Some dates in computing history are heavy with coincidence. 30 January is one of them: it produced the person who invented the way we point at things on a screen, the first prime numbers ever found by a machine, and one of Microsoft’s most argued-over operating systems.
1925: Douglas Engelbart is born
Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon, graduated from Oregon State in 1948 and took a master’s (1953) and PhD (1955) at Berkeley. On 9 December 1968, at a computer conference in San Francisco, he and his team at the Stanford Research Institute gave a ninety-minute demonstration that showed, for the first time in public, a computer mouse, windows, hypertext links, collaborative editing and video conferencing — nearly everything a modern desktop does, twenty years before most of it shipped. The presentation is still called “the Mother of All Demos”. Engelbart founded the Bootstrap Institute, held some twenty patents, and collected the Turing Award (1997), the US National Medal of Technology (2000), the Lemelson–MIT Prize and the BCS Lovelace Medal (2001). He died in 2013. The mouse itself, a wooden block with two wheels, earned him nothing: the patent expired before the device became universal.
1952: a computer finds two primes
The Standards Western Automatic Computer, built by the US National Bureau of Standards in Los Angeles from 1950, was one of the first machines to be pointed at pure mathematics. On 30 January 1952, on its first attempt, it identified two new Mersenne primes — numbers of the form 2ⁿ−1 with no divisors — larger than any found by hand. Three more followed within the year. Prime hunting has belonged to computers ever since; the largest known primes today have tens of millions of digits and are found by volunteers’ PCs, a direct descendant of SWAC’s afternoon. The machine ran, in two versions, until 1967.
2007: Windows Vista goes on sale
Five years after Windows XP, Microsoft released Vista to the public on 30 January 2007 (businesses had it from November 2006), alongside Office 2007. It was the first Windows sold as a digital download as well as on disc. Vista sold better than Microsoft’s own forecasts — 200 million users within two years — and was disliked anyway, for its hardware demands and its endless permission prompts. Retail sales ended in October 2010; Windows 7 (2009) was the apology. In Bangladesh, where XP ran on most PCs until well past its expiry, Vista was largely skipped, which in hindsight was the right call.
