wireless! Watch him - he may Fredkin is credited with have a razor on him.” inventing the “walking” disk drive at MIT. According to the Oct. 2nd The first public demonstration story, he wrote a program that of the system, and Stooky, made an IBM tape drive stop so occurred on [Jan 26] 1926. In suddenly after reaching its top Stooky Bill is Seen later years, the system was put speed that it caused the device Oct. 2, 1925 on display in the London Science to rock back and forth, move Museum, along with Stooky's around, and occasionally fall head. Scottish inventor John Logie over. Baird [Aug 13] produced the first recognizable image on the The character Stephen Falken in world’s first working TV. Being the film “WarGames” [June 3], constantly short of funds, he had Edward N. Fredkin was modeled after Fredkin. built the device from assorted scrap materials, including an old Jr. hatbox, a pair of scissors, bicycle Born: Oct. 2, 1934; Martin Edward light lenses, and sealing wax and Los Angeles, California glue. Fredkin is the inventor of the Hellman His invention, which he termed a trie data structure (a search tree Born: Oct. 2, 1945; “televisor,” used rotating disks that utilizes string prefixes), and the Bronx, NYC to scan objects as electrical the Billiard-Ball Computer impulses via a photocell. The Model for reversible computing Hellman is best known as the co- signals were displayed on a with cellular automata. The inventor of public key screen as a low-resolution model utilizes Fredkin gates, cryptography with Whitfield greyscale image. which support a form of Diffie [June 5]. A message sender reversible bit swapping. uses the recipient’s public (widely known) key to encrypt His interest in cellular automata his data, and the recipient [Dec 26], led to his support of decrypts the message with his or "Digital Philosophy" which her private (top-secret) key. claims that all natural physical Aside from encryption, the keys processes are types of can also be used as digital computation. Other learned signatures. advocates include Konrad Zuse [June 22] and Stephen Wolfram Diffie and Hellman worked [May 18]. lacked a practical implementation, but this was Fredkin founded the DEC user supplied later by Ronald Rivest group, DECUS [March 00], and [May 6], Adi Shamir [July 6] , and persuaded BBN [Oct 15] to buy Leonard Adleman [Dec 31] with the first PDP-1 [Nov 00]. It came their RSA algorithm. with no software, so Fredkin A modern replica of Stooky Bill wrote an assembler called FRAP Hellman is an active speaker on (2009). Narrow Bandwidth (FRedkin’s Assembly Program), computer privacy issues, and a Television Association. Photo one of the first time-sharing keen speed skater and glider by G1MFG. OSes [Jan 1] for it, and he and pilot. Ben Gurley [Nov 00] modified The first image produced was of the machine to support a ventriloquist’s dummy Baird interrupts. He was also nicknamed “Stooky Bill”. After responsible for the program that Guy Lewis Steele Stooky, he produced pictures of operated the scissors that cut William Edward Taynton, a 20 the ribbon at the machine's Jr. year-old who worked in the inauguration. Naturally, he Born: Oct. 2, 1954; offices below Baird’s attic lab. called the PDP-1 “the world’s Missouri, USA first ‘fun’ computer.” Subsequently, looking for Steele is sometimes called “The publicity and funding, Baird In the fall of 1961 Fredkin left Great Quux” due to his invention tried to interest the Daily BBN to form Information of the variable name "quux", Express newspaper in his International Inc. (aka “Triple I” which is used in much the same invention. The news editor was [Oct 00]), to build high precision way as "foo" and "bar" [March terrified and told one of his staff: monitors, and the company went 10]. Perhaps more importantly, “For God’s sake, go down to on to play an important role in he and Gerald Jay Sussman [Feb reception and get rid of a lunatic the development of computer 8] created Scheme [Dec 22], and who’s down there. He says he’s graphics. helped to define a parallel got a machine for seeing by version of Lisp called *Lisp (Star 1 Lisp). In 2005, he led a team at Army’s field artillery museum. Unfortunately for Telefunken, it Sun that produced Fortress, a Craft struck a deal to borrow considered the invention too high-performance replacement eight ENIAC panels in exchange unimportant to patent, but a for Fortran. He has served on the for restoring them. description of the mouse-like standards bodies that define Rollkugel, written by Günter After Perot’s company was Common Lisp, Fortran, C, Neubauer, appeared in purchased by Dell in 2009, seven ECMAScript [Aug 13], and Telefunken’s technical journal Scheme. of the eight panels were on this day, a few weeks before returned to Fort Sill, where they Doug Engelbart’s “The Mother of Earlier in his career, David Moon are now on display. All Demos” [Dec 9]. However, and Steele wrote the original Engelbart had been working on EMACS text editor in 1976 in the his mouse since the early 1960s form of a set of Editor MACroS [Nov 14]. for TECO [Oct 29]. ANITA Launched His version of the "Jargon File" Oct. 2, 1961 was published as “The Hacker’s The ANITA Mark VII and Mark Dictionary” in 1983, and was VIII, built by the Bell Punch illustrated with Steele’s Crunchly Co. in the UK, were the first all- cartoons. The follow-up,“The electronic desktop calculators. New Hacker’s Dictionary,” was Their logic circuits were built edited by Eric Raymond [Dec 4]. around vacuum tubes; the first Steele is a Western Square fully transistorized desktop dancer, has published chess calculator was probably the A Telefunken Rollkugel. Photo problems and sonnets, and Friden EC-130 [June 00]. by Marcin Wichary. CC BY 2.0. played Lun Tha, a Burmese The acronym ‘ANITA’ either scholar, in “The King and I.” stood for “A New Inspiration To Instead of Engelbart’s three A quote: “Being forced to write Arithmetic”, or “A New buttons, the Rollkugel used one, comments actually improves Inspiration To Accounting”, which coincidentally made it code, because it is easier to fix a though there were rumors that quite similar to the mice that crock than to explain it.” it was actually the name of the eventually appeared on the Apple Lisa [Jan 19] and Mac [Jan designer’s wife. The project leader, Norbert (Norman) Kitz , 24]. Also, the Rollkugel circular had worked on the Pilot ACE shape was very reminiscent of End of the ENIAC [May 10], and with Andrew the iMac hockey puck [May 6]. Oct. 2, 1955 Booth [Feb 1] at Birbeck. Earlier designs (I through VI), After eight years [July 29] of never reached production, and a America Online loyal service at the Ballistic quirk of timing meant that the Research Laboratory (BRL) in the Mark VIII was released a few Oct. 2, 1989 Maryland, the ENIAC [Feb 15] days before the Mark VII. was decommissioned at America Online (AOL) was 11:45pm today. originally a dial-up service called Quantum Link [Nov 5] which Some of the retired hardware provided chat rooms, an e-mail went to good homes: Arthur The Rollkugel service, and games. Quantum Burks [Oct 13] donated four Oct. 2, 1968 and Apple launched "AppleLink ENIAC panels to the University Personal Edition" on [May 20] of Michigan, and the The Telefunken Rollkugel 1988 , and Quantum soon Smithsonian obtained several, (rolling ball) was pushed over a followed with "PC Link", a but most of the machine just table to displace a cursor on an similar service for IBM- disappeared. Altogether the attached SIG-100-86 vector compatibles developed with ENIAC used around 40 panels, graphics terminal, thereby Tandy. After Quantum parted with each one about 2 feet wide, simplifying operations such as ways with Apple, the company 2 feet deep, and 8 feet high. drawing a shape. changed the service’s name to America Online on this day. In 2006, Ross Perot [June 27] The device was based on an decided to mount a computing earlier trackball device (also America Online for MS-DOS was history display at his company called the Rollkugel) built into launched in Feb. 1991, followed headquarters in Plano, Texas. radar flight control desks a year later by a Windows Libby Craft, Perot’s director of developed by Rainer Mallebrein version. In September 1993, AOL special projects, was dispatched at Telefunken. added USENET [Jan 29] access, in search of the ENIAC. In 1965, Mallebrein and his team triggering the “Eternal September” [Jan 26]. This She found nearly a quarter of its came up with the idea of coincided with AOL’s “carpet hardware in storage at Fort Sill “reversing” the Rollkugel to turn bombing” marketing campaign in Oklahoma, home to the it into a mouse-like device. 2 of free trial disks. At one point, RS/6000 workstation in October Taligent was officially dissolved 50% of the CDs produced 1993, and later in the Apple in Jan. 1998. worldwide had an AOL logo Power Mac [March 14]. Almost printed on them. every Mac featured a PowerPC processor until 2006 when the company moved to Intel CPUs [June 6]. Richard Shaffer, publisher of Computer Letter, said of the Apple-IBM team up: “It’s like a surfer girl marrying a banker.” Robert Stearns, vice-president of corporate development at Compaq Computer, said that people supporting the PowerPC “are smoking dope. There’s no way it’s going to work.” AIM should not be confused with "AIM" (Advanced Idea Mechanics) – a group of international science-terrorists that appear in Marvel comics.