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Thomas E. Kurtz
Thomas Eugene Kurtz (February 22, 1928 – November 12, 2024) was an American computer scientist and educator. A Dartmouth professor of mathematics, he and colleague John G. Kemeny are best known for co-developing the BASIC programming language and the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System in 1963 and 1964. These innovations made computing more accessible by simplifying programming for non-experts and allowing multiple users to share a single computer, transforming how computers were used in education and research. For his role in creating BASIC, the IEEE honored Kurtz in 1991 with the Computer Pioneer Award, and in 1994, he was inducted as a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. Early life and education Thomas Kurtz was born on February 22, 1928, in Oak Park, Illinois, United States, to Helen Bell Kurtz and Oscar Christ Kurtz. His father, a German-American, worked for the Lions Clubs International headquarters, holding various roles. From an early age, Kurtz developed an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oak Park, Illinois
Oak Park is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States, adjacent to Chicago. It is the List of municipalities in Illinois, 26th-most populous municipality in Illinois, with a population of 54,318 as of the 2020 census. Oak Park was first settled in 1835 and later incorporated in 1902, when it separated from Cicero, Illinois, Cicero. It is closely tied to the smaller town of River Forest, Illinois, River Forest sharing a chamber of commerce and a high school, Oak Park and River Forest High School. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright and his wife settled in Oak Park in 1889, and his work heavily influenced local architecture and design, including the Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio. Over the years, rapid development was spurred by railroads and streetcars connecting the village to jobs in nearby Chicago. In 1968, Oak Park passed the Open Housing Ordinance, which helped devise strategies to integrate the village rather than resegregate. Today, Oak Park remains ethnically diverse a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Tukey
John Wilder Tukey (; June 16, 1915 – July 26, 2000) was an American mathematician and statistician, best known for the development of the fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm and box plot. The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distribution, the Tukey test of additivity, and the Teichmüller–Tukey lemma all bear his name. He is also credited with coining the term '' bit'' and the first published use of the word ''software''. Biography Tukey was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1915, to a Latin teacher father and a private tutor. He was mainly taught by his mother and attended regular classes only for certain subjects like French. Tukey obtained a B.A. in 1936 and M.S. in 1937 in chemistry, from Brown University, before moving to Princeton University, where in 1939 he received a PhD in mathematics after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "On denumerability in topology". During World War II, Tukey worked at the Fire Control Research Office and coll ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Altair 8800
The Altair 8800 is a microcomputer introduced in 1974 by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) based on the Intel 8080 CPU. It was the first commercially successful personal computer. Interest in the Altair 8800 grew quickly after it was featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of ''Popular Electronics''. It was sold by mail order through advertisements in ''Popular Electronics'', ''Radio-Electronics'', and in other hobbyist magazines. The Altair 8800 had no built-in screen or video output, so it would have to be connected to a serial terminal (such as a VT100-compatible terminal) to have any output. To connect it to a terminal, a serial interface card had to be installed. Alternatively, the Altair could be programmed using its front-panel switches. According to the personal computer pioneer Harry Garland, the Altair 8800 was the product that catalyzed the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s. The computer bus designed for the Altair became a ''de facto'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Allen
Paul Gardner Allen (January 21, 1953 – October 15, 2018) was an American businessman, computer programmer, and investor. He co-founded Microsoft, Microsoft Corporation with his childhood friend Bill Gates in 1975, which was followed by the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. Allen was ranked as the The World's Billionaires, 44th-wealthiest person in the world by ''Forbes'' with an estimated net worth of $20.3 billion at the time of his death in October 2018. Allen quit from day-to-day work at Microsoft in early 1983 after a Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, remaining on its board as vice-chairman. He and his sister, Jody Allen, founded Vulcan Inc. in 1986, a privately held company that managed his business and philanthropic efforts. At the time of his death, he had a multi-billion dollar investment portfolio, including technology and media companies, scientific research, real estate holdings, private space flight ventures, and stakes in other sectors. He owned the Se ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ecma International
Ecma International () is a Nonprofit organization, nonprofit standards organization for information and communication systems. It acquired its current name in 1994, when the European Computer Manufacturers Association (ECMA) changed its name to reflect the organization's global reach and activities. As a consequence, the name is acronym#Pseudo-acronyms and orphan initialisms, no longer considered an acronym and no longer uses full capitalization. The organization was founded in 1961 to standardize computer systems in Europe. Membership is open to large and small companies worldwide that produce, market, or develop computer or communication systems, and have interest and experience in the areas addressed by the group's technical bodies. It is located in Geneva. Aims Ecma aims to develop Standardization, standards and Technical_report, technical reports to facilitate and standardize the use of information communication technology and consumer electronics; encourage the correct u ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Structured Programming
Structured programming is a programming paradigm aimed at improving the clarity, quality, and development time of a computer program by making specific disciplined use of the structured control flow constructs of selection ( if/then/else) and repetition ( while and for), block structures, and subroutines. It emerged in the late 1950s with the appearance of the ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60 programming languages, with the latter including support for block structures. Contributing factors to its popularity and widespread acceptance, at first in academia and later among practitioners, include the discovery of what is now known as the structured program theorem in 1966, and the publication of the influential " Go To Statement Considered Harmful" open letter in 1968 by Dutch computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra, who coined the term "structured programming". Structured programming is most frequently used with deviations that allow for clearer programs in some particular cases, such as whe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bill Gates
William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend Paul Allen. Following the company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO), Gates became a billionaire in 1987—then the youngest ever, at age 31. ''Forbes'' magazine The World's Billionaires, ranked him as the world's wealthiest person for 18 out of 24 years between 1995 and 2017, including 13 years consecutively from 1995 to 2007. He became the first centibillionaire in 1999, when his net worth briefly surpassed $100 billion. According to ''Forbes'', as of May 2025, his net worth stood at US$115.1 billion, making him the thirteenth-richest individual in the world. Born and raised in Seattle, Washington, Gates was privately educated at Lakeside School (Seattle), Lakeside School, where he befriended Allen and developed his computing interests ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum (CHM) is a computer museum in Mountain View, California. The museum presents stories and artifacts of Silicon Valley and the Information Age, and explores the Digital Revolution, computing revolution and its impact on society. History The museum's origins date to 1968 when Gordon Bell began a quest for a historical collection and, at that same time, others were looking to preserve the Whirlwind (computer), Whirlwind computer. The resulting ''Museum Project'' had its first exhibit in 1975, located in a converted coat closet in a Digital Equipment Corporation, DEC lobby. In 1978, the museum, now ''The Digital Computer Museum'' (TDCM), moved to a larger DEC lobby in Marlborough, Massachusetts and opened to the public in September 1979. Maurice Wilkes presented the first lecture at TDCM in 1979 – the presentation of such lectures has continued to the present time. TDCM incorporated as ''The Computer Museum, Boston, The Computer Museum'' (TCM) in 1982. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
IEEE Computer Society
IEEE Computer Society (commonly known as the Computer Society or CS) is a technical society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) dedicated to computing, namely the major areas of hardware, software, standards and people, "advancing the theory, practice, and application of computer and information processing science and technology." It was founded in 1946 and is the largest of 39 technical societies organized under the IEEE Technical Activities Board with over 375,000 members in 150 countries, more than 100,000 being based in the United States alone. It operates as a "global, non-governmental, not-for-profit professional society" publishing 23 peer-reviewed journals, facilitating numerous technical committees, and developing IEEE computing standards, It maintains its headquarters in Washington, DC and additional offices in California, China, and Japan. History The IEEE Computer Society traces its origins to the Subcommittee on Large-Scale Computing, est ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joint Computer Conference
The Joint Computer Conferences were a series of computer conferences in the United States held under various names between 1951 and 1987. The conferences were the venue for presentations and papers representing "cumulative work in the omputerfield." Originally a semi-annual pair, the Western Joint Computer Conference (WJCC) was held annually in the western United States, and a counterpart, the Eastern Joint Computer Conference (EJCC), was held annually in the eastern US. Both conferences were sponsored by an organization known as the '' National Joint Computer Committee'' (NJCC), composed of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) Committee on Computing Devices, and the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) Professional Group on Electronic Computers. In 1962 the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) took over sponsorship and renamed them Fall Joint Computer Conference (FJCC) and Spring Joint ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Federation Of Information Processing Societies
The American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) was an umbrella organization of professional societies established on May 10, 1961, and dissolved in 1990. Its mission was to advance knowledge in the field of information science, and to represent its member societies in international forums. History AFIPS grew out of the National Joint Computer Committee (NJCC), an organization formed in 1951, which held two major computer conferences: the Eastern (EJCC) and Western Joint Computer Conferences (WJCC). The three founding societies of AFIPS were the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE), and the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE). AFIPS represented these societies in the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), formed a year earlier under the auspices of UNESCO. In 1962, AFIPS took over sponsorship of the EJCC and WJCC and renamed them the Spring (SJCC) and Fall Joint Computer Con ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
