【Today in History】August 4: First female Turing Award winner; NVIDIA acquires MediaQ; first Cybersecurity Challenge completed

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Through "Today in History", look at the future from the past, and change the future from the present.

Today is August 4, 2022, and on this day in 1988, America's space shuttle Discovery flew for the first time since the Challenger explosion in 1986.And just seconds before ignition, a computer stopped engine tests in preparation for the launch of the space shuttle Discovery.The computer control system for the shuttle's engines determined that one valve was not closing fast enough, and sent a command from the computer to the three engines with a major component failure, telling them not to fire.The power of computers successfully prevented a catastrophe from happening.Looking back on August 4th in computer history, what other key events happened on this day?

August 4, 1932: Birth of Frances Allen, a pioneer in optimizing compilers

Born on August 4, 1932, Frances Elizabeth Allen is an American computer scientist and pioneer in the field of optimizing compilers, the first woman ever to become an IBM Fellow, andIn 2006, she became the first woman in the world to receive the Turing Award.Her accomplishments include pioneering work on compilers, program optimization, and parallelization.She worked at IBM from 1957 to 2002, when she became an IBM emeritus.

Source: Wikipedia

Allen grew up on a farm in Perutown, New York.In 1954, she graduated from the State Teachers College of New York (now SUNY-Albany) with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and began teaching at the local school in the town of Peru.Two years later, she enrolled at the University of Michigan, where she received a master's degree in mathematics in 1957.On July 15, 1957, Fran joined the IBM Research Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, as a programmer, to pay off his student loans.

In the beginning, Allen mainly taught new employees the basics of the FORTRAN language.She had planned to stay at IBM only until the debt was paid off, but no one thought she would spend her entire career at IBM.Allen retired from IBM in 2002 but remains associated with the company as an honorary member.After retirement, she shifted her focus from research to social activism, working on educational training programs that encourage women to pursue computer science research.

Two years ago today, August 4, 2020, Frances Allen passed away on her 88th birthday.As an academician of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Computer Society, Allen has won the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award from AWC, the 2006 Turing Award and many other honors.She is also the first female Fellow in IBM history—the highest technical position at IBM.

Source: Wikipedia

August 4, 2003: NVIDIA Acquires MediaQ

Source: Wikipedia

On August 4, 2003, Nvidia Corporation announced that it had signed a definitive agreement to acquire chipmaker MediaQ, a provider of graphics and multimedia technology for wireless mobile devices, for $70 million in cash.Its chips are suitable for 3G and 2.5G cell phones, PDAs, LCD monitors and other mobile devices.MediaQ's customers include leading handset and PDA manufacturers such as Mitsubishi, Siemens, DBTel, Dell, HP, Palm, Philips, Sharp and Sony.

In a statement, Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia, said: "This acquisition supports Nvidia's strategy to expand the reach of our platforms and accelerate our entry into the wireless mobile market."Along with MediaQ's technologies in 3D, video, ultra-low power, and wireless mobile architecture, a product roadmap for the rapidly growing mobile and handheld markets, including high color counts, will be provided over the next few years.color-screen mobile phones and PDAs with multimedia capabilities.Today, mobile N cards are stagnant and deadlocked. Do you think the next performance breakthrough will be this year?Feel free to share your insights in the comments section.

Source: Wikipedia

August 4, 2016: Inaugural Cybersecurity Challenge Completed

Source: Wikipedia

Cyber ​​Grand Challenge CGC (Cyber ​​Grand Challenge) is a global cyber security challenge launched by DARPA. The competition is machine-to-machine, with no human intervention. It is the world's first automatic network defense competition.The goal of the CGC is to promote the development of automated cyber defense technologies.A CGC competition lasts for two years, with the first year being the qualifying round and the second year being the final round.

The CGC is similar in structure to the CTF security competition, featuring a more standardized scoring and vulnerability attestation system: all exploits and patched binaries are submitted and evaluated by the referee infrastructure.In the 2016 finals, the winning system was the Mayhem made by ForAllSecure, a spin-off of Carnegie Mellon University.In the following DEF CON CTF, held from August 5th to 7th, Mayhem played against humans for the first time, and also defeated two human teams.

Taking history as a mirror, one can know the rise and fall.Since the development of computer science, there are many important events and figures.In "New Programmers: Our Technological Age, Our Programming Life,More than 40 technicians spanned half a century, using code to type out a real program life story!

Scan or click "New Programmers: Our Technological Age, Our Programming Life

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