Inventor of LEDs wins $500,000 MIT award
Inventor of LEDs wins$500,000 MIT award
BOSTON -- When Nick Holonyak Jr. set out to create a new kind of visible lighting using semiconductor alloys, his colleagues thought he was "nuttier than hell."
Today, Holonyak's discovery -- light-emitting diodes, or LEDs -- are used in DVDs, alarm clocks, traffic lights, even the Nasdaq stock billboard in New York.
On Friday, Holonyak will receive the 10th annual Lemelson-MIT Prize, a $500,000 award given to prominent inventors by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Holonyak, 75, now a professor at the University of Illinois, said he had suspected LEDs would become commonplace but didn't realize how many uses they would have.
"You think you're doing something important, you think it's worth doing, but you really can't tell what the big payoff is going to be, and when, and how," Holonyak said. "You just don't know."
At Bell Labs, Holonyak was part of a team that developed integrated circuits. At General Electric, he invented a switch now widely used in house dimmer switches and power tools.
Later, he started looking into using semiconductors to generate light. But while colleagues focused on generating invisible infrared light, he wanted to generate visible light. The LEDs he invented in 1962 now last about 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs.
AOL e-mail subscriberscan use other software
NEW YORK -- America Online subscribers can now check their e-mail using most third-party software, yet another sign of holes opening up in the Internet dial-up leader's walled garden.
That means Internet users accustomed to Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora and other programs needn't use AOL's proprietary software or use Web-based interface to check their AOL electronic mail.
AOL quietly began supporting the open IMAP protocols April 5 and formally launched it Wednesday.
"We've had members that have said, 'I'm used to using Outlook at work or Eudora at my old ISP [Internet service provider], so why can't I do the same things?"' said Roy Ben-Yoseph, AOL's director of e-mail products.
Before, only AOL's main software, its AOL Communicator and the AOL-owned Netscape browsers supported AOL e-mail. Instructions for using IMAP are at AOL keywords "open mail access."
AOL also has been making more of its once-exclusive content available through its Web site. It has been shifting from its proprietary programming language, known as "Rainman," to the hypertext markup language that powers the World Wide Web.
Associated Press
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