Programming Languages & Computing History

The Apple Newton MessagePad was Apple's first PDA (Personal Digital Assistant), released in 1993. It was a pioneering device in the handheld computing market, featuring handwriting recognition. The Newton line was discontinued by Steve Jobs in 1998.

Sir C. V. Raman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1930 for his work on the scattering of light and the Raman effect. He discovered that when light passes through a transparent medium, some of the scattered light changes wavelength - the Raman effect.

Niklaus Wirth designed Pascal in 1968-69 as a language for teaching structured programming. It was named after the French mathematician Blaise Pascal and influenced many later programming languages.

John Backus led the IBM team that created FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation) in 1957. It was the first widely-used high-level programming language and revolutionized scientific and engineering computing.

Dennis Ritchie developed the C programming language at Bell Telephone Laboratories (Bell Labs) in the early 1970s. C was created for developing the UNIX operating system and became one of the most influential programming languages in history.

Bjarne Stroustrup developed C++ (originally named 'C with Classes') in 1979 at Bell Labs. He designed it as an extension of the C language to add object-oriented features while maintaining C's efficiency.

Java was created by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems in 1995, originally called 'Oak' and then 'Green' before being named Java. Gosling developed the language as a platform-independent code for consumer devices. David Gelernter is known for work on parallel computing and tuple spaces.

Perl was created by Larry Wall in 1987 as a scripting language for text processing and system administration on Unix systems. Wall developed it originally for report processing on bug-reporting systems. Konrad Zuse was a German computer pioneer who built the first programmable computer.

Linus Torvalds created the Linux kernel in 1991 as a student at the University of Helsinki. Yukihiro Matsumoto created Ruby. M. Benveniste and J.R. Cordy are not associated with major programming language creation. Linux began as a personal project before becoming the foundation of the open-source operating system.

Internal combustion engines burn fuel inside a combustion chamber within the engine, unlike external combustion engines (like steam engines) where combustion occurs outside. The combustion chamber is where the fuel-air mixture ignites and expands.