binary numbers and Boolean his career began at Hungary’s algebra were suited for Central Statistical Office in Sept. 10th computer design. Budapest in the mid-1960s. While there, he taught himself For more on logic machines, see how to program on a Russian- those by Stanhope [Aug 3], made URAL-2 [May 1], and Charles Sanders Jevons [Sept 1], and Pastore developed a simple Peirce [Nov 13]. programming language for the URAL called Colur (Code Born: Sept. 10, 1839; Language for the URAL); it Cambridge, Mass. Gunpei Yokoi translated arithmetic statements Died: April 19, 1914 into a form the URAL could Born: Sept. 10, 1941; understand. Peirce's work on relational logic was rediscovered by Alfred Kyoto, Japan After studying at Berkeley, Died: October 4, 1997 Tarski [Jan 14] in the 1940s, and Simonyi joined Xerox PARC [July went on to influence the Yokoi is perhaps best known as 1], where he and Butler development of relation algebra, the inventor of the plus-shaped Lampson [Dec 23] developed the and the relational database control pad employed by nearly first WYSIWYG (“what you see is model [Aug 19]. all video game controllers. He what you get”) word-processor, Bravo [Oct 00], and its successor In 1880–81, in an unpublished was also the co-designer of the BravoX. paper, Peirce showed how "Game Boy" [April 21] with Boolean algebra could be Satoru Okada. At Microsoft (as employee no. represented by a single binary Yokio claimed that the idea for 40), he integrated these operation (logical NAND or his "Game & Watch" handheld WYSIWYG ideas into Word [Sept NOR), anticipating Henry M. system came to him while 29] and Excel [May 2]. He also Sheffer's work by some 30 years. traveling on a bullet train in taught other programmers his Japan. He noticed a bored Hungarian programming style. businessman playing with a The Oxford English Dictionary calculator, and realized a watch includes Simonyi’s notation as could double as a miniature one of the meanings of video game screen. “Hungarian.” In 1981, Yokoi supervised the In 1995, Simonyi established the development of "Donkey Kong" "Simonyi Professorship for the [July 9] by Shigeru Miyamoto Public Understanding of [Nov 16]. Yokoi also worked Science" chair at Oxford. Richard with Miyamoto on "Mario Bros" Dawkins [Nov 15] was the first [Sept 13], and proposed its person to sit in it, and in the multiplayer concept and giving foreword to his anthology, "The Mario some superhuman Oxford Book of Modern Science abilities. Writing" (2008) called Simonyi: "a sort of combination of In his early years at Nintendo International Renaissance Man, [Sept 23], Yokoi had developed Playboy of the Scientific World, toys, including: the “Ultra Hand”, Test Pilot of the Intellect, and the “Ten Billion Barrel” puzzle, a Space-age Orbiter of the Mind as Charles Sanders Peirce (1900). miniature remote-controlled well as of the planet". New York Public Library. vacuum cleaner, a baseball throwing machine, and the Pierce also noticed that Boole’s “Love Tester.” He had originally [Nov 2] two-valued logic could been hired in 1965 to repair DATAR on the Ball readily lend itself to a conveyor belts. Sept. 10-11, 1953 description in terms of electrical switching circuits, which he DATAR (Digital Automated described in a letter dated Dec. Tracking and Resolving) was a 30, 1886 sent to his former pupil Charles (Karoly) computerized battlefield Allan Marquand [Dec 10]. This Simonyi information system developed influenced Marquand’s design of for the Royal Canadian Navy. It his electrical logical machine, Born: Sept. 10, 1948; combined data from sensors but this insight was forgotten Budapest, Hungary deployed throughout a naval until the mid-1930’s when task force dispersed over a Claude Shannon [Aug 10], John Simonyi is the former head of 80x80-mile grid. The collective Microsoft’s application software Atanasoff [Aug 14], and Konrad information was transmitted to Zuse [April 11] would all group, and a two-time “space all the ships and displayed on independently demonstrate that tourist” [March 26]. However, radar-like displays. The system 1 was first successfully tested on Ma became the first mainland kind, and more were to follow Lake Ontario on this day. Chinese entrepreneur to appear [March 1], [May 7], [July 22]. on the cover of Forbes in July DATAR was primarily designed The evidence was collected 2000, and has appeared there by Tom Cranston, Fred Longstaff through a dummy BBS called many times since then. and Kenyon Taylor, engineers at “Celco 51,” which helped identify Ferranti Canada, and borrowed At a conference in 2010, Ma the people dealing in the stolen some ideas from the similar CDS revealed that he had never cellular telephone and credit [July 31] created for the UK's written a line of code, nor made card data. Royal Navy. For example, they a sale to a customer. He acquired chose a trackball as the primary a computer for the first time input device, inspired by the when he was 33. “roller ball” device used in the Illegal Prime CDS. This meant that a user Sept. 10, 2001 could move a cursor over any object on the display to quickly Archie Released An illegal prime number obtain data on its heading, Sept. 10, 1990 represents information whose speed, altitude, or depth. possession or distribution is Unfortunately for Ferranti, they Archie was the first search legally forbidden. The first such never patented this trackball engine for the Internet which, prime was a 1401-digit number idea because DATAR was a before the Web, was mostly text, that began and ended with secret military project. image, software, and database 48565…29443, and was proved resources stored on FTP servers to be prime by Phil Carmody on [Aug 16]. this day. When written in hexadecimal, the number Archie (ARCHIvE server) was Ma Yun (Jack Ma) corresponds to the text of a C developed by Alan Emtage, Bill program implementing the Born: Sept. 10, 1964; Heelan, and Mike Parker, three deCSS algorithm [March 00], Hangzhou, China students at McGill University in when encoded as a gzip file [Oct Montreal. The aim was to index Until recently, Ma was the 31]. executive chairman of the the contents of all those FTP The number was illegal because Alibaba Group [April 4], one of servers and then provide keyword searching on that the deCSS code could bypass the the world’s largest e-commerce index. Also, Archie could be digital rights management businesses. The group began in accessed in several different scheme used on DVDs of the April 1995, when Ma founded "China Yellowpages", China’s ways: using a software client; by time, and the distribution of first Internet-based company. telnetting to the Archie server; such a program in the US was by e-mailing queries to that illegal under the Digital server; and (later) via the Web. Millennium Copyright Act [Oct 28]. The story that the engine's name comes from the titular character Subsequently, Carmody in Archie Comics sadly seems to discovered another illegal prime, be untrue sadly. Nevertheless, this one corresponding to the other early Internet search machine code for deCSS on a technologies, such as Veronica Linux i386. [Nov 17] and Jughead [Sept 2], Finding novel ways to distribute were named after characters from those comics because of deCSS was quite popular at the the perceived Archie connection. time. They included: hiding it with steganography, printing the code on T-shirts, as MIDI music files, and as a 465-stanza haiku. Jack Ma (2015). Photo by Operation UNclimatechange. CC BY 2.0. Cybersnare In 2003, Alibaba opened Taobao Sept. 10, 1995 Marketplace, an online shopping site, and its rapid rise led to a A US secret service's "sting", purchase offer from eBay [Sept codenamed “Operation 3]. Instead, Ma obtained Cybersnare,” resulted in the financial support worth a $1 arrest of six people and the billion [Aug 11] from Yahoo! seizure of at least twenty [April 12] co-founder Jerry Yang systems across several states. It [Nov 6]. was the first successful law enforcement operation of its 2 .