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Sept. 25Th Born: Sept small memory linked with Steven J. Wallach others through a network that Sept. 25th Born: Sept. 25, 1945; users altered through reprogramming. The company’s Brooklyn, New York motto was: “We’re building a Motorola Wallach has contributed to high- machine that will be proud of performance computing through us.” Sept. 25, 1928 the design of vector and parallel systems, notably the Convex Motorola was founded in mini-supercomputer series. Chicago as Galvin Manufacturing by Paul V. and Joseph E. Galvin. Bob Paluck and Wallach founded It helped popularize car radios Convex Computer in 1982 to in the 1930s, with devices produce a vector processor marketed under the “Motorola” machine similar to Cray's brand name (“motor” plus “-ola,” [March 4], but with a better to signify sound). In 1947, the price/performance ratio. company changed its name to His design work for the Data Motorola. General [Sept 20] Eclipse The company's semiconductor MV/8000 processor at the end group manufactured its first of the 1970s was memorably transistor in 1952, a three-amp chronicled in Tracy Kidder’s device and, in 1955, it released “The Soul of a New Machine” the world’s first commercial [July 00]. Wallach is portrayed germanium-based transistor. as a man with a photographic Danny Hillis (2014). Photo by Joi memory who likes rearranging Ito. CC BY 2.0. Motorola announced its first his office when frustrated. microprocessor, the 8-bit Supposedly, after his mother With the CM-5, announced in MC6800 on [March 7] 1974, and read the book, she asked him, 1991, TMC switched from an its 32-bit chip, the 68000, on “Where did you learn to speak architecture of simple [Sept 26] 1979. Its PowerPC that way?” processors to a multiple family (1992) was developed in instruction, multiple data partnership with IBM and Apple (MIMD) design. A CM-5 was in the AIM alliance [Oct 2]. featured in the film "Jurassic Motorola's Martin Cooper made William Daniel Park" ([June 9] 1993) in the the first private handheld island’s control room (instead of mobile phone call on [April 3] “Danny” Hillis a Cray X-MP [Dec 4] used in the 1973. On Sept. 21 1983, the FCC Born: Sept. 25, 1956; novel). approved its DynaTAC 8000X Baltimore, Maryland In July 2005, Hillis and others telephone, the world’s first started Metaweb Technologies, commercial cellular device [Oct During his college years, Hillis and Brian Silverman built a to develop semantic data storage 13]. Motorola also pioneered the for the Internet, and Freebase, computer out of Tinkertoys, “flip phone” in the mid-1990s an “open, shared database of the which is now exhibited at the with its MicroTAC, and StarTAC world’s knowledge”. Metaweb Computer History Museum [Sept [Jan 3]. later became the basis of 24]. It contains about 10,000 By 1998, cellphones accounted wooden parts, plus fishing line Google’s Knowledge Graph. Its information is typically for two thirds of the company’s and sinkers. The machine plays presented in a box to the right of gross revenue. In 2002, it tic-tac-toe [Aug 25], with the Google’s search results [Aug 29]. introduced its first 3G cellular human player allowed to move phone, the A830 model, and the first, but still unable to win. As a Motorola Razr (pronounced graduate student at MIT, Hillis “razor”) was a popular phone of became interested in tendon- Computer Dating the mid-2000s, after which the controlled robot arms and company focused on Android touch-sensitive robot “skin”. Sept. 25 (??), 1959 [Nov 5] smartphones. In May 1983, Hillis co-founded Philip A. Fialer and James Recent times have not been so Thinking Machines Corporation Harvey took Jack Herriot’s happy: after having lost $4.3 (TMC) with Sheryl Handler, to course, “Math 139, Theory and billion between 2007 and 2009, develop the Connection Machine Operation of Computing the company was divided into (CM-1), a massively parallel Machines,” at Stanford in the fall two, Motorola Mobility and supercomputer. The CM-1 used of 1959. Their course project, Motorola Solutions, on Jan. 4, up to 65,536 one-bit processors “The Happy Families Planning 2011. and could complete several Service”, became the earliest billion operations per second. computer dating service. Each processor had its own 1 They matched partners by David A. Kaplan of Forbes has received one of the earliest correlating answers to a 30- described the 6-foot-5, 290- SIM8-01 8008 development kits question questionnaire. One of pound Benioff has having “the and started work on the “M/C”. the questions asked about mind of a fox and the body of a Sadly, despite its historical politics (choose one of bear.” significance, the MCM/70 was a Communist, Socialist, Democrat, commercial flop. Also, a New-Deal Republican, Old- Guard Republican, and Fascist), “MCM/700” was proudly launched in late 1975, but this and another had the participant MCM/70 was pure marketing: the only choose from six religious Sept. 25, 1973 difference between the 70 and groupings (Mystery Cults; Jews; the 700 was the extra zero Quakers and Mormons; Canadian Micro Computer printed on the case. Protestants and Non-Religious; Machines (MCM) announced the Christians, etc.; and Catholics). MCM/70, featuring an Intel 8008 [April 00], 8 KB of RAM, a one- The matched pairs met at a line plasma display, one or two party hosted by Fialer and Telesoftware cassette drives, a keyboard, and Harvey in Portola Valley. None 14 KB of ROM. An APL [Dec 17] Sept. 25-29, 1978 resulted in the sound of wedding interpreter was built in, along bells. Telesoftware (“software at a with a keyboard specially distance”) was pioneered in the Commercializing the idea never designed to support the UK during the 1970s and 1980s, occurred to them. “I wish I could language's extended character and referred to the transmission have had the foresight,” said set. of program code via broadcast Harvey later, whose actual teletext [May 12], by encoding career path was in aerospace each byte as a pair of teletext engineering. “Maybe I would characters. A paper about it was have been a Google or presented on this day by R. H. something.” Vivian and William J. G. “The Happy Families Planning Overington at the International Service” received an “A” from Broadcasting convention, and by Professor Herriot. the early 1980s software was being broadcast in this format For more dating, see [April 22]. by all the UK TV channels (e.g. Ceefax [Sept 23] published code for the BBC Micro [Dec 1] using Marc Russell this approach). Benioff The MCM Model 70. Photo by Belle Wins Born: Sept. 25, 1964; Nash Gordon. CC BY-SA 4.0. San Francisco, California Sept. 25-29, 1980 Benioff began Salesforce in a San Although the MCM/70 was The Belle chess computer, Francisco apartment in March announced on this day, the first developed by Joe Condon 1999 with the mission systems were only shipped to (hardware) and Ken Thompson [ statement: “The End of dealers in the autumn of 1974. Feb 4] (software) at Bell Labs, Software.” Salesforce was a This made it the second ever won the Third World Computer pioneer in hosting software in microcomputer to be released in Chess Championship (WCCC the cloud, rather than on their a pre-assembled form, and the [Aug 5]) in Austria this week. clients’ computers. Along the first portable (or, more way, Benioff coined the phrase accurately, “luggable”, at 20 Three years later, in 1983, it “platform as a service”. pounds). The first pre- became the first machine to achieve master level game play, This was not his first business assembled PC is generally agreed to be the Micral [Jan 15]. when the US Chess Federation endeavor – when 15-years-old, assigned it a rating of 2,250 he had founded Liberty Software The manual contained a note points. By comparison, only to create games for the Atari 400 from MCM's president, Mers 2,500 players had ratings above and 800 [Nov 00]. At 23, he was Kutt, which ended with “Enjoy 2,000, and Bobby Fischer, a named Oracle’s "Rookie of the the privilege of having your own former world champion, was Year". During his 13 years at personal computer.” ranked at 2,850 at the time. Oracle, Benioff became close friends with Larry Ellison [Aug Kutt knew Bob Noyce [Dec 12], Thompson began working on 17], and some people even and had been following Intel’s Belle in the summer of 1972, as wondered if Benioff was work on the 1201, an 8-bit chip a break from UNIX [Oct 15]. The Ellison’s nephew. that was eventually renamed the hardware came later – a LSI-11 8008. In May 1973, MCM had (the CPU of the PDP-11 [Jan 5]) 2 controlled three custom boards for move generation, four boards for position evaluation, and a microcode implementation of alpha-beta pruning. These hardware elements increased Belle's speed from 200 nps (number of positions checked/sec) to 160,000 nps. Thompson concluded that adding another level of move searching improved Belle's chess rating by approximately 250 points. But beyond 2,000, the improvements leveled off. When Thompson traveled to Moscow in 1982 he sent Belle along in a crate to compete in a tournament. However, the US Customs Service confiscated the machine at Kennedy Airport as part of Operation Exodus, which stopped the export of high technology items to the Soviets. Belle is now spending her retirement at the Smithsonian. 3 .
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