Organize | Wang Qilong
Through "Today in History", the future can be seen from the past, and the future can also be changed from the present.
Today is October 2, 2021. In history, there are no fewer key technological events than yesterday. The world-famous general electronic computer ENIAC is retiring today. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, a world-renowned university in my country, officially opened its doors. Google’s two founders launched a brand new company...
October 2, 1925: British inventor Baird invents television
There are many "Williams" and "Johns" in the history of science and technology, but today I will introduce a "John" who has a profound influence on today's world, John.L.Baird (John.L.Baird). On October 2, 1925, he manufactured the world's first mechanical television capable of transmitting images, which is the prototype of today's television. Despite the fuzzy faces and loud noises on Baird's television screen, the ability to see a lifelike image in an unassuming black box was intriguing. The first television was called the "magic box".
John Logie Baird (John.L.Baird) was a British electrical engineer. He was born in a pastor's family in Helensburgh, Scotland. He showed his talent as an inventor since he was a child. Baird was educated at Glasgow University and the Royal Institute of Technology, and during World War I, Baird decided he was unfit for military service and became the head of a major electricity company.
After hundreds of experiments, Baird summed up a lot of experience. In the early morning of October 2, 1925, when Baird started the machine in the room again, as the motor speed increased, he finally received Bill clearly from the video receiver in another room—a performance doll face. On January 27, 1926, Baird's machine was significantly improved, and he began to recruit experts and sponsors. The invited experts all agreed that this is an incredibly great invention; and the sponsors quickly realized the broad market prospect of this invention, so they invested one after another and established several companies.
Today in 2021, Baird's TVs have evolved to such a degree that a clear and vivid TV has become a real-life necessity. In 1962, communication satellites were put into orbit, and communication between continents was no longer difficult. Now sitting at home, people can know what is happening in every corner of the world, and the space and time distance between people is shortened, all thanks to Baird's invention.
Source: Wikipedia
October 2, 1945: Turing Award winner and cryptographer Martin Hellman is born
Martin Edward Hellman was born on October 2, 1945 in New York, USA. He is an expert in cryptography and cybersecurity technology, best known for inventing public key cryptography. Herman's main papers are "New Directions in Cryptography" (New Directions in Cryptography). In February 2016, Herman and (Bailey W. Diffie) won the 2015 Turing Award.
Establishing a secure channel for two parties to communicate privately on the Internet is fundamental to the use of the Internet by billions of people. Every day, individuals and banks, e-commerce sites, mail servers and cloud platforms are being connected. Herman and Diffie's seminal 1976 paper, "New Directions in Cryptography," introduced the methods of public keys and electronic signatures that underlie most Internet security protocols today. The Diffie-Hellman protocol secures everyday Internet communications, as well as trillions of dollars in financial transactions.
In "New Directions in Cryptography," Herman and Diffie show an algorithm that shows that asymmetric encryption, or public-key encryption, is possible. This is Public Key Cryptography. In this algorithm, a public key—which is not secret and can be freely shared—is used to encrypt, and a private key is used to decrypt, which never needs to leave the receiving device. Although the public key determines the private key, the design of this asymmetric encryption system makes it impossible to calculate the private key from the public key.
We all know the RSA algorithm now, which is the most popular public key encryption/digital signature algorithm; in fact, it is the RSA algorithm that verifies that the Diffie-Hellman protocol is achievable, because Hellman and the others did not propose any A specific public-key encryption algorithm. As early as 2002, Rivest, Shamir and Adleman won the Turing Award for jointly proposing the RSA algorithm, while Diffie and Hellman received the Turing Award 14 years later, which once again reflects the fact that the computer field is a A field where theory and practice combine.
Source: Wikipedia
October 2, 1954: Guy Steele, creator of the Scheme language, is born
Guy Lewis Steele Jr. was born in Missouri, USA on October 2, 1954. He is the founder of Scheme, a member of the Sun Java team, and the original designer of some commands of Emacs; he is also a senior researcher in Sun's laboratory, responsible for Language design and implementation strategies, parallel algorithms and computer research work. He is currently working on Sun's Fortress, a programming language focused on parallelism and mathematics. Guy Steele is also the author of Common Lisp: the Language (CLtL).
Guy Steele is the kind of genius programmer often seen in the story. He revealed in the interview that he often went to the artificial intelligence laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he was very young, and Scheme originated in 1975. First implemented by Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman at MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
The predecessor of the Scheme language is Lisp, a language born at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. It is said that Lisp is the second oldest language in the family tree of programming languages after Fortran. Guy Steele once joined Thinking Machines, where he helped define and promote a parallel version called *Lisp (Guy Steele).
In addition to working with Lisp all his life, Guy Steele also presided over the editing of the first edition of the ECMAScript standardization and led the development of the Java language specification. In 2005, he began leading a research team at Sun to develop a new programming language called Fortress, a high-performance language designed for the obsolete Fortran. Guy Steele is a name that cannot be ignored on the road to Java's success. His Scheme language is also a very good language, which is worth remembering.
Source: Wikipedia
October 2, 1955: ENIAC computers retired
At 23:55 on October 2, 1955, the ENIAC, which had been in operation for nearly 10 years, was officially retired. Today, its components are scattered in the University of Pennsylvania, the US Army Ordnance Museum, the US Computer History Museum, the Smithsonian Institution and many other institutions. ENIAC actually ran for 80223 hours. This computer adopts an external program, and it has not yet fully possessed the main features of modern computers, but as far as the first general-purpose electronic computer is concerned, in its 10-year service life, it has performed more calculations than the sum of human calculations in history. There are many more, which have brought incalculable impact on human beings.
ENIAC is the world's first general-purpose electronic computer, which came out on February 14, 1946. Objectively speaking, the first electronic computer was the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC Computer). However, the ABC computer is not programmable and does not have Turing completeness, and can only perform calculations of linear equations; its value is to determine some modern computer design ideas, such as the use of binary and reusable memory. So ENIAC is the first truly general-purpose electronic computer.
In 1955, when ENIAC retired, Professor John McCarthy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) proposed the technical concept of time-sharing (time-sharing), hoping to satisfy the needs of multiple people using a computer at the same time. appeal. John McCarthy is the father of artificial intelligence. The idea he put forward this year, in a word, is to create a "computer system that multiple people can use at the same time", which is the "virtualization" and "cloud" that we are familiar with today. The concept of "computing" laid the foundation. It can be seen that when a generation of legends falls, a spark of new ideas will always be ignited.
Source: Wikipedia
October 2, 1991: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology officially opened
The Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST), established in October 1991, is a highly international research university. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology is one of the eight higher education institutions in Hong Kong that are funded by the Government University Education Grants Committee and can award degrees.
Over the past 30 years since its founding, HKUST has created world-leading teaching and research achievements, such as the world’s thinnest single-walled carbon nanotubes, the world’s highest-resolution photos, the world’s first smart bactericidal coating, and the world’s No. 1 EMBA program. Wang Tao, the founder of Xinjiang Innovation, Lu Jianhua, an expert in communication and information systems, Sun Binyong, a mathematician, Li Huiqiong, chairman of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of China, Luo Shuohan, chief financial officer of Tencent Group, and other outstanding talents in various fields.
HKUST has gained a reputation in just 20 years since its establishment, and has achieved remarkable achievements. It ranks 17th in the 2021 QS Global University Rankings, shoulders shoulders with Qingbei, and is ranked among the world's top universities in the Times Global Higher Education in 2019. Ranked first among young universities. The research team of the Department of Physics of HKUST successfully developed carbon nanotubes with a diameter of 0.4 nanometers, which are the thinnest single-walled carbon nanotubes in the world so far. This research achievement was recommended by academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering as one of the top ten scientific and technological achievements in the world that year, and it is also well-known today.
Source: Baidu Encyclopedia, Wikipedia
October 2, 2015: Larry Page and Sergey Brin launch Alphabet, Google's new parent company
On August 10, 2015, Sundar Pichai was appointed as the new CEO of Google, and Google was reorganized into Alphabet. On October 2, 2015, Google announced the reorganization of the holding company, Alphabet became Google's successor, and Pichai assumed the new post of Google CEO.
Alphabet is a parent company established by Google, with Larry Page (Larry Page) as CEO and Sergey Brin (Sergey Brin) as Chairman of the Board. Alphabet will have a series of wholly-owned small companies that are independent according to business lines, such as the current Google, X-Lab, Life Sciences, Ventures & Capital and others. The establishment of the new company this time is more like an adjustment of the organizational structure, used to repair the relatively bloated Google before, and to clarify the responsibilities and achievements of each business unit (subsidiary).
In 2019, the two "Google boys" Larry and Sergey officially resigned, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai succeeded Page as Alphabet CEO, announcing the end of an era. So, what has Alphabet done in the past few years?
From 2004 to 2015, Google made more than 240 acquisitions and rapidly expanded into multiple fields; however, running a large enterprise itself is a big problem. Alphabet was born in this way. It is the result of adjusting the corporate structure and is a strategy of Google; Alphabet divides different departments or parts into different independent companies and conducts unified management. Google becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Not only can transaction costs be converted into management costs, greatly reducing the risk of department isolation, but each independent limited liability company is more suitable for the development of the enterprise.
Around the world, many multinational corporations are structured like this. Google's corporate restructuring was very successful, inheriting a Fortune 500 brand from Alphabet, followed by Microsoft and Apple. Google's overall profitability has been boosted through corporate restructuring, a strategic triumph for the company. "Sergey and I are seriously considering new businesses. In fact, from the very beginning, we have tried to use existing resources to do more things, important things and meaningful things." Larry Page believes, The technology industry must usher in a revolution, and if you don’t fall behind, you must be unwilling to be lazy; it can be said that Alphabet is the last gift left by Sergey and Larry to Google.
Source: Wikipedia
October 2, 2019: Microsoft releases Surface Duo, a dual-screen folding smartphone
How much do you know about the "black technology" of folding screen mobile phones? In fact, it is not difficult to develop a folding screen. Since the oled screen made by Samsung has a certain degree of flexibility, it has launched a very distinctive curved screen mobile phone a few years ago. 2019 was the first year of folding screen mobile phones, but at that time, folding screen mobile phones were expensive and still in their infancy, and basically no one cared about them; and the world's first folding screen mobile phone was neither Huawei nor Samsung, but a Domestic brand: Rouyu. After Rouyu, Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, TCL, and OPPO have all released folding screen phones one after another. This time, the software giant Microsoft also came to this nascent field to test the waters.
On October 2, 2019, Microsoft released Surface Duo, a dual-screen folding smartphone, catching up with the first-year craze for folding screens. The back of the mobile phone is designed with a glass back panel, printed with the "Tian" brand belief logo, and adopts a double-folding screen design. Unlike Huawei Mate X and Samsung, which use a whole screen, it is a double-screen folding design. Winning in technical stability.
However, all expectations are fleeting the moment the user turns on the screen. In an era when major manufacturers are pursuing high screen-to-body ratios, the two large black screens of Surface Duo seem out of place, and they can’t bring users a good experience in terms of perception. Watching videos is a bit less immersive. Microsoft's dual-screen design seems to make the field of view larger, but if you play videos in this way, there will be a very obvious sense of fragmentation, just like using two monitors with wide borders to form a dual screen.
Microsoft's advantage is software, and in terms of hardware, we all know that Microsoft has encountered Waterloo of Windows Phone. In less than a year, Surface Duo has plummeted by more than 6,000 yuan, becoming another stepping stone on Microsoft's road to hardware exploration; it is not only unsatisfactory in terms of hardware, but also has various problems in terms of software compatibility. That old saying: "Don't buy Microsoft's first generation."
[Contributions are welcome] Taking history as a mirror, you 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 build "Today in History" together. Contribution email: [email protected].