COFF August 2019

coff@tuhs.org

5 participants
6 discussions

by Dave Horsfall

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

4 years, 11 months

Minsky and Epstein

by John P. Linderman

Two names I never expected to appear in one article. <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/business/media/mit-jeffrey-epstein.html?…> Very sad, whether true or not. I knew Minsky in the way students know their professors. He was on my thesis committee. I liked and admired him.

4 years, 11 months

Happy birthday, Marvin Minsky!

by Dave Horsfall

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

4 years, 11 months

Happy birthday, WWW!

by Dave Horsfall

In 1991 Tim Berners-Lee outlined plans for something he called the "world wide web". -- Dave

4 years, 11 months

Harvard Mk I

by Dave Horsfall

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

4 years, 11 months

In Memoriam: Edsger Dijkstra, and happy birthday Jon Postel!

by Dave Horsfall

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

4 years, 11 months

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COFF August 2019