Showing posts with label happy birthday. Show all posts
Showing posts with label happy birthday. Show all posts

03 April 2008

Happy Birthday, Open Data

The received wisdom is that open source begat open access, which begat open data, and in broad outline that's true enough. But in one respect it's quite wrong: the first, and arguably most important open data store was set up fully 25 years ago, and is still going from strength to strength:

For a quarter century, GenBank has helped advance scientific discovery worldwide. The nucleic acid sequence database was established by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1982. Since its creation, the GenBank database has grown at an exponential rate. Amazing as it may seem, in 1984, the entirety of GenBank’s data was published in a two volume hardcover book. Today, if the current contents of GenBank’s database were printed, it would fill more than 300 pickup trucks with paper.

Unveiled at the onset of the “Information Age”, GenBank has continued to evolve and incorporate technological innovations. The GenBank database has remained on the cutting edge of technology and illustrates the dynamic changes over the past 25 years in quantity and speed with which information is shared.

GenBank joined with sequence databases in Europe and Japan to form the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration. GenBank was one of the earliest bioinformatics community projects on the Internet promoting open access communications among bioscientists. In 1992, the GenBank project transitioned to the newly created National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) within NIH where it resides today.

19 December 2007

22 November 2007

Happy Birthday Internet

Watch out, there's a meme about:


The Internet is 30 today. Exactly 30 years ago today on November 22, 1977 the first three networks were connected to become the Internet.

(Via Simon Willison's Weblog.)

07 November 2007

Happy Birthday, GNU/Linux

RMS sends his own characteristic birthday greetings to celebrate the marriage of GNU and Linux:

15 years have passed since the combination of GNU and Linux first made it possible to use a PC in freedom. During that time, we have come a long way. You can even buy a laptop with GNU/Linux preinstalled from more than one hardware vendor, although the systems they ship are not entirely free software. So what holds us back from total success?

(The answer, in case you were wondering, is "social inertia".)

12 June 2007

Happy Birthday, GCC

It was early June in 1987 when Richard Stallman announced the release of the GNU C compiler version 1.0.

Interesting historical background from Michael Tiemann. It all seems so long ago, now....