Two anniversaries
Will points out that today is the 50th anniversary of Nature's publication of Watson & Crick's proposal for the structure of DNA. Fifty years ago, the phrase "double helix" didn't have the instant resonance it has today. I wonder what it was like for biologists to pick up that copy of Nature and see the now-famous diagram for the first time. (Added later: they're gonna take away my writing license, or maybe my English degree, if I don't mention the phrase "Silent, upon a peak in Darien" somewhere in this paragraph.)
Of course, as with most science, this work didn't come out of the blue. The OSU library has a nice piece called Linus Pauling and the Race for DNA, which gives the whole story from a viewpoint sympathetic to Pauling, with a bunch of cool images of primary documents. (Follow the "narrative" link on that page.) If that version is accurate, it looks like Watson & Crick's work rested on a foundation laid by Pauling, with hugely important input from Rosalind Franklin, Maurice Wilkins, Erwin Chargaff, Jerry Donohue, and others. (That issue of Nature also included related papers by Wilkins and Franklin & Gosling.)
Watson was about 25 years old at the time; Crick about 36.
Interestingly, Pauling was twice in the early '50s denied the ability to travel to the UK:
Passports had become a political weapon since the passage of the Internal Security Act of 1950, which broadened the government's power to restrict the travel of political dissidents. [Ruth] Shipley, a fervent anti-Communist, took advantage of her position to refuse passports to anyone she and the State Department's security personnel—or the FBI, with which she kept in close contact—suspected of being too far left and too loud about it. Pauling was a committed leftist and opponent of nuclear bombs. He had been accused of being a Communist (he was not).
Later, after this incident became "a public relations fiasco," the State Department decided to allow Pauling to travel with "a limited passport—good for a short period of time for travel only in England and France—provided that he sign a new affidavit denying membership in the Communist Party."
Anyway. The other recent sci/tech anniversary I wanted to mention was that this past Tuesday (April 22) was touted in various places as the tenth anniversary of the release of NCSA Mosaic, the first web browser. But some poking around online doesn't turn up any particular information about what happened on that date. The Windows and Mac versions of the browser were released on November 11, 1993; there was an early release of the X-Windows (UNIX) version in February, I think; I can't find any information about what happened on April 22. Maybe the 1.0 UNIX version? Not sure.
But it's also been widely noted that Mosaic was neither the first web browser nor the best early one. As with most technology, this work didn't just come out of the blue. It built on earlier work by all sorts of people, and had contributions from a lot of people. But for various reasons, Mosaic was the browser that caught the public imagination.
Anyway, no matter how you count it, it's been somewhere around ten years since the web first began to really take off. Been a lot of changes since then.
Here's an article from fall 1993 talking about this cool new Mosaic thing. And another piece showing a screen snap of the first Mac public beta of Mosaic (Sept. 1993). "The browser initially only supported left-justified images and text. . . ."
