Event: Windows 7 released to manufacturing
Interesting Facts:

• Windows 7 became available to the general public 3 months later on the 22nd of October.
• Since release, Windows 7 has had upgrades which include features such as handwriting and touch recognition
• There are now many different editions of Windows 7 such as Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate editions which can be accessed from home.

July 27th

Year: 1993
Event: Windows NT 3.1 was initially released to the public
Interesting Facts:
•    This was the first version of Windows that used a 32-bit “flat” virtual memory.
•    When Windows NT 3.1 was in conception, the main goal was its portability of both software and hardware. Previous versions of Windows fell short on these, so the idea of a common code base was developed to ensure ease of portability for this release.

July 29th

Year: 2007
Event: The first version of iOS (then known as OS X) was initially released to the public on the 1st gen iPhone
Interesting Facts:
•    There had been 6 different versions of iOS and version 7 is due to be out in a few months, this will be released with the new iPhone 6/iPhone 5S
•    OS X was rebranded to iOS in June 2010, after Apple licenced the IOS trademark from Cisco to avoid any potential implications of using the brand, which Cisco had used for over a decade.

Image credits:

http://pixabay.com/en/papyrus-hieroglyphics-63004/

en.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FFile%3ALogitech_logo.png

http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-2757536235

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:5.25_inch_MFM_hard_disk_drive.JPG

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Larry_Sanger.jpg

http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-2893115274

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lynx_%28web_browser%29.png

http://www.pcweenie.com/other/blog/blog-1.shtml

http://pixabay.com/en/icon-etiquette-stock-theme-windows-27046/

http://kurdiu.org/hawal/?pageid=119860http://kurdiu.org/hawal/?pageid=119860

• Fun, Facts & Figures
• History