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• Posted Nov. 5, 2013, 1 p.m. - 10 years, 5 months ago

Events in Computing History – November

November 1^st

 

Year: 1979

Event: Seagate Technology (then known as Shugart Technology) incorporated

Interesting Facts:

• Seagate may have its principle executive office in California, but it is actually incorporated in Ireland.
• Seagate invented the 5mb ST-506 hard drive in 1980, which was the first 5.25” hard drive to hit the market and this launched them into being a major hardware supplier for the microcomputer market during the 80s.
• Seagate changed their name from Shugart Technology in 1979 to avoid a lawsuit with Shugart Associates, a subsidiary of Xerox and also founded by Al Shugart, one of Seagate’s original founders (confusing? Yeah, we thought so too!)

 

November 1^st

Year: 1984

Event: Lenovo founded in Beijing, then known as Legend.

Interesting Facts:

• “Legend”, the original name for Lenovo, was changed after 20 years of trading as founder Yang Yuanqing wanted to expand outside of China and the Legend name was already in use throughout the rest of the world by various companies.
• Lenovo were official computer sponsors for the 2006 Winter Olympics in Italy, and the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.
• Lenovo are also the “Official Laptop, Desktop and Workstation Sponsor” to the NFL in the USA, with advertising space in NFL venues as well as on adverts and on official NFL merchandise.

 

November 6^th

 

Year: 1968

Event: Happy birthday to Jerry Yang – co-founder of Yahoo! Inc

Interesting Facts:

• Jerry Yang was born in Taiwan but moved to Santa Jose when he was 10.
• He resigned from Yahoo! In 2012 after various criticisms of how the company was faring with Yang as the CEO. He was replaced in 2009 by Carol Bartz but retained his position on the board of directors until his resignation on January 17, 2012.
• Yang currently sits on the Stanford University Board of Trustees, as well as the Board of Directors of the Asian Pacific Fund and Cisco.

 

November 10^th

 

Year: 1959

Event: Happy birthday to Richard Brodie – original creator of Microsoft Word

Interesting Facts:

• Brodie is the author of both Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme and Getting Past OK: The Self-Help Book for People Who Don’t Need Help. Both of these were bestsellers upon release.
• Brodie is also well known as a poker player and is well known in the gambling world, playing in the 6 World Poker Tours and 5 World Series of Poker.
• He was the 77^th employee to work at Microsoft, and actually worked there twice, from 1981-1986, and 1991-1994.

 

November 10^th

 

Year: 1963

Event: Happy birthday to Bert Bos – inventor of CSS

Interesting Facts:

• Bos is the current W3C Staff Contact of the CSS Working Group, and has co-authored a book about the language, “Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web” which is available in 3 editions.
• Bos also invented the web browser Argo as a test bed to make the Internet accessible to those studying Humanities at the University of Groningen.
• Bos’ co-author on ‘Cascading Style Sheets: Designing for the Web’, Håkon Wium Lie, is the current Chief Technology Officer at Opera Software, and actually proposed the concept of CSS in 1994.

 

 

November 15^th

 

Year: 1971
Event: First public mention of the Intel 4004 CPU in the 1971 edition of Electronic News.
Interesting Facts:

• This was the first microprocessor that was commercially available and used silicon gate technology for faster performance.
• Ted Hoff, Masatoshi Shima and Federico Faggin were the chief designers of the 4004.
• The Intel 4004 was succeeded by the Intel 4040 and Intel 8008 chips.

 

November 17^th

 

Year: 1951

Event: J Lyons and Co. ran the first business application on an electronic computer

Interesting Facts:

• The computer, known as LEO (Lyons Electronic Office I), was modelled on the famous Cambridge EDSAC and had a clock speed of 500kHz.
• J Lyons and Co are best known for Lyons Tea, with the strapline, “Always the Best”. Unfortunately, having fallen on tough times, Lyons sold off parts of the business over a period of time, with Lyons Biscuits Ltd being sold in 1994 and thus effectively ending their reign over the food and consumer industry.

 

November 17^th

 

Year: 1997

Event: Windows 95 stable version released worldwide

Interesting Facts:

• The successor to Windows 3.1x, Windows 95 was the first version to be dated in its name by year of release, and had been in planning and design since 1992.
• In America, Microsoft ran a Windows 95 Preview Program prior to release, which cost $20 per user. For this, each person received a set of Windows 95 installation floppy discs that would either upgrade or clean install Windows 95, and also contained a free preview of The Microsoft Network (MSN).
• To herald the release of the OS, various marketing ploys took place, including use of “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones in adverts, branches of PC World opening at midnight to eager buyers, and possibly the most impressive of all – the Empire State Building was lit to match the colours of the logo.

 

 

November 20^th

 

 

Year: 1985
Event: Microsoft introduce Windows to the world – Windows 1.0
Interesting Facts:

• Windows 1.0 was the first version of Windows and was introduced as the first OS to support multi-tasking and a graphical interface.
• Competitors at the time included Apple with their Lisa II and IBM’s Top View, both of which had graphical interfaces and had a larger market share than Microsoft.
• Microsoft provided technical support for Windows 1 for 16 years, the longest for any Windows product in their history.

 

November 20^th

 

Year: 2000

Event: Intel introduce Pentium 4 to the world

Interesting Facts:

• Pentium 4 was available from 2000 to 2008, succeeded by Pentium D in 2005 and eventually both were replaced by Core 2 on August 8, 2008.
• Pentium 4 succeeded Pentium III, which was introduced in early 1999 and stopped manufacture in 2003.
• The first Pentium 4 cores were codenamed Willamette.

 

November 21^st

 

Year: 1969

Event: First permanent ARPANET link established

Interesting Facts:

• ARPANET stands for the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network and was the first network to introduce TCP/IP.
• The first link was between Stanford Research Institute and UCLA and the first message was “lo”, on October 29, 1969. The message was meant to be “login”, but only “lo” were transmitted.
• The ARPANET was shut down when the NSFNet (National Science Foundation Network) was introduced in 1985.

 

November 22^nd

 

Year: 1968

Event: Happy birthday to Rasmus Lerdorf – inventor of the PHP programming language

Interesting Facts:

• Lerdorf was born in Greenland and graduated from the University of Waterloo in 1993 with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Systems Design Engineering.
• As well as inventing PHP, he has also made significant contributions to the Apache HTTP Server and the MSQL DBMS by adding the LIMIT clause.

Lerdorf currently works with Jelastic as a senior advisor, and in the past has worked for Yahoo! Inc, WePay and Etsy.

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