At the beginning ...

I love the origin story. Of everything. Questions keeping popping up in my head and I love following the rabbit holes to find the answers. For eg. consider the questions in the image below.

I could fill up an entire book with such questions and still hit only an infinitesimal small percentage of inventions and discoveries that have shaped humankind.

I love creation stories, and stories of pioneers. The inventions, tools, ideas, philosophies, culture, etc. that humans indulge in amazes me and energizes me. I appreciate the practicality of focusing on how to use these ideas for profit. How the aim should be in using the outputs of this effort to do what needs to get done. After all the best way to respect an idea, a process or a tool is to use it.

However the act of creation, the decision on why that particular process was chosen, the stimuli for why the tool was created, how did a certain combination of people enable a certain idea to gain currency, the answers to all these questions are important in my opinion. It is what allows mankind to stand on the shoulder of giants. It has it's place in our lives, providing us a blueprint, and an inspiration; and making our shoulders capable to allow the future generation to rest on it.

Please cast a glance at the questions in the image above, how many of them do you know the answer to (it does not matter if you don't know them all, even I didn't.)

While I don't not intend this post to be a quiz, do pop over to the bottom of the post to check out the answers if you are interested. The answers to these questions amazed me, and I hope make you enjoy digging through a rabbit hole or two too.

So what does all of this have to the with the CWH and DreemPort Challenge of creating a profile piece this month?

Well, I want to report on one such pioneering story that you might not have heard of. Maybe the story is not as important as the creation of world wide web or open heart surgery, but it has a soft corner in my heart. It is a story of the start of something which has now become ubiquitous. It is also a story of a lad in India (me) who got a wind under his wing thanks to the magic broadcasts from this pioneering effort.

I use the verb ***report**** … not as a general verb, but as a constraint. I want to write a report as a journalist would. As I am not a journalist, I don't aspire to perfection. The core idea is to try a different tone - instead of a blogger or journaler I need to think like a reporter would, especially the way they might think when working on a researched feature piece. Will I be successful? Well it is a bit like going from 0 to 100. So we will have to see. However what I will commit to is that while I aim to complete it in the time for the challenge, I will complete it even if I miss the deadline.

What's in it for you?

Why would you be interested?

Since most of you love technology, knowledge and web3, I do think it will be an interesting piece of history.

This is a community of self starters, people who make things happen rather than wait for things to happen. If I do my job right, I am sure you will appreciate the origin story which I found so interesting.

It is a daunting task to try and write in a simple way about an event that I might be the only one interested in. However in this journey I hope to learn some new skills, and also share what I know. I am more optimistic than usual that it is going to rock - and about 50% of the optimism is thanks to CWH founder Hive account@alessandrawhite and the other 50% is thanks to the Dreemers Hive account@dreemsteem and Hive account@shadowspub.

CWH-Dreemport Feb Challenge

This February we have been challenged to create a feature or profile post, just one deep one for the month. For the three weeks of Feb the way we submit will be as follows:

1. First week drop a teaser post about your feature post. This post is my teaser post.
2. Second week drop a post about how the CWH-Dreemport collaboration impacted your creation of the final post. Pros and cons to be put in, and,
3. Final post to be submitted for the topic you are looking to explore. This final post is the feature post you have been working on.

Check out the official week 1 prompt and official week 2 prompt.

Answers

• Who discovered calculus and why?

! Generally Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz are credited to have both independently worked on and invented modern calculus. I say modern as ideas of calculus were already in use through trigonometry in almost every old civilization. Check this Wikipedia page to start your journey through the history of calculus There are many good YouTube videos too discussing this origin story.

• Where did algebra and algorithm originate?

! While algebra has been something that has been discovered and built over centuries the word algebra is derived from the arabic al-jabr. It was mentioned by the mathematician Al-Khwārizmī in his treatise. Click to find more about the history of algebra To know more about Al-Khwārizmī check out this Wikipedia page His name also inspired the creation of 'algorithm' Click to read more about algorithms.

• Who did the first open heart surgery?

! Lots of people are involved in this but looks like Dr. Lillehei might be assumed to be the first, or at least one of the first. Read this link to see the maker spirit in him Also to know more about open heart surgery check this link.

• Who invented the steam engine?

! I used to think James Watt invented the steam engine but Wikipedia has disabused me of this notion. Looks like he made some major modifications (and probably had good PR) According to Wikipedia Thomas Savery or Thomas Newcomen could be considered as the inventor dependent on which version of the engine we are talking of. Check out more in the wiki link

• Who was the first programmer?

! The first two names I learnt with respect to computing and programming was all the way back in 1986. The names were Charles Babbage who created the Differential Engine and Analytical Engine and Lady Ada Lovelace who wrote the first program for it. Check out more in the link. Interesting she is the daughter of Lord Byron who will figure again in another answer.

• Who invented the sci fi genre? And the modern horror genre?

! Ok this is more of what I remember rather than a link to a source, but we can more or else look at Frankenstein as the start of modern Sci-Fi and Dracula would the book to start the modern horror genre. The fun part of this story is that Mary Shelly wrote it in a personal competition between the guests of Lord Byron. Check out the full story here in the archives Though it is treated as a horror book I find it to be more a scifi book. Another story that came out from a guest there was Vampyre about vampires :) Dracula is another favorite of mine by Bram Stoker and this is the first modern horror book for me.

• Who invented podcasting?

! Wikipedia says it differently, but going by my memory it was Dave Winer (who had just invented RSS at the time) and Adam Curry together worked up the plan that turned into podcasting. As I remember it Adam was the one who named it. Their Daily Source Code was the first podcast audio that came out where RSS feeds would pull in audio and the same would then be copied from the download folders into our mp3 players or iPods to listen to later. Those were heady days, I still get goosebumps when I think of that iPod and web 2.0 time.

• Who invented Unix?

! For me Ken Thompson invented Unix though again it was not a specific moment in time but rather and evolving queue of challenging restrictions that forced him to think and make this happen. And he had a good group of people around him to help extend his solution to the fantastic OS that Unix was. Read more about Unix here.

• Who invented broadband?

! Trick question warning. There is no one person who invented broadband. In fact even what defines broadband has been a moving target at times. It was truly a collaboration of multiple people, universities and companies to make it happen.

• Who invented the world wide web?

! One of my favorite scientists, Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web while working at CERN. Check out both pages. I find it particularly interesting how he says that this invention was an act of desperation :)

Sources:

1. Images are by me using AI solutions like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion. One of the images was created using the free Canva application.
2. Dividers used are the ones shared for free use by @ kittygirl over on the Terminal Discord. (keeping @ separate from user name as she has said she does not need credit and I don't want her to get an unnecessary notification.