Do the best you can in every task, no matter how unimportant it may seem at the time. No one learns more about a problem than the person at the bottom. – Sandra Day O’Connor.
1928 – Sliced bread is sold for the first time (on the inventor‘s 48th birthday) by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.
Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, USA invented the first loaf-at-a-time bread-slicing machine. A prototype he built in 1912 was destroyed in a fire and it was not until 1928 that Rohwedder had a fully working machine ready. The first commercial use of the machine was by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, which produced their first slices on July 7, 1928. Their product, “Kleen Maid Sliced Bread”, proved a success. Battle Creek, Michigan has a competing claim as the first city to sell bread presliced by Rohwedder’s machine; however, historians have produced no documentation backing up Battle Creek’s claim. The bread was advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.”
1945 – Adele Goldberg, American computer scientist is born.
Adele Goldberg (born July 7, 1945) is a computer scientist who participated in the development of the programming language Smalltalk-80 and various concepts related to object-oriented programming while a researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, PARC, in the 1970s.
Goldberg began working at PARC in 1973 as a laboratory and research assistant, and eventually became manager of the System Concepts Laboratory where she, Alan Kay, and others developed Smalltalk-80, which both developed the object-oriented approach of Simula 67 and introduced a programming environment of overlapping windows on graphic display screens. Not only was Smalltalk’s innovative format simpler to use, it was also customizable and objects could be transferred among applications with minimal effort. Goldberg and Kay also were involved in the development of design templates, forerunners of the design patterns commonly used in software design. In 1988 Goldberg left PARC to co-found ParcPlace Systems, a company that created development tools for Smalltalk-based applications.
Along with Kay, she wrote the influential article “Personal Dynamic Media”, which predicted a world where ordinary individuals would use notebook computers to exchange, modify, and redistribute personal media. This paper outlined the vision for the Dynabook.
She served as president of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) from 1984 to 1986, and, together with Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls, received the ACM Software Systems Award in 1987 and was also included in Forbes’s “Twenty Who Matter”. She also received PC Magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. In 1994 she was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.
Many of the concepts developed by Goldberg and her team at PARC became the basis for graphically based user interfaces, replacing the earlier command line based systems. According to Goldberg, Steve Jobs demanded a demonstration of the Smalltalk System, which she refused to give him. Her superiors eventually ordered her to, at which point she complied, satisfied that the decision to “give away the kitchen sink” to Jobs and his team was then their responsibility. Apple eventually used many of the ideas in the Alto and their implementations as the basis for their Macintosh desktop.
1947 – The Roswell incident, the (supposed) crash of an alien spaceship near Roswell in New Mexico.
In mid 1947, a military Air Force surveillance balloon crashed at a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico prompting claims alleging the crash was of an extraterrestrial spaceship.
After an initial spike of interest, the military reported that the crash was merely of a conventional weather balloon. Interest subsequently waned until the late 1970s when ufologists began promulgating a variety of increasingly elaborate conspiracy theories claiming that one or more alien spacecraft had crash-landed and that the extraterrestrial occupants had been recovered by the military who then engaged in a cover-up.
In the 1990s the US military published reports disclosing the true nature of the crashed Project Mogul balloon. Nevertheless, the Roswell incident continues to be of interest in popular media, and conspiracy theories surrounding the event persist. Roswell has been called “the world’s most famous, most exhaustively investigated, and most thoroughly debunked UFO claim”.
1981 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan appoints Sandra Day O’Connor to become the first female member of the Supreme Court of the United States.
…On July 7, 1981, Reagan – who had pledged during his 1980 presidential campaign to appoint the first woman to the Court – announced he would nominate O’Connor as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, to replace the retiring Potter Stewart. O’Connor received notification from President Reagan of her nomination on the day prior to the announcement and did not know that she was a finalist for the position. Reagan formally nominated O’Connor on August 19, 1981.
2003 – NASA Opportunity rover, MER-B or Mars Exploration Rover – B, was launched into space aboard a Delta II rocket.
Opportunity, also known as MER-B (Mars Exploration Rover – B) or MER-1, is a robotic rover active on the planet Mars since 2004. Launched on July 7, 2003 as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover program, it landed in Meridiani Planum on January 25, 2004, three weeks after its twin Spirit (MER-A) touched down on the other side of the planet. With a planned 90 sol duration of activity, Spirit functioned until getting stuck in 2009 and ceased communications in 2010, while Opportunity remains active as of 2015, having already exceeded its operating plan by 11 years, 65 days (in Earth time). Opportunity has continued to move, gather scientific observations, and report back to Earth for over 40 times its designed lifespan.
Mission highlights include the initial 90 sol mission, finding extramartian meteorites such as Heat Shield Rock (Meridiani Planum meteorite), and over two years studying Victoria crater. It survived dust-storms and reached Endeavour crater in 2011, which has been described as a “second landing site”.
2010 – Pomona Test Lead Holders
We have been obsessed for a while…now we stock them!