National Computing Day

What the day is

National Computing Day is observed on October 3. It is a broad day rather than a specific one, covering computing as a field: the hardware, the software, the people who build it and the fact that almost nothing now works without it.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented, and no founder or sponsoring organization is reliably known.

The history it gestures at is unusually compressed. Programmable electronic computers were wartime and postwar machines occupying entire rooms and consuming enormous power. The transistor, and then the integrated circuit, shrank them by orders of magnitude within two decades. Personal computers arrived in the 1970s and became household objects in the 1980s, the web made them communication devices in the 1990s, and smartphones put more computing power in a pocket than existed in the institutions that built the first machines.

A few names are worth knowing beyond the famous ones. Ada Lovelace described the idea of a general-purpose programmable machine in the nineteenth century. Alan Turing formalized what computation is. Grace Hopper built early compilers and pushed the idea that programs should be written in something closer to human language. Much of the programming workforce in the field's first decades was women, a fact that the industry's later self-image largely erased.

How to take part

• Back up something you would hate to lose. Follow the standard rule: three copies, two kinds of media, one off-site.
• Update your devices. Most successful attacks exploit flaws that were patched months earlier.
• Teach someone a thing they have been avoiding. Password managers, two-factor authentication and photo backups are the usual candidates.
• Try writing a little code. An hour with an introductory tutorial demystifies more than years of using software.
• Give an old machine away rather than throwing it out, after wiping it. Refurbished computers are in constant demand by schools and charities.

If you want a historical thread to pull, look up the machine that first ran a stored program and how little memory it had. The comparison with the device you are reading this on is genuinely hard to believe.