IBM announce a new machine with a hard-drive, A judge declares reverse engineering is legal and Microsoft wins a civil case against spammer Paul Fox. All on today’s On This Day from TEST Huddle.
1956 – IBM announce a computer with a hard Drive
On This day in 1956, International Business Machines (IBM) introduces the IBM 305 RAMAC. It is the first commercial computer to feature a magnetic disk storage system (hard drive). The computer is capable of storing 20MB of data. IBM lab leader Reynold B. Johnson (later called the “father” of the disk drive) developed a way to store data on a metal disk rather than the traditional tape or drum. The RAMAC (random access method of accounting and control) drive features fifty double-sided two-foot diameter disks or “platters,” each operated by an arm and one read/write head. Each disk has a capacity of about 5MB each with a transfer rate is 8800 characters per second, and each drive costs $50,000. It marks a revolution in computing as it the first business computer designed to provide businesses with real time accounting.
1992 – Reverse Engineering is Legal
A US Court of Appeals rules that reverse engineering is a legitimate business practice. The ruling comes in the Nintendo vs Atari copyright infringement case. The court rules, however, that Atari had infringed Nintendo copyrights for other reasons. One famous exapmle of reverse engineering was Phoenix Technologies reverse engineering of IBM’s BIOS. The company asked one set of programmers to go through 8kb of code and write out what each line of code did. Then they gave that to a new set of programmers who had never seen IBM’s BIOS and asked them to build a BIOS based on those instructions. It’s called the Clean Room approach. Reverse engineering is popular for both hardware and software.
2006 – Spamming does not Pay
In a European court, Microsoft wins the largest civil judgement ever won against a spammer in Europe. Paul Fox is ordered to pay £45,000 to Microsoft after the court finds that he breached Microsoft’s terms and conditions of service that forbids users to send spam or send spam through its email service. Microsoft found that some users were getting over two hundred fifty messages in a single day.
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.
Images: Wikipedia
