This Day in Computer History: September 10

This Day in Computer History: September 10
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This Day in Computer History

1990

The first Internet search engine in history, Archie, is officially launched by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and Mike Parker, three students at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. The first version of Archie is a simple program that crawls a list of FTP archives once a month to compile a listing, however it would evolve to use telnet, email, and, much later, the World Wide Web to index data.

1991

Bob Alberti, Farhad Anklesaria, Paul Lindner, Mark McCahill, and Dan Torrey of the University of Minnesota publicly announced the Gopher protocol, one of the earliest internet protocol designed to search and retrieve documents. For the following three years, the Gopher would be one of the single most ubiquitous tools on the web, however, in 1993, the appearance of Mosaic marked the beginning of its end, as most browsers duplicated the Gopher protocol’s functionality. By the advent of Internet Explorer, it will have all but disappeared for use. It draws its name from both the mascot of the University, the “Golden Gopher” and from a play on its purpose, to “go for” information.

1996

The Board of Directors of the ground-breaking Boston Computer Society unanimously decided to disband all chapters of the non-profit organization. Jonathan Rotenberg established the group in 1977 at the age of thirteen for computer hobbyists and professionals to come together to exchange information about computers. At the time the BCS was thought to be the world’s largest and oldest computer organization. In 1989, it reached a peak membership of thirty-one thousand.

1999

America Online announces that William Raduchel, currently the chief strategy officer of Sun Microsystems, will step into the position of chief technology officer for AOL, succeeding Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed court papers in which it characterized the testimony of Microsoft’s Chairman, William “Bill” Gates in the antitrust trial as “bizarre” and “not credible.”

2002

Apple Computer announced that beginning in January, all of its computers would ship with only Mac OS X installed. The announcement represents a large step forward for the operating system, as less than a year previous, version 10.1 of OS X had only just addressed serious concerns in the Apple community with performance and feature improvements in the original OS X release, but with continued reliance on OS 9.

Version 8.4 of the Tcl/Tk programming language was released.

2003

Adobe Systems released the seventh version of their HTML editor, Dreamweaver MX 2004.

This post is part of the series: A Chronology of Computer History: This Day in History

This series provides a daily account of what happened on this day in the history of computing and technology. Discussing developments, breaking news, new releases and global implications that occurred as a result of these ground breaking events.

  1. This Day in Computer History: September 2
  2. This Day in Computer History: September 3
  3. This Day in Computer History: September 4
  4. This Day in Computer History: September 5
  5. This Day in Computer History: September 6
  6. This Day in Computer History: September 7
  7. This Day in Computer History: September 8
  8. This Day in Computer History: September 9
  9. This Day in Computer History: September 10
  10. This Day in Computer History: September 11
  11. This Day in Computer History: September 12
  12. This Day in Computer History: September 13
  13. This Day in Computer History: September 14
  14. This Day in Computer History: September 15
  15. This Day in Computer History: September 16
  16. This Day in Computer History: September 17
  17. This Day in Computer History: September 18
  18. This Day in Computer History: September 19
  19. This Day in Computer History: September 20
  20. This Day in Computer History: September 21
  21. This Day in Computer History: September 22
  22. This Day in Computer History: September 23
  23. This Day in Computer History: September 24
  24. This Day in Computer History: September 26
  25. This Day in Computer History: September 27
  26. This Day in Computer History: September 28
  27. This Day in Computer History: September 29
  28. This Day in Computer History: September 30