2005: YouTube was launched

Yes, today is the day: 15th February 2005, when YouTube was launched and made publically available. As of 2020, it is the second most visited site on Earth with over 2 Billion users.

On this day, the domain name was activated and the initial version was made public. At this point, uploading videos was not possible which came a few weeks later in April.

It was created by 3 PayPal employees namely Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Later on 9th October 2006, it was acquired by Google on seeing its potential.

1995: Kevin Mitnick (hacker) was arrested

On this day (15th February 1995), FBI solved one of the biggest case in Computer Hacking and arrested Kevin Mitnick today on charges of breaking into the computers of several Companies like Sun Microsystems (company behind Java) and Motorola and of wire fraud.

Kevin is considered one of the greatest hackers of all time and is considered as a celebrity. He's friend is Steve Wozniak, Founder of Apple.

He was arrested for 5 years followed by 2 years of restrictions. He was caught at his hiding place at Raleigh in North Carolina, USA. The thing is that it was not the first time Kevin was caught. He performed his first hack at the age of 12 and over the years, his techniques became more sophisticated.

Today, he works as a Security Consultant and is widely known for this day.

1934: Niklaus Wirth was born (Pascal)

Today (15th February) is the day, Niklaus Wirth was born. He is a computer scientist and is widely known as being the creator of Pascal, one of the first widely used high level programming language.

He is known for:

Creating Pascal
A pioneer in Software Engineering

Apart from Pascal, he formulated several other programming languages like Euler, Algol W, Oberon, Modula and others. Major events in his professional life are as follows:

1959: Completed B.Sc in Electronic engineering from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich
1960: Completed M.Sc from Universite Laval, Canada
1963: Completed PhD from University of California, Berkeley
1963 to 1967: Professor at Stanford University
1968 to 1999: Professor at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich

Following this, he retired but his contributions to Software Engineering and Programming languages are going strong even today.

He won several notable awards like:

Turing award (1984)
Fellow of ACM (1994)
SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award
Fellow of the Computer History Museum (2004)

If you are born on this day (15 February), you should be proud and happy as such great people in Computer Science like Niklaus Wirth was born with other major events.