May 9Th Essential That One of These New Includes Showers on Two Floors, Enigmas [Oct 30] Devices Could for Use by Staff and Students, but Be Captured for Study

in the Atlantic and sensors were in daily use. Mediterranean. It became Incidentally, the building May 9th essential that one of these new includes showers on two floors, Enigmas [Oct 30] devices could for use by staff and students, but be captured for study. it's unclear if location awareness extended into those areas. Enigma Captured A heavily altered version of May 9, 1941 today's events were filmed as The success of the Active Badge the movie “U-571” in 2000. In system can be judged by its Bletchley Park already particular, British sailors were appearance in an “Alex” cartoon possessed an Enigma machine replaced by members of the US in the UK newspaper, The Daily [Feb 23] given to them by Polish Navy played by sturdy Matthew Telegraph, on April 27, 1995 Intelligence before the war [Aug McConaughey and stirling Bill (online at 16]. However, to actually Paxton. UK Prime Minister Tony https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/resea decrypt a message on the device Blair called the film an “affront”. rch/dtg/attarchive/cartoon.htm required the correct settings for l). A German WWII U-Boat the machine’s three rotors. commander was asked for his Hopper is a keen pilot, having On this day, the British opinion of the film's logged over 5,000 hours, destroyers HMS Bulldog, HMS authenticity. His response: including a round-the-world Broadway, and HMS Aubrietia “They got one thing right in the flight. His farm near Cambridge captured a German U-110 movie. There were U-Boats in includes an airstrip for his six- submarine just south of Iceland, the North Atlantic during the seater Cessna light aircraft. on what was later to be called Second World War.” Operation Primrose. They recovered a naval Enigma machine, its cipher keys, and Day of Illiaction code books. Andrew Hopper May 9, 1970 Born: 9 May 1953; The ILLIAC IV [Sept 7] was one Warsaw, Poland of the first attempts to build a UK citizen since 1964 massively parallel computer. From the mid 1970's, Hopper The University of Illinois signed worked with Maurice Wilkes a contract with DARPA [Feb 7] [June 26] and Roger Needham in 1964, and the machine's [Feb 9] on the Cambridge Ring construction was subcontracted and its successor the Cambridge to Burroughs [Feb 18]. Fast Ring (CFR) (which does not Unfortunately, after the imply that the first was slow). university’s ties with the HMS Bulldog, April 1944. Hopper helped set up Orbis Department of Defense (i.e. IWMCollections IWM Photo No.: Ltd. In 1978 to commercialize DARPA) became known, FL 1817. the Cambridge Ring work, and protests began. On Jan. 6, 1970, Orbis merged with Acorn the student newspaper The Daily The seizure was kept secret, and Computers [Dec 5] in 1979. Now Illini claimed that the computer the Germans continued to use at Acorn, Hopper designed some would be used to design nuclear their current codes, thinking of the chips for the BBC Micro weapons. that the submarine had been [Dec 1] and helped develop the The Kent State shootings in May sunk. company's ARM project [April triggered anti-war protests 26]. The materials were taken to across many US university Bletchley, where they allowed U- In the early 1990's, he worked campuses [May 4]. At the boat messages to be decrypted on location technologies that University of Illinois, students for several weeks until the keys became the Active Badge joined a May 9 nationwide expired. Merchant ship losses system. A badge transmits a student strike by declaring a dropped by over two-thirds in unique infra-red signal every ten “Day of Illiaction”. According to July 1941, and remained low seconds which is picked up by a “Smash Illiac IV” flyer, local until Nov. networked sensors. This events would include It also meant that Bletchley information can be employed by workshops, talks, teach-ins, and became familiar with the style a variety of location-aware “free music all day”, but no and formatting of Naval applications, often grouped smashing of the computer. messages, which helped in under the exciting heading of Indeed, it would have been breaking the new keys. sentient computing. difficult since its was still being constructed at Burroughs. Unfortunately, this became a lot The largest Active Badge system harder in 1942 when the was deployed in the Cambridge Matters became even more Germans added a fourth rotor to University Computer Lab, where heated after the August 24 the Enigma machines on vessels over 200 badges and 300 bombing of the Army 1 Mathematics Research Center at Computing [May 17], and later Larry Ewing did the first the University of Wisconsin- reprinted in “The Best of drawing of Tux, as a submission Madison. The building was Creative Computing, Vol. 1”. It for a Linux logo contest. Three scarcely damaged, but a physics was ported to many other such competitions took place. researcher was killed and three languages and platforms, and and Tux won none of them. As a others injured. graphical versions soon consequence, Tux is formally the appeared. Linux mascot, not the logo. As the delivery date for the machine grew nearer in Jan. The Wumpus makes several 1971, the Director of the ILLIAC appearances in the card game IV project, Dan Slotnick [Nov 12] “Magic: The Gathering”, is a Shakespearian decided that the university guest star in NetHack [July 28], couldn’t guarantee its safety. It and occupies an entire chapter Monkey Business was agreed to have it sent to the of “Land of Lisp [April 15]” by NASA Ames Research Center Conrad Barski. May 9, 2003 instead, which being a US Navy The “infinite monkey theorem” base was protected by marines. states that an infinite number of For more May protests, see [May Tux the Penguin monkeys typing on an infinite 4], [May 19]. number of typewriters, will eventually produce the works of May 9, 1996 Shakespeare. Linus Torvalds [Dec 28] adopted Hunting the Tux the penguin as a mascot for The theorem is sometimes Linux, taking inspiration from a attributed to Thomas Huxley, an Wumpus penguin drawing in the style of a English biologist, known as “Creature Comforts” character. “Darwin’s Bulldog” because of May 9-13, 1973 “Creature Comforts” is a stop- his spirited advocacy of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. “Hunt the Wumpus” was an motion clay animation comedy early game involving the search TV series, where zoo animals are Huxley supposedly proposed the for a mysterious monster (the interviewed. The show was theorem during a debate over Wumpus) lurking deep inside a created by Nick Park and Darwin’s “On the Origin of network of rooms. When a Aardman Animations. Species” with the Anglican player gets near to it, the Torvalds chose a penguin Bishop of Oxford, Samuel message “I smell a Wumpus” is because he was bitten by one (of Wilberforce, held at Oxford on printed. the species Eudyptula minor), June 30, 1860. The veracity of this account sadly suffers from It was written in BASIC by during a visit to the National Zoo the fact that the typewriter had Gregory Yob in response to the and Aquarium in Canberra, yet to be invented (a patent for many grid-based hunting games probably in 1993. the Sholes and Glidden “Type- he'd seen. Yob wanted to play a Writer” was granted on [June map-based game instead. 23] 1868). He dropped the game off with Nevertheless, researchers from the People’s Computer Company Plymouth University’s MediaLab (PCC [Oct 00]), expecting it to decided to test the theorem. For appear in a future newsletter, some reason, rather than and a few weeks later attended typewriters, and an infinite the Synergy Conference at number, they chose six Celebes Stanford; he remembers: crested macaques (named Elmo, “PCC had a few terminals Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe running in a conference room and Rowan) at Paignton zoo in and I dropped by. To my vast Devon, one computer, and a time surprise, all of the terminals limit of a month. were running Wumpus and Eudyptula minor at Canberra The results were somewhat scraps of paper on the floor with Zoo. Photo by Stephen Dann. disappointing: the macaques scrawled numbers and lines CC BY-SA 2.0. produced just five pages of text testified that much dedicated between them, primarily Wumpus-hunting was in consisting of the letter “s”. progress. I had spawned a hit The mascot's name, Tux, was Indeed, the monkeys were computer game!!!” suggested by James Hughes as a observed to be much more Although the game was derivative of Torvalds’ UniX, as interested in urinating and mentioned in the Sept. 1973 well as being short for tuxedo, defecating over the keyboard. issue of the PCC newsletter, the the attire favored by most Director of the university’s code was first published in the penguins. Institute of Digital Arts and Oct. 1975 issue of Creative Technology (i-DAT), Mike 2 Phillips, denied the project was a disaster and claimed they had learnt “an awful lot”. He also explained that “It wasn’t actually an experiment as such, it was more like a little performance.” The macaques’ typed work was later published in a limited edition entitled “Notes Towards The Complete Works of Shakespeare”. The experiment was part of the wider Vivaria Project, which aims to install computers in zoos across Europe to study the differences between animal and artificial life. It was helped by a generous grant of £2,000 from the UK Arts Council. 3 .

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