Anniversaries

Today brings us a couple of notable anniversaries.  The one everyone probably already knows is that today is the tenth anniversary of the second impeachment of an American president.  The House officially impeached Bill Clinton on December 19th, 1998:

Afterwards, the Senate declined to convict Clinton on the impeachment and remove him from office. The impeachment carries a historical stain on Clinton’s term of office, but in reality it has done little to hinder him. He had to forego his law license, but has made tens of millions of dollars on the speaking circuit and his wife came close to winning the Democratic nomination for her own shot at the presidency. In the end, impeachment did little to change history, and this anniversary has become more or less an answer to a trivia question.

The only other American president to be impeached, Andrew Johnson, also recovered politically, but had less time to enjoy it. After leaving office in the normal manner in 1868, he tried to return to Congress in 1868 and 1872 without success. In 1874, however, the Tennessee legislature elected him as Senator, and he was warmly received in his return to Washington. He died less than five months later.

On the positive side, a much more obscure anniversary today had a much greater impact on the world. In fact, you might not be reading this today if MITS had not launched the Altair 8800 personal-computer kit on this day in December 1974. Popular Mechanics wrote a cover story on the launch, and that changed the lives of four key people:

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak sold off Jobs’ VW van and Wozniak’s scientific calculator in order to get the funds to start building their own computers — a company that became Apple Computer. Paul Allen showed the magazine to his friend Bill Gates, who promptly dropped out of Harvard to start writing software for computers, which became Microsoft. When Apple and IBM started producing complete personal computer solutions, it put unprecedented power into the hands of the public.

One man almost thwarted history. Bill Gates’ proctor at Harvard tried to stop him from leaving school before he got his degree, and reached out to a friend to help convince Gates to stay put. Bill Bennett relates the story in his new book The American Patriot’s Almanac: Daily Readings on America that he told Gates, “I think it’s a mistake,” but that Gates remained unmoved.