On This Day in Tech History

Herman Hollerith was an American inventor and statistician who is best known for developing a mechanical tabulating machine that used punched cards to process data Hollerith's machine was developed to address a problem faced by the US Census Bureau in the late 19th century. The bureau was struggling to process and analyze the vast amounts of data collected during the census, which included information on everything from population demographics to industrial production. Hollerith's solution was to create a machine that could read and tabulate data from punched cards. Each card contained holes that represented different data points, such as age, gender, occupation, and so on. By feeding the cards through his machine, Hollerith could quickly and accurately tabulate the data, greatly reducing the amount of time and labor required for data processing. The punch card calculator was a major breakthrough in the field of data processing, and it quickly became popular with businesses, governments, and other organizations that needed to process large amounts of data. Hollerith went on to found the Tabulating Machine Company (which later became IBM) to manufacture and sell his machines.

Developed by Thomas R. Bruce, Cello was designed to be a web browser for Microsoft Windows on the Windows NT 3.5 operating system. At the time, the World Wide Web was still in its early stages, and there were few web browsers available to the public. Cello was one of the first web browsers to support tables and images, and it was also notable for being one of the few browsers to support SSL encryption for secure web browsing. Despite its innovative features, Cello's time in the spotlight was short-lived. The browser was discontinued just 11 months after its release, in April 1994. This was due in part to the fact that other web browsers, such as Mosaic and Netscape Navigator, had already gained popularity, and Cello was unable to keep up with their rapid development. Despite its brief lifespan, Cello remains an important piece of internet history. It was a pioneering effort to make the web accessible to a wider audience, and it helped to pave the way for the web browsers that we use today.

Tim Berners-Lee, full name Sir Tim Berners-Lee, is a British computer scientist who is widely recognized as the creator of the World Wide Web. He was born in London, England, on June 8, 1955. In 2004, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom knighted him, and the Finnish Technology Award Foundation presented him with the first-ever Millennium Technology Prize, worth €1 million. Since both of Berners-Lee's parents worked on the Ferranti Mark I, the first commercial computer, he developed a natural aptitude for computing. Following his graduation from the University of Oxford in 1976, Berners-Lee spent two years creating computer software for Poole, Dorset-based Plessey Telecommunications Ltd.