What Happened Today, March 26th

Hewlett-Packard Company co-founder David Packard dies after several weeks of illness. With fellow Stanford graduate Bill Hewlett, Packard founded Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto garage in 1938, spurring the development of what has come to be known as Silicon Valley. The company's first product was an oscillator, eight of which Disney used in its groundbreaking film "Fantasia." Since then, HP has made a name in personal computers, laser printers, calculators, accessories, and test equipment.

Jean Sammet, an early pioneer of computing, is born in New York. Sammet attended Mount Holyoke College and the University of Illinois, where she launched a teaching career. Trained in math, she moved into industry in 1961, developing the language FORMAC at IBM. The language was the first commonly used language for manipulating non-numeric algebraic expressions. She also wrote one of the classic histories of programming languages in her book, Programming Languages: History and Fundamentals. Sammet passed away May 20, 2017.

Texas Instruments demonstrates the first integrated circuit. Its inventor, Jack Kilby (b. Nov 8, 1923), created the device to prove that resistors and capacitors could exist on the same piece of semiconductor material. His circuit consisted of a sliver of germanium with five components linked by wires. It was Fairchild's Robert Noyce, however, who filed for a patent within months of Kilby and who made the IC a commercially-viable technology. Both men are credited as co-inventors of the IC.

Microsoft Corporation releases its Excel 4.0 spreadsheet program. Excel was one in a long line of practical applications that Microsoft and other companies developed for personal computers, making them more appealing to home and office users. The earliest commercial computerized spreadsheet was VisiCalc, written by Ed Frankston and Dan Bricklin and released for the Apple II personal computer in 1979.

Hewlett-Packard Company co-founder David Packard dies after several weeks of illness. With fellow Stanford graduate Bill Hewlett, Packard founded Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto garage in 1938, spurring the development of what has come to be known as Silicon Valley. The company's first product was an oscillator, eight of which Disney used in its groundbreaking film "Fantasia." Since then, HP has made a name in personal computers, laser printers, calculators, accessories, and test equipment.

Bill Gates gives the opening address at the First Annual World Altair Computer Convention in Albuquerque, New Mexico. MITS, the company that developed the Altair, had set up shop in the southwestern city to develop its kit computer, which was a hit among hobbyists after it graced the cover of Popular Electronics magazine. Gates, then a 20-year-old erstwhile Harvard student, had helped develop the form of BASIC sold with the Altair.

In one of the earliest developments in treating the AIDS epidemic, which had only recently begun making headlines, a team from Roche Laboratories in New Jersey publishes an article in Science magazine that discussed the theoretical basis for the HIV protease molecule. Designing molecules with which to target viruses is one of the many ways pharmaceutical researchers have come to use computers.

Pixar wins an Academy Award for Tin Toy, the first entirely computer-animated work to win in the best animated short film category. Pixar, now a division of Disney, continued its success with a string of shorts and the first entirely computer-animated feature-length film, the best-selling Toy Story.