Today in Tech History – – May 12, 2018

1936 – University of Washington education professor August Dvorak received a patent for his new more efficient keyboard layout. While widely recognised as superior to the QWERTY layout, the Dvorak keyboard is not widely used.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=WSNkAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1941 – German engineer Konrad Zuse presented the Z3, the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. It succeeded the Z1 which was the first binary digital computer.

http://www.dw.com/en/konrad-zuse-and-the-digital-revolution-he-started-with-the-z3-computer-75-years-ago/a-19249238

2005 – Elijah Wood revealed the Xbox 360 on the MTV Music Awards. Microsoft didn’t announce price or release dates, only saying it would arrive for sale by the end of the year.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1501783/new-xbox-designed-customization.jhtml

2015 – Verizon announced it would acquire AOL, including its ISP, advertising and blogging opertions as a wholly-owned subsidiary.

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/verizon-buying-aol-4-4-billion-twitter-reacts/

2017 – Ransomware called WannaCry took advantage of a leaked NSA security tool called EternalBlue and spread to unpatched and out of date Windows installations. It infected more than 200,000 machines in more than 150 countries.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39901382

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