November 15, 1971
The Intel 4004, 4-bit central processing unit (CPU), is publicly mentioned for the first time in an Electronic News advertisement declaring “a new era in integrated electronics." It was the first general-purpose programmable microprocessor. Two years earlier, Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation approached Intel to design 12 custom chips for its new printing calculator. Intel responded by suggesting a family of just four chips, including one that could be programmed for use in a variety of products, “setting in motion an engineering feat that dramatically altered the course of electronics.” On October 15, 2010, Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stanley Mazor were awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation by President Barack Obama for their pioneering work on the 4004.
November 15, 1972
IBM’s Data Processing Division announces the IBM Health Care Support Electrocardiogram Analysis program, a computer program for cardiologists. Almost 40 years later, the Wall Street Journal reported on the first commercial application of IBM Watson, to be used by health insurer WellPoint to help suggest treatment options and diagnoses to doctors: “Researchers have been trying since the 1970s to develop computers that can advise doctors, but the efforts haven’t gotten much traction. Now, though, the health industry is under unprecedented pressure to digitize. At the same time, medical providers are increasingly paid based at least partly on quality-of-care measures.” In September 2015, IBM opened its Watson Health global headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.
November 16, 1904
British scientist John A. Fleming is seen "scudding down Gower Street" in London, oblivious to all around him on his way to patent his idea for the first vacuum tube. This invention—improved a few years later by American inventor Lee De Forest and others—is considered to have been the beginning of electronics.
November 17, 1970
Douglas Engelbart receives a patent for his invention of the first computer mouse. Early models had a cord attached to the rear part of the device looking like a tail, resembling a mouse.
November 17, 1999
Slashdot, the “News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters” website, reports: “There is a cool new tool out there called Napster that allows anyone to become a publicly accessible FTP site – tapping in to that huge resource of personal MP3 collections that everyone has, but have not been able to share… RIAA [Recording Industry Association of America] should be scared out of their minds because users are not logged on permanently, so it’s hard to track them down to take legal action.” The RIAA filed a law suit against Napster on December 7, 1999 and, as a result, the service shut down in July 2001.
November 19, 1996
IBM demonstrates Personal Area Networks (PAN), transmitting data through the human body. A prototype PAN system allows users to exchange electronic business cards by shaking hands. Says IBM: “A kiss may still be a kiss, but soon even a simple touch can be the conduit for the transfer of detailed business, personal or even medical data using IBM's Personal Area Network (PAN) technology.”
On June 22, 2004, Microsoft received a patent for “Method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body.” The Guardian reported that Microsoft had no specific product in development but suggested possible uses such as “special spectacles with screens that flash up accompanying images and video footage” and using an area of skin as a keypad. The Guardian also mentioned IBM’s 1996 demonstration and that “a spokesman for IBM confirmed the company had filed several patents in the area, but said its research has since moved on.”
IEEE 802.15.6-2012 is the current standard for Wireless Body Area Networks, for “short-range, wireless communications in the vicinity of, or inside, a human body (but not limited to humans).”
November 20, 1963
The MIT student newspaper reports that many telephone services have been curtailed “because of so-called hackers,” the earliest known public use of the term. According to Steven Levy in Hackers, members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club in the late 1950s used the term a hack to describe “a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfil some constructive goal but with some wild pleasure taken in mere involvement… The most productive people working on the S&P [the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the club] called themselves ‘hackers’ with great pride.”
The 1963 article in The Tech described some of the wild pleasure-filled projects:
The hackers have accomplished such things as tying up all the tie-lines between Harvard and MIT, or making long-distance calls by charging them to a local radar installation. One method involved connecting the PDP-1 computer to the phone system to search the lines until a dial tone, indicating an outside line, was found…. To quote one accomplished hacker, “the field is always open for experimentation.”
Two of the most famous experimenters were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who, in 1971, developed (Wozniak) and sold (Jobs), as their first business venture, a “Blue Box” for making free long-distance phone calls. Wozniak told Dan Lyons in 2011:
I didn’t do it to make money but just to build a device to explore it, not to save money on phone calls. I was so honest I would not use the blue box to make long-distance calls. But if I wanted to play pranks, like route signals around the world and make them come back to the phone next to me. We did prank calls. I would call a hotel in Paris and make a reservation. At the dorms in Berkeley we would go door-to-door selling blue boxes. One hundred and fifty bucks was the price... We were doing a demo of a blue box in a dorm room. I called Italy, then asked for Rome, then asked for the Vatican. I told them I was Henry Kissinger calling from a summit meeting in Moscow. It was 5:30 in the morning in Italy. They told me to call back in an hour. I did, and I spoke to a bishop who said he had just spoken to Henry Kissinger in Moscow.
