The Morris Worm

The Morris Worm is the first worm to destroy hundreds and thousands of computers over the web. When the first traces broke out, many were aghast over the way their computers would instantly slow down and eventually hang up. Its effect was so great that within 15 minutes of its release, it has damaged almost 2,000 computers.

 

The Morris Worm was created by its namesake, Robert Morris at the MIT. His was an innocent attempt to try to measure the capacity of the internet. It was not intended to harm thousands of computers in the process. In building the worm, Morris took advantage of the weaknesses of rsh. He also saw the opportunity to bypass the security of simple passwords and Unix sendmail. He created the worm to tap only on the DEC VAX systems running 4BSD. But Morris made a mistake.

 

Morris unintentionally programmed the worm to replicate itself even if there is already an existing one running in the system. Normally, the worm should be programmed in such a way that it will no longer run in a system if there is already an existing similar worm running on it. If this was the case, it would be easier to get rid of the worm and prevent it from spreading. But instead, Morris programmed the worm to run even if there’s already one in existence. The worm is directed to ignore this fact not just once or twice but seven times. This makes it impossible to get rid of the worm in one go. The result of this is the rapid spreading of the worm throughout the system until it became wholly disabled.

 

The damage was so great that Morris was convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. His creation not only introduced the world to the negative effects of technological advancement but also planted the seed for future worm creations.

 

Computer Science

As the name suggests, this is a technical field with reference to the areas it covers, that are related to other fields. Anyone that desires to venture in this field must be prepared to have their minds opened up to other technical fields that relate to it since it has a wide scope of coverage. From technology to practical applications of the same this field proves to be one that engages students in a significant way.

Due to this fact and maybe other reasons that may be attached to this, female students have been rare to find in computer science classes in the past. In addition to this, not many institutions around will be found offering this program which makes it rare in some countries, which have not yet embraced it due to one reason or another.

This has left it as a preserve of a few secluded individuals that are willing to take on the challenge of studying it and are enthusiastic about technological advancements. This is to say that the field of computer science has been predominated by the male gender in the past and this has been the case for a long period of time.

In a move that seems to be a game changer as far as this is concerned, in this day and age, 30 percent of the total enrollment in computer science major at Stanford University is made up of female students. This makes up a total of 214 female students studying this major currently and is a major shift in this institution where the field accounts for 20 percent of the total enrollment of the institution.

This is despite the fact that male students make up the majority of the total population of students at Stanford University with the figures standing at 51 percent while the remaining part is composed of female students. Previously, human biology was topping the list of the programs with most students enrolled which emphasizes the fact that computer science is slowly picking up pace in institutions.

Evolution in the world of today has changed the way the female gender has been perceived in the past and women/ladies are coming out boldly and strongly to justify the fact that certain fields will not remain the preserve of men only in the days to come. This has been replicated in the job market with women taking what was considered “odd” jobs for them in the past.

This kind of enrollment at Stanford University in the field of computer science is just a picture of what is expected in the future, in other men dominated fields and job markets in general and this should be encouraged.

Curta: A Mechanical Drum Calculator

Calculators are essential to the history of computers. They provided the framework and mindset that led to the invention of computers. Although not as emphasized like the evolution involved in computer models, these calculators also underwent a series of developments and upgrades. One such unique invention is that of Curta, a cylindrical handheld calculator that utilizes a drum mechanism to perform basic arithmetic operations.

Curta was the brainchild of Curt Herzstark. He saw the advantage of having a digital device within his reach in place of manually doing all calculations on his own. Thus, he began planning a new model, one that would become the most successful pocket calculator of his time. Even the war did not deter Herzstark from pursuing his goals. At the prodding of the officials in his concentration camp, he began conceptualizing the model, detailing everything needed in each step of the construction process. Soon, production was underway.

Curta is a hand cranked calculator that closely resembles a grenade. The numbers have to be entered via slides wherein one slide contains one number. A total of eight digits can be inputted. When you turn the crank, the number is inputted onto the revolution counter and the result is subsequently displayed on the result counter. Since it relies on a drum mechanism, a simple shift or pull will translate to a different arithmetic operation. Normal position translates to addition while pulling it means subtraction. The same goes for multiplication and division.

When it was finally released to the public in the late 1940s, Curta was deemed to be highly useful. Sports enthusiasts saw its practicality for solving their rallies in terms of time, distance and speed. Its user-friendliness and accurate results also led it to be highly favored by pilots for computing their flight details in terms of weight and balance.

Through the years, Curta was considered to be the most popular and highly successful calculator of all time. This only stopped when electronic calculators were eventually introduced to the market.

Sergey Brin: The Co-Founder of Google

There is no doubt that Google revolutionized the world. It paved the way for extracting available data and delivering it to millions and billions of people around the world. And that’s all thanks to Sergey Brin and his partner, Larry Page.

Brin came from a family of mathematicians. That is why it came natural for him to take up mathematics and computer science at the University of Maryland. But aside from immersing in his studies, Brin has another intellectual hobby – systems development. Brin has long been fascinated with developing systems that could enable easy and fast mining of data.

Upon graduation, Brin took it upon himself to get a PhD in computer science at Stanford University. It was during the orientations where Brin met the one who would be his longtime friend and co-founder of Google, Larry Page. Their initial contempt towards each other was replaced with fondness and respect when they realized that both of them share a common interest. Page’s belief in the importance of citations in a research paper and inferring them in other papers coincided with Brin’s hobby of data mining development.

Soon, they began working on the back link data of the web crawler of BackRub. It was written in both Java and Python and features a number of back links whenever a query was entered. They were initially only working on a paper entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” but subsequent research and algorithm development allowed them to see that they are capable of building a superior search engine.

They created the PageRank algorithm that allowed them to connect the back links to a webpage. But this could only work if they could come up with the new technology that would operate on it. Undeterred, Brin and Page took the computer parts in their laboratory to build the technology that would connect their new search engine to the network.

Upon launch, BackRub was welcomed by the students in Stanford. Its user-friendliness and accessibility induced the great number of users every day. From a handful of users, it quickly climbed to 10,000 in a couple of days.

The success of BackRub and eventually, Google led many to regard Brin and Page as the modern Johannes Gutenberg.

IBM Launched the RT Workstation

In 1986, IBM introduced their first computer workstation – RT PC. RT PC, which is short for RISC Technology Personal Computer, laid the foundations for future spin-offs. Although it performed poorly in the market, IBM RT’s structure and software provided the inspiration for IBM’s other developments like PowerPC.

 

There were two types of RT produced by IBM, the desktop model and the tower model. The RT models include slots for the processor cards, RAM cards and the input-output system. The processor cards are capable of at least 1 MB memory although this can be expanded to 2 or 4MB. They also have the option of operating with a floating point accelerator. If the user needs more memory, they can make use of the ECC memory cards that are capable of storing up to 4MB of data.

 

IBM RT is the first model to make use of microkernel. This virtual resource manager is the one responsible for controlling the rest of the hardware from the mouse and keyboard to the display, the network and the hard drives. The microkernel allows several operating systems to be operational. Through the use of the hot keys, a user can switch from one operating system to the other. It allowed the current system in use to get a hold over the rest of the hardware. RT made use of the AIX version 2 as its primary operating system while the PL/I was used as the programming language.

 

When IBM launched RT into the market, many deemed it poor in both design and performance. Its processing power was not enough and its features did not stand out. It didn’t help that RT was priced similar to the other high-end computer models. As a workstation, many felt that the UNIX workstations were better thus, RT was received poorly. As a result, IBM was forced to halt the production of RT but it also persuaded the company to work on this concept and develop on it.