Tech Time Warp: Happy birthday, HAL—however old you are
Depending on your vantage point, HAL—the supercomputer at the heart of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—is turning 21, 26, or 50 this year. In the screenplay, a malfunctioning HAL says, “I became operational at the H.A.L. Plant in Urbana,...
Tech Time Warp: The Origin of the Name “Microsoft”
Quick: Name some of the mostly widely used portmanteaus of the past 40 years. You might think of “Bennifer,” “Brangelina,” and other failed celebrity couples, but did you think of Microsoft? On Jan. 2, 1975, Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and...
Tech Time Warp: Happy Birthday to Charles Babbage, Father of Computing
Amid the time warp that is the week between Christmas and New Year’s, don’t forget to raise a glass of eggnog in honor of Charles Babbage, the “Father of Computing,” born on Dec. 26, 1791. The English mathematician’s prescient plans—some...
Tech Time Warp: The Not-So-Merry Christmas Tree Exec
As an MSP, you might want to remind clients not to let holiday cheer get in the way of smart Internet use and security best practices. Thirty years ago, users of the European Academic Research Network (EARN) and its U.S....
Tech Time Warp: The CAN-SPAM Act Turns 14
The “Nigerian princes” of the world were dealt a semi-blow on Dec. 16, 2003, when Congress passed the awkwardly named “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act,” or CAN-SPAM Act. Legitimate email marketers were required to include a...
Tech Time Warp: A quick look back at QuickTime’s beginnings
For today’s Mac user, QuickTime is nothing special—just part of the base package, lost among other bells and whistles. But travel back to this week in December 1991, when consumers got their first taste of QuickTime 1.0, and you’ll understand...
Tech Time Warp: The Surprisingly Long History of the MP3
In May, the creators of the MP3 called time of death on their revolutionary file format. The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany announced that its licensing program for MP3-related patents—the first of which was issued in the United States on Nov....
Tech Time Warp: The Confounding Case of Conficker
One of the most insidious worms of all time made its debut Nov. 21, 2008, and it’s still alive and kicking today. Conficker continues to spread, thanks to installations of the beloved but now out-of-support Windows XP. Eleven million devices...
Tech Time Warp: Happy birthday to a father of timesharing computing
Cloud computing might seem like a modern convenience, but its roots lie in the timesharing computers developed at MIT in the 1960s. Project MAC was directed by Italian-American computer pioneer Robert Fano, born on Nov. 11, 1917. Funded by the...
Tech Time Warp: Morris worm exposes Internet security issues
The morning of Nov. 3, 1988, the Internet discovered stranger danger thanks to a 24-year-old grad student whose intellectual curiosity got out of hand. The Morris worm was the creation of Cornell University student Robert Tappan Morris Jr. and provided...