Mike Williams Club – The Blog – Weirder words were never written!

Daily Tech History: September 16, 1959 — The Xerox 914 Copier Debuts

The Xerox 914, the first successful plain-paper photocopier, introduced in 1959

On September 16, 1959, the Xerox 914 was introduced to the public in a live televised demonstration from the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York City. It was the first automatic, plain-paper copier that ordinary offices could actually use, and it’s the machine that turned “xerox” from a company name into a verb.

Before the 914, copying a document usually meant messy carbon paper, special coated paper, or sending it out to a print shop. The 914 let anyone feed in a regular sheet and get a dry copy back in seconds, at the push of a button. It was a commercial gamble for the Haloid Xerox company, which famously leased the machines instead of selling them outright since the price tag was so high, and that bet paid off enormously: the 914 became one of the best-selling industrial products in American history and built the foundation of the modern Xerox Corporation.

The launch wasn’t entirely smooth, though. By some accounts, one of the two demo units on hand that day actually caught fire during testing, which is a fitting bit of chaos behind a product about to become a fixture of office life for decades. Xerox even had to install small fire extinguishers, marketed as “scorch eliminators,” inside early production units just in case.

Source: Wikipedia — Xerox 914

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

September 16, 2026 by Mike Williams Daily Tech History 0

Daily Tech History: September 14, 1956 — IBM Announces the RAMAC, the First Hard Disk Drive

IBM 350 RAMAC disk storage unit, the first commercial hard disk drive, announced in 1956

On September 14, 1956, IBM publicly announced the RAMAC 305 system, built around the IBM 350 disk storage unit — the world’s first commercial hard disk drive. Two refrigerator-sized cabinets held 50 spinning magnetic platters that together stored about 5 megabytes, a staggering capacity for the time delivered by a machine that weighed over a ton and had to be moved by forklift.

What made RAMAC a turning point wasn’t just the storage size, it was the “random access” part of its name. Earlier computers relied on magnetic tape, which meant reading data in strict sequential order, like fast-forwarding a cassette to find one song. RAMAC’s disk heads could instead jump straight to any piece of data, which is the same basic principle underlying every hard drive and SSD in use today. Banks and insurers were early customers, using it for real-time accounting and inventory tracking rather than the batch-processed reports that had defined computing up to that point.

RAMAC’s reign at the top was short but its legacy was not: IBM kept building on the disk-drive concept for decades, and the RAMAC name is often cited as the true starting point of the data storage industry. A working RAMAC unit is preserved today at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Source: Wikipedia — IBM 305 RAMAC

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

September 14, 2026 by Mike Williams Daily Tech History 0

Daily Tech History: September 13, 1959 — Luna 2 Becomes First Human-Made Object to Reach the Moon

Luna 2 Soviet spacecraft that impacted the Moon in 1959

On September 13, 1959, the Soviet probe Luna 2 slammed into the Moon, becoming the first human-made object in history to touch another world. It hit near the Sea of Serenity roughly 160 miles from where Apollo 15 would land twelve years later, closing out a fast three-day trip after launching from Baikonur on September 12.

Luna 2 wasn’t built to land softly — there was no way to slow a spacecraft down for a gentle touchdown yet, so “impact” was the plan from the start. Packed into its instrument shell were six experiments meant to sniff out radiation, magnetic fields, and micrometeorites around the Moon. The readings came back mostly negative — no real magnetic field, no radiation belts — which was itself useful science, ruling out theories about the Moon’s composition and environment. Just before impact, the probe scattered small Soviet-emblem pennants across the lunar surface, a literal flag-planting that put the USSR unmistakably ahead in the early space race. Khrushchev later gave Eisenhower a replica of one of those emblem spheres, turning a hunk of Cold War hardware into a diplomatic gift.

The mission mattered less for the science than for the message: two years after Sputnik, the Soviets could now hit a target a quarter-million miles away. It set the pace for a decade of increasingly ambitious lunar missions from both sides that eventually put people on the Moon.

Source: Wikipedia, NASA

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

September 13, 2026 by Mike Williams Daily Tech History 0

Daily Tech History: September 12, 1958 — The First Integrated Circuit

Jack Kilby, inventor of the integrated circuit

On September 12, 1958, Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit at Texas Instruments in Dallas. Kilby, a newly hired engineer who hadn’t yet earned enough vacation time to join his colleagues on their summer break, used the quiet lab to test an idea he’d been sketching out: put multiple electronic components on a single piece of semiconductor material instead of wiring them together separately. His prototype was a tiny sliver of germanium, about the size of a paperclip, with a transistor, resistors, and a capacitor etched into it and connected by fine gold “flying wires.” When he powered it up as an oscillator circuit, it worked.

It’s hard to overstate how much that little germanium sliver changed. Before Kilby’s circuit, engineers built electronics the way they always had, one discrete component at a time, hand-soldered and wired together, which put a hard ceiling on how complex and reliable a device could be. By proving that a whole circuit could exist on one chip, Kilby (working independently and around the same time as Robert Noyce at Fairchild, who solved the manufacturing side of the same idea) laid the groundwork for the integrated circuit industry. Texas Instruments shipped its first commercial IC-based product in 1960, and the basic concept scaled from a handful of components on a chip to the billions packed into a modern processor. Kilby won the Nobel Prize in Physics for the work in 2000.

Source: Computer History Museum, “This Day in History”

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

September 12, 2026 by Mike Williams Daily Tech History 0

September 11, 2001

New Yorkers may have forgotten about it but I have not.

Smoke flames twin towers attacks World Trade September 11 2001.

September 11, 2026 by Mike Williams Sadness 0

Daily Tech History: September 11, 1940 — First Public Demonstration of Remote Computing

George Stibitz, the Bell Labs researcher who demonstrated remote computing in 1940

On September 11, 1940, Bell Labs researcher George Stibitz gave the world’s first public demonstration of remote computing — dialing into a computer over ordinary telephone lines from hundreds of miles away.

The machine in question was the Complex Number Calculator, a relay-based computer Stibitz and colleague Samuel Williams had built at Bell Labs in New York and gotten running earlier that year. For a joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, Stibitz had a teletype terminal installed in the lecture hall and connected it back to the calculator in New York over a leased telephone line. Audience members called out complex-number equations, an operator typed them into the teletype, and about a minute later the answer clattered back from a machine none of them could see. Mathematicians in the room — including Norbert Wiener and John Mauchly, both of whom would go on to shape early computing themselves — watched a computation happen somewhere else entirely.

It’s a small, almost quaint scene by today’s standards, but the underlying idea is exactly the one modern computing runs on: a person at a terminal using processing power that lives somewhere else, accessed over a communications line. That’s the same basic premise behind everything from time-sharing mainframes in the 1960s to the cloud servers powering apps today. Stibitz’s Dartmouth demo is widely cited as the first time the public saw it work.

Source: Computer History Museum, EDN

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

September 11, 2026 by Mike Williams Daily Tech History 0

Daily Tech History: September 10, 2008 — The Large Hadron Collider’s First Beam

A section of the Large Hadron Collider tunnel at CERN showing superconducting magnets

On September 10, 2008, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN successfully sent its first beam of protons all the way around its 27-kilometer ring beneath the Swiss-French border. At 10:28 a.m. local time, engineers watched a beam travel the full loop of the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator for the first time, capping off roughly two decades of design, funding battles, and construction. The moment was broadcast live around the globe and reportedly reached an audience of more than a billion people.

The LHC wasn’t just a physics milestone — it was one of the most ambitious engineering projects in tech history. Built inside a tunnel originally dug for CERN’s previous accelerator, it relies on thousands of superconducting magnets cooled to colder than outer space to bend proton beams to nearly the speed of light before smashing them together. That first-beam success in 2008 was short-lived; a faulty electrical connection between two magnets caused a serious fault just nine days later, forcing over a year of repairs. But the LHC came back strong, and by 2012 its detectors had confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, the long-sought particle that explains how other particles get their mass.

Source: CERN — First beam in the LHC, History.com — CERN Large Hadron Collider is powered up

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

September 10, 2026 by Mike Williams Daily Tech History 0

Daily Tech History: September 9, 1999 — Sega Launches the Dreamcast in North America

On September 9, 1999, Sega launched the Dreamcast in North America, built around a marketing hook of “9/9/99 for $199.” The console broke the U.S. video game industry’s single-day sales record on arrival, selling more than 225,000 units and pulling in roughly $98.4 million in its first 24 hours, with 19 launch titles on shelves including Sonic Adventure and Soulcalibur.

The Dreamcast was the first console of what’s now called the sixth generation, beating both the PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox to market, and it introduced ideas that felt ahead of their time: a built-in modem, online play baked into several launch games, and a slick visual memory card (the VMU) with its own tiny screen. Sales stayed hot through the end of 1999, with Sega crossing a million units sold in North America by early November and grabbing roughly 31% of the market by Christmas. It just wasn’t enough to hold off Sony’s PS2 juggernaut the following year, and Sega discontinued the Dreamcast in 2001, ending its run as a console maker for good.

Also on this day: September 9 has another well-known entry in tech folklore — in 1947, engineers working on the Harvard Mark II computer found a moth jammed in one of its relays, an incident widely credited with popularizing the term “debugging.”

Source: Wikipedia

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

September 9, 2026 by Mike Williams Daily Tech History 0

Daily Tech History: September 9, 1947 — The First Computer “Bug” Is Found

A moth resting on a rock, evoking the moth found in the Harvard Mark II computer's relay in 1947

On September 9, 1947, a team working on the Harvard Mark II computer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, found a moth wedged between the contacts of relay #70 in panel F. The insect had shorted out the relay and was causing the machine to malfunction. Once the operators fished it out, someone taped the moth directly into the computer’s logbook and wrote beside it: “First actual case of bug being found.”

The word “bug” for a mechanical or electrical fault actually predates this by decades — Thomas Edison used it in his notebooks back in the 1870s. But the Mark II moth is the moment the term got a literal, physical punchline, and it’s widely credited with popularizing “debugging” as the word for tracking down and fixing the problem. Grace Hopper, the pioneering programmer and future Navy rear admiral who was part of the Mark II team, wasn’t the one who taped in the moth, but she loved the story and told it often in her lectures for years afterward, which helped cement it in computing folklore. The actual logbook page, moth and all, now lives in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

It’s a fitting bit of trivia for an industry that still spends a huge share of its time hunting down bugs, just ones made of code instead of insect wings. Next time you’re staring down a stack trace, you can take small comfort in knowing engineers have been “debugging” machines for nearly 80 years — moth included.

Source: Computer History Museum

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

September 9, 2026 by Mike Williams Daily Tech History 0

Daily Tech History: September 8, 2003 — The RIAA Starts Suing Its Own Customers

Stack of CDs in cases on a wooden shelf, evoking the early-2000s era of CD ripping and file sharing

On September 8, 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America filed 261 federal lawsuits against individual music fans accused of illegally sharing songs on peer-to-peer networks like Kazaa and Morpheus. It was the opening shot in what became a years-long legal campaign against the record industry’s own customers, at a moment when Napster-style file sharing had already upended how people got their music.

The RIAA framed the targets as “major offenders,” each accused of sharing on average more than a thousand copyrighted files. In practice, the dragnet caught far more sympathetic defendants than habitual pirates: a Yale professor, an unemployed woman in New York, an elderly man who barely used his computer, and — most notoriously — a 12-year-old girl in New York City public housing whose family ended up settling for $2,000 and a public apology. Because federal law allowed damages up to $150,000 per shared song, even ordinary users faced financially ruinous exposure, and the lawsuits became a case study in how not to win over the public during a piracy crackdown.

The RIAA kept filing suits like this for years afterward, eventually shifting strategy toward suing file-sharing services directly and, later, working with ISPs on graduated-response warnings instead. The episode remains a touchstone in the history of digital copyright enforcement and helped shape the streaming-first model the music industry relies on today.

Source: History.com

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

September 8, 2026 by Mike Williams Daily Tech History 0