March 9, 2026 — 50 Days of IT History Journal
March 9, 2026
Fifty days ago this project quietly started with a simple idea: every day, look at the calendar and find what happened in the history of computing on that exact date.
From that small routine the IT History Journal was born.
Every day we search through historical sources, archives, release notes, technical documents, RFCs, and old news to find events that happened on that specific day in the past. Sometimes it is a famous event everyone knows. Sometimes it is a forgotten release, a patent, a talk, or the birthday of a person who influenced the development of computing.
Programming languages
Many posts tell the story of programming languages and their releases. We wrote about events such as:
- the publication of FORTRAN in 1957 by John Backus and his team at IBM
- the development of Java
- the emergence of languages like Racket and Pascal
Programming languages are one of the main engines of software progress, and their history shows how developers tried to make computers easier to program.
Computers and devices
Another major topic is the evolution of hardware. The journal covered machines such as:
- the Harvard Mark I, designed by Howard Aiken
- the Sony PlayStation 2, one of the most influential gaming consoles
- early personal computers and scientific machines
These machines changed how people interacted with technology and opened the door to entirely new industries.
Internet and protocols
Many important events in computing history happened in the development of the internet. The journal regularly mentions:
- RFC publications
- early ARPANET milestones
- domain registrations
- the emergence of web platforms
Standards documents, protocols, and networking experiments shaped the modern digital world.
Security and viruses
Computing history is not only about inventions but also about conflicts and security. We already covered stories such as:
- the Michelangelo virus activation in 1992
- early computer worms
- major security incidents
These events show how cybersecurity evolved together with the growth of the internet.
Talks, books, and ideas
Not all historical milestones are products or releases. Some are ideas.
For example, the journal wrote about Richard Hamming’s famous talk “You and Your Research,” which influenced generations of scientists and engineers.
Books, lectures, and academic papers often shape the future of computing long before the technology becomes mainstream.
People
Behind every technology there are people. The journal often highlights birthdays and biographies of figures such as Howard Aiken, Richard Hamming, and Niklaus Wirth.
Understanding who built the foundations of modern computing is just as important as understanding the technologies themselves.
A calendar of computing
What makes this project unusual is its structure. It is not organized by topic or by popularity. Instead it follows the calendar.
Every day we look at that exact date in history and ask a simple question: What happened in computing on this day?
Sometimes the answer is huge — the release of a programming language or the launch of a computer. Sometimes it is a small event that quietly influenced the future.
But together these events form a living timeline of technology.
The first 50 days
During the first fifty days the journal has already covered topics from the earliest theoretical ideas of computing to modern artificial intelligence systems.
And this is only the beginning.
Computing history is enormous, and every day reveals another story.
Tomorrow there will be another date, another event, and another piece of the history of technology.
The timeline continues.