×

Search anything:

Computer History on 11th February

Binary Tree book by OpenGenus

Open-Source Internship opportunity by OpenGenus for programmers. Apply now.

Everyday of the year is filled with one of the greatest events in Computer History. 11 th February is one such that and lead to the development of the current state of computing. You should feel lucky to witness this day.

Major events in Computer History that took place on 11 th February are:

  • 1942: Armas Markkula was born (Founder of Apple)
  • 1847: Thomas Edison was born (Founder of GE)
  • 1915: Richard Hamming was born (Hamming codes)
  • 1897: Emil Post was born (Logician)
  • Other events

Enjoy Computer Science events that occured on other days at OpenGenus.

Read on to get deep idea of the above events:

1942: Armas Markkula was born (Founder of Apple)

Armas Clifford Markkula is a Businessman, investor and Engineer who was born on 11th February 1942 and is known for being the Founder of Apple and the second CEO of Apple.

In light of the popularity of Steve Jobs, people rarely recognize Armas to be a founder but he is technically, one of the founders and he funded the initial days of Apple. In fact, Steve Wozniak who designed Apple's first computer said in an interview that Armas contributed more towards the success of Apple.

He was the CEO at Apple from 1981 to 1983.

He retired early in his life (at 32 years) after working at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel. He studied at University of Southern California.

1847: Thomas Edison was born (Founder of GE)

Thomas Edison was born on this day 11th February 1847. He is known to be one of the greatest inventors of all time but one of his achievement is that he was the founder of General Electric, a company that exists even today (2020).

1915: Richard Hamming was born (Hamming codes)

Richard Hamming was born in 11th February 1915. He was a Computer Scientist and has made significant contributions in the field of Telecommunications. Some of his best known works include:

  • Hamming code
  • IBM calculating machine
  • Hamming distance
  • Hamming window
  • Hamming number

In 1945, while working at the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory, he developed the IBM calculating machine. He was used to calculate solutions to a set of equations as provided by the Physicists at Manhattan Project.

More on some of his theoretical contributions:

  • Hamming code is an error correcting code which is applied to binary data and on receiving, it is checked for error. If there is an indication of transfer error, a correction procedure is initiated.
  • Hamming distance is comparison metric between two strings based on the number of characters that differ.

In 1946, he joined Bell Labs of IBM where he retired in 1976. Following this, he joined the Naval Postgraduate School as a professor.

He has an award named after him: IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal which is presented by IEEE for contributions in the field of Information Science.

Major awards Richard Hamming received are:

  • Turing Award (1968)
  • Fellow of ACM (1994)

He, also, appeared in the 1962 TV show named "The Computer and the Mind of Man". This shows that he was widely known in the community at his time.

1897: Emil Post was born (Logician)

Emil Post was born on 11th February 1897. He was a mathematician and logician and is best known as the man behind recursion.

Some of his major contributions include:

  • Formulation 1 (similar to Turing Machine)
  • Recursion
  • Post's problem

He is well remembered from his influential speech at American Mathematical Society in 1944 where he presented the Post's problem. It was, later, solved in late 1950s by the use of Priority method in recursion theory.

Formulation 1 was his influential paper where he introduced recursion theory and developed a machine similar to Turing Machine. It was done independently of Alan Turing and was done in parallel. In this paper, he introduced Post's rewrite technique which is present till date in every programming language.

He made a fundamental contribution to theory of polyadic, or n-ary, groups in 1944 as well.

Majority of his contributions are theoretical and is significant as he was one of the early contributors in the field of Computing. His contributions have shaped computing till this day.

Other events on 11th February

  • FreeNet (a peer to peer censorship free tool) received the SUMA-Award for "protection against total surveillance" on this day 11th February 2015.

Enjoy Computer Science events that occured on other days at OpenGenus.

Today (11th February) is important as you can see the several important and influential people were born on this day and went forward to change the entire World. Enjoy.

Ue Kiao, PhD

Ue Kiao, PhD

Ue Kiao is a Technical Author and Software Developer with B. Sc in Computer Science at National Taiwan University and PhD in Algorithms at Tokyo Institute of Technology | Researcher at TaoBao

Read More

Improved & Reviewed by:


Computer History on 11th February
Share this