Today in Tech History – March 31, 2016

In 1939 – Harvard and IBM signed an agreement to build the Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). It weighed 5 tons and read data from paper tape and punch cards.

In 1993 – Richard Depew accidentally posted 200 identical messages to news.admin.policy while testing some auto-moderation software. It became the first USENET postings to be referred to as spam.

In 1998 – After three years of development and much wrangling with the Warcraft engine it was originally built on, Blizzard released the iconic game Starcraft.

In 2013 – IBM shut down the Roadrunner supercomputer, the first computer to run at more than one petaflop.

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