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.Ellinor Algin via Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0- 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.Shah 'Alam II via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
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.