Today in Tech History: June 22, 2008 Video
Today in Tech History: June 22, 2008 Video Transcript
Hi, I'm Molly Wood. It's June 22, 2008, and here's what happened today in technology history. On this date in 1978, astronomer James Christy discovered Charon, a satellite of the not-a-planet-or-a-dwarf-planet Plutoid known as Pluto. Charon is now also called Pluto 1, since it's been discovered that Pluto actually has three moons. Which, if that doesn't make you a planet, I don't know what does. Seriously. Today is the birth date [1910] of German engineer Konrad Zuse, a computer pioneer who created the world's first program-controlled, Turing-complete computer. It was called the Z3 and it was completed in 1941. He also designed the first high-level computer programming language, and founded the first computer startup company, in 1946. Zuse died in 1995. And today marks the passing of Bob Bemer[2004], an American computer scientist sometimes called the Father of ASCII for his contributions to that character codeset. He also made some of the first published attempts to prepare for the Year 2000 problem -- as early as 1971, and in the late 1990s, he invented an approach to Y2K date conversion as a fix for the terrifying bug. And that's all the tech history for today, friends. Go sign a "save the Planet Pluto" petition or something. I'll see you back here tomorrow.
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