In case you were wondering about notable science events that happened the week of June 20th…
|photo credit: Neil Rickards|
A far cry from Grand Theft Auto and Super Mario. On June 21st, 1948, the first stored-program was run on a computer. The Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine, nicknamed “Baby”, ran a program that held only 17 instructions. The computer program test was to find the highest proper factor of 218. It took 3.5 million operations and 52 minutes for the computer to produce an answer. And I thought my computer was slow.
The world doesn’t revolve around you. On June 22nd, 1638, Galileo Galilei was forced by the Catholic Church to recant his heliocentric theory that the sun, and not the earth, is the center of the universe. Of course, now we know that the sun is not the center of the universe either.
Minty Fresh. On June 26th, 1974, the first Universal Product Code was used in Ohio. The barcode was used at a supermarket; the first product scanned was a piece of Wrigley’s gum.
|photo credit: mu0x|