The story behind the birth of HTML5|Today in History

Finishing | Wang Qilong

Through “today in history”, we can see the future from the past, and we can also change the future from the present.

Today is October 28, 2022, on this day in 1838, the Finn Fredrik Idestam was born, who founded a wood pulp mill on the banks of the “Nokia River” in Finland, named Nokia . Nokia has gone through a long road of development, continuously divested non-core businesses, and made the decision to focus on mobile communications in the 1990s, making it a legend of a generation of mobile communications. October 28th in the history of technology also gave birth to many key events, let’s see how these events changed the course of technology in the world and have an impact on our lives today.

October 28, 1937: Ted Hoff, one of the inventors of the first microprocessor, is born

We have introduced the four designers of the world’s first microprocessor, the 4004, many times, and today is the birthday of one of them, Ted Hoff. Hough came up with the idea of ​​using a “general-purpose processor” rather than various custom-designed circuits, and his insight started the microprocessor revolution in the early 1970s.

Source: Wikipedia

Marcian Edward Ted Hoff was born in Rochester, New York, on October 28, 1937. In 1958, he received his BEE degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. The summer after college, he worked at the Universal Railroad Signaling Company in Rochester, where he developed it and received his first two patents. He then attended Stanford University as a National Science Foundation Fellow, earning a master’s degree (1959) and a doctorate (1962) in electrical engineering.

In 1968, when Intel was born, Hough joined Intel as its twelfth employee; in 1980, he was named the first Intel Fellow, the company’s highest technical position. In the early 1980s, he briefly served as vice president of technology at Atari, and as vice president and chief technology officer at Teklicon, Inc., a patent and intellectual property consulting firm.

Among the four designers of the Intel 4004, the world’s first microprocessor, Hof was the most important one; he defied all opinions and let Intel insist on the project and deal with Japanese customers; his design combined all The logic circuit of the calculator is compressed into three pieces: the processor, the memory and the read-only memory. The read-only memory is used to provide the program that drives the processor to work, creating a new era of integrated circuits.

Source: Wikipedia

October 28, 1955: Microsoft founder Bill Gates is born

On October 28, 1955, Bill Gates (William H. Gates) was born in Washington, USA, he is a famous capitalist, investor, software engineer, philanthropist; Gates was founded together with Paul Allen in the 1970s Microsoft Corporation, he served as Microsoft’s chairman, CEO and chief software designer, and holds more than 8% of the company’s common stock, and is also the company’s largest individual shareholder.

Source: Wikipedia

Bill Gates developed a BASIC version of the Altair 8800 while studying at Harvard; with BASIC’s success, he and co-developer Paul Allen founded Microsoft. The fledgling company launched the operating system for IBM personal computers, the Microsoft Word word processor, the Windows operating system, and many others.

In the late 1970s, IBM was planning to enter the personal computer market and officially launched the IBM personal computer in 1981; IBM needed to find a suitable operating system for its products based on the Intel x86 family of processors. IBM approached Microsoft after brief negotiations with another company, which allegedly came up with the word DOS without any leverage at the time; and Microsoft, without telling itself that it was negotiating with IBM, found Seattle through connections A computer company that bought the operating system they developed for $50,000.

Eventually, Microsoft renamed the software PC-DOS, and then licensed IBM to use the operating system; Microsoft also negotiated with other computer manufacturers to install the modified MS-DOS system on each new computer. Afterwards, Seattle Computer sued Microsoft for buying the company’s products at a very low price without telling the facts, but the two parties eventually reached an out-of-court settlement. By 1996, Microsoft Corporation controlled 84% of the operating system software market, it developed MS-DOS disks installed as software on 120 million computers, and it developed WINDOWS (windows operating system) for 25 languages, with more than 100,000 users. 60 million.

In 1999, Gates resigned as CEO of Microsoft and was replaced by Steve Ballmer. While Gates remains closely tied to Microsoft’s vision and operations, he devotes more of his time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a charitable organization that aims to Promotes global health initiatives, educational opportunities, and means to eradicate poverty and hunger; Gates has been listed as the world’s richest man by Forbes on more than one occasion, despite his many charitable giving.

Source: Wikipedia

October 28, 1967: John Romero, co-founder of id Software

Source: Wikipedia

Alfonso John Romero was born on October 28, 1967 in Colorado, USA. He is an American programmer and a well-known producer in the field of video games.

He founded id Software in 1991 with John Carmack, and by 1996 had produced and published several landmark games: Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D ), Doom and Doom II, Quake; the game terms “Deathmatch”, “Deathmatch” are recognized as his coined.

From 1991 to 1996, Romero worked at id Software and participated in the production of a number of trend-setting games; he wrote many tools for id Software to develop games, including Doom and Quake. “The level editor DoomEd, QuakeEd and IGRAB that integrates game resources into WAD files are all from him. In a keynote speech at the 2017 WeAreDevelopers Design Conference, Romero called this period “acceleration mode”, in which he emphasized that he had made 28 games in five and a half years, but the development team did not. to ten people.

John Romero’s game design and development tools drove the popularity of first-person shooters (FPS) in the 1990s. Since their first game, id Software has licensed their game source code (game engine) to other game production companies. id Software’s engine revolutionized the computer game industry and is a milestone.

Source: Wikipedia

October 28, 2010: iFLYTEK voice input method released

Source: Wikipedia

The iFLYTEK voice input method is the predecessor of the iFLYTEK input method. It is a Chinese pinyin and phonetic input method introduced by iFLYTEK. It is famous for its high speech recognition rate, fast recognition speed, and support for multiple dialects. iFLYTEK was established on December 30, 1999 by students from the University of Science and Technology of China, focusing on intelligent voice and artificial intelligence research. In 2013, the Xunfei input method launched a PC beta version, and the mobile input method was also renamed the Xunfei input method mobile version. The feature of the iFLYTEK input method is the voice input based on the iFLYTEK voice cloud platform, with high voice recognition rate and fast recognition speed. In November 2013, the “Honeycomb” input model was launched, which supports pinyin, handwriting, and voice input methods of cloud + client.

On October 19, 2016, Luo Yonghao demonstrated the iFLYTEK input method built into the M1 at the Hammer conference, detonating the application download. According to the official introduction, the iFLYTEK input method “voice input of 400 words in 1 minute, with a general speech recognition rate of 98%; supports 23 dialects such as Cantonese, Sichuan dialect, and Hokkien.” In June 2017, iFLYTEK was listed on the “World’s 50 Smartest Companies” list by MIT Technology Review. On November 23, 2019, the Linux platform version was launched. 

In our current life, more and more people abandon the pinyin input function and use the voice input function instead; the voice functions of social apps such as WeChat and QQ are very mature, and Baidu search, Sogou search, etc. have also added the voice input function , The voice input method market led by iFLYTEK is getting bigger and bigger, which makes people wonder whether voice input can replace pinyin input. Which input method do you prefer now? Feel free to vote and comment in this issue to share your insights into the future.

Source: Wikipedia

October 28, 2014: W3C recommends and publishes HTML5 programming language to the public

HTML5 is the latest revision of HTML. The standard formulation was completed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on October 28, 2014; the goal is to replace the HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0 standards formulated in 1999, with a view to achieving rapid development of Internet applications. Make network standards meet contemporary network requirements.

When you talk about HTML5 broadly, you’re actually referring to a set of technologies that includes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It hopes to reduce the web browser’s need for plug-in rich web application services (Plug-in-Based Rich Internet Application, RIA), such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and Oracle JavaFX, and provide more to effectively strengthen the network The set of standards to apply.

HTML5 adds many new syntactic features, including , and elements, while integrating SVG content. These elements were added to make it easier to add and work with multimedia and image content in web pages; other new elements such as

, , and are used to enrich the data content of the document. HTML5 also defines the specifics of handling illegal documents so that all browsers and client programs can handle syntax errors consistently. 

Source: Wikipedia

Standardization of HTML5 took a decade of bumpy rides. The Web Hypertext Technical Working Group (WHATWG) initially started developing new standards in 2004, when HTML 4.01 had not been updated since 2000, and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was focusing future development on XHTML 2.0; in 2009, The W3C allowed the XHTML 2.0 Working Group Charter to expire and decided not to renew it.

In June 2004, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software presented a position paper at a workshop sponsored by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) focused on developing technologies that are backward compatible with existing browsers, including Web Forms 2.0 Initial draft specification; workshop ended with 8 votes in favor and 14 votes against continuing work on HTML.

This caused some dissatisfaction, and immediately following the workshop, the Web Hypertext Technology Working Group (WHATWG) was formed and worked on that goal and announced a second draft, Web Applications 1.0; later, the two specifications merged to form HTML5. In 2007, HTML5 was accepted by the W3C and a new HTML working group was formed; on January 22, 2008, the first public working draft was published.

Although HTML5 was already very well-known among web developers at the time, it became a mainstream media topic in April 2010, when Apple CEO Steve Jobs published an article titled “Thinking about Flash,” stating that with the With the development of HTML5, Adobe Flash will no longer be necessary when watching videos or other content. This has sparked debate among developers, including that while HTML5 provides enhanced functionality, developers must take into account differences in browser support for different parts of the standard, as well as functional differences between HTML5 and Flash.

HTML5 is a technology brewed by hundreds of companies such as Google, Apple, Nokia, China Mobile, etc. According to a report released on September 30, 2011, 34 of the top 100 websites in the world use HTML5; A separate report released this month showed that as many as 153 of the Fortune 500 companies have adopted HTML5. HTML5 is both a technology of the past, a standard of the present, and the future of developers.

Source: Wikipedia

October 28, 2018: IBM acquires Red Hat (Red Hat)

Red Hat (Red Hat) is an enterprise in the United States that develops, sells Linux packages and provides technical services. Its famous product is Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In the late 1990s, when Linux called for free software and open source code, trying to challenge the dominance of commercial and closed-source Windows in the operating system market, Red Hat launched the Linux system and software integration package Red Hat Linux timely responded. The demand of the market has established Red Hat’s standard-bearer status in the Linux industry.

As of 2008, Red Hat was the largest company of its kind offering Linux integration services. Red Hat was listed on the Nasdaq on August 11, 1999, included in the Nasdaq 100 Index on December 19, 2005, and transferred to the New York Stock Exchange on December 12, 2006.

Source: Wikipedia

On October 28, 2018, IBM will acquire all outstanding shares of Red Hat for $190 per share in cash, for a total value of approximately $34 billion. Red Hat products involve five major technical fields: cloud computing, storage, virtualization, middleware, and operating systems; Red Hat provides technical support for open source products and is the world’s largest open source infrastructure company.

It believes in the community, gives back to the community, and implements the technical concept of open source. Therefore, the real reason for IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat was once divided, not just the acquisition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the surface.

In any case, this is IBM’s largest acquisition ever, and one of the largest corporate mergers in U.S. technology history. After the acquisition, Red Hat was merged into IBM’s hybrid cloud division, which is expected to bring growth to the cloud business; former Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will also join IBM’s executive team and report to IBM CEO.

Back in 2022, CentOS ended support after several setbacks between Red Hat and IBM, and has since ceased maintenance. Is IBM going to repeat history and ruin a big ecosystem due to acquisitions, or take over to create a new ecosystem? The answer to this question will take time to verify.