On March 22, 1965, Digital Equipment Corporation released the PDP-8 at $18,000 — dramatically cheaper than any mainframe. For the first time, universities, labs, and factories could afford their own computer. It helped move computing out of isolated rooms and into everyday work.
On March 23, 1965, NASA launched Gemini 3 — the first American spaceflight to carry a digital computer onboard. The computer couldn't make autonomous decisions, but it could calculate orbital positions faster than any human. A few years later, its descendants landed people on the Moon.
Yukihiro Matsumoto was born on April 14, 1965 in Osaka. He is the creator of the Ruby programming language, which he began developing in 1993 and released in December 1995. Within the Ruby community, he is universally known simply as Matz.
