electrical engineering, much to the relief of all those involved. Leisure Suit Larry July 5th July 5, 1987 "Leisure Suit Larry" is an adult- Victor H. Yngve Susan Wojcicki themed video game series Born: July 5, 1968; created by Al Lowe , and Born: July 5, 1920; USA published by Sierra [Oct 30]. Santa Clara County, California Died: January 15, 2012 Each game followed Larry can be said to have been Laffer, a leisure suit-wearing Yngve was one of the early born in Wojcicki's garage [Sept computer programmer in his researchers in computational 7] at 232 Santa Margarita Ave, 40s, in his attempts, usually linguistics., and developed Menlo Park, after she decided to unsuccessful, to seduce women. COMIT, the first string rent it to [March 26] processing language in the later The series had its origins in and [Aug 21] for 1950's. COMIT had a strong Sierra’s "Softporn Adventure", a $1700 a month. influence on later languages, 1981 text adventure. When owns the house. such as SNOBOL [May 19] Lowe was asked to update the game, he remarked that it would One of his first COMIT programs be difficult as the game had aged produced random but well- so badly that it might as well be formed sentences, based on the wearing a leisure suit. text from the children’s book, “The Little Train” (1940), by The first game in the series, Lois Lenski. "Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards", was One outcome of this (apparently released on this day, and went frivolous) work was the ”depth on to win the Software hypothesis,” for which Yngve is Publishers Award for best probably best known. While adventure game of 1987. It was calculating the maximum followed by two sequels before amount of memory required to skipping straight to the fifth produce a sentence, he found game because Lowe had that even very long sentences promised he wouldn’t make a seldom had a syntactic depth of Leisure Suit Larry 4. more than two or three. Sentences with greater depths Lowe has said of the recent in- were often considered Susan Wojcicki (2013). Photo by name-only sequels, “It was like ungrammatical and/or TechCrunch Disrupt SF. CC BY getting a video from your son’s unintelligible. 2.0. kidnappers. On the one hand you’re glad he’s still alive, but oh shit what’ve they done to him!?” Juris Hartmanis Wojcicki became Google’s first marketing manager in 1999, and Born: July 5, 1928; was the product lead for You’re a Dog? Riga, Latvia AdWords [Oct 23], AdSense [June 18], DoubleClick, and July 5, 1993 Hartmanis established the . She handled foundations of the field of the purchase of YouTube [Feb Peter Steiner’s cartoon “On the computational complexity 14] in 2006 and DoubleClick in Internet, nobody knows you’re a theory with Richard Stearns in a 2007, and became the CEO of dog” appeared on page 61 of seminal paper from 1965. YouTube in Feb 2014. today's The New Yorker. The single panel shows a dog sitting They introduced time In 2015, Time Magazine at a computer while talking to complexity classes which described her as “the most another dog about its Internet represents the amount of time powerful woman on the usage. (or number of computation internet.” steps) that a computer (such as The panel has become the most a Turing machine [Nov 12]) Wojcicki's first business was reproduced cartoon from the would take to solve a certain selling "spice ropes" door-to- magazine according to Robert problem using a given algorithm. door when she was 11. Mankoff, the cartoon editor. Hartmanis’ work on complexity Steiner has said of its popularity: theory was instrumental in ‘’I feel a little like the person establishing computer science as (whoever it is) who invented the a formal discipline distinct from smiley face.’’ [Most historians mathematics, physics, and think it was Harvey Ross Ball [Sept 19].]

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In a 1996 interview, Jon Postel [Oct 6], said that the cartoon showed that the print media no longer had to explain the Internet every time they used it. At least one software product, Cyberdog [Feb 16], was inspired by the cartoon. For more computing cartoons, see [March 12], [April 16], [Aug 23], [Sept 9], [Sept 24], [Oct 17].

First Uber Arrives July 5, 2009 Uber became a pioneer in the sharing economy due to its ride- hailing app which now operates in over 700 cities worldwide. On this day, UberCab (as it was then called) connected its first rider with a car for a journey across San Francisco. The company's "creation myth" goes that Garrett Camp had spent $800 hiring a private driver on New Year’s Eve, and had been thinking of ways to decrease the cost of black car services. Another version has Camp and Travis Kalanick stuck out in the snow in Paris, unable to get a cab. This one seems unlikely since Kalanick joined the team after hearing about the ride-hailing idea at the LeWeb technology conference in Dec 2008. The prototype app was built by Camp, Oscar Salazar and Conrad Whelan, with participation from Kalanick, who’d been brought on as a “mega advisor”. Uber’s appeal hit the mainsteam in 2012 when the company created UberX, a service that allowed anybody to use their car as a cab. The "Uber" name is a reference to the German word über, meaning “above”. Friedrich Nietzsche's 1883 text, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," introduced the related concept of the Übermensch, which can be translated as "superman".

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