The Tuesday after the first Monday in November is the day set for election day in the US, and thus it was on 4 November 1952 that a computer first entered into the television studio to assist in predicting the results even before the ballots have been counted (and in some cases cast). The first built UNIVAC computer had been delivered to the Bureau of the Census in the summer of 1951, and a year later the fifth machine was being readied for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The delivery of this machine was delayed, and it was programmed by the Remington-Rand (UNIVAC division) staff to analyze the partial results in order to anticipate the outcome. So it was that evening that only a few minutes after the East Coast election booths closed that the UNIVAC being used on behalf of the CBS television program, was ready to predict a landslide victory for Dwight D. Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson. But the CBS producers were unprepared for such an early prognostication, and thus made it appear that the UNIVAC was not ready to made a statement. Just after midnight when the outcome was as predicted, a spokesman for the network apologized on the air for not believing the analysis and for subjugating the early announcement. Four years later in the second election in which Dwight Eisenhower, an IBM 701 (Defense Calculator) performed the same task and correctly prophesied the president's re-election.
The birthdates of particular programming languages are often difficult to ascertain, since languages tend to evolve over a long period rather than appear full fledged on a single day. FORTRAN, for example evolved over about a year-long period starting in December 1954 when John Backus produced a short memorandum outlining the elements of the language. But it took another year to finalize the details of the language that would eventually lead to the first compiler for the IBM 704 that was delivered to Westinghouse-Bettis in Pittsburgh PA in April 1957. Similarly the successor languages that were designed by committee, ALGOL and COBOL, evolved slowly, probably as a function of the ability of the committee members to assemble for meetings. But one programming language, JOSS [1], claims to have a specific birthdate - 7 November 1960. JOSS, JOHNNIAC Open Shop System, was a language developed by J.C. (Cliff) Shaw at RAND Corporation to provide users with a hands-on connection to computer, in a period when operating systems had become the major management tool of computing center directors. Through operating systems programmers were kept away from the machine console and the dead time between the computer runs by individual programmers. JOSS allowed 12 users to use the machine (apparently) simultaneously, preceding the invention of time-sharing by Fernando Corbató by a year. JOSS was still operating in the early 1970s on IBM System/360 systems, and had been translated into several languages.
The on-going discussion regarding the identification of the "first computer" includes, among other candidates, the definition of the "Universal Machine" by Alan Turing in 1937. The paper entitled "On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem" first appeared on 12 November 1937, somewhat contemporaneously with the work on the first of the Z-machines by Konrad Zuse in Germany, on the ABC by John Vincent Atanasoff, on the Bell Telephone Laboratory Relay machines by George Stibitz, and the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC or Harvard Mark I) by Howard Aiken. Later renamed the "Turing Machine", this abstract engine provided the fundamental concepts of computers that would be realized independently by the other inventors. While others provided the pragmatic means of computation, Turing provided the abstraction that would be the basic theory of computability for several decades.
29 November 1972 was the date on which ATARI announced the arcade game PONG appears, in time for Christmas shopping. PONG was a simple game of tennis that could be played on a standard home television, and probably the first commercially available "computer game", though by no means the first computer game. The first game was probably the coding of Noughts and Crosses (Tic-Tac-Toe) on the EDSAC computer at the University of Cambridge in 1949. In 1973 there appeared the first actual arcade versions of PONG starting the revolution in providing entertainment to adolescents.
George Boole, born 2 November 1815, in Lincoln, UK, died 8 December 1864 in Cork, Ireland, was the British creator of a logic and a number system that bears his name. Initially a school teacher in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, England, Boole developed his ideas about symbolic logic without the benefit of a formal university-level education. Queen's University at Cork, Ireland recognized his contributions and offered him the chair of mathematics in 1848. To make up for his lack of formal training and consequent paper qualifications, Boole was awarded honorary degrees from Dublin and Oxford Universities, the Royal Society elected him as a fellow, and in 1858 he was elected as an honorary member of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. In late 1864 Boole walked to Queen's University from his home - a distance of just over two miles - in a rain storm, and then gave his lecture. Suffering from pneumonia, Boole died at the age of 50 on 8th December.
Adriaan van Wijngaarden, born 2 November 1916, died 7 February 1987, was a leader in programming linguistics and language translation, and a contributor to ALGOL 60. He led the recasting of ALGOL 60 into ALGOL 68 , a vastly different language that not only represented the state of the art of programming languages, but which included features that were far ahead of its time. He received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1986 for his work on ALGOL 68.
Gene M. Amdahl, born 16 November 1922, Flandreau SD; was a primary designer of the IBM System/360, and of the line of machines that bear his name. Amdahl had designed his first computer as part of his Ph.D. dissertation. Eventually the machine, the Wisconsin Integrally Synchronized Computer (WISC), was built by successive generations of students. Amdahl was named as one of the charter recipients of the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980, and later received the Eckert-Mauchly Award in 1987, and the Computer Entrepreneur Award, in 1989.
Jack St. Clair Kilby, born 8 November 1923 in Jefferson City MO was the 1958 inventor in 1958 of the germanium-based integrated computer chip (the "IC"). Texas Instruments filed a patent application and filed a lawsuit against Robert Noyce and Fairchild Industries for infringement. In 1969 the courts ruled in favor of Noyce whose version was silicon-based. It is generally agreed, in hindsight, that Kilby built the first integrated circuit while Noyce provided a practical implementation that could be commercialized. Kilby received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1994.
