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Youtube created

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It's hard to believe YouTube is only five years old. How ever did we procrastinate without videos of babies break-dancing and chumps wiping out on treadmills? Then again, it's also remarkable that the video-sharing site has lasted this long: five minutes is a more typical Internet life span. But YouTube — the world's third most visited website after Google and Facebook — shows no signs of slowing down. The site marked the May anniversary of its 2005 beta launch with another milestone: YouTube's users now clock more than 2 billion views every single day. (See YouTube's 50 best videos.)

That kind of reach must have been inconceivable for former PayPal co-workers Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who created YouTube as a Flickr-style sharing site for videos in February 2005. They posted their first clip, a 19-second shot of Karim at the San Diego Zoo, that April. By November, with the aid of neophyte-friendly uploading software, YouTube users were sending 8 terabytes of data flickering across the Internet every day — the equivalent, Hurley noted, of the entire contents of a Blockbuster store. By the time Google paid $1.65 billion in stock for the company in the fall of 2006, the site boasted more than 700 million views a week. Today more video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than all three U.S. television networks have created in 60 years.

Backlash was inevitable, of course, and YouTube has been slammed for encouraging everything from narcissism to piracy. It has also reportedly lost money every year so far. But maybe not for long: already its signature amateur content is giving way to professional fare that's more attractive to advertisers. (In April, the slick video for Lady Gaga's hit single "Bad Romance" became YouTube's most popular video ever.) Which means YouTube might be a very different company by the time it celebrates birthday No. 10.

See the top 10 YouTube train wrecks.

See the top 10 viral videos of 2009.

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It's hard to believe YouTube is only five years old. How ever did we procrastinate without videos of babies break-dancing and chumps wiping out on treadmills? Then again, it's also remarkable that the video-sharing site has lasted this long: five minutes is a more typical Internet life span.

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First android smartphone

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As Android has grown, Samsung has come to completely dominate it. The South Korean manufacturer sold more mobile phones than any other company in 2012, accounting for 22 percent of the market, according to Gartner. Knowing that Android claimed around 70 percent of the worldwide smartphone market in 2012 and IDC research suggests that Samsung was responsible for 42 percent of all Android smartphone shipments during the year. Samsung is the most popular Android phone maker, by far.

This success is entirely built on Samsung's Galaxy brand which has encompassed over 50 separate devices, if you count all the smartphone variants, phablets, and tablets released so far. Samsung has bombarded every niche, every price point, every form factor, every carrier, and every country it can possibly reach.

When the Samsung i7500, also known as the Samsung Galaxy, was released in June 2009, it marked Samsung's entry into the Android smartphone market. The first Android smartphone, the HTC Dream (or T-Mobile G1), had been released the previous year and the all-conquering Motorola Droid was to land just a couple of months later. Few would have predicted Samsung's climb to dominance back then. Fast forward to the present day and Samsung is riding high as excitement builds ahead of the release of its newest flagship, the Galaxy S4, which is expected to be the next in line for the Android throne, and could even outsell the iPhone, if it's lucky.

The S stands for success

Throughout Samsung's assault on the smartphone market, the company has always been careful to distinguish its flagship line with the letter S.

The original Samsung Galaxy S was released in the summer of 2010 and it has sold over 24 million units worldwide. As a high-end, premium Android smartphone, it packed a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, a 4-inch display, and a 5-megapixel camera. The reception was good and it was widely considered as credible competition for the HTC Desire and the iPhone 4. It was released on all of the major U.S. carriers and Samsung created a special version for each of them and differentiated them with the Epic 4G, Vibrant, Captivate, Fascinate, and Mesmerize names.

A few budget Galaxy offshoots aimed at various markets around the world followed, and the year ended with a bang as the pure Android Nexus S, co-developed with Google, launched in time for Christmas, but in 2011 Samsung was to enjoy even greater success. Hardly a month passed in 2011 without a new Galaxy smartphone - the Ace, the Fit, the Gio, the Mini, but it was the Galaxy S2 that was to secure Samsung's place at the top of the Android tree. Slim, powerful, and hugely desirable, the S2 launched in more than 120 countries in the summer of 2011.

With a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, a 4.3-inch display, and an 8-megapixel camera the S2 blew the competition away and it was widely praised as the best Android phone on the market, with some reviewers going further and calling it the best smartphone on the market. Samsung has sold more than 40 million S2 handsets since release and there have been a number of variants on different carriers and in various countries.

You'd be forgiven for feeling a sense of deja-vu as Samsung saw out 2011 with a laundry list of Galaxy models including the R, the W, the Y, the XCover, the Stratosphere, and most notably the Galaxy Nexus. The pattern continued in 2012 with the Ace Plus, the Beam, the Pocket, and then in the summer Samsung's greatest success so far.

The Galaxy S3 boasted a 1.4GHz quad-core processor (1.5 GHz dual-core in some markets), 1GB or 2GB of RAM, a 4.8-inch display with a 720p resolution, and an 8-megapixel camera. It proved to be the fastest-selling Android smartphone to date and Samsung has sold over 40 million S3 handsets in 145 countries so far, meaning it's selling at roughly double the rate of its predecessor.

For the rest of 2012 Samsung continued to pump out a huge number of Galaxy devices from the Stellar, to the Reverb, to the Rugby Pro. Samsung even released a camera under the Galaxy brand. This year has started in much the same way as the hype grows deafening in the buildup to the release of Samsung's next flagship, the Galaxy S4, which is expected to outsell its predecessors.

Relationship with Google

The Nexus S was released in December 2010 and, as a co-development with Google, it seemed to indicate Samsung's coming of age in the Android market. It was the first Android device with NFC (near-field communication) and it got a fairly good reception. The partnership obviously went well enough that the two companies collaborated again to release the Galaxy Nexus just under a year later. It boasted a high definition 720p display and launched version 4.0 of the Android platform, codenamed Ice Cream Sandwich. This time the reviews were universally positive, but because of the direct Web sales strategy from Google and the lack of sales statistics from carriers like Verizon and Sprint, we don't know how many people actually bought one.

It looks like that will be the last collaboration between the two companies for the foreseeable future as Motorola is widely expected to produce the next Google Android smartphone. Rumblings in the tech press suggest that Google is concerned about Samsung's dominance in the Android field.

Tablets and hybrids

Samsung hasn't confined the Galaxy brand to smartphones; it has also released the Galaxy Tab range of Android tablets and the Galaxy Note smartphone/tablet hybrids. The first Galaxy Note was a surprise success and sold over 10 million units since its release at the end of 2011. It combined powerful specs with a 5.3-inch display and a special stylus with unique functionality and related software, known as the S-Pen. Its successor, the Galaxy Note 2, upped the display to 5.55 inches and is arguably Samsung's current flagship packing a 1.6GHz quad-core processor, 720p resolution display, 2GB of RAM, and storage capacity up to 128GB (if you use a microSD). It was released at the end of September 2012 and sold 5 million units in the first two months.

When it comes to tablets, Samsung's success has apparently been more modest. The range includes releases at various sizes from the 7-inch display of the Galaxy Tab 7.0 through 7.7 and 8.9 to 10.1. The Galaxy Note 10.1 is its biggest and best tablet so far and it combines the S-Pen from the smaller Note models with a large form factor traditional tablet. None of these tablets have come to rival the iPad, or even Amazon's Kindle Fire, which remains the most popular Android tablet.

Can Samsung do it again?

With reports that Samsung is planning to sell 10 million Galaxy S4 handsets a month and Galaxy S4 rumors in overdrive, we expect fireworks on March 14 (today). The trick Samsung has pulled off so successfully so far is to flood every area of the market with Galaxy devices and yet keep its flagship S series distinct. This is partly due to the design and the quality, but clever marketing has also played a huge part. Can Samsung continue to dominate so thoroughly, or has it finally grown fat and lazy on too much success?

Whatever happens later today, it will be the start of a new chapter in the history of the Galaxy brand. If history is any indication, the Galaxy S4 is going to be one wildly successful phone.

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A history of Samsung's Galaxy phones and tablets, from the S1 to the S4

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As Android has grown, Samsung has come to completely dominate it. The South Korean manufacturer sold more mobile phones than any other company in 2012, accounting for 22 percent of the market, according to Gartner.

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First iPhone

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The history of the iPhone development by Apple Inc. spans from the early 2000s to about 2010. The first iPhone was released in 2007. By the end of 2009, iPhone models had been released in all major markets.

Initially started from a conflict between Steve Jobs and his brother-in-law working at Microsoft, then convinced by a French high-level engineer, Jean Marie Hullot, working for Apple France to do so. The project within Apple Inc. for developing the iPhone began with a request in 2004 from CEO Steve Jobs to the company's hardware engineer Tony Fadell, software engineer Scott Forstall and design engineer Sir Jonathan Ive to work on the highly confidential "Project Purple."

While pitting two teams of engineers led by Fadell and Forstall, Jobs decided to investigate the use of touchscreen devices and tablet computers (which later came to fruition with the iPad). Jobs ended up pushing for a touch-screen device that many have noted has similarities to Apple's previous touch-screen portable device, the Newton MessagePad. Like the MessagePad, the iPhone is nearly all screen. Its form factor is credited to Apple's Chief Design Officer, Jonathan Ive.

Jobs expressed his belief that tablet PCs and traditional PDAs were not good choices as high-demand markets for Apple to enter, despite receiving many requests for Apple to create another PDA. In 2002, after the iPod launched, Jobs realized that the overlap of mobile phones and music players would force Apple to get into the mobile phone business. After seeing millions of Americans carrying separate BlackBerrys, phones, and Apple's iPod MP3 players; he felt eventually consumers would prefer just one device.

Jobs also saw that as cell phones and mobile devices would keep amassing more features, they will be challenging the iPod's dominance as a music player. To protect the iPod new product line, which by the start of 2007 was responsible for 48% of all of Apple's revenue, Jobs decided he would need to venture into the wireless world. So at that time, instead of focusing on a follow-up to their Newton PDA, Jobs had Apple focus on the iPod. Jobs also had Apple develop the iTunes software, which can be used to synchronize content with iPod devices. iTunes had been released in January 2001.

Several enabling technologies made the iPhone possible. These included lithium-ion batteries that were small and powerful enough to power a mobile computer for a reasonable amount of time; multi-touch screens; energy-efficient but powerful CPUs, such as those using the ARM architecture; mobile phone networks; and web browsers. Apple approached glass manufacturer Corning in 2005 to investigate the possibility of a thin, flexible, and transparent material that could avoid the problem of metal keys scratching up phone screens. Corning reactivated some old research material that had not yet found an application to produce Gorilla Glass.

The iPhone beta was created in 2004 to test the device and its functions. The beta version enabled Apple to develop the phone's capabilities before launching a final product. While it may technically have been the first iPhone that was created, it was never released to the public, so it has not been considered the first iPhone.

In an effort to bypass the carriers, Jobs approached Motorola. On September 7, 2005, Apple and Motorola collaborated to develop the Motorola ROKR E1, the first mobile phone to use iTunes. Steve Jobs was unhappy with the ROKR, among other deficiencies, the ROKR E1's firmware limited storage to only 100 iTunes songs to avoid competing with Apple's iPod nano. iTunes Music Store purchases could also not be downloaded wirelessly directly into the ROKR E1 and had to be done through a PC sync. Apple therefore decided to develop its own phone, which would incorporate the iPod's musical functions into a smartphone.

Feeling that having to compromise with a non-Apple designer (Motorola) prevented Apple from designing the phone they wanted to make, Apple discontinued support for the ROKR in September 2006, and, after creating a deal with AT&T (at the time still called Cingular), released a version of iTunes that included references to an as-yet unknown mobile phone that could display pictures and video. This turned out to be the first iPhone (iPhone 2G).

On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone was released. The iPod Touch, which came with an iPhone-style touchscreen to the iPod range, was also released later in 2007. The iPad followed in 2010.

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone at the Macworld convention, receiving substantial media attention. Jobs announced that the first iPhone would be released later that year. On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone was released.

On June 11, 2007, Apple announced at the Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference that the iPhone would support third party applications using the Safari engine. Third parties would be able to create Web 2.0 applications, which users could access via the Internet. Such applications appeared even before the release of the iPhone; the first of these, called OneTrip, was a program meant to keep track of users' shopping lists.

After some trial and error, the first iPhone was officially launched and made accessible to the public in 2007, and was advertised noticeably at the Macworld of that same year. In this first release, the iPhone was accessible in the US, UK, , Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Spain, Italy and South Africa. On August 21, 2007, Apple released version 7.3 of iTunes to coincide with the release of iPhone. This release contained support for iPhone service activation and syncing.

The first generation iPhone was manufactured in the Shenzhen factory of the Taiwanese company Hon Hai (also known as Foxconn).

The first-generation iPhone is commonly retroactively referred to as the "iPhone 2G" due to only supporting 2G mobile data. This name was, however, never used by Apple.

Connection to AT&T

When Apple announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007, it was sold only with AT&T (formerly Cingular) contracts in the United States. After 18 months of negotiations, Steve Jobs reached an agreement with the wireless division of AT&T to be the iPhone's exclusive carrier. Consumers were unable to use any other carrier without unlocking their device.

Apple retained control of the design, manufacturing and marketing of the iPhone. Since some customers were jailbreaking their iPhones to leave their network, AT&T began charging them a $175 early-termination fee for leaving before the end of their contract.

Questions arose about the legality of Apple's arrangement after the iPhone was released. Two class-action lawsuits were filed against the company in October 2007: one in Federal court and the other in state court. According to the suits, Apple's exclusive agreement with AT&T violated antitrust law.

The state-court suit, filed by the law office of Damian R. Fernandez on behalf of California resident Timothy P. Smith, sought an injunction barring Apple from selling iPhones with a software lock and $200 million in damages. In Smith v. Apple Inc., the plaintiffs said that Apple failed to disclose to purchasers its five-year agreement with AT&T when they bought iPhones with a two-year contract and cited the Sherman Act's prohibition of monopolies.

The second case was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiff, Paul Holman, filed a complaint against Apple and AT&T Mobility that he could not switch carriers or change SIM cards without losing iPhone improvements to which he was entitled. Holman also cited a Sherman Act violation by the defendants. On July 8, 2010, the case was affirmed for class certification. On December 9 the court ordered a stay on the case, awaiting the Supreme Court's decision in AT&T v. Concepcion (disputed whether the state's basic standards of fairness were met by a clause in AT&T's contract limiting complaint resolution to arbitration). On April 27, 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that AT&T met the state's fairness standards.

In 2017, Apple was sued after they admitted to slowing down older phone models. The plaintiffs, Stefan Bogdanovich and Dakota Speas, filed the lawsuit when their iPhone 6s was slower after an update. The plaintiffs were entitled to compensation due to the interferences and the economic damages they suffered.

The first advertisement for iPhone, titled "Hello", aired during the 79th Academy Awards on February 25, 2007, on American Broadcasting Company (ABC). On June 4, 2007, Apple released four advertisements announcing that iPhone would be released on June 29, 2007.

On July 1, 2007, it was reported that Apple paid at least US$1 million to Michael Kovatch for the iphone.com domain name, previously owned by Kovatch since 1995. The URL now redirects to Apple's iPhone page.

On June 28, 2007, during an address to Apple employees, Steve Jobs announced that all full-time Apple employees and those part-time employees who had been with the company for at least one year would receive a free iPhone. Employees received their phones in July after the initial demand for iPhones subsided.

Initially priced at $499 (equivalent to $652 in 2021) and $599 (equivalent to $783 in 2021) for the 4GB models and 8GB models respectively, the iPhone went on sale on June 29, 2007. Apple closed its stores at 2:00pm local time to prepare for the 6:00pm iPhone launch, while hundreds of customers lined up at stores nationwide.

In the US and some other countries, iPhones could be acquired only with a credit card, preventing completely anonymous purchases of iPhones. At the time, there was no way to opt out of the bundled AT&T data plan. At first, iPhones could not be added to an AT&T Business account, and any existing business account discounts could not be applied to an iPhone AT&T account. AT&T changed these restrictions in late January 2008.

The Associated Press also reported in 2007 that some users were unable to activate their phones because, according to AT&T, "[a] high volume of activation requests [was] taxing the company's computer servers." On October 29, 2007, the Usenet newsgroup misc.phone.mobile.iphone was created.

Early estimates by technology analysts estimated sales of between 250,000 and 700,000 iPhones in the first weekend alone, with strong sales continuing after the initial weekend. As part of their quarterly earnings announcement, AT&T reported that 146,000 iPhones were activated in the first weekend. Though this figure does not include units that were purchased for resale on eBay or otherwise not activated until after the opening weekend, it is still less than most initial estimates. It is also estimated that 95% of the units sold were the 8GB model.

Stories of unexpected billing issues began to circulate in blogs and the technical press a little more than a month after iPhone's heavily advertised and anticipated release. The 300-page iPhone bill in a box received by iJustine on Saturday, August 11, 2007 became the subject of a viral video, posted by the following Monday, which quickly became an Internet meme. This video clip brought the voluminous bills to the attention of the mass media. Ten days later, after the video had been viewed more than 3 million times on the Internet, and had received international news coverage, AT&T sent iPhone users a text message outlining changes in its billing practices.

On September 5, 2007, the 4GB model was discontinued, and the 8GB model price was cut by a third, from US$599 to US$399. Those who had purchased an iPhone in the 14-day period before the September 5, 2007 announcement were eligible for a US$200 "price protection" rebate from Apple or AT&T. However, it was widely reported that some who bought between the June 29, 2007 launch and the August 22, 2007 price protection kick-in date complained that this was a larger-than-normal price drop for such a relatively short period and accused Apple of unfair pricing.

In response to customer complaints, on September 6, 2007, Apple CEO Steve Jobs wrote in an open letter to iPhone customers that everyone who purchased an iPhone at the higher price "and who is not receiving a rebate or other consideration", would receive a US$100 credit to be redeemed towards the purchase of any product sold in Apple's retail or online stores.

With the July 11, 2008 release of the iPhone 3G, Apple and AT&T changed the US pricing model from the previous generation. Following the de facto model for mobile phone service in the United States, AT&T would subsidize a sizable portion of the upfront cost for the iPhone 3G, followed by charging moderately higher monthly fees over a minimum two-year contract.

On January 11, 2011, Verizon announced during a media event that it had reached an agreement with Apple and would begin selling a CDMA iPhone 4. The Verizon iPhone went on sale on February 10, 2011. The CDMA version was a bespoke model, lacking a SIM slot and with a revised metal chassis, the design of which would be reused on the iPhone 4S.

During Apple's official unveiling of iPhone 4S on October 4, 2011, it was announced that Sprint would begin carrying the reconfigured CDMA iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S in the US on October 14. Cricket Wireless announced on May 31, 2012 that it would become the first prepaid carrier in the US to offer iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S, beginning June 22, 2012. A week later, Virgin Mobile USA became the second American prepaid carrier to offer iPhone 4 and 4S, announcing plans to release the phones on June 29, 2012. T-Mobile USA's inability to provide iPhone to customers raised its subscription churn rate, decreased the percentage of lucrative postpaid customers, and contributed to parent Deutsche Telekom's decision to sell it to AT&T in March 2011, although AT&T canceled the deal in December 2011 because of antitrust concerns. T-Mobile began offering iPhone on April 12, 2013.

On November 9, 2007, the iPhone was officially launched in Europe. In the UK, sales went through the UK O2 unit of Telefónica, while in Germany, it is offered through Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile division. As in the case of the previous launch in the US, customers lined up as much as a day in advance to obtain the much-anticipated phone.

Apple occasionally produced a limited number of 4GB iPhones for German and UK markets, but they never reached end customers and were used as in-store demo units. Later most of the units were disposed of.

The initial operating model of locking iPhone owners to one selected carrier has been controversial in Europe. In Germany, Vodafone, an operator competing with the operator that Apple had locked German iPhone sales to (Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile division), brought a legal case claiming that the arrangement was against German law. On November 20, 2007, an interim court order resulted in sales of locked iPhones in Germany being temporarily stopped. The iPhone launch in France a few weeks later through the operator Orange faced the same legal issues. Other countries that will pose the same problems for the business model revolving around the sale of locked iPhones include Belgium, Italy, Finland, and Brazil.

On December 1, 2007, Tušmobil, the Slovenian mobile operator, started selling "unlocked" iPhones without an official contract with Apple. The offer caused confusion between Apple Europe, local media, and local Apple representatives.

On May 6, 2008, Telecom Italia announced that it had signed a deal with Apple to sell iPhones in Italy by the end of 2008. It was estimated that it would probably be the second generation iPhone with 3G- UMTS capability.

SingTel (in Singapore) and Globe Telecom (in the Philippines) were the first two carriers to launch the iPhone in Southeast Asia. Both carriers launched the iPhone 3G in August 2008.

On March 20, 2009, became the first telecommunications company in Indonesia to offer the Telkomsel iPhone 3G with customizable plans for all Telkomsel customers. In the same month, Maxis was only the first carrier officially launched the iPhone 3G in Malaysia.

In October 2011, Smart Communications was the last telecommunications company to carry StarHub launched the iPhone in Singapore. Smart Communications followed suit in December 2011 by launching the iPhone 4S in the Philippines. Apple's iPhone in Southeast Asia.

The very first iPhone 3G model released on July 11, 2008 was sold in The iPhone 3G was available only to customers on the Auckland, New Zealand to 22-year-old student Jonny Gladwell at 12:01 am NZST. Vodafone network. There was criticism from some New Zealand customers when Vodafone announced pricing for the iPhone 3G, as Vodafone was the only network to offer this generation of iPhone.

Subsequent launches of iPhone models in New Zealand have typically been a few weeks after the worldwide release.

After months of high anticipation, the first iPhone to be released in Canada was the iPhone 3G. Rogers Wireless began offering 8 GB and 16 GB models on July 11, 2008. Facing a public backlash, Rogers dropped the price of its service plan from CA$ 100 to CA$30 per month.

The iPhone 3GS, with the new iPhone OS 3 operating system, was released in Canada by Rogers Wireless on June 19, 2009. Users who signed up for a 3-year agreement with a data option could choose between a 16 GB device for CA$199 and a 32 GB device for CA$299.

Bell and Telus Mobility announced that they would release iPhone on November 4 and 5, 2009, respectively.

On May 6, 2008, Vodafone announced that they had signed a deal with Apple to sell iPhone in Australia, the Czech Republic, Egypt, Greece, Italy, India, Portugal, New Zealand, South Africa, and Turkey.

Subsequent announcements confirmed that Apple was moving away from exclusive one-carrier deals. Soon after Vodafone's announcement, TIM announced that it would also be selling iPhone in Italy, on May 12, 2008, Optus confirmed that it would sell iPhone in Australia and SingTel confirmed that it would be selling iPhone in India through its Indian Joint Venture, Airtel.

Russia's second largest mobile operator, Beeline, announced on August 28, 2008 that they signed a contract with Apple to sell iPhone on the Russian market by late 2008. The deal was rumoured to be non-exclusive, according to unofficial statements made by MTS and MegaFon. MTS and MegaFon belong to the "Russian Big Three", and were expected to release the iPhone 3G at the same time as Beeline. As predicted, MegaFon issued a press release regarding the iPhone 3G release on September 2, 2008.

On November 14, 2008, Vodafone Egypt and Mobinil started selling the iPhone 3G in Egypt. iPhone 3G is priced at and LE 4,600 for the 8 GB and 16 GB models respectively. Customers must also sign up for one of 3 service plans to use the phone.

On September 28, 2009, Orange announced that they were going to become the second operator of the iPhone in the UK, indicating that an exclusive deal that O2 had established with Apple in 2007 had ended. Orange later announced that the iPhone would be released on November 10, with pricing plans starting from £29.36 stg on contract and £440 for the 3GS 16GB on pay as you go. On the following day, Vodafone UK announced that they would be selling the iPhone by early 2010, becoming the third UK network and Vodafone's 11th country to offer the iPhone.

There had been ongoing speculation in the United States that Apple might offer a CDMA-compatible iPhone for Verizon Wireless. This speculation increased on October 6, 2010, when The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple would begin producing a CDMA-compatible iPhone, with such a model going on sale in early 2011.

On January 8, 2011, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that Verizon Wireless would, on January 11, 2011, officially announce the launch of a CDMA-based iPhone for use on their network. The date in which the Verizon iPhone would go on sale was unknown, though the two most recent iPhone releases were made available within weeks of their launch announcement. Verizon confirmed the announcement on January 11, with an on-sale date of February 10.

On January 11, 2011, Verizon announced that they would start carrying a CDMA version of Apple's iPhone 4 during February 2011. Existing Verizon Wireless customers could pre-order iPhone on February 3. Pricing for the iPhone 4 was $199 for 16GB and $299 for 32GB. The Verizon iPhone 5 released on Friday, September 19, in the United States; it was the first GSM unlocked iPhone, which worked on AT&T and other GSM networks.

The international release of iPhone was staggered over several months. Today, the iPhone is available in most countries.

Date

Country

Carrier(s) (released date)

June 2007

United States (1)

AT&T ( 2007), Verizon ( February 2011), Sprint ( October 2011), C Spire Wireless ( Late 2011), Cricket ( June 2012), Virgin Mobile ( June 2012), T-Mobile ( April 2013), Boost Mobile ( November 2013), U.S. Cellular ( November 2013)

November
2007

O₂, 3, T-Mobile, Orange, Vodafone, EE, Tesco Mobile§, Virgin Mobile ( November 2013)

March
2008

T-Mobile, O₂, Orange

July
2008

Australia† Austria† Belgium‡ Canada† Denmark Finland Hong Kong†‡ Italy†‡ Mexico Netherlands New Zealand Norway†‡ Portugal† Spain Sweden Switzerland† (23)

3, movistar, Optus, Orange Rogers Communications (Fido Solutions,[120] Rogers Wireless), (Mobistar, One, Optimus), América Móvil (Telcel), TeliaSonera (NetCom), SoftBank, Swisscom, TIM, Telstra, T-Mobile, Vodafone

August
2008

Argentina† Chile† Colombia† Czech Republic†‡ Ecuador† El Salvador† Estonia Greece†‡ Guatemala† Honduras Hungary India† Liechtenstein† Macau Paraguay Peru† Philippines Poland† Romania Singapore Slovakia† Uruguay† (45)

3, América Móvil (Claro, Comcel, Porta), Era, movistar, O₂, SingTel, Bharti Airtel, Aircel, Orange, Globe, TeliaSonera (EMT), Smart - December 2011, SingTel, Swisscom, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Telenor

September
2008

Brazil†‡ Latvia Lithuania South Africa Turkey† (50)

TIM, TeliaSonera (LMT, Omnitel), América Móvil Vodafone (Vodacom), (Claro), Turkcell, Vivo, MTN Group, Oi

October
2008

November
2008

Later
2008

Botswana Cameroon Central African Republic Dominican Republic† Guinea Ivory Coast Jamaica Jordan Kenya Madagascar Mali Malta Mauritius Republic of Moldova Nicaragua† Niger Panama Réunion Qatar Senegal United States Virgin Islands Venezuela (79) Taiwan†

América Móvil (Claro, MiPhone), Chunghwa Telecom, movistar, Orange, Vodafone

January
2009

Thailand (80)

True Move

February
2009

March
2009

Bulgaria Indonesia† Malaysia (86)

GLOBUL, T-Mobile, Telkomsel, Maxis

October
2009

China Unicom

November
2009

KT

December
2009

Qatar Uganda Israel (92) Singapore

GTA Teleguam, Vodafone, Orange, Pelephone, Cellcom, StarHub, M1

March
2010

Viettel Mobile, MobiFone, VinaPhone, Orange

September
2010

(95)

Orange

June
2011

Trinidad & Tobago[128] (97)

December
2013

Sri Lanka[129]

Dialog Axiata

May
2014

Kosovo[130] (98)

IPKO

October
2014

† iPhone offered by multiple carriers under contract from Apple (country not carrier-exclusive)

‡ iPhone offered without contract and without carrier lock

Brian Merchant (2018). The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone. Back Bay Books. ISBN 978-0316546249.

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The history of the iPhone development by Apple Inc. spans from the early 2000s to about 2010. The first iPhone was released in 2007. By the end of 2009, iPhone models had been released in all major markets.

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hulu created

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nintendo makes the wii

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Google maps was made

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Camera phone was invented

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I was born

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Steve jobs and Wozniak invent the first apple computer

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"One of the greatest inventors of the last century" On October 5, 2011 Steve Jobs died, and with this epitaph the worldwide media said goodbye. Three years after his death, we look back on the inventor side of his legacy, as contentious and controversial as the rest of his personality.

His name appears as the author of 346 patents in the US registry, but his actual role in all these innovations has been challenged, as he really had no skills as a designer or engineer. In fact, his official biographer, Walter Isaacson, describes him as a tweaker: someone who, rather than invent, was devoted to tweaking and refining already-invented devices and technologies in order to simplify their use.

Macintosh: A great leap in the career of Steve Jobs was the introduction of the original Macintosh (1984), the first consumer computer with a graphical user interface. In other words, it had an operating system with windows and icons, and a mouse to move between them. This idea did not originate with Steve Jobs. It's well known how he was inspired during a visit to the Xerox research centre, where all these ideas had already been developed. But Jobs managed to pack them all into a revolutionary computer, adding a few touches of his own.

Typography on screen: One of the major innovations of the original Macintosh was that it showed on the screen the font chosen for the text. Until then, what was drawn on computer screens was just like on a typewriter. It was on the insistence of Steve Jobs that the first Mac had the ability to display different fonts. As he explained in his famous speech at Stanford University, this effort was due to a fleeting period in college when he was bored and decided to take a course in calligraphy.

Mouse: Steve Jobs was not the inventor of the mouse, but during his career at the head of Apple, one of his obsessions was to perfect this device for communicating with computers, though the results were rather disparate. He first got it right with the simple one-button mouse for the original Macintosh, much simpler than the mice that he had discovered on his visit to Xerox PARC. Next, on the launch of the iMac, he insisted on the idea of ​​a single-button mouse, but with a circular design that made it much more uncomfortable and confusing to users. Finally, with his immodest "Mighty Mouse" and "Magic Mouse," he corrected the mistake and took his idea even further: Apple mice no longer have any buttons.

iMac (1998) + iPod (2001) + iPad (2010): These three devices fall into the same category. With them, the Californian "tweaker" proposed reinventing three devices that seemed to him to be stagnant and/or useless: the personal computer, the MP3 player and the tablet PC. In all three cases his strategy was the same. He led teams of talented designers and software engineers and had them invent more and more prototypes. Then he eliminated the vast majority until he was left with one that did not upset him and, from that prototype, he had ​​them start over, once again refining, looking for simplicity and beauty.

iPhone: This same "Jobs method" was the key to developing the iPhone, perhaps the technological work that definitively exalted the president of Apple in 2007. Rather than reinventing the smartphone, the iPhone integrated functions of other mobile devices such as MP3 players, GPS navigators or even cameras, almost sweeping the market. The key to integrating all these capabilities into a single terminal was reinventing the operating system, again putting together pieces that already existed: icons, touchscreens and gesture control (like using two fingers to enlarge or reduce a picture on the iPhone, or swiping the screen to unlock the phone).

After the announcement of the iPhone in January 2007, the competitors of Apple began working on this same product line, and from there arose the disagreements of Jobs with executives from Google and Samsung. The great "tweaker" disliked that others were inspired by his creations. Thus he started a patent war in which he won a great battle posthumously: in October 2013, Apple won a patent that gathers together, in 364 pages, many details of the original iPhone. Apple had just passed two years from the death of its technological father, and that macro-patent became known as the "Steve Jobs Patent".
Ventana al Conocimiento (Knowledge Window)

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The 5 "inventions" of Steve Jobs - OpenMind

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"One of the greatest inventors of the last century" On October 5, 2011 Steve Jobs died, and with this epitaph the worldwide media said goodbye. Three years after his death, we look back on the inventor side of his legacy, as contentious and controversial as the rest of his personality.

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Bill Gates founded microsoft

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This article is about the co-founder of Microsoft. For other people with the same name, see Bill Gates (disambiguation).

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First video game

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October 1958: Physicist Invents First Video Game

In October 1958, Physicist William Higinbotham created what is thought to be the first video game. It was a very simple tennis game, similar to the classic 1970s video game Pong, and it was quite a hit at a Brookhaven National Laboratory open house.

Higinbotham was born on October 25, 1910 in Bridgeport, CT and grew up in Caledonia, NY.

He graduated from Williams College in 1932, and then went to graduate school in physics at Cornell University. At Cornell as a graduate student he worked as an electronics technician. In 1941, he joined the MIT Radiation Lab, where he worked on cathode ray tube displays for radar systems. In 1943 he moved to Los Alamos to work on electronics for a timing system for the atomic bomb.

In 1948 he joined Brookhaven National Laboratory's instrumentation group. He served as head of that group from 1951 to 1968.

During that time, in October Brookhaven held annual visitors' days, during which thousands of people would come tour the lab. Higinbotham was responsible for creating an exhibit to show off the instrumentation division's work.

Most of the existing exhibits were rather dull. Higinbotham thought he could better capture visitors' interest by creating an interactive demonstration. He later recalled in a magazine interview that he had thought "it might liven up the place to have a game that people could play, and which would convey the message that our scientific endeavors have relevance for society."

The instrumentation group had a small analog computer that could display various curves, including the path of a bouncing ball, on an oscilloscope. It took Higinbotham only a couple of hours to conceive the idea of a tennis game, and only a few days to put together the basic pieces. Having worked on displays for radar systems and many other electronic devices, Higinbotham had no trouble designing the simple game display.

Higinbotham made some drawings, and blueprints were drawn up. Technician Robert Dvorak spent about two weeks building the device. After a little debugging, the first video game was ready for its debut. They called the game Tennis for Two.

Players could turn a knob to adjust the angle of the ball, and push a button to hit the ball towards the other player. As long as they pressed the button when the ball was in their court, players couldn't actually miss the ball, but if they hit it at the wrong time or hit it at the wrong angle, the ball wouldn't make it over the net. Balls that hit the ground would bounce like a real tennis ball. When the ball went off the court or into the net, players hit a reset button to start the next round.

Tennis for Two had none of the fancy graphics video games use today. The cathode ray tube display simply showed a side view of a tennis court represented by just two lines, one representing the ground and a one representing the net. The ball was just a dot that bounced back and forth. Players also had to keep score for themselves.

The game circuitry was fairly simple, using mostly resistors, capacitors and relays, though it did use transistors for the fast switching needed when the ball was in play.

Visitors loved it. It quickly became the most popular exhibit, with people standing in long lines to get a chance to play.

The first version, used in the 1958 visitor's day, had an oscilloscope with a tiny display, only five inches in diameter. The next year, Higinbotham improved it with a larger display screen. He also added another feature: the game could now simulate stronger or weaker gravity, so visitors could play tennis on the moon, Earth or Jupiter.

After two years, Tennis for Two was retired. The oscilloscope and computer were taken for other uses, and Higinbotham designed a new visitor's day display that showed cosmic rays passing through a spark chamber.

Higinbotham, who had already patented 20 inventions, didn't think his tennis game was particularly innovative. Although he saw that the Brookhaven visitors liked the game, he had no idea how popular video games would later become. Even had he had the foresight to patent the game, since he worked at a government lab, the federal government would have owned the patent, so he wouldn't have made any money from it. "It never occurred to me that I was doing anything very exciting. The long line of people I though was not because this was so great but because all the rest of the things were so dull," he once said.

Tennis for Two was more or less forgotten for some time. In 1964 Sanders Associates received the first patent for a video game. Magnavox bought the patent and produced video game systems beginning in the early 1970s. Competitors wanting to break the Magnavox patent found out about Higinbotham's earlier video game and he was called to testify, but the case was settled out of court. Higinbotham only became well known as the inventor of the video game after an article appeared in Creative Computing magazine in 1982.

Higinbotham's main interest throughout most of his career was not video games, but nuclear arms control. He helped found the Federation of American Scientists and served as its first chairman and executive secretary. Higinbotham died in November 1994, more famous for his video game than his work on nonproliferation.

Further reading: http://www.bnl.gov/bnlweb/history/higinbotham.asp

Flatow, Ira. They All Laughed... from light bulbs to lasers: the fascinating stories behind the great inventions that have changed our lives. HarperCollins, 1993.

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October 1958: Physicist Invents First Video Game

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In October 1958, Physicist William Higinbotham created what is thought to be the first video game. It was a very simple tennis game, similar to the classic 1970s video game Pong, and it was quite a hit at a Brookhaven National Laboratory open house.

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univac invented

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Figure 1: The LLNL Univac Console ./images/Univac.1.big.jpg and ./images/UNIVAC4.jpg This is an excellent picture of the UNIVAC 1 console. It is easy to see that the operator has to be somewhat of a virtuoso switch toggler. The UNITYPER provided the remarks that the machine wanted to say to the operator.

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colossus invented during WW11

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Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943-1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program.

Colossus was designed by General Post Office (GPO) research telephone engineer Tommy Flowers to solve a problem posed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing's use of probability in cryptanalysis (see Banburismus) contributed to its design. It has sometimes been erroneously stated that Turing designed Colossus to aid the cryptanalysis of the Enigma. Turing's machine that helped decode Enigma was the electromechanical Bombe, not Colossus.

The prototype, Colossus Mark 1, was shown to be working in December 1943 and was in use at Bletchley Park by early 1944. An improved Colossus Mark 2 that used shift registers to quintuple the processing speed, first worked on 1 June 1944, just in time for the Normandy landings on D-Day. Ten Colossi were in use by the end of the war and an eleventh was being commissioned. Bletchley Park's use of these machines allowed the Allies to obtain a vast amount of high-level military intelligence from intercepted radiotelegraphy messages between the German High Command ( OKW) and their army commands throughout occupied Europe.

The existence of the Colossus machines was kept secret until the mid-1970s; the machines and the plans for building them had previously been destroyed in the 1960s, as part of the effort to maintain the secrecy of the project. This deprived most of those involved with Colossus of the credit for pioneering electronic digital computing during their lifetimes. A functioning rebuild of a Mark 2 Colossus was completed in 2008 by Tony Sale and some volunteers; it is on display at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park.

The Colossus computers were used to help decipher intercepted radio teleprinter messages that had been encrypted using an unknown device. Intelligence information revealed that the Germans called the wireless teleprinter transmission systems "Sägefisch" (sawfish). This led the British to call encrypted German teleprinter traffic " Fish", and the unknown machine and its intercepted messages " Tunny" (tunafish).

Before the Germans increased the security of their operating procedures, British cryptanalysts diagnosed how the unseen machine functioned and built an imitation of it called " British Tunny".

It was deduced that the machine had twelve wheels and used a Vernam ciphering technique on message characters in the standard 5-bit ITA2 telegraph code. It did this by combining the plaintext characters with a stream of key characters using the XOR Boolean function to produce the ciphertext.

In August 1941, a blunder by German operators led to the transmission of two versions of the same message with identical machine settings. These were intercepted and worked on at Bletchley Park. First, John Tiltman, a very talented GC&CS cryptanalyst, derived a key stream of almost 4000 characters. Then Bill Tutte, a newly arrived member of the Research Section, used this keystream to work out the logical structure of the Lorenz machine. He deduced that the twelve wheels consisted of two groups of five, which he named the χ () and ψ () wheels, the remaining two he called μ () or "motor" wheels. The chi wheels stepped regularly with each letter that was encrypted, while the psi wheels stepped irregularly, under the control of the motor wheels.

With a sufficiently random keystream, a Vernam cipher removes the natural language property of a plaintext message of having an uneven frequency distribution of the different characters, to produce a uniform distribution in the ciphertext. The Tunny machine did this well. However, the cryptanalysts worked out that by examining the frequency distribution of the character-to-character changes in the ciphertext, instead of the plain characters, there was a departure from uniformity which provided a way into the system. This was achieved by "differencing" in which each bit or character was XOR-ed with its successor. After Germany surrendered, allied forces captured a Tunny machine and discovered that it was the electromechanical Lorenz SZ ( Schlüsselzusatzgerät, cipher attachment) in-line cipher machine.

In order to decrypt the transmitted messages, two tasks had to be performed. The first was "wheel breaking", which was the discovery of the cam patterns for all the wheels. These patterns were set up on the Lorenz machine and then used for a fixed period of time for a succession of different messages. Each transmission, which often contained more than one message, was enciphered with a different start position of the wheels. Alan Turing invented a method of wheel-breaking that became known as Turingery. Turing's technique was further developed into "Rectangling", for which Colossus could produce tables for manual analysis. Colossi 2, 4, 6, 7 and 9 had a "gadget" to aid this process.

The second task was "wheel setting", which worked out the start positions of the wheels for a particular message, and could only be attempted once the cam patterns were known. It was this task for which Colossus was initially designed. To discover the start position of the chi wheels for a message, Colossus compared two character streams, counting statistics from the evaluation of programmable Boolean functions. The two streams were the ciphertext, which was read at high speed from a paper tape, and the key stream, which was generated internally, in a simulation of the unknown German machine. After a succession of different Colossus runs to discover the likely chi-wheel settings, they were checked by examining the frequency distribution of the characters in processed ciphertext. Colossus produced these frequency counts.

plaintext

key - the sequence of characters used in binary XOR with
the plaintext to give the ciphertext

extended psi - the actual sequence of characters added by
the psi wheels, including those when they do not advance

ciphertext

de- chi-the ciphertext with the chi component of the key removed[22]

any of the above XOR'ed with its successor character or bit[17]

the XOR operation[c]

By using differencing and knowing that the psi wheels did not advance with each character, Tutte worked out that trying just two differenced bits (impulses) of the chi-stream against the differenced ciphertext would produce a statistic that was non-random. This became known as Tutte's "1+2 break in". It involved calculating the following Boolean function:

and counting the number of times it yielded "false" (zero). If this number exceeded a pre-defined threshold value known as the "set total", it was printed out. The cryptanalyst would examine the printout to determine which of the putative start positions was most likely to be the correct one for the chi-1 and chi-2 wheels.

This technique would then be applied to other pairs of, or single, impulses to determine the likely start position of all five chi wheels. From this, the de- chi (D) of a ciphertext could be obtained, from which the psi component could be removed by manual methods. If the frequency distribution of characters in the de- chi version of the ciphertext was within certain bounds, "wheel setting" of the chi wheels was considered to have been achieved, and the message settings and de- chi were passed to the " Testery". This was the section at Bletchley Park led by Major Ralph Tester where the bulk of the decrypting work was done by manual and linguistic methods.

Colossus could also derive the start position of the psi and motor wheels, but this was not much done until the last few months of the war, when there were plenty of Colossi available and the number of Tunny messages had declined.

Colossus was developed for the " Newmanry", the section headed by the mathematician Max Newman that was responsible for machine methods against the twelve-rotor Lorenz SZ40/42 on-line teleprinter cipher machine (code named Tunny, for tunafish). The Colossus design arose out of a prior project that produced a counting machine dubbed " Heath Robinson". Although it proved the concept of machine analysis for this part of the process, it was initially unreliable. The electro-mechanical parts were relatively slow and it was difficult to synchronise two looped paper tapes, one containing the enciphered message, and the other representing part of the key stream of the Lorenz machine, also the tapes tended to stretch when being read at up to 2000 characters per second.

Tommy Flowers MBE was a senior electrical engineer and Head of the Switching Group at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill. Prior to his work on Colossus, he had been involved with GC&CS at Bletchley Park from February 1941 in an attempt to improve the Bombes that were used in the cryptanalysis of the German Enigma cipher machine. He was recommended to Max Newman by Alan Turing, who had been impressed by his work on the Bombes. The main components of the Heath Robinson machine were as follows.

Flowers had been brought in to design the Heath Robinson's combining unit. He was not impressed by the system of a key tape that had to be kept synchronised with the message tape and, on his own initiative, he designed an electronic machine which eliminated the need for the key tape by having an electronic analogue of the Lorenz (Tunny) machine. He presented this design to Max Newman in February 1943, but the idea that the one to two thousand thermionic valves ( vacuum tubes and thyratrons) proposed, could work together reliably, was greeted with great scepticism, so more Robinsons were ordered from Dollis Hill. Flowers, however, knew from his pre-war work that most thermionic valve failures occurred as a result of the thermal stresses at power up, so not powering a machine down reduced failure rates to very low levels. Additionally, the heaters were started at a low voltage then slowly brought up to full voltage to reduce the thermal stress. The valves themselves were soldered in to avoid problems with plug-in bases, which could be unreliable.[citation needed ] Flowers persisted with the idea and obtained support from the Director of the Research Station, W Gordon Radley. Flowers and his team of some fifty people in the switching group spent eleven months from early February 1943 designing and building a machine that dispensed with the second tape of the Heath Robinson, by generating the wheel patterns electronically. Flowers used some of his own money for the project.

This prototype, Mark 1 Colossus, contained 1600 thermionic valves (tubes). It performed satisfactorily at Dollis Hill on 8 December 1943 and was dismantled and shipped to Bletchley Park, where it was delivered on 18 January and re-assembled by Harry Fensom and Don Horwood. It was operational in January and it successfully attacked its first message on 5 February 1944. It was a large structure and was dubbed 'Colossus', supposedly by the WRNS operators. However, a memo held in the National Archives written by Max Newman on 18 January 1944 records that 'Colossus arrives today".

During the development of the prototype, an improved design had been developed - the Mark 2 Colossus. Four of these were ordered in March 1944 and by the end of April the number on order had been increased to twelve. Dollis Hill was put under pressure to have the first of these working by 1 June. Allen Coombs took over leadership of the production Mark 2 Colossi, the first of which - containing 2400 valves - became operational at 08:00 on 1 June 1944, just in time for the Allied Invasion of Normandy on D-Day. Subsequently, Colossi were delivered at the rate of about one a month. By the time of V-E Day there were ten Colossi working at Bletchley Park and a start had been made on assembling an eleventh.

The main units of the Mark 2 design were as follows.

A tape transport with an 8-photocell reading mechanism.

A six character FIFO shift register.

Twelve thyratron ring stores that simulated the Lorenz machine generating a bit-stream for each wheel.

Panels of switches for specifying the program and the "set total".

A set of functional units that performed Boolean operations.

A "span counter" that could suspend counting for part of the tape.

A master control that handled clocking, start and stop signals, counter readout and printing.

Five electronic counters.

An electric typewriter.

Most of the design of the electronics was the work of Tommy Flowers, assisted by William Chandler, Sidney Broadhurst and Allen Coombs; with Erie Speight and Arnold Lynch developing the photoelectric reading mechanism. Coombs remembered Flowers, having produced a rough draft of his design, tearing it into pieces that he handed out to his colleagues for them to do the detailed design and get their team to manufacture it. The Mark 2 Colossi were both five times faster and were simpler to operate than the prototype.

Data input to Colossus was by photoelectric reading of a paper tape transcription of the enciphered intercepted message. This was arranged in a continuous loop so that it could be read and re-read multiple times - there being no internal storage for the data. The design overcame the problem of synchronizing the electronics with the speed of the message tape, by generating a clock signal from reading its sprocket holes. The speed of operation was thus limited by the mechanics of reading the tape. During development, the tape reader was tested up to 9700 characters per second (53 mph) before the tape disintegrated. So 5000 characters/second (40 ft/s (12.2 m/s; 27.3 mph)) was settled on as the speed for regular use. Flowers designed a 6-character shift register, which was used both for computing the delta function (ΔZ) and for testing five different possible starting points of Tunny's wheels in the five processors. This five-way parallelism enabled five simultaneous tests and counts to be performed giving an effective processing speed of 25,000 characters per second. The computation used algorithms devised by W. T. Tutte and colleagues to decrypt a Tunny message.

The Newmanry was staffed by cryptanalysts, operators from the Women's Royal Naval Service (WRNS) - known as "Wrens" - and engineers who were permanently on hand for maintenance and repair. By the end of the war the staffing was 272 Wrens and 27 men.

The first job in operating Colossus for a new message was to prepare the paper tape loop. This was performed by the Wrens who stuck the two ends together using Bostik glue, ensuring that there was a 150-character length of blank tape between the end and the start of the message. Using a special hand punch they inserted a start hole between the third and fourth channels sprocket holes from the end of the blank section, and a stop hole between the fourth and fifth channels sprocket holes from the end of the characters of the message. These were read by specially positioned photocells and indicated when the message was about to start and when it ended. The operator would then thread the paper tape through the gate and around the pulleys of the bedstead and adjust the tension. The two-tape bedstead design had been carried on from Heath Robinson so that one tape could be loaded whilst the previous one was being run. A switch on the Selection Panel specified the "near" or the "far" tape.

After performing various resetting and zeroizing tasks, the Wren operators would, under instruction from the cryptanalyst, operate the "set total" decade switches and the K2 panel switches to set the desired algorithm. They would then start the bedstead tape motor and lamp and, when the tape was up to speed, operate the master start switch.

Howard Campaigne, a mathematician and cryptanalyst from the US Navy's OP-20-G, wrote the following in a foreword to Flowers' 1983 paper "The Design of Colossus".

My view of Colossus was that of cryptanalyst-programmer. I told the machine to make certain calculations and counts, and after studying the results, told it to do another job. It did not remember the previous result, nor could it have acted upon it if it did. Colossus and I alternated in an interaction that sometimes achieved an analysis of an unusual German cipher system, called "Geheimschreiber" by the Germans, and "Fish" by the cryptanalysts.

Colossus was not a stored-program computer. The input data for the five parallel processors was read from the looped message paper tape and the electronic pattern generators for the chi, psi and motor wheels. The programs for the processors were set and held on the switches and jack panel connections. Each processor could evaluate a Boolean function and count and display the number of times it yielded the specified value of "false" (0) or "true" (1) for each pass of the message tape.

Input to the processors came from two sources, the shift registers from tape reading and the thyratron rings that emulated the wheels of the Tunny machine. The characters on the paper tape were called Z and the characters from the Tunny emulator were referred to by the Greek letters that Bill Tutte had given them when working out the logical structure of the machine. On the selection panel, switches specified either Z or ΔZ, either or Δ and either or Δ for the data to be passed to the jack field and 'K2 switch panel'. These signals from the wheel simulators could be specified as stepping on with each new pass of the message tape or not.

The K2 switch panel had a group of switches on the left-hand side to specify the algorithm. The switches on the right-hand side selected the counter to which the result was fed. The plugboard allowed less specialized conditions to be imposed. Overall the K2 switch panel switches and the plugboard allowed about five billion different combinations of the selected variables.

As an example: a set of runs for a message tape might initially involve two chi wheels, as in Tutte's 1+2 algorithm. Such a two-wheel run was called a long run, taking on average eight minutes unless the parallelism was utilised to cut the time by a factor of five. The subsequent runs might only involve setting one chi wheel, giving a short run taking about two minutes. Initially, after the initial long run, the choice of next algorithm to be tried was specified by the cryptanalyst. Experience showed, however, that decision trees for this iterative process could be produced for use by the Wren operators in a proportion of cases.

Although the Colossus was the first of the electronic digital machines with programmability, albeit limited by modern standards, it was not a general-purpose machine, being designed for a range of cryptanalytic tasks, most involving counting the results of evaluating Boolean algorithms.

A Colossus computer was thus not a fully Turing complete machine. However, University of San Francisco professor Benjamin Wells has shown that if all ten Colossus machines made were rearranged in a specific cluster, then the entire set of computers could have simulated a universal Turing machine, and thus be Turing complete. The notion of a computer as a general-purpose machine - that is, as more than a calculator devoted to solving difficult but specific problems - did not become prominent until after World War II.[citation needed ]

Colossus and the reasons for its construction were highly secret and remained so for 30 years after the War. Consequently, it was not included in the history of computing hardware for many years, and Flowers and his associates were deprived of the recognition they were due. Colossi 1 to 10 were dismantled after the war and parts returned to the Post Office. Some parts, sanitised as to their original purpose, were taken to Max Newman's Royal Society Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University. Tommy Flowers was ordered to destroy all documentation and burnt them in a furnace at Dollis Hill. He later said of that order:

That was a terrible mistake. I was instructed to destroy all the records, which I did. I took all the drawings and the plans and all the information about Colossus on paper and put it in the boiler fire. And saw it burn.

Colossi 11 and 12, along with two replica Tunny machines, were retained, being moved to GCHQ's new headquarters at Eastcote in April 1946, and again with GCHQ to Cheltenham between 1952 and 1954. One of the Colossi, known as Colossus Blue, was dismantled in 1959; the other in 1960. There had been attempts to adapt them to other purposes, with varying success; in their later years they had been used for training. Jack Good related how he was the first to use Colossus after the war, persuading the US National Security Agency that it could be used to perform a function for which they were planning to build a special-purpose machine. Colossus was also used to perform character counts on one-time pad tape to test for non-randomness.

A small number of people who were associated with Colossus-and knew that large-scale, reliable, high-speed electronic digital computing devices were feasible-played significant roles in early computer work in the UK and probably in the US. However, being so secret, it had little direct influence on the development of later computers; it was EDVAC that was the seminal computer architecture of the time.[citation needed ] In 1972 Herman Goldstine, who was unaware of Colossus and its legacy to the projects of people such as Alan Turing ( ACE), Max Newman ( Manchester computers) and Harry Huskey ( Bendix G-15), wrote that,

Britain had such vitality that it could immediately after the war embark on so many well-conceived and well-executed projects in the computer field.

Professor Brian Randell, who unearthed information about Colossus in the 1970s, commented on this, saying that:

It is my opinion that the COLOSSUS project was an important source of this vitality, one that has been largely unappreciated, as has the significance of its places in the chronology of the invention of the digital computer.

Randell's efforts started to bear fruit in the mid-1970s, after the secrecy about Bletchley Park was broken when Group Captain Winterbotham published his book The Ultra Secret in 1974. In October 2000, a 500-page technical report on the Tunny cipher and its cryptanalysis-entitled General Report on Tunny-was released by GCHQ to the national Public Record Office, and it contains a fascinating paean to Colossus by the cryptographers who worked with it:

It is regretted that it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the fascination of a Colossus at work; its sheer bulk and apparent complexity; the fantastic speed of thin paper tape round the glittering pulleys; the childish pleasure of not-not, span, print main header and other gadgets; the wizardry of purely mechanical decoding letter by letter (one novice thought she was being hoaxed); the uncanny action of the typewriter in printing the correct scores without and beyond human aid; the stepping of the display; periods of eager expectation culminating in the sudden appearance of the longed-for score; and the strange rhythms characterizing every type of run: the stately break-in, the erratic short run, the regularity of wheel-breaking, the stolid rectangle interrupted by the wild leaps of the carriage-return, the frantic chatter of a motor run, even the ludicrous frenzy of hosts of bogus scores.

Construction of a fully functional rebuild of a Colossus Mark 2 was undertaken between 1993 and 2008 by a team led by Tony Sale. In spite of the blueprints and hardware being destroyed, a surprising amount of material survived, mainly in engineers' notebooks, but a considerable amount of it in the U.S. The optical tape reader might have posed the biggest problem, but Dr. Arnold Lynch, its original designer was able to redesign it to his own original specification. The reconstruction is on display, in the historically correct place for Colossus No. 9, at The National Museum of Computing, in H Block Bletchley Park in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.

In November 2007, to celebrate the project completion and to mark the start of a fundraising initiative for The National Museum of Computing, a Cipher Challenge pitted the rebuilt Colossus against radio amateurs worldwide in being first to receive and decode three messages enciphered using the Lorenz SZ42 and transmitted from radio station DL0HNF in the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum computer museum. The challenge was easily won by radio amateur Joachim Schüth, who had carefully prepared for the event and developed his own signal processing and code-breaking code using Ada. The Colossus team were hampered by their wish to use World War II radio equipment, delaying them by a day because of poor reception conditions. Nevertheless, the victor's 1.4 GHz laptop, running his own code, took less than a minute to find the settings for all 12 wheels. The German codebreaker said: "My laptop digested ciphertext at a speed of 1.2 million characters per second-240 times faster than Colossus. If you scale the CPU frequency by that factor, you get an equivalent clock of 5.8 MHz for Colossus. That is a remarkable speed for a computer built in 1944."

The Cipher Challenge verified the successful completion of the rebuild project. "On the strength of today's performance Colossus is as good as it was six decades ago", commented Tony Sale. "We are delighted to have produced a fitting tribute to the people who worked at Bletchley Park and whose brainpower devised these fantastic machines which broke these ciphers and shortened the war by many months."

There was a fictional computer named Colossus in the 1970 film Colossus: The Forbin Project which was based on the 1966 novel by D. F. Jones. This was a coincidence as it pre-dates the public release of information about Colossus, or even its name.

Neal Stephenson's novel Cryptonomicon (1999) also contains a fictional treatment of the historical role played by Turing and Bletchley Park.

Anderson, David (2007), Was the Manchester Baby conceived at Bletchley Park? (PDF), British Computer Society, archived from the original (PDF) on 23 September 2015

Budiansky, Stephen (2000), Battle of wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II, Free Press, ISBN 978-0684859323

Carter, Frank (2008), Codebreaking with the Colossus Computer, Bletchley Park Reports, 1 (New ed.), Bletchley Park Trust, ISBN 978-1-906723-00-2

Chandler, W. W. (1983), "The Installation and Maintenance of Colossus", IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 5 (3): 260-262, doi:10.1109/MAHC.1983.10083, S2CID 15674470

Coombs, Allen W. M. (July 1983), "The Making of Colossus", IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 5 (3): 253-259, doi:10.1109/MAHC.1983.10085, S2CID 597530

Copeland, B. J. (October-December 2004), "Colossus: its origins and originators", IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 26 (4): 38-45, doi:10.1109/MAHC.2004.26, S2CID 20209254

Copeland, B. Jack; et al. (2006), "Mr Newman's section" in Copeland (2006)

Copeland, B. Jack (2010), "Colossus: Breaking the German 'Tunny' Code at Bletchley Park. An Illustrated History", The Rutherford Journal, 3

Updated and extended version of Action This Day: From Breaking of the Enigma Code to the Birth of the Modern Computer Bantam Press 2001

Fensom, Harry (2006), How Colossus was Built and Operated - One of its Engineers Reveals its Secrets, pp. 297-303 in Copeland (2006)

Flowers, Thomas H. (1983), "The Design of Colossus", Annals of the History of Computing, 5 (3): 239-252, doi:10.1109/MAHC.1983.10079, S2CID 39816473

Flowers, Thomas H. (2006), Colossus in Copeland (2006)

Gannon, Paul (2007), Colossus: Bletchley Park's Greatest Secret, London: Atlantic Books, ISBN 978-1-84354-331-2

Good, Jack; Michie, Donald; Timms, Geoffrey (1945), General Report on Tunny: With Emphasis on Statistical Methods, UK Public Record Office HW 25/4 and HW 25/5

Good, I. J. (1979), "Early Work on Computers at Bletchley", IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 1 (1): 38-48, doi:10.1109/MAHC.1979.10011, S2CID 22670337

Good, I. J. (1980), "Pioneering Work on Computers at Bletchley", in Metropolis, Nicholas; Howlett, J.; Rota, Gian-Carlo (eds.), A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, New York: Academic Press, ISBN 0124916503

McKay, Sinclair (2010), The Secret Life of Bletchley Park: The WWII Codebreaking Centre and the men and women who worked there, London: Aurum Press, ISBN 9781845135393

Randell, Brian (1982) [1977], "Colossus: Godfather of the Computer", The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, New York: Springer-Verlag, ISBN 9783540113195

Randell, Brian (1980), "The Colossus" (PDF), in Metropolis, N.; Howlett, J.; Rota, Gian-Carlo (eds.), A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, pp. 47-92, ISBN 978-0124916500

Small, Albert W. (December 1944), The Special Fish Report describes the operation of Colossus in breaking Tunny messages

Wells, B (2004), "A Universal Turing Machine Can Run on a Cluster of Colossi", Abstracts of the American Mathematical Society, 25: 441

Wells, Benjamin (2006), "The PC-User's Guide to Colossus", pp. 116-140 in Copeland (2006)

Campaigne, Howard; Farley, Robert D. (28 February 1990), Oral History Interview: NSA-OH-14-83 Campaigne, Howard, Dr. 29 June 83 Annopalis, MD By: Robert G. Farley (PDF), National Security Agency

Colossus: Creating a Giant on YouTube A short film made by Google to celebrate Colossus and those who built it, in particular Tommy Flowers.

Cragon, Harvey G. (2003), From Fish to Colossus: How the German Lorenz Cipher was Broken at Bletchley Park, Dallas: Cragon Books, ISBN 0-9743045-0-6 - A detailed description of the cryptanalysis of Tunny, and some details of Colossus (contains some minor errors)

Enever, Ted (1999), Britain's Best Kept Secret: Ultra's Base at Bletchley Park (3rd ed.), Sutton Publishing, Gloucestershire, ISBN 978-0-7509-2355-2 - A guided tour of the history and geography of the Park, written by one of the founder members of the Bletchley Park Trust

Rojas, R.; Hashagen, U. (2000), The First Computers: History and Architectures, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-18197-5 - Comparison of the first computers, with a chapter about Colossus and its reconstruction by Tony Sale.

Sale, Tony (2004), The Colossus Computer 1943-1996: How It Helped to Break the German Lorenz Cipher in WWII, Kidderminster: M.&M. Baldwin, ISBN 0-947712-36-4 A slender (20-page) booklet, containing the same material as Tony Sale's website (see below)

Smith, Michael (2007) [1998], Station X: The Codebreakers of Bletchley Park, Pan Grand Strategy Series (Pan Books ed.), London: Pan MacMillan Ltd, ISBN 978-0-330-41929-1

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Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in the years 1943-1945 to help in the cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Colossus used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to perform Boolean and counting operations. Colossus is thus regarded as the world's first programmable, electronic, digital computer, although it was programmed by switches and plugs and not by a stored program.

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tabulating machine invented

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Statistician and inventor Herman Hollerith became known as the father of modern automatic computation for his electric tabulating system, which revolutionized the US census.

He was recruited to work on improving the census by one of his Columbia professors who was a special agent at the Census Office. In the 1880s he worked on the 1880 census, operating the Seaton device, which made tabulating census data easier by isolating and organizing the lines on large tallying sheets. It took eight years to count the 50 million Americans for the 1880 census.

After gaining an understanding of the census process and the idea to use punch representation from John S Billings, Hollerith used a job at the patent office to learn about machinery components, then began developing a mechanical solution to the census problem.

The Census Bureau held a competition in 1888 to find a more efficient system. The contest required participants to process 1880 census data from four areas of St Louis, MO, and the fastest results won a contract for the next census. The other two contestants captured the data in 144.5 and 100.5 hours, but Hollerith finished in just 72.5 hours. When they were challenged to break down the data and prepare it for tabulation, the other contestants took 44.5 and 55.5 hours, while Hollerith completed the task in 5.5 hours, winning him the contract.

He developed a mechanical tabulator based on punched cards to rapidly tabulate statistics from millions of pieces of data, which he received a patent for in 1889 ( patent 395781).

Clerks prepared the census data by putting the 3.25×7.375-inch punch cards containing 12 rows and 20 columns on a pantograph and using a stylus to mark holes in a template that corresponded to a specific demographic category. Pressing the stylus into a hole on the template created a hole in the punch card.

The tabulator had a card reader that consisted of two hinged plates manually operated by a lever. Clerks inserted the punch cards between the plates, and spring-loaded pins passed through the holes and completed an electrical circuit when they landed in the well of mercury below. The completed circuit energized magnetic dials which advanced counting hands, and made a bell ring which prompted a clerk to transcribe the data indicated on the dial. The tabulator had 40 dials representing different data items collected during the census. Once the data was recorded, the clerk reset the dials, removed the punch card, and filed the card in a sorting table.

These illustrations show the card reader and dial of the tabulating machine. Source:
US Census Bureau

Using the tabulating machine for the first time in 1890 cut the time to produce the census down to two years. Updated versions of Hollerith's 1890 electric counting machine were used for the census until the UNIVAC I computer was introduced in 1951.

Hollerith went on to found the Tabulating Machine Company that later merged into the Calculating-Tabulating-Recording (C-T-R) company in 1914, which was later renamed IBM.

Also see:
For more moments in tech history, see this blog. EDN strives to be historically accurate with these postings. Should you see an error, please notify us.

Editor's note: This article was originally posted on January 8, 2014 and edited on January 8, 2017.

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Hollerith patents the electric tabulating system, January 8, 1889

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Statistician and inventor Herman Hollerith became known as the father of modern automatic computation for his electric tabulating system, which revolutionized the US census. He was recruited to work on improving the census by one of his Columbia professors who was a special agent at the Census Office.

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Hertz produces radio waves.

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In November 1886 Heinrich Hertz became the first person to transmit and receive controlled radio waves.

Considering how indispensable his wireless transmissions quickly became, it seems a little odd looking back that he had no practical purpose in mind for the radio or Hertzian waves he discovered.

His research was focused solely on discovering if James Clerk Maxwell's 1864 theory of electromagnetism was correct.

A Young Man in a Hurry

The first time Hertz thought seriously about proving Maxwell's theory was in 1879, when he was a 22 year-old student in Berlin. He decided against it. It seemed too hard, and anyway he wanted to concentrate on completing his doctorate.

In 1883, after getting his first lecturing job, he revisited Maxwell's theory. He wrote an impressive paper, reworking the theory mathematically.

In 1885 he moved to the University of Karlsruhe as a full professor of experimental physics. Now he decided the time was ripe to look for a way to prove Maxwell's theory.

(We have more details of Hertz's life here.)

A Spark of Genius

In October 1886 Hertz saw an electrical spark, starting a train of thought that would end up transforming the world.

Hertz had been demonstrating a piece of electrical apparatus called Riess spirals to students. The spirals produced electric sparks by a process called magnetic induction. The sparks flew between spark-gaps - small gaps in circuits.

Hertz became fascinated by sparks.

He started generating them using a piece of electrical equipment called an induction coil. (A car's spark plugs are powered by an induction coil. The induction coil transforms low voltage dc electricity coming from a car's battery into high voltage ac electricity. This electricity crosses a small air gap at regular intervals as a spark - i.e. you have a spark plug.)

You can see a diagram of an induction coil connected to a spark-gap below.

Playing around a little with this apparatus, Hertz connected a secondary spark-gap to the existing spark-gap, as shown.

He used the induction coil to generate high voltage ac electricity, producing a series of sparks at regular intervals at the main spark-gap.

Hertz found that when sparks flew across the main gap, sparks also usually flew across the secondary gap - that is between points A and B in the image; Hertz called these side-sparks.

He found the behavior of the side-sparks highly thought-provoking.

He varied the position of connection point C on the side-circuit. The only way he could stop side-sparks being produced was to arrange the apparatus so the length of wire CA was the same as CB.

Given that the electricity was ac, this suggested to Hertz that voltage waves were separately racing through the wire along paths CA and CB.

If the distances CA and CB were the same, then the same voltage must reach points A and B at the same time. The electrical waves in CA and CB were said to be in phase with one another, so sparks could not be generated. Sparks could only be generated if there was a large voltage difference between points A and B.

Perfectly Behaved Electric Waves

Hertz did more experiments which revealed that the sparking at the main gap was producing beautifully regular electrical waves, whose behavior was predictable.

He pictured waves of electric charge moving back and forth, creating a standing wave within the wire.

In other words, he believed the circuit was vibrating like a tuning fork at its natural, resonant frequency. He thought he now had a circuit in resonance.

Of course, in Hertz's circuit the vibrations were not of sound, they were vibrations of electric charge.

It's worth bearing in mind that resonance is not actually needed for electromagnetic waves to be produced - they're produced whenever electric charges are accelerated.

The importance of resonance is that if a receiver has the same resonant frequency as a transmitter, the incoming electromagnetic waves have a much stronger effect on it. This is similar to the situation in which an opera singer shatters a champagne glass because its resonant frequency is the same as the note she sings.

Aware that the frequency of electrical vibrations and hence resonance is determined by electrical properties called inductance and capacitance, Hertz looked more closely at these factors in the circuit.

Breaking Away

He identified that a phenomenon called self-induction was taking place in the wires. This allowed him to deduce that the electric vibrations had an extraordinarily high frequency.

Hertz decided to break the hard-wired connection between the main spark circuit and the side-spark circuit, as shown in the image.

He also arranged the capacitance and inductance of the main circuit so its resonant frequency was 100 million times a second. Today we would write this vibration frequency as 100 MHz. (The unit of frequency is, of course, the hertz (Hz), named in Heinrich Hertz's honor.)

According to Maxwell's theory, the main circuit would then radiate electromagnetic waves with a wavelength of about a meter.

The actual apparatus is shown below.

Producing and Detecting Radio Waves

In November 1886 Hertz put together his spark-gap transmitter, which he hoped would transmit electromagnetic waves.

For his receiver he used a length of copper wire in the shape of a rectangle whose dimensions were 120 cm by 80 cm. The wire had its own spark-gap.

Hertz applied high voltage a.c. electricity across the central spark-gap of the transmitter, creating sparks.

The sparks caused violent pulses of electric current within the copper wires leading out to the zinc spheres.

As Maxwell had predicted, the oscillating electric charges produced electromagnetic waves - radio waves - which spread out at the speed of light through the air around the wire.

Hertz detected the waves with his copper wire receiver - sparks jumped across its spark gap, even though it was as far as 1.5 meters away from the transmitter. These sparks were caused by the arrival of electromagnetic waves from the transmitter generating violent electrical vibrations in the receiver.

This was an experimental triumph. Hertz had produced and detected radio waves.

Strangely, though, he did not appreciate the monumental practical importance of his discovery.

In fact Hertz's waves would soon change the world. By 1896 Guglielmo Marconi had been granted a patent for wireless communications. By 1901 he had made a wireless transmission across the Atlantic Ocean from Britain to Canada.

By the early 1900s technically minded people were building their own spark transmitters at home. Even children got in on the act, with instructions to build a transmitter appearing in a craft book for boys in 1917.

A 'Build at Home' Spark-Gap Transmitter

Goodbye to Sparks
By the late 1920s most radio transmitters were using vacuum tubes rather than sparks to generate radio waves. And then the vacuum tubes were abandoned in favor of transistors.

Scientists and engineers have continued to innovate quickly in the field of radio technology. Radio, television, satellite communications, mobile phones, radar, and many other inventions and gadgets have made Hertz's discovery an indispensable part of modern life.

Author of this page: The Doc
Images digitally enhanced and colorized by this website. © All rights reserved.

Further Reading
Heinrich Hertz
Electric Waves
Macmillan and Co., 1893

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How Heinrich Hertz Discovered Radio Waves

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In November 1886 Heinrich Hertz became the first person to transmit and receive controlled radio waves. Considering how indispensable his wireless transmissions quickly became, it seems a little odd looking back that he had no practical purpose in mind for the radio or Hertzian waves he discovered.

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Microphone invented by  Emile Berliner

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1877: Emile Berliner invents a new kind of microphone. It assures the future of the telephone, but not fame for Berliner.

Alexander Graham Bell had already invented his telephone, but without Berliner's carbon-disk or carbon-button microphone, telephones would have sounded terrible for decades. And they may not have been capable of surmounting such great distances, hindering one of humanity's most important advances.

Like most of today's microphones, early designs turned compressions in the air, otherwise known as sound, into electrical signals. But the results didn't sound good by any account, and the device lacked practicality for widespread use. Bell's microphone, for instance, involved suspending a diaphragm above a pool of electrified liquid.

Berliner's patent application improved on the existing design by adding a layer of carbon particles in between two contacts, one of which acted as a diaphragm for catching sound waves. Movements of the diaphragm created varying pressure on the carbon particles, allowing more or less electricity to pass between the contacts.

This process converted sound waves into electricity more accurately than any other microphone could at the time. It became commonplace in telephones, and even radio, until the appearance of the condenser microphone in the mid-1920s.

Although Berliner's microphones still sounded hissy, they proved critical not only for encoding speech into electricity, but for amplifying the signal in the wire every so often to compensate for electrical resistance. Without that amplification, Bell's telephone would have remained a mere curiosity, rather than transforming the world.

In those pre- vacuum-tube, pre- transistor days, Berliner's carbon-disk microphones were coupled to little speakers to amplify the signal mechanically over long distances. Presumably, you'd be able to eavesdrop on a conversation simply by standing near one of these mechanical repeaters.

Bell paid $50,000 for Berliner's microphone patent (about $1.1 million in today's money) and began manufacturing telephones using the technology in 1878. But controversy dogged the patent, which was eventually thrown out, much to Berliner's dismay. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1892 that Thomas Edison, and not Berliner, invented the carbon microphone.

In truth, neither can claim total credit.

As Bell executive W. Van Benthuysen told The New York Times (.pdf) in December 1891, the idea of transmitting speech by varying the current between two contacts as they are affected by sound waves was common knowledge in some circles, having appeared in published works as early as 1854 - well before either Berliner or Edison (who filed a similar patent) claimed credit for the idea in 1877.

"It was known long before the date of Bell's [formerly Berliner's] patent that the resistance of a circuit is varied without being broken by variations in the intimacy of contact or amount of pressure between the electrodes in contact, from one to the other of which a current is passing," said Van Benthuysen, adding that France's Count Du Moncel had written extensively on the topic over two decades earlier.

Nonetheless, Berliner reputedly went to his grave in 1929 convinced that Edison had stolen his idea. Before that, he did receive ample credit for another crucial invention: the lateral-cut disc record, whose design is still prized by hipsters and purists alike. Before that, everybody was using Edison's phonograph cylinders, which took up much more space, and were difficult to duplicate.

Berliner's records were used in toys from 1888 until 1894, when his company began selling records using a logo of a dog cocking its ear towards a record player. Modified versions of the "His Master's Voice" logo have been used by record companies around the world, including RCA in the United States. It now forms the retail entertainment chain HMV's logo.

The saga of the carbon-button microphone comes as a reminder that while history feels the need to assign great ideas to individual people, their origins are often murky and collaborative in nature, and owe no small part to people ripping each other off.

We couldn't find any accounts of Emile Berliner's first words transmitted by microphone, but they were probably not " Ich bin ein Berliner" - as nice as that would have been.
Source: Various
Photo: Emile Berliner sits with a couple of microphones in 1927./Courtesy Library of Congress
Diagram courtesy TutorVista

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March 4, 1877: The Microphone Sounds Much Better

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1877: Emile Berliner invents a new kind of microphone. It assures the future of the telephone, but not fame for Berliner. Alexander Graham Bell had already invented his telephone, but without Berliner's carbon-disk or carbon-button microphone, telephones would have sounded terrible for decades.

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Braille invented by  Louis Braille

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1/4/2013 - First Appendectomy performed,Louis Braille was born

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A calendar for posting and announcing events related or having to do with people with disabilities, their history, meetings, conferences, fund-raisers, community actions, and health conferences.

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Charles Babbage designs the Babbage Engine

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On TechTricksWorld, we have been writing about notable personalities of the tech industry that you can find here. And, when we are talking about technology, how we can miss Charles Babbage who created the first computer. Nowadays, we use computer for almost everything we do such as online shopping, ticket booking, finding information, and even this blog post was written and published using computer only. That is the reason, we call him Father of the Computers.
Let's know more about him.
You have heard of this great name already! Charles Babbage - this mastermind founded something which pioneered a whole new industry. He created something no person of his time had even thought of. He made a machine which laid a strong foundation for its successors, which almost the entire mankind relies on. How revolutionizing it is to create the world's first mechanical computer!

In this article, we are going to talk in brief about Charles Babbage, known as the " Father of the computer ".

Early Life and Education

Charles Babbage was born in London on 26 December 1791. His father, Benjamin Babbage, was a rich man being a banking partner of William Praed in founding Praed's & Co. of Fleet Street, London. Therefore, Charles had financial freedom since his childhood. But, he had severe health issues. For instance, he had to move to a country school when he was just eight years old to recover from an extremely serious fever. After that, he attended King Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes, but once again he had to retreat, and he ultimately settled with private tutors.

Like most great personalities, Charles was labelled as " dumb " by his parents who often quoted about Charles - "his brain was not to be taxed too much". Babbage finally joined the 30-student Holmwood academy, in Baker Street, Enfield, Middlesex. The huge library of this academy developed Charles' love for mathematics. After passing out from here, he engaged with two private tutors and landed at the Cambridge University.

Cambridge University

In October 1810, Charles landed at Trinity College, Cambridge. However, he was not satisfied with the mathematical education taught there. In 1812, Charles transferred to Peterhouse, Cambridge. Despite being the smartest person there, he received a degree without examination in 1814, trying to defend the silly charges against him.

Successive Years

Charles did not face many difficulties with the prevailing education system. He made quick progress there, with the backing of his wealthy father. Because of his father's insistence, he married early in 1814, along with his friend Edward Ryan to Whitmore sisters. His father died in 1827, leaving him a lot of wealth. He became financially independent. His wife died in the same year, and in depression, he spent most of his time travelling.

Babbage has works in Natural Theology, Astronomical Society, Mathematical Tables, Mechanical Computation, Mechanization and a lot more. His motivation to overcome the existing barriers and his innovative mindset helped him leaps and bounds. For example, there was a high error rate in the calculation of math tables during his times. He decided to find a way out of a new math table that could reduce this error rate. He thought a lot about this.

Difference Engine

Charles Babbage introduced his invention, " Difference Engine" on June 14, 1822, to the Royal Mechanical Society. It was probably the solution to the error rates by calculating polynomials using his new " differences method ". His idea was approved, and he received a grant of 1500 euros to work on his idea. He converted one of his rooms to a workshop and started working on it.

While he was travelling after remorse of his father's death, rumors spread that the difference engine was not an ideal project, and the government's money was being wasted. He was defended by John Herschel and Royal Society, but he started facing difficulty in receiving government grants. After investing 23000 Euros, this project was ceased and abandoned by the government in 1834.

Analytical Engine

Babbage brought a new concept in his mind. He thought of an improved engine that would be able to calculate almost every equation. He came up with a design in 1835 and decided his new mill would measure 15 feet length and 6 feet diameter. Once again, he had issues receiving grants from the government. But still, he kept going and in October 1842, his work on Analytical Engine became the subject of a paper published by Federico Luigi.

Second Difference Engine

Babbage left his accomplishments behind and kept moving ahead. In 1846, he decided to start working on yet another difference engine. The best part about this was that it used three times fewer parts than its predecessor - something fabulous in the field of a mechanical engine. A confusing part about this was that Babbage never tried to improve upon this machine. He kept on furnishing the analytical engine but never altered this one.

Cryptography

Interestingly, Charles Babbage made notable accomplishments in the field of Cryptography, which came to be known only after his death.

In 1845, Charles solved a cipher posed as a challenge by his nephew, Henry Hollier. He discovered "Vigenere Tables" at that time. In the 1850s, he broke the "Vigenere's autokey cipher". However, credit for this was given to Friedrich Kasiski, someone who discovered the same what Babbage did years before, just because Charles' discovery wasn't known by anyone!

His Achievements

Charles is accredited to many achievements. He won the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. He was termed the Lucasian professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1828 even before he came to know about it. He accepted this post on insistence by his friends. He held on to this till 1839.

Babbage also invented the cow-catcher, also known as Pilot. It was basically a metal frame to clear the obstacles faced by locomotives.

Death

Babbage left this world at the age of 79, on 18 October 1871, in London itself. He was buried in London's Kensal Green Cemetery.

His memorials such as "The Moon Crater" are a tribute to his research. British Rail named a locomotive after him in the 1990s. Moreover, Charles Babbage Institute is formed at the University of Minnesota. The Economist's Science and Technology Blog is termed as "Babbage". Lastly, the former computer store "Babbage's" was named after this great personality.

Final Verdict

Charles' discoveries have allowed the personal computer to come into existence. The electronic devices we are synced with today are the result of this great man's penance and dedication. Indeed, he deserves the title - "Father of the Computer".

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Charles Babbage - Father of The Computer

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On TechTricksWorld, we have been writing about notable personalities of the tech industry that you can find here. And, when we are talking about technology, how we can miss Charles Babbage who created the first computer.