September 18 – Technical history

1830 – America’s first native locomotive, the “Tom Thump” lost a race to draft horse at Ellicotts Mills, Maryland.

1926 – James Cooley Born

James Cooley, co-creator of the fast Fourier transform, was born. Working with John Tukey, Cooley in 1965 worked out a vast improvement to a common mathematical algorithm called the Fourier transform. Although the algorithm had been useful in computing, its complexity required too much time. While working at IBM, Cooley built on Tukey’s ideas for a swifter version.

1927 – The Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System went on the air with 47 radio stations. Within two years it would be sold and become the Columbia Broadcasting System and later simply CBS.

1989 – NeXTSTEP OS Released

NeXT Computer releases version 1.0 of NeXTSTEP, an object-oriented, multitasking operating system. Originally designed to run on NeXT’s brand of computers, it was later ported to other architectures such as the Intel x86.

Often considered years ahead of its time, NeXTSTEP brought to market many advanced features that were not seen together in any other operating system for nearly 10 years. Its powerful object-oriented development environment was also used for the creation of the World Wide Web.

In 1997 Apple acquired NeXT Computer to build their next-generation operating system upon the NeXTSTEP architecture, later named Mac OS X. Today’s iOS that runs on iPhone and iPads is descended from Mac OS X and NeXTSTEP.

I had the opportunity to use NeXTSTEP in 1992 for a computer science class at the University of Illinois. I immediately recognized how powerful it was, yet didn’t fully appreciate what I was experiencing until years later. It really wasn’t until the late 1990’s and early 2000’s that other operating system brought together the power and reliability of NeXTSTEP.

1990 – NeXTstation Computers

The NeXTstation is finally released. It used the 68040 Motorola processor running 33MHz and the 68882 math co-processor running at 25 MHz. 2.88 MB floppy, 8MB RAM, monochrome monitor, all for $4.995.if you wanted 4096 colors, that would cost you – $7,995.

1998 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers aka ICANN was created in order to take over Internet administrative tasks from the US Government. The most famous of those tasks is overseeing the Domain Name System.

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