6 August 23

On this date 88 years ago (1935), William Coolidge obtained a patent for the cathode ray tube, a critical ingredient of TV and other electronic applications. I knew CRTs primarily from the big-box televisions at home in my childhood, but I worked  with oscilloscopes in physics class laboratories. Early personal computers, including the IBM AT desktops pictured on my tie, used cathode ray tube displays, first (around 1981) for monochrome texts and later (after 1984) for full color displays. The development of liquid crystal displays in the 1990s produced the slim, compact monitors suitable for laptops, and the incredible versatility of LCD and other technologies has made cathode ray tube displays essentially obsolete across the electronics industry.

12 August 21

On this date in 1981, IBM introduced its first personal computer. The IBM PC had an operating system named PC-DOS 1.0. My tie shows the "Personal Computer/AT" from a few years later, among the first models to have a "mouse."

6 August 19

On this date in 1935, William Coolidge received a patent for the cathode ray tube, the major display element for televisions, oscilloscopes and many other electronic devices. My tie features personal computers of the "IBM AT" era, in the 1980s-early 1990s, when the hefty monitors were based on cathode ray tubes.

20 September 17

I'm wearing a computer tie today to honor the 63rd anniversary of the first FORTRAN program. If you remember computer punch cards, you may also recall creating nested DO loops, calling subroutines, and declaring INTEGER variables. The word FORTRAN came from "formula translation" because the language was designed to process mathematical and statistical formulas. I learned to program with FORTRAN for the IBM 1130 at Houghton College, around 1972-73. Today I was surprised to learn that FORTRAN is still in use, although it has been superseded by other programming languages like C++, SQL and Python.

21 April 16

No special occasion -- Mandy Eppley's birthday will be celebrated soon -- so I'm just keeping track of wearing this computer-themed tie today.

20 November 14

This tie features "IBM-AT"-style computers, appropriate to recall Microsoft's release of "Windows 1.0" on this date in 1985. It was a despicable program, intended purely as a knock-off of Apple's first Macintosh operating system. But November 20 has a redeeming unofficial holiday celebration, "Name Your PC Day." What name do you shout (or mumble) when your computer misbehaves?

25 September 13

For this no-notable-occasion day I found this tie which I had not worn for almost three years. Maybe it's time to put this tie in the computer museum, to decorate the displays of corded single-button mice and bulky desktop units with floppy disk drives.

30 November 10

Computer Security Day!

Last weekend my mother-in-law gave me a very thoughtful gift: a sign which I've posted on my office door.

29 October 08

As published in Wikipedia:

The first message ever to be sent over the ARPANET (sent over the first host-to-host connection) occurred at 10:30 PM on October 29, 1969. It was sent by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline and supervised by UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock. The message was sent from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer. The message itself was simply the word "login." The "l" and the "o" transmitted without problem but then the system crashed. Hence, the first message on the ARPANET was "lo". They were able to do the full login about an hour later.

This message, transmitted from Los Angeles to Stanford, marks the very beginning of what has become known as the Internet. The computers on my tie are from the early generations of personal computers, in the 1980s.

18 April 08

On Fridays I am usually un-tied, but today I have to go to a meeting in Frankfort to interview a candidate for a new position at the state's Council on Postsecondary Education. So I'll wear a rather tame computerish tie for that.