We gained computer pioneer John Mauchly on this day in 1907; he was best known
as the co-inventor of ENIAC, one of the world's first computers.
-- Dave
We gained Marvin Minsky on this day in 1927; he was an AI researcher,
computer scientist, invented neural networks etc, and is now thought to be
cryogenically preserved.
-- Dave
Dedicated on this day in 1944, it was conceived by Dr. Howard Aiken; the
Wikipedia entry for it has a fascinating history, and it's a wonder that
it worked at all!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I
-- Dave
We lost computer pioneer Edsger Dijkstra in 2002; he gave us ALGOL,
structured programming, semaphores, and ranted against the GOTO statement
(much to the distress of the Fortranites and their spaghetti coding). Oh,
and a certain Prof. Goto used to complain that everybody wanted to
eliminate him :-)
However, we gained Jon Postel in 1943; with umpteen RFCs to his name, he
could pretty much be described as the Father of the Internet (but note
that he edited most of the RFCs, not authored them, but deserves credit
all the same).
-- Dave
