Service (DNS), which delegated has a glorious Web interface, the responsibility of assigning and a user can even attach a August 6th addresses to distributed name Word document to a record. servers. In its present form the system Postel’s law is "Be conservative manages roughly $1.3 trillion in Peter Jay in what you do; be liberal in obligations and 340,000 what you accept from others." It contracts. It runs on an IBM Weinberger comes from RFC 761 , where he 2098 model E-10 mainframe, Born: Aug. 6, 1942; summarized desirable that can carry out 398 million Pennsylvania (??) interoperability criteria for the instructions per second. Internet Alfred Aho [Aug 9], Weinberger, There have been several and Brian Kernighan [Jan 1] Postel attended the same high attempts to replace MOCAS, but developed the AWK language school (Van Nuys in Los they’ve floundered due to cost, (he's the “W”) in 1977, which Angeles) as two other Internet complexity, and transition was first distributed in pioneers, [Oct 15] planning. Version 7. The acronym is and [June 23]. pronounced in the same way as the "auk " bird, which also acts The WWW Virtual as the language's emblem. In 1985 they extended the Library language, most significantly by adding user-defined functions. Aug. 6, 1991 This version is sometimes called “new awk” or nawk. The WWW Virtual Library ( http://vlib.org/) is the When Weinberger was oldest Web directory, able to promoted to be the head of trace its venerable heritage back Computer Science Research at to Tim Berners-Lee’s [June 8] Bell Labs [Jan 1], his picture was WWW overview page [ merged with the AT&T “death entry] at CERN. The site is star” logo of the mid-80s. This currently run by volunteers who image has appeared on T-shirts, (1994). Photo by Irene compile pages of for coffee mugs, CDs, and on at least Fertik, USC News Service. particular areas in which they one water tower (during the are expert. night of September 16, 1985). The Economist called him, “the The first really successful Heavenly Father of the Internet,” directory page was probably perhaps because of his Jerry Yang [Nov 6] and David Jonathan Bruce luxurious, flowing beard and Filo’s Yahoo! [March 2], which habit of wearing sandals. began in 1994. Postel Born: Aug. 6, 1943; Altadena, California Oldest Software Web Summary Died: October 16, 1998 Aug. 6, 1958 and First Pages Postel made significant contributions to the When the US Dept. of Defense Aug. 6, 1991 development of the Internet, Reorganization Act was signed particularly with respect to the into law on this day, part of it Tim Berners-Lee [June 8] posted standards written in the Request required the creation of a the first public summary of his for Comment (RFC [April 1]) management system for tracking project to the document series, which he contracts and payments to alt. [Jan 29] edited for almost three decades. vendors. MOCAS (Mechanization newsgroup. It begins: of Contract Administration “The WorldWideWeb (WWW) Postel created the Internet Services) went operational project aims to allow links to be Assigned Numbers Authority sometime later in 1958, and is made to any information (IANA) to assign network still running today. addresses to machines, and anywhere. […] The WWW helped create SRI’s Network MOCAS was probably first coded project was started to allow high Information Center (NIC [March in -MATIC [May 2], but energy physicists to share data, 2]), which made those addresses was soon ported to COBOL news, and documentation. We available over the network. [April 8]. Since those halcyon are very interested in spreading punch cards days, MOCAS has the web to other areas, and As the Internet grew, Postel and been updated numerous times. having gateway servers for [Nov 18] For example, the current system created the Domain Name

1 other data. Collaborators The “Line Mode" name refers to MS Office [Aug 1] on the Mac for welcome!” the fact that the program only another five years. displayed text, and only The post included an FTP site Steve Jobs [Feb 24] joined the supported line-by-line text input address (info..ch) where the Apple board of directors as the (i.e. there was no cursor code for a Web server, the Line de facto head of the company positioning). These restrictions Mode Browser [next entry], and [Sept 16] along with Larry meant it could work across a the WorldWideWeb NeXT wide range of terminals, Ellison [Aug 17] of Oracle. The browser/editor could be found deal was announced by Jobs at including Teletypes [April 00]. and downloaded. There was also the Macworld Expo in Boston, a URL [Dec 25]: The browser was initially with Bill Gates [Oct 28] making http://info.cern.ch/hypert released to a limited CERN an ominous “big brother”-like ext/WWW/TheProject.. audience (mostly the High- appearance on a large video These Web pages were restored Energy Physics community) in screen behind Jobs. Jobs was not by CERN in 2013, reconstructed March 1991, running on the dressed for a marathon nor from a backup made on Nov. 3 VAX, RS/6000 and Sun-4. It was carrying a sledgehammer [Jan 1992. None of them have any announced to the general public 22]. pictures, since the first web on this day [previous entry] via image only appeared on [July the alt.hypertext newsgroup. 18] 1992. The first graphical UNIX The Hutter Prize For the official birthday of the browsers, ViolaWWW [March 9] Web, see [March 12]. and [April 15], appeared Aug. 6, 2006 early in 1992. The Hutter Prize rewards the Pellow left CERN at the end of data compression of human Line Mode August 1991, but returned after knowledge as represented by a graduating in 1992, to work text file holding the first Browser with [Jan 26] on 1,000,000,000 characters from a Aug. 6, 1991 MacWWW, the first browser for specific version of the English the Mac. Wikipedia [Jan 15]. The first browser was Tim CERN released a simulated Marcus Hutter announced the Berners-Lee's WorldWideWeb version of the Line Mode prize on this day with a smaller [Dec 25], but it only worked on Browser in 2013 that runs in text file consisting of just NeXT computers [Sept 18], any browser (http://line- 100MB, but it was increased to which were fairly rare beasties. mode.cern.ch/www/hypertext 1GB on Feb. 21, 2020. The cash This was remedied by the /WWW/TheProject.html). It award was also enlarged, from second browser, the Line Mode starts by loading the first Web 50,000 to 500,000 Euros. The Browser, which could run on page ever published [Dec 25]. competition is currently almost anything: UNIX, VMS, organized by Hutter, Matt VM/CMS, MVS, and any PC with Mahoney, and Jim Bowery. an installed sockets library. The prize award amount is It was written in early 1991 by Microsoft Invests based on how well the . She had joined submitted compressor improves the WWW Project in November in Apple upon the current record. There 1990, taking a break from her Aug. 6, 1997 must also be a decompressor undergraduate math degree. Prev: [Dec 6] which restores the original file within specified time and After 18 months of losses, "sad memory constraints. face" Apple was rescued when Microsoft bought 100,000 non- Alexander Ratushnyak is the voting shares in the company, current record holder with a worth $150 million. Microsoft compressor that reduced the also "donated" an undisclosed 1GB file by 8.58% on July 4, amount to the ailing company, 2019, taking a mere 23 hours to estimated at well over $500 finish. million. One condition was that Apple had to drop its long-running CDE is Freed court cases over look-and-feel Aug. 6, 2012 Nicola Pellow with Tim [March 17], and QuickTime [Dec Berners-Lee. Photo by CERN. 6]. [Aug 16] The Common Desktop became the default browser on Environment (CDE) was a the Mac, and Microsoft kindly desktop environment based on agreed to continue supporting the widget toolkit for UNIX

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[Oct 15] and OpenVMS [Oct 25]. Hewlett-Packard, IBM, SunSoft, and Unix System Labs had announced CDE back in June 1993 as a joint development within their Common Open Software Environment (COSE) initiative. During the 1990’s it became the standard desktop on most UNIX workstations. However, other desktop environments, such as GNOME [March 3] and KDE [Oct 14] , improved rapidly, and became increasingly popular along with Linux [March 14]. Since CDE was a proprietary solution, it never made it over to Linux. In 2006, a petition was created asking The Open Group (the entity in charge of CDE since 1996 [Feb 14]) to release the source code for CDE and Motif under a free license. CDE was set free on this day, but it was only when the underlying Motif widget toolkit was also released under a LGPL license on Oct. 23, 2012 that CDE could call itself truly, completely free and open source [Feb 3]. Hallelujah!

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