Feb. 13Th the Calculator’S TSI S14001A Noted Chemist
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former fruit packing shed in for their “TSI Speech+” talking Mountain View. Funding came calculator for the blind. from Arnold Orville Beckman, a Feb. 13th The calculator’s TSI S14001A noted chemist. chip was the first self-contained Shockley couldn’t persuade speech synthesizer, supporting a William Bradford anyone from Bell Labs in New 24-word vocabulary inside a 4K Jersey to join him, but he still ROM. The chip also found use in Shockley Jr. managed to gather a team of a few arcade games, notably Born: Feb. 13, 1910; engineering hotshots from other Atari’s "Wolf Pack", and Stern London, UK sources. On [Sept 18] 1957, Electronics’ "Berzerk and But his parents were American, eight of them resigned after Frenzy". Later National from Palo Alto. Shockley decided to discontinue Semiconductor licensed the research into silicon-based design for its “DigiTalker” Died: Aug. 12, 1989 semiconductors. speech synthesizer, the Along with John Bardeen [May MM54104. 23] and Walter Brattain [Feb They formed Fairchild 10], Shockley is credited with Semiconductor [Oct 1], a At first, all the words were co-inventing the point-contact transfer of talent which encoded by Mozer personally transistor on [Dec 16] 1947, and seriously affected Shockley working in his basement. the three men were awarded the Semiconductor. However, the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics [Dec company did earn a reputation 10]. However, Shockley believed for seeding tech firms, and has Murray Turoff (and stated) that he should have sometimes been characterized received all of the credit, and as "putting the silicon in Silicon Born: Feb. 13, 1936; Valley," along with Hewlett- afterwards actively excluded San Francisco, California Bardeen and Brattain from new Packard [Jan 1]. Turoff was a founding father of areas of transistor research. Late in his life, Shockley became computer-mediated interested in race, human Shockley went on to develop the communication through his intelligence, and eugenics. In N-P-N (negative-positive- design of the "Emergency 1965, he attended the Nobel negative) bipolar junction Management Information conference and gave an transistor, which he patented in System And Reference Index" infamous speech: “Genetics and 1948. Then in 1951, he headed a (EMISARI) in 1971, the first-ever the Future of Man,” where he development group with Gordon group communication system. Teal [May 10] and Morgan warned of “genetic Sparks [July 6] that built the first deterioration” and “evolution in EMISARI’s chat functionality, reliable junction transistor. reverse”. called the "Party Line", was intended to replace telephone He was an accomplished climber conference calls that might have and a difficult route in the 30 or more participants, making “Shawangunks” in the Hudson effectively communicate River Valley is named impossible. “Shockley’s Ceiling”. Turoff next designed the "Electronic Information Exchange System" (EIES [June Forrest S. Mozer 00]), an early online Born: Feb. 13, 1929; conferencing bulletin board system, which may be the Lincoln, Nebraska earliest example of groupware. Mozer did pioneering work on In 1978, Turoff's book, “The solid state electronic speech Network Nation,” co-authored synthesizers and recognizers, with Roxanne Hiltz, presented a and was also involved with the vision of how computer- William Shockley (1975). Photo physics of high energy particles, mediated communication might by Chuck Painter. CC BY 3.0. and rocket and satellite revolutionize social and measurements. Shockley became increasinly intellectual life. It's been called disgruntled with Bell Lab’s Mozer first became interested in the “bible” of computer management, although some speech technology in 1970 when conferencing. people have suggested that the a blind student in his class asked problems had more to do with whether Mozer could help him Shockley’s own abrasive style. In design a talking calculator. They any case, on his birthday in spent five years working on it, 1956, he founded Shockley and the technology was licensed Semiconductor Lab, located in a by TeleSensory Systems in 1976 1 Apollo’s quarterly sales passed gained some bad press for its Kurt E. Petersen $100 million in late 1986, giving over-zealous censorship of Born: Feb. 13, 1948; it the largest share of the content. For example, members workstations market, twice that couldn’t use the word “bitch” in San Francisco, California of Sun Microsystems [Feb 24], a dog breeders’ group, or the Petersen works on MEMS the number two. However, poor word “beaver” in zoology (micro-electro-mechanical marketing, and other problems, forums. systems), electo-mechanical eventually led to financial In 1994, Prodigy became the machines that might only be 20 difficulties and Hewlett-Packard first of the dialup services to micrometers long, packed onto a [Jan 1] acquired the company for offer Web access, albeit only via silicon wafer alongside the $476 million in 1989. its own lackluster browser. In circuitry controlling them. HP workstations proved a hard 1996, the company retooled Petersen established the first sell, and Sun became the new itself as an ISP, and "Prodigy micromachining research group top-dog in the market with over Classic" closed in Nov.1999, at IBM in 1975, and his review $2 billion in revenue. But the officially because of the paper from May 1982, “Silicon increasing speeds and falling imminent apocalypse known as as a Mechanical Material” is prices of PCs meant that the Y2K [Dec 31]. credited with inspiring obsolescence of the workstation widespread research on the wasn't far away. topic. Inktomi Of course, the potential of very small machines was appreciated Prodigy Founded Feb. 13, 1996 long before the technology The Inktomi Web search engine existed to make them. A good Feb. 13, 1984 was created by Eric Brewer and historical starting point is The Prodigy dialup service Paul Gauthier based on software Richard Feynman’s [Dec 29] (originally called Trintex) was a they'd developed at Berkeley. 1959 lecture, “There’s Plenty of joint venture of Sears, CBS and Room at the Bottom.” It became the top search engine IBM (hence, the “tri” in Trintex). during 1999, and ended up It offered a broad range of online services, including news, powering both Yahoo! [March 2] and MSN [Nov 10]. CEO David weather, shopping, bulletin Apollo Computer Peterschmidt predicted that it boards, games, banking, stocks, would soon become an “arms Feb. 13, 1980 and travel. After CBS dropped merchant” to numerous content out, the service was renamed delivery services, and by March Apollo Computer was the first Prodigy (why not Duotex?). vendor of graphical 2000 the company had a market workstations through its Prodigy promoted itself as the cap of $25 billion. Apollo/Domain range, built first consumer-oriented online Exactly one year later, the stock around the Motorola 68000 service, playing up its simple had dropped by 99.9%; the [Sept 26] and running a GUI to differentiation it from reason, of course, was Google proprietary OS, Aegis, because of CompuServe [Sept 24] and [Sept 27], and its ability to the large cost of UNIX licenses at GEnie [Oct 1], which still generate more relevant results the time; it was written in a lumbered along with command- through its PageRank algorithm version of Pascal. line interfaces. The GUI relied on a text-based protocol called [Aug 29]. The bursting of the dot-com bubble didn’t help North American Presentation Inktomi either [March 10], and Level Protocol Syntax (NAPLPS), the business was acquired by a product of the Teletext era Yahoo! for $240 million in 2003. [Sept 23], and proprietary languages called TBOL (Trintex The company’s name, Basic Object Language) and PAL pronounced ‘INK-tuh-me’, was (Prodigy Application Language). derived from a legend of the The protocol’s big advantage Native American Lakota people was its ability to encode about a trickster spider. complex graphics as short commands. An Apollo DN330 (the By 1990, Prodigy had become .NET "Swallow") (1985). Photo by Jim the second-largest online service Rees. CC BY-SA 2.5. provider, with 465,000 Feb. 13, 2002 subscribers, trailing only CompuServe’s 600,000. Microsoft started developing the .NET Framework in the late Some geeks still sneeringly 1990's, originally under the title referred to it as “Stodigy”, and it "Next Generation Windows 2 Services" (NGWS). In late 2001, 2000Q offered 2,048 qubits. The times a year, twice on the east the first beta version was upcoming Pegasus P16 promises coast and twice on the west. released, and v.1.0 came out on 5,640 qubits. The ceremonies each involve this day. Experts estimate that the seven custodians, with a further The framework had two main number of qubits needed for a seven acting as backups who can parts: the Common Language ‘useful’ quantum computer is access a last-resort measure to Runtime (CLR; a virtual between 1,000 and 100,000, reconstruct the system if machine), and the Framework with likely application areas something goes very badly Class Library (FCL). being cryptography, atomic- wrong with the dark magic. Unfortunately, it was level simulations, and faster All but one of the 21 keyholders proprietary software, which put solutions of linear equations. has been with the organization off many developers so There's some debate about since the very first ritual was Microsoft responded with Mono, whether D-Wave machines are performed. Only one has ever an open-source project true quantum computers. D- resigned: Vint Cerf [June 23]. providing compatibility between Wave’s approach is based on The fact that "Vint" and .NET and other platforms, condensed matter physics rather "Voldemort" both start with the especially Linux. than the more mainstream letter "V" is a pure coincidence. Microsoft’s grand .NET strategy quantum information fields. also apparently involved adding ".NET" to as many product names as possible: Visual Studio 1234567890 .NET, Visual Basic .NET, .NET The Seven Keys Passport, .NET My Services, Feb.