Kate Johanns

All posts by Kate Johanns

Kate Johanns is a communications professional and freelance writer with more than 13 years of experience in publishing and marketing.

Tech Time Warp: Swen worm poses as security patch

Tech Time Warp: Swen worm poses as security patch

The hits for network admins kept coming in late summer/early fall 2003. Just weeks after the Blaster-Welchia-SoBig.F triple punch, the Swen worm wriggled its way onto at least 1.5 million computers. Like so many other pieces of malware, Swen exploited...

/ September 24, 2021
Tech Time Warp: The first FORTRAN program runs

Tech Time Warp: The first FORTRAN program runs

Although FORTRAN was not commercially released until 1957, the date September 20, 1954, is also significant in the history of the groundbreaking computer language. That’s when the first FORTRAN program successfully ran while in development at IBM. John Backus worked...

/ September 17, 2021 / 1 Comment
Pioneers in Tech: Luis von Ahn turns everyone into a crowdsourcer

Pioneers in Tech: Luis von Ahn turns everyone into a crowdsourcer

Depending on your point of view, a CAPTCHA or a reCAPTCHA is either an annoyance (who can read those fuzzy letters, anyway?) or a boon to security, preventing fake account creation, spam commenting, fraudulent transactions, and more. But did you...

/ September 10, 2021 / 1 Comment
Tech Time Warp: eBay Inc. gets its start

Tech Time Warp: eBay Inc. gets its start

What are your Labor Day weekend plans? Chances are they won’t prove as lucrative as those of Pierre Omidyar back in 1995, who spent his three-day weekend launching a website called AuctionWeb from his San Jose home. We now know...

/ September 3, 2021
Tech Time Warp: Happy birthday to the Computer Misuse Act

Tech Time Warp: Happy birthday to the Computer Misuse Act

Happy 31st birthday to the British Computer Misuse Act (CMA), which went into effect Aug. 29, 1990, as one of the first cybercrime laws on the books. Although the CMA has undergone several revisions, many cybersecurity experts believe it’s desperately...

/ August 27, 2021
Tech Time Warp: The One-Two-Three Viral Punch of August 2003

Tech Time Warp: The One-Two-Three Viral Punch of August 2003

August qualifies as the dog days of summer. It’s a good time to take it easy and use some PTO.  But that’s not something the network administrators of 2003 could do, thanks to an onslaught of viruses. August 2003 brought...

/ August 20, 2021
Pioneers in Tech: Barbara Liskov and the CLU programming language

Pioneers in Tech: Barbara Liskov and the CLU programming language

After earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1961 from the University of California, Berkeley, Barbara Liskov applied to graduate school at Princeton University. In response to her application, Liskov received a form letter informing her the school didn’t accept...

/ August 13, 2021
Tech Time Warp: Andy Warhol and the Amiga

Tech Time Warp: Andy Warhol and the Amiga

The format of the Apple product launch is legendary, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the July 23, 1985, launch of the Commodore Amiga 1000. Held at Lincoln Center, with Commodore employees sporting tuxes and the music of a...

/ August 6, 2021
Tech Time Warp: Zeus, Ruler of Malware?

Tech Time Warp: Zeus, Ruler of Malware?

The Zeus malware, like its Greek god namesake, is a powerful and virile Trojan malware. Since it first surfaced in July 2007 in an attack on the U.S. Department of Transportation, Zeus, aka Zbot, and its variants have wreaked havoc on the...

/ July 30, 2021
Tech Time Warp: 1964 Olympic Games, aka the Technology Olympics

Tech Time Warp: 1964 Olympic Games, aka the Technology Olympics

As the world’s eyes turn to Tokyo for the postponed 2020 Olympic Games, delayed to this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s worth also looking back at the 1964 Tokyo Games. Known as the “Technology Olympics,” the 1964 Games...

/ July 23, 2021