Commodore. In 1985, she went on to work on the became a Rear Admiral and Manchester Mark 1 [June 16]. remained on active duty until Dec. 9 In an essay called “Speculations 1986. Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine” in Grace Brewster 1965 he originated the idea of “intelligence explosion” (now Murray Hopper known as “the singularity” (née Murray) [March 30]) which argued for the eventual advent of Born: Dec. 9, 1906; superhuman machine New York City intelligence. This essay led Died: Jan. 1, 1992 Stanley Kubrick to consult with him while filming “2001: A In 1943 Hopper joined the US Space Odyssey” ([April 2] 1968). Naval Reserve, and was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance He owned the vanity license Computation Project at Harvard. plate “007 IJG,” a reference to his She became the third person to intelligence work. program the Harvard Mark I [March 00] in a team headed by Howard Aiken [March 8]. Among Grace Hopper at the UNIVAC her many contributions, she's keyboard, c. 1960. Smithsonian The Stylator credited with popularizing the Institution. CC BY 2.0. Dec. 9 - 13, 1957 term “debugging” [Sept 9]. The USS Hopper [Sept 6] was Tom Dimond of Bell Labs Hopper joined the Eckert- named for her, as was the Cray described his Stylator (short for Mauchly Computer Corporation XE6 “Hopper” supercomputer. “stylus translator”), a graphics (EMCC [Dec 8]) in 1949, first She was awarded the Data tablet with a stylus, in a talk in working on the BINAC [April 4] Processing Management Washington. in octal, and later programming Association’s “Man-of-the-Year” with John Mauchly’s Short Code Award in 1969. The tablet contained copper [July 00] on the UNIVAC 1 conductors laid out so that when [March 31]. Some quotes: “Humans are the stylus was dragged across its allergic to change. They love to surface any numerical character Hopper developed several of her say, ‘We’ve always done it this could be recognized. It was only own languages and their way.’ I try to fight that. That’s necessary to process signals compilers: A-0 ([May 2] 1952); why I have a clock on my wall from three lines consisting of A-2, the first to handle symbolic that runs counter-clockwise.” seven conductors to produce a manipulation (1953); and “When you have a good idea and result. Later the system was FLOW-MATIC (1957) which expanded to recognize letters. greatly influenced the you’ve tried it and you know it’s development of COBOL [April 8]. going to work, go ahead and do The Stylator greatly improved This perhaps explains why it, because it’s much easier to on Goldberg’s Controller [Nov Hopper preferred the nom de apologize afterwards than it is to 23], and the next step was the guerre, “grandmother of COBOL” get permission.” RAND Tablet [Aug 00]. when Dan McCracken [July 23] asked if he could dedicate his book, “A Simplified Guide to Structured COBOL Irving John Good; lp0 on Fire Programming” (1976), to her as originally Isidore Jacob Gudak Dec. 9 1957 the "mother of COBOL.” Owing Born: Dec. 9, 1916; to her accomplishments, she was London, UK “lp0 on fire” (or “Printer on also sometimes referred to as Died: April 5, 2009 Fire”) is an error message “Amazing Grace”. generated by some versions of Good worked with Alan Turing UNIX [Oct 15]. lp0 refers to a Hopper's work became more at Bletchley Park [Aug 15], [June line printer, but the message is widely known after she was 23] for two years, and then an indication of a general error, interviewed on the popular CBS joined Donald Michie [Nov 11] not necessarily that the device is television show "60 Minutes" in in Max Newman’s [Feb 7] group, aflame. March 1983. US Representative where the Heath Robinson [June Philip Crane watched the 1] and Colossus [Jan 18] were One of the two known fire- programme, and initiated a bill developed. starting printers was the to have her officially recognized. Stromberg-Carlson S-C 5000 This included the promotion of In 1947, Newman invited Good xerographic device (similar to a Captain Hopper by special and Turing to join him at the modern laser printer, but with a appointment to the rank of University of Manchester. Good CRT as the light source rather

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than a laser). It was first publicly implement a fully functional The demonstration was dubbed demonstrated at the New York CPU, and so most historians “The Mother of All Demos” by Coliseum in Feb. 1958, but the believe the honor of first Steven Levy [Jan 26] in his 1994 name had been copyrighted on microprocessor belongs to the book, “Insanely Great”. He this day. Intel 4004 [Nov 15]. argued that the presentation helped inspire the creation of A S-C 5000 was installed at the Booher, an engineer at the Alto at Xerox PARC [March Lawrence Livermore Lab in Autonetics in Anaheim, had 1], which in turn spawned the 1959, and modified to print an earlier invented four-phase Mac [Dec 00] and Windows GUI impressive one page per second. logic. It used four separate clock [March 17]; [Dec 14]. This required an expansion of its signals, each with a different on- toner fusing oven, which proved off pattern, to change transistor to be a mistake. The moving states, allowing the circuitry to paper would often catch fire, be substantially simplified. which the device was unable to Using this technique, he made detect, so it would happily keep the first working four-phase ejecting burning scraps at high MOS chip in Feb. 1966, the speed. Sadly, no variation of the Autonetics DDA integrator, a “lp0 on fire” message was digital implementation of a reported. differential analyzer [July 23]. In 1964, the S-C 5000 was replaced by the “Radiation Printer”, which sounds even worse, but the name refers to The Mother of all where it was located, the Screenshot from the video of Radiation lab, not its printing Demos 'The Mother of All Demos". process. Dec. 9, 1968 Uploaded to YouTube by MarcelVEVO. The other fire-starting printer Douglas Engelbart [Jan 30] and was also a Xerographic device his group at Stanford's Bill Paxton (one of Engelbart’s [Feb 26]. For something similar, Augmentation Research Center ARC group) has said that but with CPUs, see [April 7]. (ARC) demonstrated their NLS perhaps 90% of the computer (“oNLine System”) to a packed science community thought audience of 1000 people at the Engelbart was “a crackpot” back First MOS AFIPS Fall Joint Computer then. “It’s hard to believe now,” Conference in San Francisco he explained, “but at the time, Computer [prev. entry]. even we had trouble understanding what he was The 90-minute presentation Dec. 9-11, 1968 doing. Think of everyone else introduced the world to a out there.” R. K. "Bob" Booher presented system that combined a mouse the paper, "MOS GP Computer," [Nov 14], a GUI, hypertext [April at the AFIPS 68 conference in 18], word processing, San Francisco. He described the collaborative real-time editing, The Sword of development of the D200, the e-mail, revision control, and first general-purpose computer dynamic file linking. Damocles with a CPU fashioned from just The demo was conducted via 24 MOS chips [May 17]. It had Dec. 9 - 11, 1968 real-time video conferencing been completed early in 1967. between Engelbert and his lab Ivan Sutherland [May 16] The D200 only weighed a few 30 miles away. This required Bill presented the paper, “A head- kilograms, and was later used English [Jan 27] and other ARC mounted three dimensional for guidance control in Poseidon members to build two display” in San Francisco (at the submarine-launched ballistic customized 1200 baud modems, same conference as "The Mother missiles and for fuel linked via a leased line. For the of all Demos" [prev. entry]). The management on the B-1 bomber. live two-way video, two device is better known as the It was even considered for the microwave links were also "Sword of Damocles", and space shuttle. setup. Engelbart later remarked, widely considered to be the first “The demo really never would virtual reality (VR) head- The D200's CPU is sometimes have flown if it weren’t for Bill mounted display (HMD), called the first microprocessor, English.” although the very first VR device along with two other claimants: is probably Helig’s Sensorama Ray Holt's MP944 [Dec 28] for Two massive Eidophor video [Aug 28]. the F-14 Tomcat fighter [Dec projectors displayed Engelbart’s 21], and Lee Boysel's AL1 [Dec actions on a 22-foot high screen, The Sword was built by 31]. However, all of these together with video insets of the Sutherland, with the help of his required multiple chips to ARC team back at Stanford. student Bob Sproull, as a

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stereoscopic display of initiative in creating the wireframe objects. It utilized Windows 2.0 Internet.” From that day forward perspective that varied with the Dec. 9, 1987 he was mercilessly mocked, direction of the user’s gaze, although he often tried to which made head tracking Prev: [Nov 20] Next: [May 22] explain that he was only necessary. It was intended to referring to his creation of the help pilots land helicopters at The notable new feature of MS Act. night. Windows 2.0 was that application windows could Gore had also claimed to have Its functionality and weight overlap. The user could also coined the term “information required the HMD to be attached minimize them and drag them superhighway” [Jan 3]. to a mechanical arm suspended around the desktop with a from the lab’s ceiling, and the mouse. user’s head had to be securely fastened into the rig at all times. Updates to Microsoft Word [Sept The resulting appearance 29] and Excel [May 2] made use inspired the Sword of Damocles of the improvments, which gave name. The original was a them an edge over their main mythical Greek weapon that was competitors, WordPerfect [Nov suspended above the king’s 26] and Lotus 1-2-3 [Jan 26], throne. which were still primarily text- based.

But it wasn't enough to lure It’s Christmas people away from MS-DOS, and Windows' glory days only really Dec. 9, 1987 started with version 3.0. However, this release did trigger The "Christmas Tree" worm was a lawsuit from Apple [Aug 24]. a REXX script that drew a Also, IBM licensed the GUI for Christmas tree in ASCII, and sent OS/2 1.1 [Dec 4], but renamed it a copy of itself to everyone in the Presentation Manager. the user's email contacts. Microsoft officially supported The worm started on EARNet Windows 2.0 until Dec. 31, 2001, (the European Academic a period of 14 years. Research Network) but quickly spread to BITNET [May 5]. It ended up circulated for six days, causing many mail servers to Al Gore ‘Creates’ crash, and so became the first widely disruptive replicating the Internet network program. Dec. 9, 1991 The worm had been written by a German university student, who The US High Performance later claimed that the damage Computing and Communication was unintentional; the program Act of 1991 was enacted. It had was only meant to send been drafted by Al Gore, and so Christmas greetings to his was more commonly called “The friends. Gore Bill”. "Christmas Tree" resurfaced on The Act kicked off the creation of USENET [Jan 29] in 1990, and a national high-speed fiber optic forced IBM to briefly shut down network, the National its 350,000-terminal network in Information Infrastructure (NII), order to purge it. by funding the National Centre for Supercomputing Incidentally, the core Applications (NCSA [Jan 15]) at mechanism employed by the the University of Illinois. NCSA ILOVEYOU worm [May 5] in later became the home of the 2000 was basically the same as Mosaic web browser [Sept 28]. "Christmas Tree", although coded in VBScript. A few years later, on March 9 1999, Vice President Gore gave a fateful interview to CNN’s "Late Edition" in which he stated: “During my service in the United States Congress, I took the

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