| Wang Qilong
looks at the future from the past through "Today in History", and can also change the future from the present.
Today is July 14, 2022. On this day in 2005, IBM began to stop selling the operating system OS/2; on December 23 of the same year, IBM announced that it would no longer support the OS/2 system. Supporters of OS/2 asked IBM to open source code for OS/2, but IBM refused. In November 2007, OS/2 supporters again called for open source, but IBM still refused. In addition, Voyager and osFree are trying to remake a new desktop environment based on the OS/2 architecture. Looking back at July 14th in computer history, what other key events occurred on this day?
July 14, 1911: William Norris, CEO of Control Data Corporation, is born
William Charles Norris was born on July 14, 1911. He was an American business executive. Norris was the CEO of the computer company Control Data Corporation (CDC). He led the company to go head-to-head with IBM and won, single-handedly turning the company into one of the most powerful and respected computer companies in the world. . Norris also served in the U.S. Navy as a code breaker, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel while working at the Navy's Nebraska Avenue Complex in Washington, D.C., and as a social activist, using the power of the CDC Corporation to Expansion in the late 1960s brought employment and training to the city center and disadvantaged communities.
Source: Wikipedia
Prior to his military service, Norris worked for Chicago's Westinghouse Company selling X-ray equipment, and then he began working as a civil service engineer in the Bureau of Ordnance until contracting with the Navy Reserves. After World War II, Norris entered the computer industry, and in January 1946, he formed the Engineering Research Association (ERA) with Howard Engstrom and other U.S. Navy cryptographers to build scientific computers. He hired 40 members of the military's code-breaking team and set up shop at the glider factory of Northwest Airlines, a major government contractor.
ERA was quite successful, but in the early 1950s a lengthy series of government investigations into "Navy Funding Circumstances" exhausted the company, and Norris was forced to sell it to Reming Remington Rand (Remington Rand). For a time they operated as a separate division within the Remington Rand Corporation, but later with the Sperry Corporation to form Sperry Rand, their division was merged with UNIVAC, resulting in much of ERA's work being abandoned. As a result, several employees left and formed Control Data Corporation (CDC), which unanimously selected Norris as president.
CDC grew rapidly after its establishment and posed a major threat to IBM's business; IBM quickly launched its own project to regain the performance crown from CDC. At the same time, IBM announced an advanced version of IBM System/360 and promoted that it would surpass CDC's flagship product "6600" and become a "6600 killer"; however, IBM System/360 had not actually been built at that time, so After carefully documenting the loss of sales from IBM's projects, Norris launched a massive lawsuit against IBM in 1968 for false advertising. The CDC ultimately won the lawsuit and was awarded $600 million in damages.
After that, Norris continued to acquire new companies and merge them into CDC, eventually returning to peripheral markets in the 1970s. This move proved particularly wise. In the early 1970s, company employee Seymour Cray left to form his own company, which quickly pushed CDC out of its leadership position in the supercomputer market, relegating CDC to second place among a handful of machines. CDC attempted to regain a foothold in the supercomputer market by spinning off ETA Systems to free developers from an increasingly rigid management structure within CDC. However, the effort failed, and the CDC ultimately abandoned the market altogether. The board began pressuring Norris to step down; Norris subsequently retired in January 1986.William Norris died in a nursing home in Bloomington, Minnesota, on August 21, 2006, after a long battle with Parkinson's disease .
Source: Wikipedia
July 14, 1918: Jay Forrester, the pioneer of system dynamics, was born
Source: Wikipedia
Jay Wright Forrester was born on July 14, 1918 , a pioneering American computer engineer and systems scientist who is considered one of the inventors of magnetic core memory; Forrest practiced electrical and computer engineering at MIT in the 1940s and early 1950s Researched, led the Tornado Project, and developed magnetic core memory; magnetic core memory was the main form of random access computer memory during the most explosive period of digital computer development (1955 to 1975). It pioneered related technologies in this field and passed Using the material's magnetism to perform switching and amplification bridges the gap between vacuum tubes and semiconductors.
Later, Forrest served as a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management, where he introduced the Forrest effect to describe supply chain fluctuations, and has since been hailed as the founder of system dynamics; research trends The simulation of interactions between objects in a system is most commonly used in research and consulting on organizations and other social systems. Forrest is also credited with creating the first animation in the history of computer graphics, the "jumping ball" on the oscilloscope . In 2006, he was inducted into the Operations Research Hall of Fame.
Source: Wikipedia
July 14, 1995: Karlheinz Brandenburg announced that the .mp3 file extension won the vote
Image source: Wikipedia
Moving Pictures Experts Group-1 or Moving Pictures Experts Group-2 Audio Layer III (MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III), which is what we call MP3, which is a popular digital audio encoding and lossy compression format today. It is designed to greatly reduce the amount of audio data by discarding the The unimportant parts of human hearing are compressed into smaller files. For most users' listening experience, the sound quality of MP3 does not significantly decrease compared with the original uncompressed audio. It was invented and standardized in 1991 by a group of engineers from the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, a research organization based in Erlangen, Germany.
MPEG-1 Audio Layer II encoding began as a Digital Sound Broadcasting (DAB) project managed by Egon Meier-Engelen at the German Space Center. This project is EU funded as an EUREKA research project and its name is commonly known as Digital Sound Broadcasting . The EU-147 research period was from 1987 to 1994. By 1991, two proposals had emerged: MPEG-1 Audio Layer II (called Layer 2) and ASPEC (Adaptive Spectrum Sensitive Entropy Coding). A confluence of ideas followed, and in 1992 MPEG became part of the first standards group, MPEG-1.
Later, on July 7, 1994, the Fraunhofer Association released the first MP3 encoder called l3enc, and the association's development team selected the extension on this day in history, July 14, 1995: ".mp3" (the extension previously used was ".bit"). Using Winplay3 (released September 9, 1995), the first real-time software MP3 player, many people were able to encode and play back MP3 files on their personal computers. Since hard drives at the time were relatively small (e.g. 500MB), this technology was crucial for storing entertainment music on computers.
Starting in the first half of 1995 and continuing throughout the late 1990s, MP3 began to flourish on the Internet. MP3's popularity was largely due to the success of companies and software packages such as soft's Winamp, released in 1997, and Napster, released in 1999, and they fed into each other's development. These programs make it easy for average users to play, create, share, and collect MP3 files. The popularity of MP3 has had an impact on the music industry.
[Contributions welcome] Using history as a mirror, we can know the ups and downs.Since the development of computer science, there have been many crucial events and figures. All friends are welcome to join in building "Today in History". Submission email: [email protected].
