Power Restored to Manhattan’s West Side After Major Blackout…
July 14, 2019
Con Edison said that the power failed at 6:47 p.m. and that 73,000 customers were in the dark for at least three hours, mainly on the West Side. The blackout stretched from 72nd Street to the West 40s, and from Fifth Avenue to the Hudson River.
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The blackout happened on the same date that a large power failure in 1977 plunged the city into darkness. Now as then, Times Square — usually blindingly bright with tourists and crowds strolling to theaters — was dark, and traffic signals were out...Fernando Corbató, Inventor of the Password and Time-Share Computing, Dies at 93…
July 14, 2019
Fernando Corbató, whose work on computer time-sharing in the 1960s helped pave the way for the personal computer, as well as the computer password, died on Friday at a nursing home in Newburyport, Mass. He was 93.
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Dr. Corbató, who spent his entire career at M.I.T., oversaw a project in the early 1960s called the Compatible Time-Sharing System, or C.T.S.S., which allowed multiple users in different locations to access a single computer simultaneously through telephone lines... When Dr. Corbató was overseeing the C.T.S.S. project, computers were considered little more than giant calculators. But when his team demonstrated the new system in late 1962, that view was beginning to change. “To this day I can still remember people only realizing when they saw a real demo: ‘Hey, it talks back. Wow! You just type that and you got an answer,’...C.T.S.S. gave rise to a successor project called Multics, which Dr. Corbató also led. He told the Babbage Institute, “Multics started out as kind of a wish list of what we would like to see in a big computer system that might be made as a commercial model.” Multics was a collaboration among M.I.T., AT&T’s Bell Laboratories and General Electric. It failed as a commercial endeavor, but it inspired a team of computer scientists at Bell Labs to create Unix, a computer operating system that took root in the 1970s and was adopted widely in the ′80s and ′90s.
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In the course of refining time-sharing systems in the 1960s, Dr. Corbató came up with another novelty: the computer password. C.T.S.S. gave each user a private set of files, but the lack of a login system requiring a password meant that users were free to peruse others’ files...