Results for: tech time warp
Tech Time Warp: Koobface worm begins to spread
Back in August 2008—when you were still juggling Facebook and MySpace profiles—unsuspecting social networkers found their machines infected by Koobface, a particularly nasty computer worm. Koobface (an anagram for Facebook) caught its victims by tempting them with tantalizing Facebook links...
Tech Time Warp: Apple begins work on the Lisa
While everyone else was at the beach during the summer of 1979, Steve Jobs began work on—you guessed it—another product that would change the world. The Lisa, introduced to the marketplace in 1983, was Apple’s first foray into personal computers...
Tech Time Warp: Email Outage Chaos
The Internet makes life so much easier … except when it doesn’t. Just like a bad cold makes you appreciate breathing through your nose, an Internet outage makes you realize your reliance on email and texts and streaming services. The...
Tech Time Warp: The First Case of Ransomware
The WannaCry ransomware attack once again brings the need for backup and security solutions into focus, but ransomware is nothing new. The first case of ransomware, chock-full of “truth is stranger than fiction” details, occurred in 1989. The PC Cyborg...
Pioneers in Tech: Happy birthday to the mayor of Silicon Valley
This week marks the 98th anniversary of the birth of Robert Noyce, often called the “Mayor of Silicon Valley.” He got the name from not only his tech innovations, but also his tech culture innovations. Interestingly, his career path could...
Pioneers in Tech: Robert Fano, a man of many gifts
Technology pioneer Robert Fano’s contributions to computer science are many—so many, indeed, that it would be best to frame them as his Massachusetts Institute of Technology colleague (and fellow innovator) Fernando Carbato did. Fano, he said, had “at least four...
Pioneers in Tech: Honoring John Atanasoff, inventor of the digital computer
Born Oct. 4, 1903, John Vincent Atanasoff is not just the inventor of the electronic digital computer—he’s the legally proclaimed inventor of the digital computer. On March 19, 1972, in the case Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, a judge ruled that...
Pioneers in Tech: Dennis Ritchie left us many tech riches, including the C language and UNIX
The October 2011 passing of Dennis Ritchie—creator of the C programming language and co-creator of the UNIX operating system—was largely overshadowed by Steve Jobs’ death the week prior. Yet Ritchie’s quiet genius laid the foundation for much of modern computing....
Pioneers in Tech: Sir Clive Sinclair, a man ahead of his time
One major development in the demise of the slide rule was the release of the Sinclair Executive Electronic Pocket Calculator in August 1972. At one-third the size of its competitors, not to mention half the cost, the Sinclair Executive was...
Pioneers in Tech: The man behind Moore’s Law
July 18 marks the 57th anniversary of Intel’s incorporation—and as with any of the Silicon Valley juggernauts, the backstory of its founders is fascinating. Take Gordon Moore, who—along with Robert Noyce and Andy Grove—incorporated the microprocessor company in 1968 and...
