IllustrativeNiyantha Shekhar via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
IllustrativeNiyantha Shekhar via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0
Today
12 August carries two United Nations-linked observances: International Youth Day, marked annually since 2000, and World Elephant Day, launched in 2012. It is also a date that keeps turning up at hinge points — one treaty that handed a trading company the revenues of eastern India, and one beige box that put a computer on an office desk.
On this day
- 1981IBM announced the Personal Computer, model 5150. Built largely from off-the-shelf parts with an openly documented architecture, it was cloned within two years — and the clones, not the original, made the PC the standard everything else had to be compatible with.
- 1990Palaeontologist Sue Hendrickson spotted weathered bone at the base of a cliff in South Dakota, uncovering the Tyrannosaurus rex specimen later nicknamed 'Sue' — still the largest and most complete T. rex skeleton ever found.
- 1765IndiaThe Treaty of Allahabad was signed, with Mughal emperor Shah Alam II granting the East India Company the Diwani — the right to collect revenue — of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. A commercial firm became the tax authority for the richest provinces in India, which is the moment the Company stopped merely trading here.
Did you know
The original IBM PC shipped in a base configuration with 16 kilobytes of memory. A single modern smartphone photo is roughly two hundred thousand times that size.
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