The Burroughs Corporation found itself part of computing history in 1953 when it moved into computers for the banking industry. By the 1960s the company had risen to the top of the computing heavyweights, competing with IBM, GE, and RCA in the mainframe market. Like IBM, Burroughs produced all of…
Arithmetic Language version 0 was created by legendary computer pioneer Grace Hopper in the early 1950s. It was the first compiler ever made for an electronic computer, and was written for the the UNIVAC I, which Hopper also had a hand in developing. She began developing A-0 in 1951, and…
Development of the IAS Computer at the Institute for Advanced Study began in 1945. Designed and built by Alfred von Nuemann based on some earlier concepts, it is also known as the von Nuemann machine. This also spawned the von Neumann architecture, in influential stored-program computing design that is still…
The evolution of modern torpedoes goes back to just before the Civil War, when they could only maintain a straight course and preset depth. By the time World War I rolled around, navies around the world had developed a complicated manual procedure using slide rules. During World War II, almost…
This petascale supercomputer built by IBM was deployed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2012. It quickly replaced the K Computer as the world’s fastest, benchmarking 16 petaflops. Running entirely on Linux, it shattered records for highest sustained performance at 10 petaflops. For the first time, a model of…
Launched in 2010 as a closed beta, Pinterest allowed users to gather, organize, and collect images referred to as “pins” by posting them on personalized pages called “boards”. It was conceptualized in December 2009 by co-founders Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra, using concepts related to visual bookmarking. After…
In September of 2013, the Cyptolocker virus is thought to have been posted online. Part of a new class of malicious software called ransomware, it would encrypt infected files and then demand a ransom from users for the decryption key. Spread through email attachments and also distributed by the Zeus…
Vine was founded in 2012 and in just a few short months was acquired by Twitter after becoming immensely popular with teens and young adults. Created by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll, it allowed users to create short videos up to six seconds long. In January 2013 it…
The IBM Simon was the first portable phone that combined modern telephone features with PDA capabilities. It could make cellular calls as well as send/receive faxes, email, and pages. The prototype was unveiled at the 1992 Comdex show and generated a lot of buzz, landing a picture on the front…
Developed by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s, the Star7 was one of the earliest known handheld touchscreen devices. Although it never really made it past the prototype phase , it was innovative for it’s time and is widely considered one of the first PDAs. It sported gesture based interaction,…