computer science

The BASIC Programming Language

The BASIC Programming Language

On May 1st, 1964, the original BASIC programming language was released by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, implemented under their direction by a team of Dartmouth College students in New Hampshire. Their initial goal was to enable students in fields other than science and mathematics to use computers. At the time, nearly all use of computers required writing custom software, which was something only scientists and mathematicians tended to learn. Actually, BASIC also was…
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Heinz Nixdorf and his Microcomputers

Heinz Nixdorf and his Microcomputers

On April 9, 1925, German computing pioneer, businessman and founder of Nixdorf Computer AG Heinz Nixdorf was born. Nixdorf founded his first computer company in 1952. He would lead this company as its owner to an international electronic concern that would make almost 4 billion D-Mark. His microcomputer could stand up to the mainframes and because of that, Nixdorf was known as one of the founders who were a symbol for the…
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Rolf Landauer and the Landauer Principle

On February 4, 1927, German-American physicist Rolf William Landauer was born. Landauer made important contributions in diverse areas of the thermodynamics of information processing, condensed matter physics, and the conductivity of disordered media. He is probably best known for the formulation of the eponymous Landauer Principle concerning the energy used during a computer‘s operation. “We shall call a device logically irreversible if the output of a device does not uniquely define the…
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John William Mauchly and the Electronic Computer

John William Mauchly and the Electronic Computer

On August 30, 1907, US-American physicist John William Mauchly was born. Along with J. Presper Eckert, Mauchly designed ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States. Together they started the first computer company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and pioneered fundamental computer concepts including the stored program, subroutines, and programming languages. Childhood and Education John…
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Robert Ledley and the Computer Tomograph

Robert Ledley and the Computer Tomograph

On June 28, 1926, American computer scientist Robert Steven Ledley was born. Ledley pioneered the use of electronic digital computers in biology and medicine. He invented the ACTA (Automatic Computerized Transverse Axial) diagnostic X-ray scanner, the first whole-body computerized tomography (CT) machine, which revolutionized medical diagnosis. Conrad Roentgen‘s discovery of the “x-rays” already was a sensation in 1895, which revolutionized medical diagnostics. The CT-scan led another step further to more thorough and…
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The World Digital Library

The World Digital Library

On April 21, 2009, the World Digital Library (WDL) was launched. The WDL is an international digital library operated by UNESCO and the United States Library of Congress. The library intends to make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials. A View of…
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The Pentium FDIV Bug

The Pentium FDIV Bug

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…
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Mark Weiser and his vision of Ubiquituous Computing

Mark Weiser and his vision of Ubiquituous Computing

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,…
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