By 1948, they'd finished the Andries van Dam company’s first product, the Dec. 8th Born: Dec. 8, 1938; BINAC [April 4], making it the world’s first commercial digital Groningen, the computer. However, their Tesla’s In the late 1960's, van Dam and estimates of the development [June 17] co- costs had proved to be Teleautomaton designed HES [April 18], the first extremely unrealistic, and by the -based system. summer of 1948, EMCC had Dec. 8 (or Sept.) 1898 However, van Dam is probably almost run out of money. Henry best known for his involvement L. Straus came to the rescue, but During the First Annual with . He only briefly [Oct 25]. They also Electrical Exhibition held at founded the Graphics Group at managed to sell the BINAC to Madison Square Garden in NYC, in 1966, now Northrop Aircraft in 1949. Nikola Tesla [July 10] the longest-running graphics demonstrated his A major reason for the cost research group, and organized Teleautomaton, a remote overruns was that Eckert and Brown's CSCI 1230: controlled boat. It was the first Mauchly were developing a “Introduction to Computer ever radio controlled device, second, more sophisticated, Graphics” – the longest-running although not the first example of computer called the UNIVAC graphics course. He also co- radio control: Marconi [Dec 11] (Universal Automatic Computer) authored the seminal textbook, and Oliver Lodge [Aug 14] had at the same time. They delivered “Computer Graphics: Principles him beat by a few years. the first one on [March 31], and Practice” 1951, and favorable reviews (1982), with James soon persuaded several Foley, Steven government agencies and Feiner, and John companies to purchase their Hughes, and co- own UNIVACs. But the orders founded the came too late; budget overruns precursor of today’s forced the partners to sell EMCC ACM SIGGRAPH to Remington Rand [Jan 25] on conference. Feb. 15, 1950. The character of The Teleautomaton (Musée de Andy in the film “Toy Story” Belgrade). Photo by Boban [Nov 22] is rumored to be Markovic. CC BY-SA 4.0. named after van Dam who Thomas Douglas taught many of the filmmakers. However, van Dam has said it's Selkirk Duff Tesla was also promoting an just an urban legend: “I can’t Born: Dec. 8, 1952; underwater device which he shake it. It’s simply not true.” Toronto, Ontario tried, unsuccessfully, to sell to But it should be noted that the military as a type of radio- “Computer Graphics: Principles Duff is known for his work on controlled torpedo. and Practice” can be seen on computer graphics and Andy’s bookshelf, and Steve Jobs animation, but has also Tesla’s most significant idea was [Feb 24] invited van Dam to the contributed to OSes (e.g. Plan 9 hidden inside these gadgets – premiere, and wrote in van [July 16]), computer security, the use of an early form of AND- Dam's copy of the "Making of and networking. gate circuit. There's some Toy Story" the words ‘you made In 1984, he and Thomas Porter argument about whether this it so’. developed a new approach to work was preceded by Allan Marquand’s [Dec 10] logic combining images: Porter-Duff machine which he probably compositing, and he later won started developing in 1885. EMCC two Oscars (in 1995 and 1997) Nevertheless, in 1903, Tesla was for this work, and for his design granted patents for a “System of Dec. 8 , 1947 with Bill Reeves of Pixar’s Signaling” and “Method of Marionette 3D animation Prev: [March 31] Next: [March system. Signaling”, which included his 31] ! AND-gate design. He authored "Duff’s device" in J. Presper Eckert [April 9] and 1988, a loop unrolling John Mauchly's [Aug 30] mechanism for speeding up C Electronic Controls Corporation code. He also found time to opened its doors in downtown develop the rc shell for UNIX Philadelphia in March 1946, but [Oct 15]. today it was incorporated as the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Duff makes a cameo appearance Corporation (EMCC). in the Niven/Pournelle sci-fi

1 novel “Footfall” (1985) as the Terrell began franchising the Time Warner, Hitachi, and co-discoverer of an invading "Byte Shop" name in Jan. 1976, others. It looked like there was spaceship. and it quickly became the largest going to be a rerun of the VHS chain of computer stores in the versus Betamax clash of the US. The company later changed 1980's. its name to MicroAge, and was a Peacemaker, Alan E. Bell, from Fortune 500 company from 1985 until 1991 (when it filed IBM’s Almaden Research Center, stepped in. He convened a for bankruptcy). Its chief meeting of people from many competitor at the time was interested companies, including ComputerLand [Sept 21]. Apple, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, and Dell. On Aug. 14, 1995, the group Common Lisp issued a press release stating Dec. 8, 1994 that they would only accept a single format. Furthermore, they In the early 1980's several threatened to boycott both groups were at working on formats unless the two camps Tom Duff (2006). Own work. successors to MacLisp [Dec 25], agreed on a single standard. CC BY-SA 3.0. but DARPA manager Bob They recruited Lou Gerstner, Engelmore wanted to develop a Jr. [March 1], president of IBM, single community Lisp dialect. Some Duff quotes: “Shared to persuade the warring factions Work on this "Common Lisp" libraries are the work of the to come to some kind of began in 1981. devil, the one true sign that the agreement. apocalypse is at hand.” In 1982, Guy L. Steele, Jr. [Oct 2] After compromises from both gave the first overview of the “With diligence it is possible to sides, a single format was language at a conference, and make anything run slowly.” formalized on this day. Philips published “Common LISP: The and Sony abandoned MMCD and “Whenever possible, steal code.” Language” in 1984, which is agreed to support SD with sometimes called the modifications. “Aluminum” book because of the color of its cover. The first DVD players and The Byte Shop movies appeared at the end of Not everyone was happy – the 1996 [Dec 20]; [March 19]. Opens language specification was Dec. 8, 1975 criticized for being too hard to implement in a fast compiler IBM Sells Paul Terrell opened the first (e.g. by Rodney Brooks [Dec 30] "Byte Shop" at 1063 El Camino and Richard Gabriel). Several Dec. 8 (or 7), 2004 Real in Mountain View (on his highly optimizing Lisp birthday), making it the second compilers, including "Lucid IBM announced that it planned retail computer store in the US Common Lisp", developed by to sell its PC manufacturing (for the first, see [July 15]). Brooks and Gabriel themselves, division to Lenovo, the largest Initially, he concentrated on put paid to that opinion. computer manufacturer in selling the Altair [Dec 19], and A X3J13 committee was formed China, for $1.25 billion in cash and stock, and Lenovo’s accessories such as memory in 1986 to draw up an ANSI agreement to relieve IBM of boards. Common Lisp standard based on $500 million in liabilities. Terrell is probably best known Steele's book, and the results for his influence on the were approved on this day. With the acquisition (which development of the Apple I [June went through on May 1, 2005), 29]. He ordered the first fifty for Lenovo gained IBM’s ThinkPad his shop, but only as fully- DVD War line and sales force, and became assembled boards as he had the world’s third largest PC trouble selling kits such as the Dec. 8, 1995 business. In 2014 it also Altair. Jobs and Wozniak had acquired IBM’s server line. In the early 1990's, war clouds actually been planning to sell the Lenovo was founded on Nov. 1, machine as a kit, but Terrell's were forming over which optical disc storage format should be 1984 by Liu Chuanzi and ten insistence on a finished product colleagues. Its first product was (even though it lacked a case, adopted. On one side stood the proud MultiMedia Compact Disc a device to augment computers power supply, and keyboard), with Chinese language helped shape the future of (MMCD), backed by Philips and Sony, and on the other the capabilities. The Chinese Apple. The Apple I went on sale Academy of Sciences (CAS) in [July 00] 1976. upstanding Super Density (SD) format supported by Toshiba, provided $25,000 in funding to

2 start the company as part of the government’s early experiments Presidential with privately managed firms. Liu and the other founders were Coding all engineers from the Institute Dec. 8, 2014 of Computing Technology, which was a member of the CAS. Barack Obama became the first US Presidential programmer Speaking about Lenovo’s IBM when he wrote a line of acquisition, Liu recalled, “I JavaScript [July 4]: remember the first time I took part in a meeting of IBM agents. I moveForward(100); was wearing an old business suit The tutorial he was following of my father’s and I sat in the featured the Disney characters back row. Even in my dreams, I Anna and Elsa from the cartoon never imagined that one day we movie Frozen (2013), and the could buy the IBM PC business. President's command caused It was unthinkable. Impossible.” Elsa to move 100 pixels forward to complete a square. (In other words, he had "Let Elsa Go.") C11 Standard C He then powered on to complete a number of other coding Adopted exercises using Google’s Blocky Dec. 8, 2011 language. C11, the informal name for ISO/IEC 9899:2011, is the current standard for C. It replaced C99, which had been in play since May 2000. Before C99, there was a C95, C90, and C89 dating from 1989. The original language, by Dennis Ritchie [Sept 9] and Ken Thompson [Feb 4] is sometimes called K&R C due to the classic President Obama Gets textbook by Brian Kernighan Programming Help. Official [Jan 1] and Ritchie. Although C White House Photo by Pete has changed significantly over Souza. the years, the second edition of the book (dating from 1988) is still a treat to read. Obama had joined a group of 20 middle school students from the Some of the more commonly South Seventeenth Street School used features of C99 are a in Newark, New Jersey at a Boolean type, a complex number White House event to celebrate type, long long ints, inline Education functions, variable-length Week. arrays, C++ style comments, and the intermingling of declarations However, it seems that Obama and code. C11 added Unicode was not quite the novice he support, anonymous structs and appeared since in a 2008 unions, threads, memory interview with Google CEO Eric alignment, better bounds Schmidt [April 27], he had checking on functions, safer I/O remarked that bubble sort was a functions, and generic macros. poor algorithm for sorting. Even more shockingly, Schmidt did not retort that bubble sort’s best case performance is O(n), and so is actually quite a good choice if the data is mostly sorted.

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