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Keep that in mind at all times and don't look at this.

If you mean Robert Metcalfe, there are also some MIT connections there: Digital Century.com

I believe that Baird invented a mechanical mechanical "television" (as well as Color TV, later on), but Farnsworth came up with the idea of using a Cathode Ray tubes instead of mechanical parts.

The years are mixed up, however. Some articles say that Baird created his TV in 1925, and Farnsworth did his part in 1923, 2 years before Baird.

Either way, it goes to show that alot of these "I invented it first" arguments are utter rubbish.
We wouldn't have modern TV or monitors without either of these folks.

What are you talking about? Photography technology cycles aren't as fast as computers'. Photography as we know it was there for most of the past century (The Lumiere brothers established the 35mm standard in 1907 according to this). Hasselblads have been around for quite a while, and most professional photographers still use theirs (some of these are the cameras that mount on a tripod, have a black cloth to cover the photographer and disposable flash). That is because the basic technology has not changed since maybe the 20's (and the negative is bigger, thus enhancing resolution). Digital photography is the biggest change there has been in this area, and is still not replacing film.
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If too many people hold off purchasing an AMD now, because they want to wait for the newest, whiz-bang thing, then the possibility exists that AMD will not be able to finance the development of the K8 on time, or even that AMD will go bust.

On January 26, 1926 Baird demonstrated a fully working prototype of mechanical television to members of the Royal Institution at 22 Frith Street, Baird's residence and laboratory. This was the world's first demonstration of true television because it showed moving human faces with tonal gradients and detail. Far from perfect, the images flickered quite a bit, but the individuals on screen were fully recognizable.

Because it is so. John Logie Baird

John Logie Baird is remembered as the inventor of mechanical television, radar and fiber optics. Successfully tested in a laboratory in late 1925 and unveiled with much fanfare in London in early 1926, mechanical television technology was quickly usurped by electronic television, the basis of modern video technology.

Your Farnsworth guy got to invent electron beam scanning television, but J. L. Baird got "television" first.

Now go prepare your missile sheilds. I hear you'll be needing them in a few days time.

Might as well wait for the Hammer. The built in memory controller should to wonders for latency. Of course the 64 bit stuff will be a nice future feature to have.

Do you remember the Osborne computer? It was a very popular CP/m computer. Osborne computer grew like crazy. Osborne announced an "Osborne II" computer, and IIRC, sales dried up, as everyone waited with baited breath for the new model. Because revenue shrunk Osborne couldn't afford to finish development of the new model. Then the IBMPC came out, and his target market disappeared.

If too many people hold off purchasing an AMD now, because they want to wait for the newest, whiz-bang thing, then the possibility exists that AMD will not be able to finance the development of the K8 on time, or even that AMD will go bust.

In the old days (ie pre 80s, pre software patents, etc), the people doing the inventing weren't the ones that did the patent filing, and when developing some new breakthrough, running to the patent office wasn't the first thing that came to mind (of the engineer, at least).

The US Patent office has changed their minds 3 times over who invented the microprocessor. That was the 1968-1971 era, perhaps the biggest invention of the last 50 years, and nobody kept records!

"[Ted] Hoff stated that Intel's patent filing was somewhat casual and that they put their time into making the 4004 work rather that the patent process." So when there is competition, the person that rushes to the patent office with an idea on paper is better rewarded than the person that takes the time to develop and implement it.

Philo Taylor Farnsworth built on Bairds ideas to produce an all electric television. It is quite incredible to me that this seems to go unnoticed by so many.

Indeed, http://www.inventorsmuseum.com/television.htm fails to even mention Bairds name!

An excellent resource for those interested is http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/baird . tml

Replying to my own post, but here's something that explains J.L.Baird's significant contributions and gives dates:
John Logie Baird
Dan

"PC" is an alternate term for a general-purpose microcomputer. I know because I'm old and I was there. If you don't believe me, then believe someone else.

Although the author may be responding to Seymour Cray's first supercomputers circa 1960 it is untrue that complex computations weren't being performed electronically until the 1960s.

The History of Unisys shows the earliest milestones with the following one almost certainly qualifying as "complex computation":

1952 UNIVAC makes history by predicting the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as U.S. president before polls close.

The site does not describe computing before the 1900's. But there were ancient computing devices that do deserve recognition. Many ancient computing devices never had moving parts, so they could not be easily identified as machines. This shows how advanced they were for their time. Stonehenge is a great example.

Some links

Two timelines here and here which date well back into B.C.

There is even an ancient Greek clocklike machine over two thousand years old that can be found here.

For those who want links to every type of computing, even modern.

"Early 90's"? I don't think so. I ran a C-64 from 1982 to 1988. By 1988 you would pretty much get laughed at if you were still running a C-64 machine. Everyone had moved to PCs by then. Commodore tried updating the design with the Commodore 128 circa 1986, but that went nowhere.

Commodore launched the Amiga line in the late 80's, which WAS able to carry them into the early 90's, but still by 1993-1994 they had completely augered in.

Click here for a good Commodore VIC20/64/Amiga history

Click here for another

My motivation is that I work for Borland. ActiveX isn't my area, but there's a certain feeling (not only by people who work here!) that our support for ActiveX is better than MS's.

A lot of people prefer Delphi (which uses an OO variant of Pascal in place of VB's pseudo-OO BASIC) because Delphi produces smaller, faster, and more reliable object files. The differences in syntax take some getting use to, but people who have used both much prefer Delphi for creating ActiveX components. It probably makes a big difference that component architecture is an afterthought in MS's toolset, but a basic part of the Delphi design.

Then for C++ diehards, there's C++Builder, which co-exists with Delphi a lot better than Visual C++ co-exists with VB. And there are those who think it supports ActiveX, MFC, and ATL better than VC does. Most of all, C++Builder treats ActiveX components as components, not some weird entity you have to kludge into your app.

Perhaps I can make up for such shameless spamming by suggesting that your real problem is a resistence to component-based programming. This is a powerful programming model, and VB's success is based on its semi-support for it. Perhaps converting your existing code base to this model would improve productivity enough to pay for the conversion.

A history of BASIC

"Kemeny and Kurtz never protected BASIC by copyright or patent, preferring to let it be in the public domain so it would be readily available to all people. "

"The version of BASIC created by Bill Gates and Paul Allen for the MITS Altair in 1975 was an interpreted language. ..... Of this version of BASIC, Kemeny and Kurtz said, 'A remarkable achievement, but disastrous to the BASIC language. Compromises had to be made, to be sure, but among the compromises were many mistakes.' "

more:
Google findings on {"software flap" BASIC}
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According to this site, the first personal computer was Simon, c. 1950, a relay and paper-tape affair. You can argue with their definitions, but it has a lot of interesting historical machines.

I don't think there will be a problem with the clearance, since Electronic Arts purchased Origin Systems a while back. Here is an excerpt from the Jones Multimedia Encyclopedia webpage:

"In 1992, it acquired Origin Systems Inc, a pubblisher of fantasy and action simulation games for CD-ROM,including Ultima and Wing Commander."

The above webpage can be found here.

A History of BASIC (Jones Telecommunication & Multimedia Encycolpedia)

BASIC (Wikipedia)

Re: Scripting vs. Programming language vs. 4GL? (comp.compilers article by David Wright)

This is good because it ensures the long-term survival of Blogger. The licensing deal gives Pyra Ltd. the money to continue to maintain (and scale) its servers, upgrade the technology, and possibly work on a more viable business model (like selling Blogger Pro, or finally completing the underlying architecture, the project-management software simply called Pyra).

Meanwhile, the most popular and easiest-to-use weblog-software gets an even bigger audience, through Trellix partners such as About and Tripod. Soon people at those services will have something like a checkbox option to start a blog; won't that be an explosion! This will lead to competitive pressure for other services like Geocities to offer something similar.

For those of you too young to remember, Dan Bricklin of Trellix is one of the original independent software developers, from back in the 1980s. His first major product, Visicalc, basically invented the spreadsheet program concept from scratch. [You can even download an MS-DOS executable!] Maybe someone else would have had the idea of putting a paper spreadsheet on the screen and letting you enter not only numbers but equations, but he was the first, and it revolutionized the PC industry. Later he was responsible for Dan Bricklin's Demo (a quick way to mock-up several screens of potential software for clients, sort of a mix of Powerpoint and Flash in its day -- and still sold as Demo-It!), and then Trellix, which was ahead of its time as a templating engine. Templates are all the rage now, but they weren't an obvious next way to go a few years back.

And basically it shows what kind of a guy Bricklin is; his company could easily have jealously set out to clone Blogger instead, but he saw an existing userbase and brand and also saw a way to redeem karma points (you know, the OLD kind of karma points, the kind that accumulate until you die) by saving a company roughly the way that Lotus (in those days the #2 or #3 commercial software vendor) saved HIS company way back when.

Blogger is certainly limited in some ways. It's dead simple, which makes it easy to set up for your grandma, and it offers online posting from almost anywhere. But it doesn't have discussions (said to be in unreleased Blogger Pro) and it doesn't let you do anything outside the blog format, so you can't use it to manage your entire site. And if you're at /. you may be interested in hacking code anyway. In that case there are certainly alternatives -- LiveJournal and Greymatter among them, and sliding up to the big boys like Slashcode, Zope and PHP Nuke. (There are also the hosted solutions, like Pitas or Dave Winer's Manila, itself the center of an interesting tangential experiment in content-management, Radio.) Those are certainly better for managing a wide-ranging site, and they allow membership and member content creation as well.

I started out with Blogger (I was one of the first users), and though I've been working with a couple of the more comprehensive products behind the scenes, for other purposes, I still do my weblog with Blogger. There's just no reason to change. And now with the Trellix investment, I don't have to worry about Pyra doing the fish-on-the-beach thing.

Just remember that not everyone is interested in -- or capable of -- hacking code just to post their thoughts every day. If you want to play with code, and I have no problem believing that's true of most Slashdotters, Blogger may not be right for you. But it's probably right for a lot of people.
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lake effect weblog

Knuth's plan to become a music major changed when he was offered a physics scholarship at Case Institute of Technology (now Case Western Reserve). His turn toward math came during his sophomore year when a particularly difficult professor assigned a special problem, offering an immediate "A" in the class to any student who could solve it. Although like most of the other students, Knuth considered the problem unsolvable, he made an attempt at it one day when he found himself with some free time, having missed the bus that was taking the marching band to a performance. By what he states was "a stroke of luck," he solved the problem in short order, earned his "A," and skipped class for the rest of the semester. Although Knuth reports that he felt guilty about skipping class, he was obviously able to overcome the lost instruction because the following year he earned an "A" in abstract mathematics and was given the job of grading papers for the very course he had failed to attend.

since, as a mere aspiring (read: native-speaking) tech head from somewhere in the sticks, I can clearly remember the VIC20, C64, and C128 that occupied old color tv sets in my house growing up. I also remember renumbering literally hundreds of lines of basic code because I was too stupid to number by tens. So when I see people still roughing their way through these antique machnines, I've gotta chuckle. It occurs to me that there was one old 8-bit machine which might just be ideal for WAP and other "tiny" codes: the Timex Sinclair 1000. Does anybody remember these machines? Had as much as 16k of ram if you bought this funny box that hung on the back, a little bitty thermal printer, and a tiny little pressure-sensitive "keyboard" that could guarantee its user Carpal Tunnel Syndrome after about two weeks of regular use. These little guys did have potential, though - there was a winery across the street from me where the owner used one to do all his books! I think the beauty of the T/S 1000 was how streamlined, not to mention tiny they were. Maybe somebody else with way too much time on his hands could dummy up some code to make one of these things into a hot lil' internet deck. Yeah, right!

"Unix was written long before Digital" ... maybe on your planet, but not on planet Earth. Unix was developed on Digital PDP-series mini-computers (started on a PDP-7, continued on a PDP-11/20). You can still buy them. Do a little research next time.

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RIP, Gary Kildall, 1942-1994.