1001 . Alan Turing is considered the father of Computer Science, in 1937, he published the paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Appli cation to the Entsheidungsproblem”.
999. Beginning in 1934, Konrad Zuse, a German engineer, built a series of computers, the Z1 through Z4, utilising binary arithmetic.
998. Claude Shannon is usually called the father of Information Tech nology. In 1948, he published “A Mathematical Theory of Commu nication” in the Bell System Technical Journal.
997. The first high-level programming language was Fortran. It was developed in 1956 by an IBM team headed by John Backus. Fortran became commercially available in 1957.
996. The first object-oriented language was Simula. It was developed by Kristen Nygaard and Ole-Johan Dahl in the mid 1960s.
995. 1981 was the year that PCs began, when IBM debuted the IBM PC. Microsoft shipped it with BASIC. The operating system, too, was developed by Microsoft.
994. The first ‘computer’, the steam-driven calculating machine, was built in 1823 by Charles Babbage.
993. Christopher Pile was sentenced to 18 months for releasing a
toolkit that would boost the impact of existing viruses by randomi-sing their codes.
992. In 1951, Jay Forrester and Robert Everett, graduate students at MIT, constructed the ‘ Whirlwind,’ a ‘real-time computer,’ working at twice the speed of the ENIAC.
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991. It is much debated whether any single person can be said to have invented the first computer. Examples of candidates are Charles Babbage and Konrad Zuse.
990 . In 1969, computer firm Honey well released the H316 “Kitchen Computer”, the first home computer, priced at $10,600.
989. In 1976, the term “personal computer” first appeared in print, in the May issue of Byte Magazine.
988. In 1981, while working on the original version of Microsoft’s Disk Operating System (DOS), Bill Gates made a remarkable predic-tion: “640 K (of RAM) should be enough for anyone.”
987 . The term ‘bug’ was probably coined after Admiral Grace Hopper found a moth in the Mark II computer at the US Naval Surface Warfare Center, causing the machine to malfunction.
986 . Jim Knopf is known as the ‘father of shareware’. His first shareware program was PC-Fiie, in 1982, which Knopf published under the pseudonym Jim Button.
985. In 1970, Steve Wozniak played a huge prank by distributing 25,000 leaflets for a non-exis tent computer, which was later referre.
984. The ENIAC had 20,000 vacuum tubes and 40 racks of equip-ment, and ran up a daily electric bill of $60, a large amount at the time, the mid 1940s.
983. The first computer to perform a trillion opera tions per second was called the Gravity Pipeline.
982. Les Solomon, publisher of the magazine Popular Electronics, and Ed Robertswere looking for a name to release their new computer under. They finally called it the Altair.
981 . Mitch Kapor founded Lotus Development Corp. in 1982 with Jonathan Sachs, who was instrumental in launching Lotus 1-2-3.
980. Founder Paul Gavin came up with the name Motorola when his company started manufacturing radios for motorcars.
To be continued.
