OTD 1959: Fire destroys Pentagon data center. Data center design & safety got a lot more serious after that.

Way cool. viterbischool.usc.ed...

OTD 1956: Burroughs acquires Electrodata, the southern California developers of the later B5000 series. Blog about the development of the Electrodata/Burroughs 205 and 220 machines: datatron.blogspot.co...

OTD 1970: IBM System/370 announced. The main reason for the bump from System/360 to System/370 was the use of IC memory instead of core. Virtual memory features took another 2 years. en.wikipedia.org/wik...

OTD 1945: von Neumann's EDVAC report published. The beginning of modern computer architecture. web.mit.edu/sts.035/...

Name that programming language! (Wrong answers appreciated!) Hint: "Personal" computer, circa 1963.

OTD 1981: My first public speaking role -- at the Usenix Texas UNIX Users conference. Full details here: vtda.org/pubs/AUUGN/...

Manchester Code IEEE Milestone: spectrum.ieee.org/ma... (Used in early Ethernet)

Father's day burgers with my son At Jumbo's Win-Win in Philo, CA. Mighty fine!

OTD 1975: The first UNIX Users Group meeting - the organization that evolved into USENIX. archive.org/details/...

70 years of A.I.: OTD 1956, the Dartmouth Workshop: en.wikipedia.org/wik... Personally, I was happier when A.I. meant American Idol.

Speaking of John Tukey - I found this plaque on my recent visit to Princeton. The plaque is in the E.E. department, although Tukey was always in math & statistics department. And Cooley was at IBM. #FFT

Happy Tukey day! Born this day, 1915. en.wikipedia.org/wik...

Apropos of nothing, here's a Sun Multibus Ethernet card (1983). It used Intel's 82586 chip and an array of 256MB of memory because (a) Multibus was slow, and (b) The Sun-1 didn't support DMA from Multibus. The horrors of programming this mess and others are described here: www.researchgate.net...

ALMOST hacked. Just had a very believable 1/2 hour conversation with "Google" about someone trying to recover my account, which they would then "do a security scan" of. They sent notifications, emails, SMS, all looking very official. 1/2

"Someday my Prints will come" - waiting for output in the "Ready Room" at Princeton's Computer Center.

It's 2002: the dot.com bubble has burst, telecoms are struggling, data is coming to cell phones, the Internet is still growing, but rife with what will be known as "network neutrality" problems. We need a new public network. The future I wanted to see: speakerdeck.com/pugs...

My god, Octavia Butler, just miss ONCE

OTD 1982: #SunMicrosystems ships 1st Sun-1 workstation. Customer is "Solo Systems", never heard from again.

OTD 1987: #SunMicrosystems announce the SunLink Channel Gateway. One of my favorite projects. www.1000bit.it/js/we...

Born this day 1927: Professor Bruce W. Arden, who was chair of the department and my advisor at Princeton. Wonderful person with seminal contributions to computer science. cse.engin.umich.edu/...

OTD 1936: Turing submits his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.” 90 years of Turing machines!

R.I.P. Cleve Moler - LINPACK & MATLAB.

Mrs. Ruby Hill, where are you now? 59 year old coding form found in a Westinghouse FORTRAN/BEEF manual.

OTD 2000: Nokia launches All-IP Core for 3G networks. www.globenewswire.co... My startup, Ipsilon Networks, became the Nokia IP Routing Group. And I personally suggested the tagline "Mobile Information Society" rather than the "Wireless Information Society" they had been planning.

Panel tomorrow: "UNIX: Before, During, and After Princeton" reunions.princeton.e...

Today: 53rd birthday of Ethernet! labs.ripe.net/author...

Highly recommended:

CaaS - Cashiering as a Service That job blows.

My neighbor Pitch Johnson, one of the first Silicon Valley VCs, just hit his 98th birthday. en.wikipedia.org/wik....

OTD 1982 (44 years!): I join Sun Microsystems as employee #8. Blog post from 2022:

OTD 1977: The first #UNIX port boots at the University of Wollongong, on their Interdata 7/32. http://bitsavers.inf...#UNIX At Princeton, we were the first to *start* a UNIX port, but it was not completed until I went to Amdahl. Wollongong also beat out the Bell Labs Interdata 8/32 port by a few months

Hipster animals.

OTD 2009: #Oracle buys #SunMicrosystems. Sigh. www.oracle.com/corpo...

#UNIX panel at upcoming #Princeton reunions. Featuring some famous people, and me too.

OTD 1989: Control Data shuts down ETA supercomputer subsidiary. ethw.org/First-Hand:...

OTD 1989: #SunMicrosystems announces the SPARCstation 1, aka Sun 4/60, aka "Campus". Also first use of SBus. theretroweb.com/moth...

Amazon announces "S3 Files": aws.amazon.com/blogs... I guess they didn't get my message that NFS Must Die! www.youtube.com/watc...

OTD 1982: I get my Sun offer letter.

Happy Mainframe Day! OTD 1964: IBM announces the System/360 family. 8-bit bytes ftw! Shown: Operator at console of Princeton's IBM/360 Model 91.

OTD 1969: RFC #1 datatracker.ietf.org...

OTD 1992: 2nd Broadband ISDN Technical Workshop - Miyazaki, Japan. I had the honor of giving the opening talk. My first trip to Japan!

OTD 1996 (30 years!) - #IpsilonNetworks takes the best of show award at the Networld+InterOp show. My career has been pretty much downhill since then. :-) web.archive.org/web/... web.archive.org/web/...

OTD 1986 (40 years!) - #SunMicrosystems "Car in Office" April Fool's Day stunt. Recreated in 2008 at Google - but they didn't have to move and replace walls.

Today is International Transgender Day of Visibility.

OTD 1951: Census Bureau accepts the first UNIVAC system - with 59% uptime. dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/...

Now Meta has bumped up their $1.5B data center plan on the other side of El Paso to an insane $10B plan.

A.I. buildout bullshit - $165B Project Jupiter outside of my hometown El Paso.

Good book from 2021 about how the huge public/private infrastructure deals are usually just short term gain for politicians and long term financial pain for the affected communities. Think about all the BS AI infrastructure deals recently announced.

🕯️manifesting.