Today in Tech History – September 19, 2017

Today in Tech History logo1982 – In a posting made at 11:44 AM, Professor Scott Fahlman first proposed using the characters 🙂 to indicate jokes on a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University. In the same post he suggested :-(.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm

1989 – About 100 hospitals that used software from Shared Medical Systems saw their computers go into a loop when the date was entered. The day was 32,768 days from January 1, 1900, which caused a system overflow.

http://books.google.com/books?id=k29i2RUzg0EC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=september+19+1989+hospital+bug&source=bl&ots=LGg9GLyZD9&sig=fCpVkfK7qoMCUGiKvhpgeFpC48A&hl=en&sa=X&ei=aIUlUMSFIsLtiwL914GICg&ved=0CFkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=september%2019%201989%20hospital%20bug&f=false

1995 – International Talk Like a Pirate Day was first celebrated by John Baur (Ol’ Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (Cap’n Slappy), of Albany, Oregon. They had come up with the idea on June 6th while playing racquetball, but that was D-Day. The 19th was Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday, and the only day he could reliably remember.

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/

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