His 2013 exposé, “Who Owns System”) had been demoed in the Future?”, argues that people Nov.1961, running on an IBM May 3rd are becoming increasingly 709, and attached to four Friden disenfranchised from online Flexowriter terminals. economies. Leonid Notable CTSS tools included:  One of the first email Genrikhovich implementations, with a mail box for each user. It had been Khachiyan proposed by [April 20], Glenda Schroeder,

Born: May 3, 1952; and Pat Crisman in Jan. 1965, St. Petersburg, Russia and was implemented by Noel Died: April 29, 2005 Morris and as Khachiyan developed the MAIL [Dec 00] during the ellipsoid algorithm for linear following summer; programming, the first to have a  Real-time text messaging for polynomial running time. This up to thirty users; also meant that problems previously implemented by Morris and thought to be intractable could Van Vleck; now be solved efficiently.  Pouzin's RUNCOM which could At the time, The New York Times execute a list of commands called him, “the mystery author contained in a file. This later of a new mathematical theorem gave him the idea to develop that has rocked the world of the [Nov 30] shell, computer analysis.” which went on to inspire scripts;  The text editor QED [March Jaron Zepel Lanier 26], the predecessor of ed and A VPL Research DataSuit. Photo vim, with regular expressions Born: May 3, 1960; by Dave Pape. NYC later added by [Feb 4]; A pioneer in the field of virtual reality (VR Dec 22]), who  RUNOFF [Nov 6] by Jerry departed Atari in 1985 with CTSS Presented Saltzer [Oct 9], one of the first Thomas G. Zimmerman [Aug 29] text formatting utilities. It was to found VPL Research, the first May 3, 1962 the ancestor of UNIX's roff, company to sell VR gear. Their nroff, and similar tools for The Compatible Time-Sharing many other systems. products included the Data System (CTSS) was probably the Glove, the EyePhone, and the first time-sharing OS. The “Compatible” in the name DataSuit – a full-body outfit with Development began in MIT’s referred to the OS’s backward sensors for measuring Computation Center in spring compatibility with the FORTRAN movement. 1961, led by Fernando. J. Monitor System (FMS), the IBM The EyePhone was featured in Corbató [July 1], Bob Daley, and 7094's batch processing OS. Marjorie Daggett. However, the 1992 sci-fi movie “The By 1965, CTSS supported up to another contender for first is Lawnmower Man.” The scientist- thirty simultaneous users every PLATO II [Aug 22], created by hero, played by Pierce Brosnan, day, and was running on the so- Donald Bitzer in early 1961. was supposedly based on Lanier. called ‘blue machine’ in the MIT Lanier was one of the first CTSS ran on a modified IBM Computation Center and the ‘red people to employ VR in the 7094 [Nov 30] with two 32K machine’ at Project MAC [July 1]. performance arts, with his band banks of core memory instead of Chromatophoria, where he the usual one. One bank was played various virtual reserved for the time-sharing Earliest Spam instruments. supervisory program, the other for user programs. 12:33 EDT His book “You Are Not a Gadget” May 3, 1978; On this day, Corbató, Daggett, (2010) offers a critique of Gary Thuerk, a dedicated DEC and Daley presented a paper various digital technologies, marketer [Aug 23], sent an email about CTSS at the 1962 Spring including Wikipedia [Jan 15] (a to a large fraction of everyone Joint Computer Conference. triumph of “intellectual mob on the ARPANET to promote the However, an earlier version of rule”), Facebook [May 18] and DECSYSTEM-20. He sincerely CTSS (then called the Twitter [March 21] believed that they would be “Experimental Time-Sharing ("dehumanizing and shallow"). delighted to receive the exciting

1 news about how DEC had In 2013 he was named a Servant integrated ARPANET support Dell Founded of God, the first stage on the into their TOPS-20 OS [Nov 29]. May 3, 1984 path towards sainthood. In those days, there was a After a detailed investigation of University of Texas at Austin printed directory listing all the a miracle in Brazil attributed to undergraduate Michael Dell ARPANET addresses. Thuerk Acutis's intercession, Pope founded "PC Limited" (later extracted those located on the Francis [June 6] announced his renamed Dell) in his off-campus west coast, and added a few beatification in a decree on Feb. dormitory room (no. 2713) at others, including people at ARPA 21, 2020. the Dobie Center. The startup HQ. The list eventually grew to specialized in selling IBM PC- For more religious-themed 397 of the 2600 people on the compatibles built from stock computing, see [April 4]. ARPANET at the time; some components. 15% of the network. During the last month of Thuerk called in a willing DEC summer break, Dell sold engineer, Carl Gartley, to work First Geocache $180,000 worth of gear, on the content of the message, prompting him to drop out of May 3, 2000 polishing its prose to precision. college, and set up a full-time When they were happy with the business in Austin; he achieved Dave Ulmer kicked off the “Great result, Gartley used Thuerk’s sales of $6 million in the first American GPS [Feb 22] Stash email account to send it off. year. Hunt” by posting the coordinates of his geocache Unfortunately, the mail software PC Limited was probably the stash to the USENET [Jan 29] would only accept a maximum of first company to apply the direct newsgroup sci.geo.satellite-nav: 320 addresses at once. selling model to computers, 45°17.460′N 122°24.800′W Undeterred due to the message’s initially through phone sales, (near Viola in Oregon). importance, Gartley re-sent it to then later via the Internet. those unlucky enough to miss The five-gallon bucket contained the first post. Dell was one of the most a Delorme Topo USA successful companies of the topographic map, two CDs, a Thuerk maintains to this day 1990's, creating a wave of cassette recorder, a “George of that he was performing a public “Dellionaires” – employees who the Jungle” VHS tape, a Ross service since the DEC-20 capitalized on the burgeoning Perot book, four $1 bills, a changes were relevant news for value of their stock to become slingshot, and a can of beans. the community – “I think of entrepreneurs, investors, and There was also a logbook and myself as the father of e- philanthropists. This helped pencil for leaving comments. marketing.” He also likes to Austin become one of the point out that the approach main tech startup centers worked: “we sold $13 million or outside of Silicon Valley. $14 million worth” of DEC gear because of the email. However, the Defense Communications Agency (DCA), Carlo Acutis which ran the ARPAnet, called Born: May 3, Thuerk’s boss to register a strong complaint. The large 1991; London, UK negative reaction to the post Died: Oct. 12, 2006 also dissuaded others from trying the same thing, at least for Acutis began documenting a few years. Eucharistic miracles around the world on his website Although Thuerk is usually miracolieucaristici.org in The First Geocache. Photo by awarded the title of First 2005, having started compiling groundspeak. CC BY-SA 4.0. Spammer, a possible earlier the catalogue at the age of example dates from 1971 on eleven. MIT’s CTSS MAIL [Dec 00]. Sadly, the bucket was severely He was educated in Milan at the damaged by an Oregon road The term "spam" was coined Jesuit Instituto Leone XIII. crew a few years later, but later [March 31], and the earliest Outside school, he did voluntary concerned geocachers, commercial spam was also a few work with the homeless and recognizing its historical years away [April 12]. destitute. Unfortunately, his importance, placed an “Original promising career as a Stash” plaque at the site. programmer was cut short by The date of this first geocache his death from leukemia. wasn’t chosen at random. GPS’s “Selective Availability” feature had just been turned off on May

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2, making it possible to use GPS The first NFT was created on to locate small objects for the this day by Kevin McCoy and first time. Anil Dash during the Seven on Seven conference held at the Back then geocaching was more New Museum of Contemporary commonly called “gpsstashing.” Art in NYC. The blockchain However, Matt Stum noted in marker was linked to a video the gpsstash group on eGroups clip that McCoy's wife had (which would later become previously made. The pair called Yahoo! Groups [Jan 30]), that the their creation: monetized term “stash” had rather negative graphics. connotations, and suggested “geocaching” instead. The first NFT site, Etheria, was launched in Oct. 2015. Most of its items went unsold until March 13, 2021, when interest Microsoft Drops in NFTs sparked a buying frenzy. Within 24 hours, everything had Yahoo! Offer been sold for a total of $1.4 May 3, 2008 million. Prev: [Sept 7] Next: [July 29] On June 30, 2021, Tim Berners- Lee [June 8] sold an NFT for his On Feb. 1, 2008, Microsoft original Web source code [Dec offered $44.6 billion ($31 / 25] for $5.4 million to an share) to purchase Yahoo!, as unidentified buyer at Sotheby’s part of its master plan to auction house. The highest bid compete against Google [Aug had stood at $3.5 million for a 19]. while, but there were a flurry of bids in the closing 15 minutes. After several months of negotiations, Yahoo! rejected the Four items were included as bid, and publicly stated that the part of the NFT: offer “substantially undervalues” the company. This was after  time-stamped files of the code; Microsoft had added an extra $5  an animated video of the code billion in loose change to the being written; tender.  a letter from Sir Tim; The deal fell apart mainly due to Jerry Yang's [Nov 6] opposition,  a digital poster of the code. even though some other board However, the sale fell short of members and several large the record - $69m, for digital shareholders had wanted to artwork by Beeple, sold at accept it. On this day, Microsoft Christie’s[Feb 23] auction officially abandoned its house, in March. proposal.

Less than ten years later, Yahoo! sold its core business to Verizon for $4.8 billion on [July 13] 2017.

Non-fungible Tokens May 3, 2014 A non-fungible token (NFT) is blockchain [Aug 19] data that certifies that a digital asset is unique, although copies of the asset are available to anyone. NFTs have been used to represent photos, videos, audio, and much more.

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