Friday, September 9, 2011

September 9, 2011

Good morning! It's The Nerd's Almanac for Friday, September 9, 2011.

Today is the anniversary of the first remote connection between man and computer, demonstrated by George Stibitz on this date in 1940. Members of the Mathematical Association of America, meeting at Dartmouth College, remotely transmitted problems to a computer located at Bell Laboratories in New York City, and then received the solution, transmitted back to the meeting hall.

This date also marks the anniversary of the first computer bug, found on this date in 1947. It was an actual bug, a moth trapped in one of the relays belonging to the Mark II computer built at Harvard University. While the true etymology (entomology?) of the term's use in computing is dubious, it's still a great story.

This date in 2001, specifically "at exactly 01:46:40 (UTC)", marks the "Unix billennium" which occurred when the numeric representation of the Unix timestamp exceeded nine digits for the first time. It will be three hundred years or so before we add an eleventh digit, so feel free to take advantage of this when writing your code. Future solvers of the EDT (eleven digit timestamp) problem will thank you.

It's the birthday today of Luigi Galvani, born in Bologna in 1737. He discovered the connection between electricity and the nervous system when he twitched dead frog legs with a spark of electricity.

And it's Dennis Ritchie's birthday today. He is a pioneer in the Multics and Unix operating systems and best known for developing the C language, one of the most important programming languages ever created.

Here is a quote for today...

main()
{
    printf("hello, world\n");
}

-- Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, from The C Programming Language.

And that's the almanac for today. Nerds of the world, we salute you!

Sources:
Wikipedia: September 9

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