This Date in IT History Nov

2 George Boole, father of Boolean logic, is born in Lincoln, England, in 1815. Boole strived to translate Aristotelian logic into numbers and algebraic formulas. “We ought to no longer associate logic and metaphysics,” professed Boole, “but logic and mathematics.”

3 Researchers at Bell Telephone Labs release the Unix Programmer’s Manual in 1971, the first written documentation for Unix. It is the first operating system that could host multiple users, and would be widely used at academic and engineering computer centers.

4 Univac, the first commercial computer, projects Dwight D. Eisenhower as the winner over Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election, with a margin of 438 electoral votes to 93, respectively. While skeptics at CBS refuse to broadcast Univac’s initial result, the final electoral college tally was 442 for Eisenhower, 89 for Stevenson.

9 In 1983, IBM and Hitachi make a secret pact to settle IBM’s 1982 lawsuit concerning Hitachi’s corporate espionage activities for $300 million, said newspaper reports.

12 In 1990, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee circulates a proposal diagramming a hypertext system, which he coins the World Wide Web. In August 1991, Berners-Lee makes his Web worldwide by releasing a Web server and line mode browser. After the 1993 release of the Mosaic Web browser by University of Illinois grad students, the WWW becomes wwwidely popular.

17 Dr. Herman Hollerith, the creator of the electric tabulating machine and founder of a company that would later become IBM, dies of a heart attack in 1929. No word on whether the just-passed stock market crash was a contributing factor.

24 AOL announces it will acquire Netscape in the midst of the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Microsoft in 1998. Microsoft argues that the case should be dismissed, contending that the merger is proof that one company cannot control technological development. Microsoft’s plea is denied.

-Daniel J. Horgan

Sources: CNN.com; CNET News; GAP (Groups, Algorithms and Programming); HistoryChannel.com; Jones Telecommunications & Multimedia Encyclopedia; World Wide Web Consortium