Today in Tech History – March 31, 2017

Today in Tech History logo1939 – Harvard and IBM signed an agreement to build the Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). It weighed 5 tons and read data from paper tape and punch cards.

1993 – Richard Depew accidentally posted 200 identical messages to news.admin.policy while testing some auto-moderation software. It became the first USENET postings to be referred to as spam.

1998 – After three years of development and much wrangling with the Warcraft engine it was originally built on, Blizzard released the iconic game Starcraft.

2013 – IBM shut down the Roadrunner supercomputer, the first computer to run at more than one petaflop.

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.