This month in IT history: June

This month, our survey of IT achievementsrecognizes the life-saving work of Alan Turing, the prescience of a calculatorbuilt in 1623 and the endearing gravelly voice of the first Speak & Spell:

June 11, 1978 The Speak & Spell is announced

Texas Instruments introduced the Speak &Spell at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1978. It was the first single-chipvoice synthesizer, at a time when toys otherwise played voices back from a tapeor phonograph record. A variant of the technology was used in the ElectronicVoice Alert in Chrysler vehicles in the 1980s. The Speak & Spell had avocabulary of 200 words, and went through several redesigns. The last wasreleased in 1992. Today, musicians continue to use it as an instrument,sometimes modding it so it can create more sounds.

June19, 1623 Blaise Pascal is born

A YouTube video on how the Pascaline works

Blaise Pascal began working on his Pascalinemechanical calculator when he was 19. It had addition and subtractionfunctions, which could be repeated to multiply and divide. He intended it tohelp his father in his work as a supervisor of taxes. The Pascaline was thefirst calculator to be used in an office, but its expense and complexity limitedsales. About twenty machines were built during Pascal's short life (he died at39). Nine of his calculators still exist today.

June 21, 1948 The first program is runI

The Manchester Baby, also known as theManchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), was the first computer torun a program stored electronically in its memory, rather than built into itshardware or stored on paper tape. It ran its first program on June 21, 1948,which was designed to find the highest proper factor of 2 to 18. The Baby foundthe solution after running 3.5 million operations in 52 minutes. The machinewas a precursor to the first commercially available general purpose computer,the Ferranti Mark 1.

June23, 1983 Test of the Domain Name System (DNS)

The Stanford Research Institute once maintaineda text file that matched simple host names to numerical ARPANET addresses,called HOSTS.TXT. But as the number of hosts grew, this and similar practicesbecame unwieldy. In 1983, an automated Domain Name System was tested for thefirst time, the beginnings of the modern system we still use today.

June 23, 1912 Alan Turing's birth; June 7, 1954 Turing's death

British mathematician and computer scientistAlan Turing was born June 23, 1912, and died 41 years later on June 7, 1954. Hetheorized a universal computer that could run any program, known as a TuringMachine. His machine-assisted codebreaking might have shortened World War II byas much as two years, saving as many as 14 million lives.