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Scott E. Fahlman holds a paper with a horizontal smiley face on it. He created the emoticon in 1982.
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TechMan Texts: Pittsburgh history rich with tech developments

Scott Fahlman

TechMan Texts: Pittsburgh history rich with tech developments

Making lists of events for the year is popular among journalists. These listicles, as they are called, can be news stories of the year, deaths of prominent people or lists of catastrophes.

TechMan has his own list: important developments in the history of tech that have a Pittsburgh connection you may not know about. These are in no order, just stuff that’s interesting.

1. Three men pleaded guilty to creating the “Mirai” botnet that was used to paralyze chunks of the internet in 2016, knocking Twitter and Netflix offline. The botnet was built from hundreds of thousands of computers and internet-connected devices, such as webcams and baby monitors. The Pittsburgh area connection? One of those pleading guilty was Josiah White, 20, of Washington, Pa.

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2. Twenty-five years ago, Rich Skrenta, a ninth-grader in Mt. Lebanon, created what has been called the first computer virus. Before the internet, trading floppy disks was a way to pirate software games and Mr. Skrenta was known for altering the floppy disks he gave out to launch taunting on-screen messages. But he cemented a place in computer history when he figured out a way to make the alteration copy itself to any other disk used in the same computer — the first self-replicating virus. He went on to a distinguished career in the computer business.

3. Carnegie Mellon University has connections to a number of commonly used features on the web.

The smiley :-) was created by Carnegie Mellon research professor Scott Fahlman on in 1982.

It was the beginning of emoticons in email.

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CMU professor Luis von Ahn and colleagues developed CAPTCHAs, those wavy, distorted words and numbers that you sometimes must decipher before completing an online transaction.

Nobel-prize-winning CMU professor Herbert Simon and fellow professor Allen Newell were pioneers of artificial intelligence.

4. The Mach kernel was created at CMU and later became the basis for NeXTSTEP, the operating system for machines from the NeXT computer company founded by Steve Jobs. When Apple bought NeXT, it made NeXTSTEP the basis for OS X, which runs Mac computers to this day.

Redefining broadband. The FCC is expected to vote Feb. 3 on redefining high-speed wired internet to include cell phone data service. This would not only camouflage many of the communities in the U.S. with no access to the internet but could prevent them from getting necessary funding to build that access, according to Motherboard.

Cell service is often slower, more expensive, comes with data caps and unsuitable for families with multiple people trying to log on at once to do homework or work or watch Netflix.

Taking AIM. AOL Instant Messenger officially went away earlier this month. At 20 years old, AIM is the grandfather of instant messaging.

Send comments, contributions, corrections and condemnations to pgtechtexts@gmail.com.

First Published: December 26, 2017, 12:30 p.m.

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Scott E. Fahlman holds a paper with a horizontal smiley face on it. He created the emoticon in 1982.  (Scott Fahlman)
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