drawbridge) as his home and behaviors, making it essentially lab, and as a showplace for his the first 2D cellular automata. large collection of Roman, April 13th Gian-Carlo Rota, a friend and medieval, and Renaissance fellow mathematician, described artifacts (including the skull of Ulam thus: “Ulam’s mind is a John Hays one of Christopher Columbus’ crewmen). The Hammond Castle repository of thousands of stories, tales, jokes, epigrams, in Gloucester, Massachusetts is Hammond Jr. remarks, puzzles, tongue- now a museum, and well worth twisters, footnotes, conclusions, Born: April 13, 1888; a visit, although Hammond's slogans, formulas, diagrams, San Francisco, California large pipe organ is no longer quotations, limericks, Died: Feb. 12, 1965 functional. summaries, quips, epitaphs, and Hammond laid the foundations headlines.” for modern radio remote control devices by conducting some of Stanisław Marcin the earliest experiments in FM broadcasting and inventing Ulam Sophie Wilson single-dial radio tuning. In fact, (born Roger Wilson) he was eventually credited with Born: April 13, 1909; more than 800 patents, mostly Lemberg, Austria-Hungary Born: April 13, 1957; in the fields of radio control and Died: May 13, 1984 Leeds, UK naval weaponry, and is often Ulam was a Polish-American At [Dec 5], called the “The Father of Radio mathematician and nuclear Wilson and [March Control”. physicist. During his time with 21] took less than a week to the Manhattan Project, he design and implement the became familiar with the prototype of what became the capabilities of the ENIAC [Feb BBC Micro [Dec 1]. Wilson also 15], and realized that computers wrote its OS and BASIC would be ideal for running interpreter. mathematical test quickly In 1985 Wilson and Furber co- enough to gather statistical designed the 32-bit Acorn RISC insights about the results. Machine (ARM [April 26]), with Nicholas Metropolis [June 11] Furber working on the dubbed this approach “The architecture while Wilson Monte Carlo method” in honor of developed the instruction set. Ulam's uncle, Michał Ulam, “who The chip was initially employed just had to go to Monte Carlo to in the BBC Micro as a second gamble" according to Ulam. processor [Dec 1], and later in the [June 11] John Hays Hammond Jr. Metropolis and Ulam published and the Apple Newton [Aug 3]. (1922). Part of the National the first unclassified paper on Photo Company Collection the Monte Carlo method in 1949, Wilson's first design work was (Library of Congress). and it was soon adopted for a concerned with the regulation of wide range of problems cow feed. Her device utilized a His "Electric Dog" of [June 7] involving finance, 6502 processor [Sept 16], and 1912 was joint work with environmental risk assessment, non-volatile EEPROM to release Benjamin Miessner. He also linguistics, sports, and many personalized amounts of feed experimented with radio more. based on reading tags attached controlled boats, and in 1914 to the cows. During the successfully guided an Ulam’s contributions to cellular following summer, ideas from unmanned forty-four-foot yacht automata grew out of his work the cow-feeder project fed into from Gloucester Harbor in at the Los Alamos National Lab her design for the Acorn System Massachusetts to Boston and in the 1940's, when he studied 1 (1979), one of the UK's first back, a round trip of 120 miles, the growth of crystals using a microcomputers. using his “System for Radio lattice network model. In the BBC TV drama “Micro Control of Moving Bodies.” This Ulam and John von Neumann Men” [Feb 00] a young Wilson developed into a target-seeking [Dec 28] utilized this model in was played by Stefan Butler, and system that allowed a remote- the late 1950's to create a Wilson herself had a cameo as a controlled ship to home in on an method for calculating the kindly pub landlady. enemy ship’s searchlights. It motion of liquid viewed as a later developed into the first group of discrete units. Each radio-guided torpedo. unit's motion was calculated Between 1926 and 1929, he based on its neighbors’ built a castle (complete with a

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The band compiled a list of design and market unmanned AT&T Data Fail 335,435 Napster users who had aerial vehicles (UAVs), April 13, 1998 allegedly shared the band's specifically consumer drones for songs in violation of copyright aerial photography and mapping Software problems with one of laws, and delivered a 60,000- It all began when Anderson AT&T's relay switches caused page hardcopy of the list to happened across Muñoz's blog the failure of its nationwide Napster’s office in a truck. The posts. Muñoz, a 20-year-old network of high-speed data lawsuit also named several Mexican immigrant, had just services. The interruption lasted universities that were to be held arrived in the US, and was for nearly a day beginning at accountable for allowing their waiting for a green card. He had 3:00pm. Industry experts later feckless students to illegally passed his time by building a remarked that it was the data download music using their drone prototype in his garage network equivalent of the academic networks. out of gaming console bits and breakdown of AT&T’s long- pieces, and regularly reporting distance switching system back on how things were going in his on [Jan 15] 1990. blog. When Anderson read about At the time, AT&T’s data the prototype, he immediately network consisted of 145 sent Muñoz a $500 check to switching hubs. The problem support his work, and their began with a single transmission collaboration started from there. between a hub in Albany and 3D Robotics announced its "Solo one in Cambridge. The outage Drone" in April 2015, calling it was caused by one of the hubs the ‘smartest’ drone ever. running out-dated software, However, a combination of which caused it to transmit a missed deadlines, buggy large number of error messages components, and stiff to its neighboring switches. This competition from other drone- deluge overloaded those hubs, building startups, caused the and the problem cascaded company to drop out of uncontrollably across the hardware production, to focus network on software. The company also Thankfully, the breakdown Metallica founding member, became a founding member of didn’t affect the conventional Lars Ulrich (2009). Photo by the "Dronecode Consortium", a and cellular telephone services, Alberto Cabello. CC BY 2.0. non-profit organization with the or interrupt Internet access. But goal of using Linux [Oct 26] to the flow of data required for On July 12, 2001, Napster write cheap and more reliable transactions involving credit reached a settlement with UAV software cards, bank accounts, and the Metallica which apparently like, was disrupted. involved Napster being sold to Bertelsmann for $94 million. For more network outages, see However, the deal fell through, FCC Net Neutrality [Jan 15], [April 20], [May 8], [Oct and Napster was forced to file 4]. April 13, 2015 for Chapter 7 and to liquidate its assets in 2002. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) published a When the band's drummer, Lars ruling that broadband Internet Metallica Sues Ulrich, looked back on the access was covered by the Napster lawsuit in 2014, he Communications Act of 1934, Napster explained: “If I wanna give my and therefore ISPs were s— away for free, I’ll give it April 13, 2000 required to follow FCC away for free. That choice was guidelines that included net The heavy metal group Metallica taken away from me.” neutrality as a principle. These sued Napster [Nov 22] alleging rules went into effect on June 12. copyright infringement and racketeering after several radio Net neutrality is the treatment of stations played an unfinished 3D Robotics Solo all data sent across the Internet demo of their latest song, “I as being equal regardless of the Disappear,” which they'd Drone user, its content, or the platform. downloaded from Napster in April 13, 2015 It effectively treats the Internet advance of its official release. as a public utility, in the same 3D Robotics was co-founded in way as the electricity, gas, and This made "Metallica 2009 by Chris Anderson, then water supplies. vs. Napster" the first case that the editor of Wired magazine involved an artist suing a peer- [Jan 2], and Jordi Muñoz. The Unsurprisingly, many ISPs and to-peer file-sharing network. company's mission was to tech companies opposed the

2 idea, claiming it would discourage investment in infrastructure. However, consumer advocates and civil rights organizations pointed out that net neutrality would protect freedom of speech and make the Internet accessible to more people. The FCC solicited public comments on a proposal to eliminate net neutrality in mid 2017 [July 19], but the results were deemed suspicious. Then, a change in the US administration meant that on Dec. 14, 2017, the FCC decided to partially repeal the ruling, classifying Internet access once again as an information service.

Alan Turing’s Notebook April 13, 2015 A 56-page notebook belonging to Alan Turing [June 23], containing his handwritten notes on logic and mathematics, sold for $1,025,000 in the "Fine Books and Manuscripts Sale" at Bonhams Auction House in NYC [Oct 22]. This book is almost certainly the only extensive handwritten manuscript by Turing still in existence. Part of it reads: “The Leibniz notation [July 1] I find extremely difficult to understand in spite of it having been the one I understood the best once!” The notes, dating from 1942 when he worked at Bletchley Park [Aug 15], were entrusted to mathematician Robin Oliver Gandy after Turing’s death. Gandy later became a Professor of Logic at the University of Manchester [June 21]. Gandy deposited most of Turing’s papers at King’s College in Cambridge in 1977, but retained the notebook because of a personal message written inside. The notebook was put up for sale after his death.

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