By Mike Manfredi
So after a bit of a hiatus, I’d like to bring back the Tech History postings, but rather than it being a daily post, I’ve decided to change things up and make this a weekly installment. So, to kick things off, here are the significant technological events that happend during this week in history
Satellite Television
April 24th, 1962 marks the first time in history that TV signals were relayed by a satellite. NASA launched the satellite Echo I in August of 1960, which at the time was the largest object yet to go into space. Echo Iwas made of Mylar and coated with aluminum, and called by one newspaper at the time the “world’s largest, most visible and yet most vulnerable artificial satellite.” Due to its aluminum coating, the satellite was able to passively reflect any signals that were aimed at it. On this day in 1962, scientists at M.I.T. successfully bounced television signals sent from a lab in California and received in Massachusetts.
Steam Power takes the Wind out of the Sales
164 years ago, the first steam powered ships successfully sailed across the Atlantic Ocean, putting an end to the need for relying on the wind to power ocean vessels. On April 4th 1838, the 700-ton steamship Sirius left Cork, Ireland, and 4 days later on April 8th, the 1250-ton steamship Great Western left Bristol, England. Both had destinations of
New York City. Both ships arrived successfully in New York on April 23rd, 1838, making the entire trip using only steam power.
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By Mike Manfredi
Say Your Prayers and 
Take Your Vitamins
Today we are able to celebrate the life of English scientist Walter Norman Haworth, the former Noble Prize winner for being the first to synthetically produce a vitamin. Ironically March 19th is the day that Haworth was born, in 1883, and also the day that he passed away, in 1950. Born in Chorley, Lancashire, England, Haworth finished grade school at the age of 14 and then went to work in a linoleum factory with his father. He was thoroughly unhappy with this line of work, and decided at the age of 20 to attend University, despite his parents’ displeasure. In just 7 years, he was able to gain the first of his two doctorates.
Haworth spent the bulk of his early career researching carbohydrates, during which he was able to figure out the structure of carbohydrate molecules. His methods are still commonly used today. His methods were responsible for allowing him to figure out the molecular structure of hexuronic acid, or what is more commonly known as vitamin C. This marks the first time in history that anyone was able to artificially make a vitamin, and earned Mr. Haworth the Nobel Prize.
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By Mike Manfredi
Celebrating the Life and Times of Two of the Original Geeks
Today we celebrate the life and accomplishments of John Frederic Daniell, a decorated British scientist in the fields of chemistry and meteorology. Yesterday we celebrated his birthday in London in 1790. Today is the anniversary of Daniell’s death, as he suddenly passed away just one day after his 55th birthday while attending a meeting at the prestigious Royal Society.
The British scholar was responsible for a number of successes and contributions to the world of science. He developed a new process for generating gas from resin and turpentine. He also invented a new hygrometer (device for measuring humidity) and a new pyrometer (thermometer for measuring very high temperatures). Both of these inventions became widely used in the meteorology community. However, Daniell is most renowned for inventing the first working electric battery.
Today we also are able to celebrate the birth of Joseph Priestley, the man responsible for inventing carbonation. Joseph turns 270 today, and ironically enough I had a difficult time fitting all of those candles on his cake. Priestly spent some time living near a brewery in Leads, England, and out of curiosity began studying the clouds produced during the fermenting process. He soon discovered that the gas in these clouds was carbon dioxide, and that he was able to dissolve this gas with water, resulting in a bubbly beverage that we commonly refer to today as soda water.
You can also meet our own resident geek, the WhatsUp Gold Guru.
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By David Karp
It’s good to stretch the ol’ brain once in a while. To that end, I popped in to MIT’s winter term to check out a workshop called “Coolhunting and Coolfarming through Swarm Creativity.” I don’t pretend to understand all of what was discussed, but I was struck by the analogies between the social network mapping shown, and the data network mapping performed by tools like WhatsUp Gold.
Prof. Peter Gloor showed off a tool that takes input from email records or online communities to create maps of social or business interactions, and Chandrika Samarth showed a real-life case study of how such mapping can lead to real process improvements in a real workplace, in this case a hospital. Characteristics like “betweenness,” “connectedness” and “sharing” are important attributes of social network nodes, also known as people. The charts show the communication between people as lines of length and thickness corresponding to the frequency and intensity of the interaction. Interesting data visualization, indeed.
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By Peter Christensen
Interesting thing virtualization, everyone is talking about it and lots of IT professionals are investigating it and quite a few are implementing it.
Virtualization offer a whole host of benefits; most significant of which are:
• hardware cost savings
• reduced server focused infrastructure to manage.
There are other points to consider with respect to virtualization as well as it does represent some risks as well. Specifically:
• total software cost – virtualization cost component is introduced
• for SMBs – introduces risk with a single point of failure
Putting the risks and benefits aside, we think the real question is how to manage it. While there are vendor specific monitoring and management solutions, do IT and network management professionals really want or need another dashboard or management tool to worry about?
How about a single management platform that embraces networks (single site or multi-site), servers (virtualized or otherwise) and any other network attached device and doesn’t cost your entire yearly IT budget?
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By David Karp
Ok, that was bad. I freely admit it. But that doesn’t change the fact that good ol’ TCP/IP is in fact 25 years old, as I was tipped off to by Jeff Caruso’s Network World blog.
It was Jan. 1, 1983, when Internet precursor ARPANET switched over fully to TCP/IP. TCP/IP is so well-known that it’s one of those acronyms we no longer spell out at Network World, but in honor of the date, we should address this underappreciated and taken-for-granted bit of engineering by its full name, Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol.
As I like to say, you learn something new every day. I wonder if future generations of network types look to us old folks and ask, “Do you remember where you were when TCP/IP was born?”
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