computer science

The Pentium FDIV Bug

30. October 2015 Harald Sack

On October 30, 1994, Thomas Nicely, a professor of mathematics at Lynchburg College, published his findings about a serious bug in the arithmetic unit of Intel’s latest Pentium processor, known as the Pentium FDIV Bug. Because of the bug, the processor can return incorrect decimal results, an issue troublesome for the precise calculations needed in fields like math and science. How the FDIV Bug was discovered The Pentium FDIV bug is the…

computer science

Mark Weiser and his vision of Ubiquituous Computing

23. July 2015 Harald Sack

On July 23, 1952, computer scientist Mark David Weiser was born. Weiser was chief scientist at Xerox PARC in the United States and is widely considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, a term he coined in 1988. In contrast to desktop computing, ubiquitous computing can occur using any device, in any location, and in any format. A user interacts with the computer, which can exist in many different forms, including laptop computers,…