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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Tech Time Warp: Sneaky SirCam worm slithers through inboxes
When it comes to use of social engineering in malware, the SirCam worm must be among the most insidious. The worm propagated itself in the usual way via email attachment. But SirCam didn’t carry a new email attachment—the typical “invoice”...
Pioneers in Tech: Margaret Hamilton’s moonshot
NASA estimates 400,000 individuals contributed to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin’s ability to land on the moon on July 20, 1969. One of them was Margaret Hamilton, a 32-year-old software engineer working at MIT. Hamilton developed the software system that...
Tech Time Warp: The Speak & Spell, far more than a toy
Readers of a certain age will recall the Speak & Spell, a Texas Instruments toy that would impress no child of today, but has earned its rightful place in history as the first consumer product to use digital signal processing...