This week’s milestones in the history of technology include Microsoft’s investment in Apple, the release of the first animated cartoon and Pixar’s first film, the first machine in the U.S. computing at electronic speeds, and the bundling of Internet Explorer.
August 14, 1940
John Atanasoff completes the paper “Computing Machine for the Solution of large Systems of Linear Algebraic Equations,” describing what became to be known as the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), arguably the first machine built in the United States to compute at electronic speeds.
August 15, 1994
Microsoft engineer Ben Slivka sends an email message suggesting to his colleagues that a World Wide Web browser should be bundled with the Windows 95 operating system. Released on August 16, 1995, Internet Explorer reached peak browser market share (95%) in 2003.
August 16, 1858
Queen Victoria sends the first official telegraph message across the Atlantic Ocean, from London to United States President James Buchanan in Washington D.C. Transmission of the congratulatory message begins at 10:50am and won’t be completed until 4:30am the next day, taking nearly eighteen hours to reach Newfoundland, Canada.
Ninety-nine words, containing five hundred nine letters, are transmitted at a rate of about two minutes per letter. The message is forwarded from Newfoundland via above ground wires, across the Cabot Strait by submarine cable to Aspy Bay in Cape Breton, and across eastern Canada and Maine, via Boston to New York by an overhead wire.
August 16, 1891
The US Census Bureau announces the results of the 1890 census. On July 1, 1890, two thousand clerks began processing the results of the 1890 U.S. Census, employing ninety-six of Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machines, using a punched card system where a hole punched in a specific place on the card signified a fact about an individual. The information on the population of the United States was processed in one year, compared to the eight years it took to process the 1880 Census.
The Electrical Engineer reported:
The statement by Mr. Porter [the head of the Census Bureau, announcing the initial count of the 1890 census] that the population of this great republic was only 62,622,250 sent into spasms of indignation a great many people who had made up their minds that the dignity of the republic could only be supported on a total of 75,000,000. Hence there was a howl, not of ‘deep-mouthed welcome,’ but of frantic disappointment. And then the publication of the figures for New York! Rachel weeping for her lost children and refusing to be comforted was a mere puppet-show compared with some of our New York politicians over the strayed and stolen Manhattan Island citizens.
August 17, 1908
The first animated cartoon, Fantasmagorie, is released.
The film was created by Émile Cohl by drawing each frame on paper and then shooting each frame onto negative film, which gave the picture a blackboard look.
The film features a stick figure moving about and encountering all manner of morphing objects, such as a wine bottle that transforms into a flower. There are also sections of live action where the animator’s hands enter the scene. The title is a reference to the “fantasmograph,” a mid-Nineteenth Century variant of the magic lantern that projected ghostly images that floated across the walls.
August 17, 1986
Pixar Animation Studios premieres Luxo Jr. at SIGGRAPH, its first film following its establishment as an independent film studio.
It is a computer-animated short film (two and a half minutes, including credits). The title character, a small desk lamp, will become a part of the company’s logo. It was the first Computer-generated Imagery (CGI) film nominated for an Academy Award.
August 18, 1947
Nine years after selling their first oscillators out of a garage in Palo Alto, California, William Hewlett and David Packard incorporate Hewlett-Packard Company (HP). They determined the order of their names in the corporate name with a coin toss. The Stanford graduates will expand the company into one of the world’s largest electronics companies. On November 1, 2015, HP split into two publicly traded companies: HP Inc. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
August 18, 1997
Steve Jobs is on the cover of Time Magazine, thanking Bill Gates for saving Apple.
At the 1997 Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be entering into a partnership with Microsoft. Included in this was a five-year commitment from Microsoft to release Microsoft Office for Macintosh as well as a $150 million investment in Apple. As part of the deal Apple and Microsoft agreed to settle a long-standing dispute over whether Microsoft's Windows operating system infringed on any of Apple's patents.
Microsoft chairman Bill Gates appeared at the expo on-screen, further explaining Microsoft's plans for the software they were developing for Mac, and stating that he was very excited to be helping Apple return to success. Following Gates, Steve Jobs said to the audience at the expo:
If we want to move forward and see Apple healthy and prospering again, we have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose. We have to embrace a notion that for Apple to win, Apple has to do a really good job. And if others are going to help us that's great, because we need all the help we can get, and if we screw up and we don't do a good job, it's not somebody else's fault, it's our fault. So I think that is a very important perspective. If we want Microsoft Office on the Mac, we better treat the company that puts it out with a little bit of gratitude; we like their software.
So, the era of setting this up as a competition between Apple and Microsoft is over as far as I'm concerned. This is about getting Apple healthy, this is about Apple being able to make incredibly great contributions to the industry and to get healthy and prosper again.
In April 2011, Microsoft’s quarterly profits and revenues were eclipsed for the first time in 20 years by Apple. On August 11, 2017, Apple's market capitalization was $815 billion and Microsoft's was $561 billion.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates recalled their history-making competition and collaboration in this D5 conference interview in 2007.
August 20, 1995
George Johnson writes in The New York Times:
In the world of software, sad to say, there is no such thing as an antique. Though the programs that animate our computers are among the most ingenious machinery cobbled together by human brains, most are doomed to disappear as soon as better ones come along…
As hard disks grow in capacity and there is less incentive to shed excess bytes, a residue of virtual antiques might accumulate in long-forgotten folders and directories, to be unearthed years later by the junk dealers of the new age. All it takes is one surviving copy, which can be cloned and cloned again. Internet entrepreneurs could open virtual antique stores and virtual museums, offering the mustiest old programs to be downloaded by future collectors. But that brings up another problem -- finding an old digital clunker to run the programs on.
