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On this day in 1986, Microsoft conducted its Initial Public Offering. Ten years earlier, Harvard Student Bill Gates had started the company by writing an implementation of the programming language BASIC for the Altair 8080, on of the first computers cheap enough to be owned by individuals. Gates sold the language to Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, the company that made the Altair, and dropped out of Harvard to go into business.
Microsoft’s real success came a few years later when it signed a contract with IBM to provide an operating system for the upcoming IBM Personal Computer. Microsoft bought the rights to QDOS, the Quick and Dirty Operating System, from Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer Products, and then turned around and sold IBM a license to use it on the PC.
Since Microsoft had managed to retain exclusive rights to the operating system in the IBM deal, the company made a fortune licensing it to the great number of computer manufactures that went into business a few years later, flooding the market with clones of the wildly successful IBM machine.
In 1985, shortly before its IPO, Microsoft released the first version of Windows, which is still the most popular graphical user interface today.
At the end of its first day of trading, the company’s stock closed at $28 per share.
On this day in 1925 Tennessee passed the Butler Act banning public schools from teaching the theory of evolution. The campaign to pass the act was led by progressive democratic politician William Jennings Bryan who was known as a great public orator and had served as Secretary of State under Woodrow Wilson. As a populist, Bryan was offended by the elitism of social darwinism, which was not well distinguished from the theory of evolution at the time. And as a devout Presbyterian, he feared that Darwinism would overturn morality and lead people to denounce Christianity.
Shortly after the Butler Act passed, the ACLU started searching for a Tennessee teacher to act as a defendant to challenge it in a court. A group of businessmen in Dayton, Tennessee decided that bringing the case to their town would make for good publicity and so they recruited local high school football coach and substitute teacher John Scopes. In May, Scopes taught a class at the high school on evolution using a textbook required by the state’s own curriculum, George Hunter’s Civic Biology. He was indicted two weeks later, but never taken into custody.
Scopes’ upcoming trial quickly became a media sensation drawing celebrity lawyers on all sides. A Christian fundamentalist organization recruited Bryan to argue against Scopes and the ACLU brought in acclaimed lawyer Clarence Darrow who had defended the teen killers Leopold and Loeb the year before.
During the course of the trial, the defense called a series of evolution experts in an attempt to argue that there was no conflict between religious belief and the study of Darwinism, but the judge discounted most of the testimony as irrelevant. In an unorthodox move, the defense then called Bryan himself to the stand as an expert on the Bible. Darrow asked Bryan a series of questions meant to show that a literal belief in the Bible was unreasonable. Bryan quipped that Darrow was trying “to cast ridicule” on believers to which Darrow responded: “We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States.”
The debate was widely seen as a victory for the defense and an embarrassment for Darrow, but the judge refused to admit it into the record, again ruling that it was irrelevant. After deliberating for nine minutes, the jury found Scopes guilty and he was ordered to pay a one hundred dollar fine. Bryan offered to pay it on his behalf.
Darrow and the defense lawyers appealed the decision to the Supreme Court of Tennessee which upheld the Butler Act, but overturned Scopes’ conviction on a technicality. The state did not seek a retrial. The Butler Act remained in effect until 1968 when the US Supreme Court ruled that such bans violate the clause of the Constitution prohibiting the establishment of an official state religion.
William Jennings Bryan died five days after the completion of the trial.
All information courtesy of Wikipedia except where otherwise noted.
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