Results for: tech time warp
Tech Time Warp: A Look Back at the Ping-Pong Virus
Thirty years ago, a little bouncing ball was driving computer users bonkers. Discovered at Italy’s University of Turin in March 1988, the Ping-Pong virus was a boot sector virus affecting MS-DOS machines. It spread via infected floppy disks. (Remember those?)...
Tech Time Warp: A Language That’s Anything But, Well, Basic
Basic is such a loaded term these days. The kids use it as a synonym for unremarkable and uninteresting—interestingly enough, words that could not describe BASIC, the computer language co-invented by John Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth University.
Tech Time Warp: Meet ENIAC, the First Digital General Purpose Computer
It might lack the immediate name recognition of Harvard’s Mark I or Bletchley Park’s Colossus, but the University of Pennsylvania’s ENIAC stands right next to them in the annals of computer history. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer made its...
Tech Time Warp: Garry Kasparov’s Rage Against the Machine
The precarious relationship between man and machine has always preoccupied the technologically minded. Computer genius Alan Turing was asking “Can machines think?” as early as 1950. Few of us, though, have devoted as much time to the question—or been as...
Tech Time Warp: First published reference to vaporware
In Texas, they call it “all hat, no cattle.” In Silicon Valley, they call it vaporware, and the first use of the term was in a Feb. 3, 1986, Time Magazine article by Philip Elmer-DeWitt about the delayed release of...
Tech Time Warp: Happy birthday to Douglas Engelbart, inventor of the mouse
Born Jan. 30, 1925, Douglas Engelbart isn’t a household name for most people, but we all know—and many of us can’t live without—his most famous invention: the computer mouse. The Portland, Oregon, native served as a Navy radar technician in...
Tech Time Warp: The Not-So Happy99 Worm
The email users of January 1999 were an innocent bunch. Fresh from seeing “You’ve Got Mail” at the box office, they received emails with the attachment Happy99.exe and thought nothing about double-clicking. One rather lame “fireworks” display later, most of...
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...
