Marvin Minsky is born, AMD introduces the Athlon processor and a supercomputer is launched All on today’s On This Day from TestHuddle.
1927 – Marvin Minsky is born
Born on this day in 1927 in New York, Marvin Minsky has since become a leader on thinking on artificial intelligence. After graduation from college he began teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with John McCarthy, in 1959 he founded the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His work has looked at the mapping of neural networks and is known for developing The Society of Mind theory. He was an adviser on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and is referred to in the movie and the book by Arthur C. Clarke. He is currently the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Professor of electrical engineering and computer science.
1999 – AMD introduces the Athlon processor
On this day in 1999, AMD introduced the AMD Athlon processor. The processor went on sale in a number of different speed types ranging from 500MHz to 650MHz.
2001 – A supercomputer is born
The National Science Foundation announces its intentions to invest US$53 million to construct the Distributed Terascale Facility, the most powerful super computer ever developed. It is expected to be capable of making 13.6 trillion calculations per second and will have 600 terabytes of data storage when it is completed in 2002. The computer is actually a multi-site “distributed facility” which is connected by ultra high-speed networking. Th DTF is expected to have at least one single-site computing system which would be capable of five or more teraflops per second (peak) performance.
If you would like to add anything to these events, or know of other significant technology events that happened on this day in history, feel free to comment below.
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