Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology

538 Appendix II• A consortium called the Open Software Foundation wasestablished to promote open source shared software development.1989••The Internet now had more than 100,000 host computers.Deep Thought defeated Danish chess grandmaster BentLarsen, marking the first time a grandmaster had beendefeated by a computer.Intel announced the 80486 CPU, a chip with over a milliontransistors.Astronomer Clifford Stoll’s book The Cuckoo’s Eggrecounted his pursuit of German hackers who were seekingmilitary secrets. Stoll soon became a well-known critic ofcomputer technology and the Internet.The ARPANET officially ends, having been succeeded by theNSFNET.•••1990• Microsoft Windows became truly successful with version3.0, diminishing the user interface advantages of the Macintosh.• At Sun Microsystems, James Gosling developed the Oak languageto control embedded systems. After the original projectwas canceled, Gosling redesigned the language as Java.• ibm announced the System/390 mainframe.• ibm and Microsoft developed OS/2, an operating systemintended to replace MS-dos. Microsoft withdrew in favor ofWindows, and despite considerable technical merits, OS/2never really takes hold.• Secret Service agents raided computer systems and bulletinboards, seeking evidence of illegal copying of a BellSouthmanual, disrupting an innocent game company. In response,Mitch Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundationto advocate for civil liberties of computer users. Anothergroup, the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility,filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for FBIrecords involving alleged government surveillance of bulletinboard systems.1991• The Science Museum in London exhibited a reconstructionof Charles Babbage’s never-built difference engine.• A Finnish student named Linus Torvalds found that hecouldn’t afford a unix license, so he wrote his own unixkernel and combined it with GNU utilities. The resultwould eventually become the popular Linux operatingsystem.• Developers at the University of Minnesota created Gopher,a system for providing documents over the Internet usinglinked menus. However, it was soon to be surpassed by theWorld Wide Web, created by Tim Berners-Lee at theCERN physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland.• Advanced Micro Devices began to compete with Intel bymaking IBM PC-compatible CPU chips.• Apple and ibm signed a joint agreement to develop technologyin areas that include object-oriented operating sys-tems, multimedia, and interoperability between Macintoshand IBM networks.1992• Reports of the Michelangelo computer virus frightenedcomputer users. Although the virus did little damage, itspurred more users to practice “safe computing” and installantivirus software.• Motorola announced the Power PC, a 32-bit RISC microprocessorthat contains 28 million transistors.• An estimated 1 million host computers were on the Internet.The Internet Society is founded to serve as a coordinatorof future development of the network.1993• Apple’s Newton handheld computer created a new categoryof machine called the pda, or personal digital assistant.• Microsoft Windows NT was announced. It is a version ofthe operating system designed especially for network servers.• Steve Jobs announced that his NeXT company wouldabandon its hardware efforts and concentrate on marketingits innovative operating system and developmentsoftware.• Leonard Adleman demonstrated molecular computing byusing DNA molecules to solve the Traveling Salesman problem.• The Cray 3 supercomputer continued the evolution of thatline. It could be scaled up to a 16-processor system.• The Mosaic graphical Web browser popularized the WorldWide Web.• The Clinton administration announced plans to develop anational “Information Superhighway” based on the Internet.Volunteer “Net Day” programs would begin to connectschools to the network.• The White House established its Web site, www.whitehouse.gov.1994•Mosaic’s developer, Marc Andreessen, left NCSA and joinedJim Clark to found Netscape. Netscape soon released animproved browser called Netscape Navigator.Apple announced that it would license the Mac operatingsystem to other companies to make Macintosh “clones.”Few companies would take them up on it, and Apple wouldsoon withdraw the licensing offer.Intel Corporation was forced to recall millions of dollarsworth of its new Pentium chips when a mathematical flawwas discovered in the floating-point routines.Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Netscape anddeveloped a new Web browser, Netscape Navigator. Itwould become the leading Web browser for several years.Red Hat released a commercial distribution of Linux 1.0.Search engines such as Lycos and Alta Vista started helpingusers find Web pages. Meanwhile, a graduate studentnamed Jerry Yang started compiling an online list of his•••••