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This is a “punch card” designed by Herman Hollerith to tabulate mortality statistics for the city of Baltimore in 1887. Hollerith used an electrical  machine he invented to compile the information punched out along the edges. This coding system was inspired by the way train conductors punched out descriptions of ticket holders along the edges of tickets, as described in this 1887 article from Railway Times: [Read more…]

Here’s the U.S. government’s press release announcing the first electronic general-purpose computer, the ENIAC (“Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer”), on February 15, 1946: [Read more…]

 

Steve Jobs: “I was actually a fruitarian at that point in time. I ate only fruit…And we were about three months late in filing a fictitious business name so I threatened to call the company Apple Computer unless someone suggested a more interesting name by five o’clock that day. [Read more…]

 

Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) envisioned a future where human knowledge would be collected and made accessible on screens to anyone in their home or office, in an influential essay called “As We May Think” published in 1945 in The Atlantic magazine. [Read more…]

 

The first significant Internet worm was released on November 2, 1988, by a 23-year-old Cornell University graduate student named Robert Morris. The “Morris worm” shut down about 10 percent of the 60,000 or so computers connected to the Internet in those days. This was a few years before the introduction of the World Wide Web when mainly only academic researchers, technology companies, and government officials were connected. [Read more…]

 

It’s an appealing story, but it’s not quite true. In 1947, computer operators at Harvard University were testing one of the early massive computers called the Mark II when the machine stopped working. Checking the circuits, they found a moth lodged inside. [Read more…]

 

Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one…Sergey and I founded Google because we believed we could provide an important service to the world-instantly delivering relevant information on virtually any topic. Serving our end users is at the heart of what we do and remains our number one priority…. [Read more…]

 

Gary Kildall (1942-1994)