A daily slice of computing history, a story that changes every day, the latest from the news, and our feature stories. Last reviewed 28 October 2026.
On this day4 November 1952Computing history
UNIVAC calls the US election on television
On election night, 4 November 1952, CBS News used a borrowed UNIVAC computer to forecast the US presidential result. It predicted an easy win for Dwight Eisenhower, and nobody believed it.
Opinion polls had pointed towards a landslide for Adlai Stevenson, so anchors Walter Cronkite and Charles Collingwood held the computer’s forecast back until the result was obvious.
UNIVAC had predicted 438 electoral votes for Eisenhower. He won 442. Election-night computers have been a fixture of television ever since.
Wayback Machine passes one trillion saved web pages
The Wayback Machine, the Internet Archive’s time machine for the web, passed one trillion archived pages in October 2025. The Archive marked the moment on 22 October with a livestreamed party at its San Francisco headquarters, nearly thirty years after it started saving websites in 1996. Founder Brewster Kahle called it “a fantastic, phenomenal success story”, and the California Senate presented the organisation with a certificate of recognition.
Wayback Machine director Mark Graham said the team had preserved more than 400 million US government web pages over the past year and, working with Wikimedia, had repaired over 28 million broken Wikipedia links. Internet pioneer Vint Cerf said that without the Archive, future generations would have little sense of the 21st century. The whole operation runs on donations from around 200,000 supporters.
Headlines are drawn automatically from each organisation’s public feed and link to the original article. NCSC content is Crown copyright under the Open Government Licence; The Conversation’s is Creative Commons BY-ND.
Feature stories
AI at workOctober 2026
01
Google’s new AI “coworker” gets its own email address
At its Gemini at Work event on 8 October, Google Cloud unveiled the Gemini Agent, a single AI agent for work. A manager describes a role, such as events coordinator, and Gemini creates a coworker agent with its own Workspace email address, calendar, Drive storage and a listing in the company directory. You give it a goal and it carries on working in the cloud, sometimes for hours or days, after you close your laptop.
It works across Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Drive and Calendar, and can reach into Microsoft 365 and Slack. Every action it takes lands in an audit trail attributed to the agent rather than to a person, and real-time spend caps pause it when a project hits its limit. Google has not announced pricing or a general release date; financial services and legal versions are in preview.
Microsoft’s reworked Copilot introduces Code, which lets anyone describe an app, tracker, dashboard or automation in plain language and have Copilot build it. The examples Microsoft gives range from small desktop widgets to interactive dashboards and cloud-hosted internal apps that can be shared with a team. It runs in a sandbox, can be hosted inside your own Microsoft 365 tenant, and uses the same underlying technology as GitHub Copilot.
Alongside it comes Autopilot, a persistent agent you give a name, role and goal, which keeps working in the cloud while you are away, and Today, a command centre across mail, calendar, Teams, meetings and tasks that went into private preview in October. The new features are reaching Microsoft’s Frontier early-access programme first, and Code, Cowork and Autopilot are billed on usage rather than per user.
AI is finding software bugs faster than the world can patch them
In late October, outages hit government websites in Europe and elsewhere after AI-driven research uncovered weaknesses in PHP, a programming language that powers a large part of the internet. Some operators could not patch in time and took their sites offline until they were secure. Research from threat-intelligence firm VulnCheck found that AI helped double the number of flaws discovered year on year.
Cloudflare chief executive Matthew Prince told Reuters he expects several years of near-constant alarms, with serious new vulnerabilities appearing regularly. Not everyone sees a free-for-all: curl’s lead developer Daniel Stenberg points out that AI-found bugs are often hard to exploit, and Prince himself argues the wave will be a net positive once the flaws it exposes are fixed.
MIT built a computer out of bacteria. It takes eight hours to add two numbers
Engineers at MIT have turned a common bacterium, Pantoea agglomerans, into living transistors and printed them onto a growth medium as “living circuit boards”. Each colony is switched on or off by one molecule, detects another and emits a third, which the next colony picks up. Colonies sit about five millimetres apart so signals flow in one direction, just like a wire.
The largest circuit so far wires 24 bacterial colonies together to add two inputs, and a calculation takes around eight hours. The point is not speed. The team imagines coating plant roots or leaves with circuits that sense drought or pests and trigger a response, such as producing a fungicide. The work was published in Nature Chemical Biology.
Each story is summarised from the linked source. CNS Support is not connected with any of the companies or institutions mentioned. The daily story rotates through a pool of 30 pieces.
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