Every Day Is Special: computer

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August 11 - Happy Birthday, Steve Wozniak

Posted on August 11, 2021

This is an update of my post published on August 11, 2010:

Born on this day in 1950, little Stevie probably was the apple of his mother's eye, but he grew up to be the apple of everyone's eye! With Steve Jobs, Wozniak worked in basements and garages to invent a little thing called the first Apple computer.

Which means that Woz was a huge part of the microcomputer revolution.

This California boy left the University of California, Berkeley, to design most of the hardware and to write most of the software for the Apple I and Apple II computers (which were released in 1976 and 1977). When their company went public in 1980, both Woz and Jobs became multimillionaires.

Apple I computer

Apple II

Wozniak later returned to the university and finished up his degree (under a false name, so that he wouldn't attract too much attention).

I owned some very early Apples!

I bought my first computer, an Apple II, in the late 1970s. It was incredibly primitive by today's standards and had an incredibly small memory – again, according to today's whiz-machines. But I was definitely the only one on the block who had a home computer – maybe the only one in the whole town! – and my house was very much the focus of much interest and early computer game play. That so-simple computer also helped me revolutionize my work as an editor at an educational publishing company! It was an exciting time!

That first Apple II computer cost around $3000, even thought I didn't buy a monitor (we hooked it up to a large [27-inch?] TV). The computer only had a memory of 64 K, which is about one six-hundred-millionth of the memory on a good hard drive from Apple Computer today! Yikes-y!

I first bought an Apple II (above).
Then, over the years, I bought an Apple II plus,
an Apple IIe, and an Apple IIgs (below).

Then I bought several PCs that were made by Dell
and were compatible with IBM microcomputers.

But the past decade or two, I came back to Apple.
I now own an iPhone, a Mac Mini, and a Mac Laptop!

Learn how computers work.

You might want to start here or here.

Also on this date:

Anniversary of the Opening of the Mall of America

Presidential Joke Day

Birthday of David Atchison, President of the U.S. for a day

Anniversary of the start of the Mayan Calendar

Ingersoll Day

Independence Day in Chad

King Hussein Ascension Day in Jordan

Birthday of Warren Brown, Gentleman Farmer

Flag Day in Pakistan

Global Kinetic Sand Day

Teej Festival

(Date varies)

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September holidays
September birthdays
Historical anniversaries in September

July 18 - Birth of Intel!

Posted on July 18, 2020

On this date in 1968, a region in California got a big boost into becoming Silicon Valley.

Bell Labs in New Jersey and Texas Instruments in - you guessed it - Texas made the first invention and development of transistors, including silicon transistors, but a dean of the University of Stanford's engineering school, a man named Frederick Terman, created a tradition of Stanford professors starting their own companies. Silicon transistors and later silicon chips began to be associated with the area near Stanford as professor after professor (and student after former student) opened electronics companies near the university.

And now the area south of San Francisco, which includes Stanford's Palo Alto and Intel's Santa Clara, is called Silicon Valley. Around 2,000 tech companies are located there!

Intel's name is a portmanteau (a word made of parts of two or more words) of the terms INTegrated circuit (microchip) and ELectronics. The fact that "intel" is short for intelligence information - as in "Did you get the intel?" - was the bonus to the name the two co-founders came up with.

Intel created the world's first commercially available microprocessor in 1971. That's what made it possible for a small machine to do what, in the past, only huge computers could do.

I remember buying my first computer - an Apple II (Apple Computers had also sprung up in Silicon Valley!) - in 1979, and my friends were astonished that little old me would have a computer in my home. Some people asked me, "But don't computers cost tens of thousands of dollars and take up an entire room?"

"Not any more," I was able to answer.

But the extraordinary development of technology continued at a break-neck pace, and the 2-foot-by-1-foot Apple II (which didn't include a screen or disc drive) had only 64 Kilobytes, whereas an Apple watch now allows us to have 8 Gigabytes of memory on our wrist! And each Gigabyte is the equivalent of 1 million KB, so that is very close to being 8 million times more memory in a teeny fraction of the space!

Also on this date:

Anniversary of the Great Fire of Rome

Scientist and polymath Robert Hooke's birthday

Astronaut John Glenn's birthday

Activist and statesman Nelson Mandela's birthday

Anniversary of a perfect game

Extreme Vehicle Day

Constitution Day in Uruguay

Actor Kristen Bell's birthday

Actor Priyanka Chopra's birthday

Birthday of "the Unsinkable Molly Brown"

Anniversary of the first band on the World Wide Web

Woodie Wagon Day

(Third Saturday in July)

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October 11 – Ada Lovelace Day in the U.K.

Second Tuesday in October

Posted October 11, 2016

Today is NOT Ada Lovelace's birthday!

As I wrote years ago, Augusta Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, was born on December 10. But celebrating the world's first “computer programmer” – born in 1815, so we are not talking about programming an IBM or an Apple II – is very important in the United Kingdom. And, since December is jammed with Christmas parties and such, for convenience sake Lovelace is celebrated on the second Tuesday of October!

This year, the second Tuesday of October is MY birthday, too, so I eagerly welcome Ada Lovelace Day to my birthday!

Here are some top things you should know about Lovelace:

Her father was famed poet Lord Byron. However, her mother left Byron because of his “immoral behaviour” when Ada was just a baby, and Byron died when Ada was just 8 years old.
Her mother brought her up with a focus on logic, mathematics, and science.
As a teen, Ada Lovelace was fascinated by the machinery being developed (the British Industrial Revolution was in full swing) and designed steam flying machines.
In 1833 she was introduced to Charles Babbage; the two worked together to develop a device called the Analytical Engine, which was an early form of a computer.
In 1842 Lovelace wrote an article about using machines to compute and to manipulate symbols. She wrote “programs” or lists of instructions that the Analytical Engine could carry out; Babbage did as well, but Lovelace's programs were more extensive and more complete. Also, her programs were the first to be published. That's why she is often called “the first” computer programmer.
Ada Lovelace married William, 8^th Baron King, and became Lady King. Later, because Ada was a descendant of the Barons Lovelace, her husband was made Earl of Lovelace, and she became Countess of Lovelace. The couple had three children.
She died at age 36, from cancer. Even though she never knew her father, she requested that she be buried next to him.
Modern computer hero Alan Turing was inspired by Ada Lovelace's notes!

Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day is an opportunity to shine a light on all the women in science, mathematics, and tech fields. It's an opportunity to talk about how to open up these fields to more girls and women, and it's an opportunity to remind ourselves of the positive steps we can take to make the world a fairer place!

Also on this date: