compilation | Wang Qilong
Through "Today in History", we can look at the future from the past and change the future from the present.
Today is October 12, 2022. On this day in history, Columbus discovered the "New World". In the America he discovered, a computer empire is rising in the future. Many key events occurred on October 12. The establishment of Siemens , the father of object-oriented programming, the birth of Intel CEO and "Father of BT", the launch of Jobs NeXT, and the death of father of , all of which affect today's technological process.
10-12: Siemens was born
Siemens is a world-leading technology company. With innovation in the fields of electrification, automation and digitalization, it provides customers with solutions in the fields of power generation and transmission and distribution, infrastructure, industrial automation, drive and software. On October 12, 1847, the world-renowned German inventor and entrepreneur Werner von Siemens (Ernst Werner von Siemens) founded the German Siemens AG. Siemens immediately became a leading enterprise in the field of electronic and electrical engineering. Since Siemens entered China in 1872, its localization is comparable to that of state-owned enterprises.
Source: Wikipedia
1847, Siemens and engineer John George Halsk established the Siemens-Halsk Telecommunications Machine Manufacturing Company based on the 6842 Tale silver coins invested by his cousin (1 Tale is equivalent to 3 marks), which mainly produces the compass-type telecommunications machine invented by Siemens, which is the predecessor of Siemens. In 1848, Siemens won the telegraph line contract from Frankfurt to Berlin, and since then it began to develop greatly.
As a physicist, Siemens' love for technology directly affected the development of Siemens. When it was founded, in addition to relying on the telegraph business, Siemens supported the development of its main business by developing and promoting new technologies; in addition to managing the company, Siemens spent more time on researching and inventions. In 1848, the company built Europe's first long-distance telegraph line, with a span of 500 kilometers from Berlin to Frankfurt; the company continued to grow and began to get involved in electrical trains and light bulbs, and produced radios, televisions and electron microscopes during World War II . In the 1950s, Siemens began to produce computers, semiconductor equipment, washing machines and pacemaker , and its business involves a very comprehensive range.
25 years after Siemens was founded, that is, in 1872, it began business transactions with China. Siemens' first order in China was to provide China with pointer-type telecommunications machines, which marked the development of China's modern telecommunications industry. In 1910, Siemens founded Siemens China Electrical Engineering Company, headquartered in Berlin and branches in Shanghai. In the next four years, Siemens will expand its business to Beijing, Guangzhou, Wuhan, Harbin, Hong Kong, , Qingdao and Tianjin. In 1914, the company was renamed Siemens China Company (Shanghai). Siemens' business in China, especially in the power sector, developed rapidly in the early 20th century. In 1937, the international security zone established by Siemens protected many Chinese people during the war and was called "China's Schindler ".
Source: wikipedia
1931 October 12: SIMULA and Ole-Johan Dahl, the father of object-oriented programming, was born
In the "Today in History" column on August 27, we introduced Kristen Nygaard, who is the co-founder of the SIMULA language and developed SIMULA-I and SIMULA-67 together with today's protagonist Ole-Johan Dahl. SIMULA is considered to be the world's earliest programming language , which is the world's earliest object-oriented programming (Object-Oriented Programming), and for the first time introduced the basic concepts of object-oriented programming language: object, class, inheritance, virtual quantities, and multi-threaded (quasi-parallel) program execution.
Source: Wikipedia
Ole-Johan Dahl, born on October 12, 1931 in Mandal, Norway, is a famous computer scientist.He, along with alumni Kristen Nygaard, created the idea that object-oriented programming emerged by designing programming languages Simula I and Simula 67, and was considered the father of “object-oriented programming.” On January 29, 2002, Dahl died at the age of 71 in a prolonged struggle with lymphoma.
A year before Dahl's death, he and Kristen Nigard won the Turing Award in 2001. The two submitted a paper on the Simula language at the Munich conference . The paper proposed processes and canceled precompilation instructions, and directly added the simulation function to the compiler of ALGOL 60; the two continued to study and proposed the basic concepts of "objects and classes" and "subclasses", and applied them to the first object-oriented programming language Simula 67; not long after, Bell Labs launched C++, setting off a craze for object-oriented technology in the industrial interface.
Source: Wikipedia
October 12, 1950: Intel CEO Paul Otellini was born
October 12, 1950, Paul Otellini (Paul Otellini) was born in San Francisco, USA. He is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer Intel Corporation (Intel). In 1974, he officially joined Intel and became Intel's fifth CEO in 2005. On November 19, 2012, Intel announced that Paul O'Dening, the company's president and CEO, had decided to retire at the company's annual shareholder meeting in May 2013, when he would resign from his management and director position. On October 2, 2017, Intel Corporation announced that former CEO Paul O'Dening passed away in his sleep at the age of 66.
Source: Wikipedia
After receiving an MBA in July 1974, Odening joined Intel. At that time, in the computer technology industry of Silicon Valley , he had 3 choices - Fairchild Semiconductor Company , AMD and Intel. The reason for choosing Intel is that although the United States was in a period of economic depression and there were not many companies hiring talents, Intel still left many recruitment quotas to newly graduated college students, while other companies discriminated against newly graduated college students. In addition, Odening found that Intel's employees were very friendly, smart, and energetic, which was very attractive to him. Intel's policy of recruiting college students continues to this day.
1993, Odening overcomes difficulties and leads the launch of Pentium microprocessors. Pentium has now become one of the most famous trademarks in the world. After the launch of Pentium processor , Odening was appointed as the senior vice president of Intel; in 1996, he was promoted to executive vice president. In 1998, Odening took a step further to the core management of Intel and became the head of Intel Construction Group, responsible for Intel's billion-dollar microprocessor division, which accounted for 80% of Intel's total business. Since then, Odening has been responsible for all Intel's business groups related to enterprise, mobile phone and desktop computing.
After taking office as CEO, Odening immediately took action to reorganize Intel and divided the company into 5 market sectors - digital homes, corporate computing, health care, mobile computing and channels. Through layoffs, Intel has improved labor productivity and equipment utilization in the manufacturing sector, improved product design methods and processes, while also cutting redundant staff. Today, 20 years later, we’re seeing that Intel has indeed become a more efficient company.
Paul O'Denning led Intel to glory, and he also injected more commercial information into Intel rather than advocating technology. Unfortunately, although he allowed Intel to maintain the throne in the field of personal computers, he never succeeded in developing a mobile business for Intel; in the mobile industry where competition is becoming increasingly fierce, does Intel still have a chance to reach the top? This takes time to verify.
Source: Wikipedia
October 12, 1975: "Father of BT" Bram Cohen was born
October 12, 1975, Bram Cohen was born. He is an American computer programmer . The software BitTorrent (BT) he wrote made him famous. He is also one of the founders of CodeCon, the organizer of the Bay Area p2p-hackers conference, and the writer of Codeville.
Source: Wikipedia
Cohen is the organizer of the San Francisco Bay Area P2P hacking conference, the author of the peer-to-peer (P2P) BitTorrent protocol, and the first file sharing program to use the protocol, also known as BitTorrent (BT), or "seed". BT can divide programs into small pieces and can quickly download files from different computers; the more popular a file is, the faster it will be downloaded.
It was not until 2003 that BT became popular due to an incident. The well-known software company RedHat released its RedHat Linux 9 operating system and provided free downloads, which quickly overwhelmed the server. A user named Foster downloaded the operating system and released Red Hat Linux 9 on BBS using BitTorrent. People flocked to exchange 21,150g of data in just three days, equivalent to the capacity of Library of Congress .
game maker Blizzard has also discovered its potential and released a new World of Warcraft game using BitTorrent. BitTorrent has a better prospect than anyone expected, including Cohen himself; in less than two years, more than 20 million people used BT; BT suddenly became the software of choice for MP3s, movies, games and software downloads. Blame Cohen has since been called the father of BT, and is also tied for the "Top Ten Most Influential Internet Figures" with "World Wide Web" Tim Berners-Lee , Google founder Bollinger and Page.
In August 2017, Cohen entered the field of "mining" and registered and established Chia Company, aiming to develop an improved blockchain and smart trading platform. Chia Network is less energy waste, more decentralized and safer than traditional proof-of-work cryptocurrencies. Cohen wrote a brand new programming language Chialist for the company, thus developing Chia, which made up for the shortcomings of the two public chains, BTC and ETH. At the same time, Chia has functions such as BTC’s peer-to-peer transactions, ETH’s smart contracts and FIL’s distributed storage storage, effectively solving enterprise-level application problems and providing a broad foundation and necessary conditions for the real implementation of blockchain.
Source: Wikipedia
October 12, 1988: Steve Jobs launches NeXT computer
We have introduced the story of Steve Jobs (Steve Jobs3) leaving Apple in 1985. In the same year as he left Apple , Jobs showed off the NeXT computer and established the computer company NeXT, which was the computer he had conceived after leaving Apple. NeXT released two computers in total. Before being acquired by Apple in 1996, it sold only 50,000 units due to its high price.
Source: Wikipedia
Jobs resigned as chairman of Apple Computer at that time, sold most of his shares, poached some Apple employees, and started a new company, NeXT, which mainly operates production workstations. The company designed the trademark through trademark designer Paul Rand, and finally adopted the name "NeXT". The slogan at that time was: "What makes a NeXT computer a NeXT computer", which means that NeXT computers will usher in a new era. Some of the employees poached by Jobs were mainly responsible for designing the Big Mac project, a project that designed the workstation. The project was canceled by successor Jean-Louis Garcy after Jobs lost his position as head of development. In addition, Dan Luen, who was originally responsible for campus promotion, also joined the group.
When Steve Jobs was asked if he was unhappy about the delay in launching this computer for several months, he replied: "Delay? This computer is five years ahead of schedule!" NeXT's first factory was completed in , California in 1987.In October 1988, NeXT computer was released and officially sold the following year. Its official name is NeXT Computer, but it is generally called "the cube". The company originally planned to sell 10,000 units per month, but in the end it only earned 400 units per month actual sales.
NeXT Computer Company eventually became NeXT software company . When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, NeXT was acquired by Apple. The acquisition prompted Jobs to return to Apple as an advisor. Then in 1997, Jobs was appointed as the interim CEO of Apple and in 2000, the official CEO. Although NeXT eventually failed in the market, it introduced several new features to personal computers, including a CD, a built-in digital signal processor that allows speech recognition, and an object-oriented language that simplifies programming; NeXT's software eventually became the foundation of Apple's OS X system.
Source: Wikipedia
October 12, 2011: The father of C language Dennis Ritchie, died
Source: Wikipedia
C language and UNIX developer Dennis Ritchie created the B language with Ken Thompson in 1969; in 1972, he created the C programming language with Brian Kernighan; and then helped develop the Multics operating system and UNIX operating system. The
C language was developed by Dennis Rich between 1969 and 1973 and is considered to be the first modern programming language that is truly portable. Since its birth, it has been ported to almost every system architecture and operating system that has appeared. Because it is a command-based, compiled and programmatic programming language that allows syntax variable scope and recursion, allows for underlying memory access, and complex I/O and string operation functions, this language becomes quite general.
Rich and Brian Kernighan optimized it to a certain extent, and were eventually further refined into the ANSI C programming language by the X3J11 committee of the American National Standards Association in 1989. In 1978, Knihan and Rich co-wrote the book C Programming Language. This book is simply called "KR C" by many people. It is a masterpiece of computer science and is also a key reference for explaining the concept of modern programming. Even today, it is also a classic textbook for learning programming in computer science courses.
Until today, ANSI C is still widely used as a programming language. Later, it has developed many derivative languages, which have many followers - such as Objective-Ch. Objective-C is largely considered a little-known C derivative until it was widely used in the NeXT Computer Systems' NeXTStep and OpenStep operating systems in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which is the NeXT developed by Jobs mentioned today's column.
In 2001, Apple released Mac OS X, which followed the Objective-C framework and object-oriented technologies introduced by NeXTStep and OpenStep.
Source: Wikipedia
C The language can only interpret half of Dennis Rich's career. Ritchie was also the co-inventor of the UNIX operating system. The prototype of UNIX was written in assembly language and was completely rewritten in C in the early 1970s. As early as 1969, the first version of "Unics" was booted on a DEC PDP-7, and since then UNIX has evolved many similar operating systems and runs on a variety of system architectures.
Every major computer vendor has implemented its own UNIX. Even Microsoft once owned a product called XENIX and later sold it to SCO.
These achievements gave Dennis the Turing Award in 1983. It can be said that almost all network products were born on his shoulders: Android smartphones, streaming devices, Macs and iPads, Windows 11 and Surface Book, cloud computing …
Eleven years ago today, Rob Pike, a colleague who worked with Dennis Rich for 20 years, came to New Jersey from California to visit him, but found that he had passed away.Since Dennis Ritchie lived alone, the exact time of death was unknown; according to his brother, Dennis Ritchie has been in poor health for many years, suffering from prostate cancer and heart disease.
Rob Parker only posted an extremely short obituary on social platforms at the time: "As far as I know, Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of Unix and C languages, has passed away." Ritchie's principle of "keep it simple" is not only reflected in his C language and Unix systems, but also carried out his life. Dennis Ritchie's silent ending is a pity. Now it seems, how do you think we should increase the awareness of the behind-the-scenes technicians such as "Father of C"? Welcome to participate in this voting and share your insights in the comment section.
[Welcome to contribute] Using history as a mirror, you can know the success or replacement. Since the development of computer science, there have been many crucial events and figures. All friends are welcome to jointly build "Today in History". Submission email: [email protected].
