title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Although the character first appeared in 1986, he was retroactively said to have been present during previously published stories. The unnamed benefactor of the Living Monolith in "Marvel Graphic Novel" #17 (1985) was later identified as Apocalypse in disguise. "Classic X-Men" #25 revealed that years earlier, Apocalypse encountered the terrorist Moses Magnum and granted him superhuman power.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: During his run on "Cable", Robert Weinberg planned a story to reveal that Apocalypse was the third Summers brother, a mysterious sibling to the mutants Cyclops and Havok. But Weinberg left the book before he could go along with his plan and the third Summers brother was revealed to be the mutant Gabriel Summers, a.k.a. Vulcan.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Apocalypse was the principal adversary in the mid-1980s "X-Men" spin-off series "X-Factor" (1986–91) until being apparently killed at the climax of issue #68 (July 1991). Since then, the character has died and been resurrected several times thanks to his power and advanced alien technology. His name En Sabah Nur was revealed in "Cable" #6 (December 1993) and his birthplace (Egypt) and the origin of his technology, were revealed in "X-Force" #37 (August 1994). According to Marvel, the name translates from Arabic as "The First One" (although, in reality, the translation is considered grammatically incorrect, as it means "The First/Morning Light" [En-("The") + Sabah- ("Morning") + Nur- ("Light")] ). It is later revealed in the origin story "Rise of Apocalypse" that he is possibly the first mutant (meaning, in this case, a human being born with the X-gene), born 5,000 years ago. The character gained greater popularity in 1995 when the storyline "Age of Apocalypse" featured an alternate timeline in which Apocalypse has conquered much of planet Earth.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: The character was reincarnated in the pages of "Uncanny X-Force" #1 as a small boy with no memory of his previous incarnation. The boy was named Evan Sabahnur. In 2012 the adult, villainous version of Apocalypse returned in the series "Uncanny Avengers". His origins are further explored in the storyline "Apocalypse Wars".


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In 2019, writers Jonathan Hickman and Tini Howard expanded upon Apocalypse's origin and agenda in the Excalibur series and the X of Swords event. Apocalypse's 'survival of the fittest' mentality was revealed to have had the aim of preparing the mutant population for a dangerous reunion with the long-lost mutants of Arakko, which included his wife and four children, the original Horsemen of Apocalypse.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: The being who would later be called Apocalypse was born thousands of years ago in Aqaba. He was born with the mutant X-gene. Because of his grey skin and blue lips, his people abandoned him as an infant. He was rescued by Baal of the Sandstormers who saw the child's potential power and will to survive. Baal named him En Sabah Nur, which Marvel translates as "The First One". The Sandstormers lived by the credo of survival of the fittest, believing that only those who are strong enough to survive hardship and direct conflict are worthy of life. It is also revealed during the Apocalypse Wars that, while still a young boy, En Sabah Nur was very generous and selfless, to the chagrin of Baal. A time-displaced Evan Sabah Nur and All-New X-Men Beast tried to save En Sabah Nur, but he allowed himself to be captured to help them escape.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Around this time, the time-traveller Kang the Conqueror arrived in Egypt and assumed the identity of Pharaoh Rama-Tut. Knowing who En Sabah Nur was fated to become and where he was, Rama-Tut sent his General Ozymandias and an army to destroy the Sandstormers and find the young Apocalypse. En Sabah Nur and Baal were injured and sought refuge in a cave. Before he died, Baal revealed advanced alien technology hidden in the cave, left behind by the deity-like aliens known as Celestials. Vowing revenge on Rama-Tut, En Sabah Nur entered the Pharaoh's city posing as a slave and drew the romantic attention of Ozymandias's sister, Nephri. On seeing the mutant's true appearance, Nephri rejected him and turned to her brother for protection. Heartbroken, En Sabah Nur's rage caused his mutant abilities to fully emerge. Rampaging, he renamed himself Apocalypse. Rama-Tut fled and En Sabah Nur used the Celestial technology to transform his former tormentor Ozymandias into a blind clairvoyant made of living stone, now enslaved to Apocalypse. As the years went on, Apocalypse found he no longer aged.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: It is revealed in the series "S.H.I.E.L.D." that Apocalypse, at some point in the days of Ancient Egypt, joined forces with the Brotherhood of the Shield to successfully fend off a Brood invasion. Also present were Imhotep and a man who was either the moon god called Khonshu or his first Moon Knight avatar/champion.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: As the millennia pass, Apocalypse travels around planet Earth, convincing civilizations that he is a deity (inspiring different myths as a result) and manipulating them into fighting wars. He justifies that this encourages "growth, judgment, and destruction". Apocalypse's progeny become the Clan Akkaba. Apocalypse encounters the near-immortal human offshoot race known as Eternals, primarily the members Ikaris and Sersi, who refer to him as their "Ancient Nemesis". At different points, Apocalypse uses his Celestial technology to enter periods of suspended animation, leaving Clan Akkaba and Ozymandias to act in his stead.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In 1013 AD, Apocalypse seeks to destroy the Asgardian Thor, who he knows will cause him trouble in the future, according to information obtained from Rama-Tut, yet the plans are foiled by Odin. In the 12th century, Apocalypse encounters the Eternal Sersi again while awakening latent mutant powers in a crusader named Bennet du Paris, also known as Exodus. In 1459, Apocalypse defeats Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler) in Romania, who later becomes the vampire more popularly known as Count Dracula.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In 1859, Apocalypse encounters British scientist Nathaniel Essex and learns more about the nature of mutants. Apocalypse uses his Celestial technology to transform Essex into the superhuman being Mister Sinister. He then coerces Sinister and the Hellfire Club into aiding his plans for global conquest, but Sinister concludes that these plans are madness and betrays Apocalypse, forcing him back into hibernation. In 1897, Count Dracula attacks the Clan Akkaba in revenge for his defeat at Apocalypse's hands, forcing the Clan to revive their master from suspended animation. Apocalypse defeats the vampire again, this time with help from Abraham Van Helsing. Eventually, Apocalypse enters hibernation again, expecting to remain so for possibly two centuries, by which point mutants should be more common on Earth.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: After many years of suspended animation, Apocalypse awakens nearly a century earlier than planned due to the arrival of the time-traveling mutant Cable (ironically, Cable had traveled to this point in time hoping to prevent the ancient mutant from awakening). Apocalypse decides the Earth is ready for further examination and testing. He grants superhuman powers to the terrorist known as Moses Magnum, who then tests the X-Men and the Avengers. Apocalypse later briefly employs the Alliance of Evil to capture the mutant Michael Nowlan, who can boost the power of other mutants. This plan brings Apocalypse into direct conflict with the first incarnation of X-Factor, when the team comprised the original X-Men.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Apocalypse then recruits mutants to serve as his personal guard, known as the Four Horsemen. Among them is Angel, AKA Warren Worthington III, whom Apocalypse has corrupted and turned into a cyborg called Death. Warren Worthington regains his identity and helps his friends defeat Apocalypse, adopting the new codename Archangel. Apocalypse escapes with his new recruit, the Morlock called Caliban, while X-Factor then takes his Celestial spaceship as a base.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: During "The Evolutionary War", the High Evolutionary plans to rid the Earth of those he feels are preventing evolution. Believing this disrupts the natural order and his own plans, Apocalypse battles the High Evolutionary. Following the genetic manipulation of Caliban, Apocalypse declines an alliance with the Asgardian villain Loki and other villains conspiring to unleash "Acts of Vengeance". This results in a brief fight between Apocalypse and Loki.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Apocalypse learns of Sinister's intention to create an adversary powerful enough to destroy him: Nathan Christopher Charles Summers, the son of Scott Summers and Madelyne Pryor. Apocalypse, viewing him as a threat and realizing that Nathan's energy is the very energy that awoke him all those months earlier, sends his newly formed group, the Riders of the Storm, to abduct the Summers child. Apocalypse at this time had conquered the city of Attilan, home of the Inhumans, as well as enslaved part of its population. X-Factor, alongside the Inhuman Royal Family, attacks Apocalypse's lunar stronghold. Although Apocalypse is severely defeated, the young Nathan is infected with a techno-organic virus and is sent to the future with a woman named Askani to be cured.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In the future, Apocalypse has conquered the Earth and ruled until the 39th century. By this time, Apocalypse's body had grown feeble: he becomes aware of the young Nathan's presence in this time, but only succeeds in kidnapping a clone of the child which Askani created. Apocalypse plans to transfer his consciousness and power into the clone's stronger body, but perishes in combat with the (real) teenage Nathan. Nathan grows up to become the warrior Cable (while his clone grows up to become the mutant terrorist known as Stryfe) and travels back to the past to prevent Apocalypse's future domination of the planet.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In the present, Apocalypse is prematurely awoken from his regeneration chamber by his Riders (now calling themselves The Dark Riders), who inform their master that his Horsemen have kidnapped Cyclops and Jean Grey, supposedly under his instructions (in actuality, Mister Sinister, who was posing as Apocalypse). When attempting to rejuvenate himself again, Apocalypse is nearly killed by Stryfe who had arrived in the past to take revenge on Apocalypse. After a battle on the Moon with his former servants, the Dark Riders (who had joined Stryfe), Apocalypse is left for dead by Archangel.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: The Dark Riders' new leader, Genesis (the adopted son of Cable, who had traveled to the present to ensure Apocalypse's rise and exact revenge on his father), plans to resurrect Apocalypse by sacrificing the lives of the people in villages neighboring Akkaba. During this time, Wolverine is held captive by Genesis, who attempts to restore Wolverine's lost adamantium skeleton and turn him into a Horseman as a gift for Apocalypse. Wolverine breaks free and kills Genesis along with nearly all of the Dark Riders. Genesis had built a sarcophagus with Apocalypse's likeness (which is empty, since Apocalypse had already revived).


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: After a long healing slumber, Apocalypse, fully restored, awakens with Ozymandias at his side and quickly learns of the present danger: Onslaught. He observes the conflict between the psionic entity and Earth's heroes with Uatu the Watcher, who suggests to Apocalypse a course of action: an alliance with the one who hated him the most, Cable. Apocalypse surmises that Onslaught will be most vulnerable through the astral plane and that he needs Cable for actual physical transportation to this realm. Once on the astral plane, Apocalypse removes the captive Franklin Richards, greatly weakening Onslaught. The plan succeeds, but is interrupted by the Invisible Woman, who had invisibly accompanied the pair, having suspected Apocalypse's motive in wanting to actually kill her son. However, the reprieve in battle gave Onslaught the time to escape, prolonging the conflict.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Following the events of the "Onslaught" saga, the gamma-spawned powerhouse, the Hulk and his human alter ego, Banner, are split into two separate entities: Hulk now draws upon energy derived from Franklin Richards' pocket universe. Apocalypse recruits the Hulk to become his Horseman, War, with intentions of using the Hulk's nexus-energy to overcome the Celestials. To test this newest recruit, Apocalypse set War against the New World Order, a shadow cabinet organization that intends to conquer the planet. The New World Order in turn set the Juggernaut and the Absorbing Man against War, but both are easily defeated. Hulk comes to his senses after injuring his friend, Rick Jones. Despite this apparent setback, the incident was still a victory for Apocalypse as it was a successful testing of newly understood Celestial technology. Apocalypse activates the self-destruct mechanism on the sword of War, which the New World Order had obtained, destroying their headquarters.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: The Hellfire Club later awakens Apocalypse's long-hidden Harbinger from its deep sleep: originally a normal man, whom Apocalypse in the 19th century once left to incubate for 100 years. Apocalypse releases his Horseman (Caliban) and his scribe Ozymandias from his possession, to fend for themselves, if they were to survive the coming events. Cable with the Avengers battles the Harbinger, but are unable to stop it. Apocalypse then appears, activating a bomb inside the Harbinger intended to destroy all of New York, but Cable manages to prevent this disaster.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: When Magneto is disrupting Earth's magnetic field, Apocalypse sends a Skrull impersonating the mutant Astra (having dealt with the original Astra) to stop the Master of Magnetism.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Intending to start an all-out war between the humans and the subterranean-dwelling Deviants as part of his plan to test the strong, Apocalypse sets off nuclear warheads at Lemuria, causing the Deviants to further mutate (which also restores Ikaris' father Virako to life). Apocalypse launches an attack at San Francisco, using a mentally controlled Deviant, Karkas, now a gigantic monster, that the Eternals are forced to battle. Apocalypse is confronted by his centuries-old foe, Ikaris, who now is a Prime Eternal. Although Apocalypse defeats Ikaris, the Eternal still succeeds in destroying his ship and thwarting his plan.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Supposedly lost diaries of the mutant seer Destiny surfaced, telling of twelve beings that could defeat Apocalypse once and for all. Various mutants, all listed in the prophecy, are abducted by Apocalypse's Horsemen including a faction of the Skrulls. The Twelve legend was in fact a ruse, orchestrated by Apocalypse himself: once the Twelve are assembled, Apocalypse intended to use them to transform himself into a deitylike entity beyond the Celestials. It is revealed at the end of this story arc that Apocalypse's physical form has been burned out due to the vast amount of energies he has under his control, forcing him to wear a bio-armor (like his future counterpart) and now plans to use Nate Grey as a host body for him to move his energy and consciousness into. The X-Men confront Apocalypse as he is close to merging with Nate, but are unable to stop him. Cyclops pushes Nate Grey out of the way, merging with Apocalypse instead. While the merge is successful, Apocalypse's aim for unlimited power is not and he attempts to complete the transformation by warping reality into various scenarios (see Ages of Apocalypse). Apocalypse hoped to lure the Twelve into empowering him with their energy, but eventually, the mutants realize their true predicament and Apocalypse teleports away.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: An amnesiac and powerless cyborg Cyclops regains control of the merged form, but Apocalypse begins to re-emerge. Jean and Cable are alerted to his location in Egypt, where Jean in the end manages to free Cyclops by telepathically tearing out Apocalypse's essence from her husband's body, rendering Apocalypse in an incorporeal astral form, which Cable apparently destroys using his Psimitar.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In the aftermath of the 2005 "Decimation" storyline, in which most of the mutants lost their powers, Apocalypse was revealed to be alive and well. The techno-organic virus, with which he long ago infected Cable, was revealed to be the means by which Apocalypse's spirit reconstituted itself. With only a drop of his blood into a vat of organs and blood, the virus rewrote the genetic code of the material within to form a body for Apocalypse. Apocalypse awakes from a slumber in a tomb in Akkaba, recalling:


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Across the world—helpless mutants slaughtered. Pogroms. Horror. ...Something has woken me from my slumber. Once, a sudden surge in worldwide mutant power stirred me from a similar sleep. Now—a plummet in global mutant capacity—has opened my eyes.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Apocalypse finds himself on a planet with its mutant population reduced to a fraction of what it had been, only a few hundred remaining out of the millions who populated earth prior to his demise at Cable's hands. Reappearing inside a Sphinx-shaped ship, Apocalypse confronts the X-Men with his newly assembled cadre of Horsemen on the front lawn of the X-Mansion. The Horseman Famine uses his powers to cause an intense feeling of hunger and weakness in the mutants and humans on the institute grounds. Apocalypse offers the mutants an elixir: his own blood, provided they join his side. Bent on becoming the new messiah for mutant-kind, Apocalypse approaches the Earth leaders at the United Nations in New York and issues an ultimatum: humanity would destroy ninety percent of its own population, putting man and mutant on level ground in anticipation of the final conflict when the worthy alone would survive – or Apocalypse would unleash his meta-plague on the planet and obliterate all humanity.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In the end, Apocalypse's horsemen are lost, Ozymandias betrays him, and he is forced to retreat by a combined assault of the X-Men and the Avengers. Ultimately, it is discovered that the Celestials "lent" their technology to Apocalypse, requiring as payment "greater sufferings later". He attempts to embrace death as an escape from his lifelong pact, only to find himself instantly resurrected and hearing a voice: ""We cannot let you die. Not yet. It is time Apocalypse… it is time"".


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Apocalypse's followers, the Clan Akkaba, manage to bring about Apocalypse's return, albeit in the form of a child they will indoctrinate. Upon learning of Apocalypse's return, X-Force seeks to kill him, but when they discover he is a child, Psylocke decides to protect him, believing they can rehabilitate him and train him as a force for good. To the shock of the rest of the team, Fantomex fatally shoots the child.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In a 2011 storyline, as X-Force succeed in stopping the Deathloks inside the World, the home of all Weapon projects, it is revealed that Ultimaton, guardian of the World, is keeping watch over an incubating young boy labeled En Sabah Nur, aged 847 days.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: During the 2012 storyline "Dark Angel Saga", it is revealed that Apocalypse had fathered a son with Autumn Rolfson and she kept this a secret from Apocalypse out of fear of what he would do to him. At the end of the storyline, it is revealed that Fantomex creates a clone Apocalypse which he helps raise to the age of a teenager in an artificial world, where the clone knows Fantomex as the kindly "Uncle Cluster" who taught him to use his abilities for good. The boy, code-named Genesis, helps X-force fight Archangel and when the battle is over, Fantomex enrolls him in the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In "Wolverine & the X-Men" #4 (March 2012), Evan Sabahnur a.k.a. Genesis is admitted as a student to the Jean Grey School of Higher Learning, where his classmates notice his resemblance to Apocalypse. En is worried when a visiting Deathlok, who reveals to the students their likely futures, shows reluctance to do so with Evan. When Evan presses him, Deathlok informs him that this is what Evan is at the school to discover. Deathlok then tells Wolverine that Evan has great potential and may be a great savior, or a conqueror.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: After being called Kid Apocalypse by Kid Omega, Evan begins learning about Apocalypse and is saddened that he himself looks like the villain, raising the possibility of a future that Evan rejects. After saving Angel and discovering that he possesses the ability to see the essence of those he looks upon, Evan asks him to tell him what he sees when he looks at him. Angel tells Evan he sees only goodness inside him, which makes Evan happy, so he thanks Angel for being a good friend. In fact, Angel lied, as the only thing he could see was the dark image of Apocalypse.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: A new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, led by Wolverine's son Daken, kidnaps Evan during a field trip to Genosha's remains. Hoping to sway the boy into becoming Apocalypse, the Brotherhood reveals to him that he is a clone and tells him of X-Force's assassination of the child En Sabah Nur from which he was cloned and the falsehood of his life under the tutelage of Fantomex. After the Brotherhood reveals that they have killed Fantomex and further tortures Evan, Daken tells En that he has a choice: either immediately ascend as Apocalypse and kill the Brotherhood as revenge for the death of "Uncle Cluster", or let the rest of X-Force die at the Brotherhood's hands to avenge the death of the original boy En Sabah Nur and to prevent X-Force from killing Evan the way they killed Apocalypse and Archangel.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Daken offers Evan a suit of Apocalypse's Celestial armor to do with what he will, secretly planning to control the new Apocalypse through the psychic abilities of the Shadow King. After Deadpool's failed attempt to rescue Evan, the boy dons the Celestial armor to prevent Wolverine's death at Daken's hands and nearly kills Brotherhood members Sabretooth and Mystique. Enraged by the lies he has been told and filled with new-found power from Apocalypse's armor, Evan prepares to attack Wolverine himself, but Wolverine convinces him of the ultimate futility of revenge. Evan is later visited by Deadpool at the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning. Deadpool tells Evan he is not Apocalypse and that Deadpool will always be there for him when he needs him.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Later Deadpool enlists Evan and Quentin's help to help him saving his daughter Eleanor Camacho from the Flag-Smasher, with Evan promising Quentin a bloodbath and some action to motivate him. He manages to save Ellie's life and proposes Deadpool to let Quentin erase from the girl's mind every memory of the ordeal. Deadpool loudly refuses and to Evan's surprise, he hugs him and tells him to stay in school.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: During the 2014 "AXIS" storyline, Evan is one of many mutants captured by the Red Skull on the island of Genosha. During a fierce battle between the Avengers, the united X-Men, as well as a group of villains who all attempt to defeat the Red Onslaught, Evan assists Kid Omega in preventing Red Onslaught's telepathy from affecting the combined combatants. In the energy released when the Scarlet Witch and Doctor Doom use the combined power of order and chaos spells to suppress the Red Skull's personality in favor of the sliver of Professor X's that still exists in his brain, Evan ascends to adulthood, stepping out of the rubble with a looming, muscular body and the presence and appearance of Apocalypse. Deadpool even comments on how changed Evan is. When Havok and Cyclops argue with Steve Rogers and the new Captain America over who should take custody of the body of Red Skull, Evan convinces the Summers brothers that Professor X is dead and they have other problems to deal with.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Acting as Apocalypse, 'En' vows to lead the mutants in an uprising, rallying the converted X-Men into helping him take Avengers Tower—now disregarded by the inverted Avengers after they captured almost all other heroes using Pym particles—to use as the site where he will detonate a Celestial-based 'gene-bomb' to wipe out all humans not carrying the X-gene. With only the inverted villains present at the original confrontation to oppose the inverted X-Men and Avengers, the gene bomb is nearly detonated, but is contained thanks to the sacrifice of Carnage. As Apocalypse broods on his failure, the decapitated Deadpool—converted to a peaceful version of himself by the inversion—convinces Apocalypse that now is the time to be heroic, proclaiming that nobody liked En Sabah Nur but everyone appreciated Evan, as he represented the hope that nurture could beat nature. Inspired by Deadpool's words, Apocalypse turns on the X-Men and the Avengers, allowing the Astonishing Avengers (along with non-inverted heroes Steve Rogers and Spider-Man) to retrieve the White Skull and undo the inversion. At the conclusion of the storyline, Evan is shown on the run with Deadpool.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: During the Apocalypse Wars, the Extraordinary X-Men travel thousands of years into Earth's future in order to rescue Colossus and his team of young mutants after they were investigating the sudden appearance of six hundred new mutant signatures in Tokyo. Arriving into Earth's future, the X-Men found themselves in a destroyed New York City and soon discovered that at some point Apocalypse had risen and what remained of Earth after his ascension became the Omega World, a huge structure composed of bubble worlds. The ones who survived the Great Trials lived on Omega World under Apocalypse's rule as he functioned as the Omega World's heart, keeping it alive, while his Horsemen functioned as its antibodies, cleansing the structure of anything that could harm their master. Omega World crumbled as the result of Apocalypse being fatally wounded by Nightcrawler. Storm was forced to take Apocalypse back to the present with them so they could undo the transformation of Colossus, who was turned into a Horseman, however, before he could restore Colossus back to normal, Apocalypse instead teleported him away, sending him to Clan Akkaba. It's left unknown if this Apocalypse was actually a future version of Evan or Apocalypse himself using a new host body.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Apocalypse was kept at X-Haven, inside a cell specially built to contain him by Forge, and later after again retrieving Colossus, Forge tried to find a way to cure him by reverse engineering Apocalypse's powers but failed. During the World-Eater's attack on Limbo, Nightcrawler agreed to free Apocalypse in exchange for a cure for his friend. After returning Colossus to his normal self, Nightcrawler indeed released Apocalypse from his prison, however what Apocalypse didn't expect was that Nightcrawler would throw him into the vortex created by the World-Eater to consume Limbo, seemingly killing him in the process.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Apocalypse is later revealed to be back on Earth, no details about what the Celestials did to him were revealed, and is shown performing experiments to create an immortal vessel which he can then use as a host for his vast power and consciousness by utilizing a modified ancient Celestial technology known as the Finch, which can repair genetic decay. His efforts are not in vain, as he begins to impose his own consciousness onto a human test subject, the fourth attempt, lending it his own regenerative powers to withstand the assault. However, the test subject resists the process, causing a massive chain reaction that bathes Apocalypse and the subject in a wave of energy. Apocalypse's mind and body are torn apart. He finds his mind wandering to that of his birth before his being is fused, mixed, and exploded along with this human form. Once the wave subsides, Apocalypse finds himself in a strange new land that he deduces was the result of the explosion within the Celestial machine that must have caused a dimensional rift which threw him into another dimension. He also discovers that his body has changed as well. Not only does he discover that he can bleed, something that should be impossible with his injury-resistant mutant physiology, but after a fight against a resident of the twisted dimension, which he was able to defeat, Apocalypse learns that his body is actively refusing physiological mutation. Needing to breathe air for the first time in centuries, he comes to a shocking truth as he watches his hand turn from its usual mutated appearance back to a human form: he's becoming human. After degenerating into an ape form, he is taken out by his previous human test subjects who, unlike him, have ascended in form after being empowered by Apocalypse's own DNA. He and other apes are tortured with the Finch, which was recovered and repaired by the human test subjects. When test subject D experiments on Apocalypse, he uses the last of his mutant power to try to transfer his mind into D and is finally able to possess him, which restores Apocalypse to his former glory and realizes that he had not been transported to another planet, rather the earlier explosion from the Finch had simply evolved his entire South American island, infusing his superior genetics into everything the blast wave struck, transforming it into the tribulation which he had been forced to endure. Apocalypse then gave his perfect host body a trial run as he killed the remaining test subjects, while reducing the entire island to rubble that was reclaimed by the sea.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Apocalypse was soon afterward captured by some mysterious force - later to be revealed as X-Man, Nate Grey - and was being held captive along with Kitty Pryde and anti-mutant senator Ashton Allen.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: During "Dawn of X", Apocalypse accepts Xavier's invite to enter Krakoa and even is among the Quiet Council, a group of fourteen powerful and experienced mutants who serve as the island's lawgivers. He takes up learning magic and acts as an advisor to the new Excalibur team. He appears to have devised a way to restore the powers of those who were depowered by Scarlet Witch's spell, but to do so, these ex-mutants need to prove themselves as worthy to get their powers back. Therefore, Apocalypse created the "Crucible", a trial by combat to death, where the ex-mutant is expected to lose in order to pass all while Apocalypse goads them about the weakness the loss of their powers created.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Its also revealed that at an uncertain point in the distant past apparently before En Sabah Nur merged himself with the Celestial technology, he met and married his wife Genesis. Together with Genesis' sister Isca they found and populated a living island known as Okkara. As time passed he and Genesis conceived four children, two sons and two daughters who eventually became their First Horsemen when the island was split by a force wielding the Twilight Sword. The mutant population were then led by Apocalypse and his family to fight the invading Daemons coming from the hellish reality of Amenth. During the war, the enemies' leader Annihilation tried to make a peace treaty with the mutants by offering a gift to them, but only if they would pass a test first. Genesis seemed to easily pass the test, but the gift Annihilation whispered to Genesis was not revealed. In the end, Genesis, the Horsemen, and Arakko decided to move to Amenth in order to hold off the Amenthi forces and deny Annihilation access to Earth by sealing the chasm, while leaving Apocalypse behind, since he wasn't strong enough, much to his and Krakoa's sorrow. However, before Genesis went to Amenth, she made Apocalypse promise to find and judge the succeeding mutants in following years in order to help them fight the threat.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Apocalypse is an ancient mutant who further augmented himself after merging with Celestial technology gaining in the process a variety of superhuman abilities. He is also among the rare subspecies of mutants that possess the additional gift of immortality. He has total control over the molecules of his body which enables him to alter his form as it suits him, such as allowing his body to become extremely malleable and flexible, enhance his physical abilities, transform his limbs into weapons, wings, or jets, regenerate from fatal injuries, generate a wide range of powers at will, and adapt his body to apparently any disease or hostile environment. He can also project and absorb energy and is capable of technopathy, being able to directly interface with the various technologies he has at his disposal. Thanks to the aid of his mutant abilities allowing him complete control over his body, special "regeneration" chambers, Celestial technology, and changing bodies, Apocalypse has further enhanced his abilities and now he can generate almost any mutant power at his will.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Aside from his superhuman powers, Apocalypse is extraordinarily intelligent and a scientific genius with knowledge in various areas of science and technology including physics, engineering, genetics, and biology, all of which are more advanced than conventional science. Apocalypse has knowledge of Celestial technology that he uses for his own applications, such as altering mutants or humans. Apocalypse is also a skilled demagogue and a master strategist.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: Apocalypse's blood can heal other mutants, but is fatal for humans. Apocalypse's blood can also restore his de-powered mutant descendants as is seen when a large dose of Apocalypse's blood regenerates the lost body part of Chamber and gave him a look similar to Apocalypse.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In the film "", his powers are portrayed slightly differently. Like most so-called "Class 5 Mutants," Apocalypse is near-godlike in his abilities and their applications. Among his more aggressive powers is the apparent ability to create objects (including enormous buildings and structures but also clothing, weapons, armor, etc.) from dust within seconds and also to turn objects into dust, also within seconds. Another of his major powers is his ability to enhance and extend the powers of other mutants, a power he uses very selectively and chiefly as a means to recruit co-conspirators for his plans for world domination. The mutants whose powers he enhances are sometimes taken with him as one of his 'horsemen' or apprentices and eventual acolytes, and are treated as his children; however, even in such a role, a given mutant might suddenly be deemed unfit by Apocalypse and ejected from his confidence, at any time.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In the "Age of Apocalypse" storyline, Apocalypse awakens ten years before Cable would arrive, witnessing the accidental death of Charles Xavier by his son, attacks humanity and conquers much of the Earth. In this universe, his son is alleged to be Holocaust/Nemesis.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: The "Ultimate Marvel" imprint title features an alternate version of Apocalypse who is an entity worshiped by Sinister. After completing a series of murders, Sinister is transformed into Apocalypse who intends to conquer the planet. The heroes are unable to defeat him until the Phoenix Force appears and destroys him. Although his abilities are never directly stated in total, he is shown to be capable of negating other mutant powers, adapting mutant powers into his own by exposure to them and "evolving" as he is fought. Following a heavy assault by the X-Men, Fantastic Four, and S.H.I.E.L.D. forces, he emerges from an explosion in a red and silver version of his traditional blue cybernetic battle armor. He is also capable of adapting to and overcoming Professor Xavier's psychic assault despite his training during his time in the future with Cable. Cable makes the most concrete implication that evolving is the major element of his powers when he remarks that Xavier must kill Apocalypse quickly before he adapts to his attacks and becomes immune to the telepathy. Apocalypse is finally dispelled by Phoenix while leaving an alive Mr. Sinister. His actual nature is unknown: he proclaims himself to be the first mutant (like in the mainstream series) and Phoenix readings portray him as an ancient being, but this is later contradicted by Nick Fury's revelation in Ultimatum, that explains mutants are a recent creation of the humans. However he later appears again as part of Sinister's psychosis.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In the "House of M" universe created by Scarlet Witch, Apocalypse was installed as the ruler of North Africa by Magneto. He was apparently killed by Black Bolt after a failed attempt to assassinate King T'Challa at Magneto's behest.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In the 2010 "Heroic Age" storyline, versions of Apocalypse and his Horsemen from a possible future appear in the Avengers Tower after Kang breaks time itself. After a fight with the Avengers, he and his Horsemen disappear.


title: Apocalypse (character)

text: In a future timeline seen in the 2009 storyline "Messiah War", a greatly weakened Apocalypse is attacked by Stryfe and Bishop, but he survives the attack. Afterward, Apocalypse contacts Archangel in the future and begs him to kill him. Archangel refuses and instead hands over some of his techno organic wing blades to him, telling Apocalypse he no longer holds any control over him. Coming into contact with the blades rejuvenates Apocalypse and he offers to join forces with Archangel to kill Stryfe who is on the verge of killing X-Force, Cable, Bishop, as well as Hope Summers. Archangel takes Apocalypse to a Celestial ship, where Apocalypse is then fully restored and wants to avenge what Stryfe did to him. Just as Stryfe is on the verge of taking Hope for himself, Apocalypse and Archangel confront and defeat Stryfe. Apocalypse releases Hope into Cable's care, but says that he will return for her eventually. Apocalypse then drags Stryfe away, intending to use him as a new host body. Stryfe manages to escape and travels back in time to the present.


title: Punched card

text: A punched card (also punch card or punched-card) is a piece of stiff paper that holds digital data represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Punched cards were once common in data processing applications or to directly control automated machinery.


title: Punched card

text: Punched cards were widely used through much of the 20th century in the data processing industry, where specialized and increasingly complex unit record machines, organized into semiautomatic data processing systems, used punched cards for data input, output, and storage. The IBM 12-row/80-column punched card format came to dominate the industry. Many early digital computers used punched cards as the primary medium for input of both computer programs and data.


title: Punched card

text: While punched cards are now obsolete as a storage medium, as of 2012, some voting machines still used punched cards to record votes. They also had a significant cultural impact.


title: Punched card

text: The idea of control and data storage via punched holes was developed independently on several occasions in the modern period. In most cases there is no evidence that each of the inventors was aware of the earlier work.


title: Punched card

text: Basile Bouchon developed the control of a loom by punched holes in paper tape in 1725. The design was improved by his assistant Jean-Baptiste Falcon and by Jacques Vaucanson. Although these improvements controlled the patterns woven, they still required an assistant to operate the mechanism.


title: Punched card

text: In 1804 Joseph Marie Jacquard demonstrated a mechanism to automate loom operation. A number of punched cards were linked into a chain of any length. Each card held the instructions for shedding (raising and lowering the warp) and selecting the shuttle for a single pass.


title: Punched card

text: Semyon Korsakov was reputedly the first to propose punched cards in informatics for information store and search. Korsakov announced his new method and machines in September 1832.


title: Punched card

text: Charles Babbage proposed the use of "Number Cards", "pierced with certain holes and stand[ing] opposite levers connected with a set of figure wheels ... advanced they push in those levers opposite to which there are no holes on the cards and thus transfer that number together with its sign" in his description of the Calculating Engine's Store. There is no evidence that he built a practical example.


title: Punched card

text: In 1881 Jules Carpentier developed a method of recording and playing back performances on a harmonium using punched cards. The system was called the "Mélographe Répétiteur" and “writes down ordinary music played on the keyboard dans la langage de Jacquard”, that is as holes punched in a series of cards. By 1887 Carpentier had separated the mechanism into the "Melograph" which recorded the player's key presses and the "Melotrope" which played the music.


title: Punched card

text: At the end of the 1800s Herman Hollerith invented the recording of data on a medium that could then be read by a machine, developing punched card data processing technology for the 1890 U.S. census. His tabulating machines read and summarized data stored on punched cards and they began use for government and commercial data processing.


title: Punched card

text: Initially, these electromechanical machines only counted holes, but by the 1920s they had units for carrying out basic arithmetic operations.


title: Punched card

text: Hollerith founded the "Tabulating Machine Company" (1896) which was one of four companies that were amalgamated via stock acquisition to form a fifth company, Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) (1911), later renamed International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) (1924). Other companies entering the punched card business included The Tabulator Limited (Britain, 1902), Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen Gesellschaft mbH (Dehomag) (Germany, 1911), Powers Accounting Machine Company (US, 1911), Remington Rand (US, 1927), and H.W. Egli Bull (France, 1931). These companies, and others, manufactured and marketed a variety of punched cards and unit record machines for creating, sorting, and tabulating punched cards, even after the development of electronic computers in the 1950s.


title: Punched card

text: Both IBM and Remington Rand tied punched card purchases to machine leases, a violation of the US 1914 Clayton Antitrust Act. In 1932, the US government took both to court on this issue. Remington Rand settled quickly. IBM viewed its business as providing a service and that the cards were part of the machine. IBM fought all the way to the Supreme Court and lost in 1936; the court ruled that IBM could only set card specifications.


title: Punched card

text: "By 1937... IBM had 32 presses at work in Endicott, N.Y., printing, cutting and stacking five to 10 million punched cards every day." Punched cards were even used as legal documents, such as U.S. Government checks and savings bonds.


title: Punched card

text: During World War II punched card equipment was used by the Allies in some of their efforts to decrypt Axis communications. See, for example, Central Bureau in Australia. At Bletchley Park in England, "some 2 million punched cards a week were being produced, indicating the sheer scale of this part of the operation". In Nazi Germany, punched cards were used for the censuses of various regions and other purposes (see IBM and the Holocaust).


title: Punched card

text: Punched card technology developed into a powerful tool for business data-processing. By 1950 punched cards had become ubiquitous in industry and government. "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate," a warning that appeared on some punched cards distributed as documents such as checks and utility bills to be returned for processing, became a motto for the post-World War II era.


title: Punched card

text: In 1956 IBM signed a consent decree requiring, amongst other things, that IBM would by 1962 have no more than one-half of the punched card manufacturing capacity in the United States. Tom Watson Jr.'s decision to sign this decree, where IBM saw the punched card provisions as the most significant point, completed the transfer of power to him from Thomas Watson, Sr.


title: Punched card

text: The Univac UNITYPER introduced magnetic tape for data entry in the 1950s. During the 1960s, the punched card was gradually replaced as the primary means for data storage by magnetic tape, as better, more capable computers became available. Mohawk Data Sciences introduced a magnetic tape encoder in 1965, a system marketed as a keypunch replacement which was somewhat successful. Punched cards were still commonly used for entering both data and computer programs until the mid-1980s when the combination of lower cost magnetic disk storage, and affordable interactive terminals on less expensive minicomputers made punched cards obsolete for these roles as well. However, their influence lives on through many standard conventions and file formats. The terminals that replaced the punched cards, the IBM 3270 for example, displayed 80 columns of text in text mode, for compatibility with existing software. Some programs still operate on the convention of 80 text columns, although fewer and fewer do as newer systems employ graphical user interfaces with variable-width type fonts.


title: Punched card

text: The terms "punched card", "punch card", and "punchcard" were all commonly used, as were "IBM card" and "Hollerith card" (after Herman Hollerith). IBM used "IBM card" or, later, "punched card" at first mention in its documentation and thereafter simply "card" or "cards". Specific formats were often indicated by the number of character positions available, e.g. "80-column card". A sequence of cards that is input to or output from some step in an application's processing is called a "card deck" or simply "deck". The rectangular, round, or oval bits of paper punched out were called chad ("chads") or "chips" (in IBM usage). Sequential card columns allocated for a specific use, such as names, addresses, multi-digit numbers, etc., are known as a "field". The first card of a group of cards, containing fixed or indicative information for that group, is known as a "master card". Cards that are not master cards are "detail cards".


title: Punched card

text: The Hollerith punched cards used for the 1890 U.S. census were blank. Following that, cards commonly had printing such that the row and column position of a hole could be easily seen. Printing could include having fields named and marked by vertical lines, logos, and more. "General purpose" layouts (see, for example, the IBM 5081 below) were also available. For applications requiring master cards to be separated from following detail cards, the respective cards had different upper corner diagonal cuts and thus could be separated by a sorter. Other cards typically had one upper corner diagonal cut so that cards not oriented correctly, or cards with different corner cuts, could be identified.


title: Punched card

text: Herman Hollerith was awarded three patents in 1889 for electromechanical tabulating machines. These patents described both paper tape and rectangular cards as possible recording media. The card shown in of January 8 was printed with a template and had hole positions arranged close to the edges so they could be reached by a railroad conductor's ticket punch, with the center reserved for written descriptions. Hollerith was originally inspired by railroad tickets that let the conductor encode a rough description of the passenger:


title: Punched card

text: When use of the ticket punch proved tiring and error-prone, Hollerith developed the pantograph "keyboard punch". It featured an enlarged diagram of the card, indicating the positions of the holes to be punched. A printed reading board could be placed under a card that was to be read manually.


title: Punched card

text: Hollerith envisioned a number of card sizes. In an article he wrote describing his proposed system for tabulating the 1890 U.S. census, Hollerith suggested a card of Manila stock "would be sufficient to answer all ordinary purposes." The cards used in the 1890 census had round holes, 12 rows and 24 columns. A reading board for these cards can be seen at the Columbia University Computing History site. At some point, became the standard card size. These are the dimensions of the then-current paper currency of 1862–1923.


title: Punched card

text: Hollerith's original system used an ad hoc coding system for each application, with groups of holes assigned specific meanings, e.g. sex or marital status. His tabulating machine had up to 40 counters, each with a dial divided into 100 divisions, with two indicator hands; one which stepped one unit with each counting pulse, the other which advanced one unit every time the other dial made a complete revolution. This arrangement allowed a count up to 9,999. During a given tabulating run counters were assigned specific holes or, using relay logic, combination of holes.


title: Punched card

text: Later designs led to a card with ten rows, each row assigned a digit value, 0 through 9, and 45 columns.


title: Punched card

text: This card provided for fields to record multi-digit numbers that tabulators could sum, instead of their simply counting cards. Hollerith's 45 column punched cards are illustrated in Comrie's "The application of the Hollerith Tabulating Machine to Brown's Tables of the Moon".


title: Punched card

text: By the late 1920s, customers wanted to store more data on each punched card. Thomas J. Watson Sr., IBM's head, asked two of his top inventors, Clair D. Lake and J. Royden Pierce, to independently develop ways to increase data capacity without increasing the size of the punched card. Pierce wanted to keep round holes and 45 columns, but allow each column to store more data. Lake suggested rectangular holes, which could be spaced more tightly, allowing 80 columns per punched card, thereby nearly doubling the capacity of the older format. Watson picked the latter solution, introduced as "The IBM Card", in part because it was compatible with existing tabulator designs and in part because it could be protected by patents and give the company a distinctive advantage.


title: Punched card

text: This IBM card format, introduced in 1928, has rectangular holes, 80 columns, and 10 rows. Card size is . The cards are made of smooth stock, thick. There are about 143 cards to the inch (143/2.54round0/cm). In 1964, IBM changed from square to round corners. They come typically in boxes of 2000 cards or as continuous form cards. Continuous form cards could be both pre-numbered and pre-punched for document control (checks, for example).


title: Punched card

text: Initially designed to record responses to yes–no questions, support for numeric, alphabetic and special characters was added through the use of columns and zones. The top three positions of a column are called zone punching positions, 12 (top), 11, and 0 (0 may be either a zone punch or a digit punch). For decimal data the lower ten positions are called digit punching positions, 0 (top) through 9. An arithmetic sign can be specified for a decimal field by overpunching the field's rightmost column with a zone punch: 12 for plus, 11 for minus (CR). For Pound sterling pre-decimalization currency a penny column represents the values zero through eleven; 10 (top), 11, then 0 through 9 as above. An arithmetic sign can be punched in the adjacent shilling column. Zone punches had other uses in processing, such as indicating a master card.


title: Punched card

text: In 1931, IBM began introducing upper-case letters and special characters (Powers-Samas had developed the first commercial alphabetic punched card representation in 1921). The 26 letters have two punches (zone [12,11,0] + digit [1–9]). The languages of Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Portugal and Finland require up to three additional letters; their punching is not shown here. Most special characters have two or three punches (zone [12,11,0, or none] + digit [2–7] + 8); a few special characters were exceptions: "&" is 12 only, "-" is 11 only, and "/" is 0 + 1). The Space character has no punches. The information represented in a column by a combination of zones [12, 11, 0] and digits [0–9] is dependent on the use of that column. For example, the combination "12-1" is the letter "A" in an alphabetic column, a plus signed digit "1" in a signed numeric column, or an unsigned digit "1" in a column where the "12" has some other use. The introduction of EBCDIC in 1964 defined columns with as many as six punches (zones [12,11,0,8,9] + digit [1–7]). IBM and other manufacturers used many different 80-column card character encodings. A 1969 American National Standard defined the punches for 128 characters and was named the "Hollerith Punched Card Code" (often referred to simply as "Hollerith Card Code"), honoring Hollerith.


title: Punched card

text: For some computer applications, binary formats were used, where each hole represented a single binary digit (or "bit"), every column (or row) is treated as a simple bit field, and every combination of holes is permitted.


title: Punched card

text: For example, on the IBM 701 and IBM 704, card data was read, using an IBM 711, into memory in row binary format. For each of the twelve rows of the card, 72 of the 80 columns would be read into two 36-bit words; a control panel was used to select the 72 columns to be read. Software would translate this data into the desired form. One convention was to use columns 1 through 72 for data, and columns 73 through 80 to sequentially number the cards, as shown in the picture above of a punched card for FORTRAN. Such numbered cards could be sorted by machine so that if a deck was dropped the sorting machine could be used to arrange it back in order. This convention continued to be used in FORTRAN, even in later systems where the data in all 80 columns could be read.


title: Punched card

text: As an aid to humans who had to deal with the punched cards, the IBM 026 and later 029 and 129 key punch machines could print human-readable text above each of the 80 columns.


title: Punched card

text: As a prank, punched cards could be made where every possible punch position had a hole. Such "lace cards" lacked structural strength, and would frequently buckle and jam inside the machine.


title: Punched card

text: The IBM 80-column punched card format dominated the industry, becoming known as just IBM cards, even though other companies made cards and equipment to process them.


title: Punched card

text: One of the most common punched card formats is the IBM 5081 card format, a general purpose layout with no field divisions. This format has digits printed on it corresponding to the punch positions of the digits in each of the 80 columns. Other punched card vendors manufactured cards with this same layout and number.


title: Punched card

text: Long cards were available with a scored stub on either end which, when torn off, left an 80 column card. The torn off card is called a "stub card".


title: Punched card

text: 80-column cards were available scored, on either end, creating both a "short card" and a "stub card" when torn apart. Short cards can be processed by other IBM machines. A common length for stub cards was 51 columns. Stub cards were used in applications requiring tags, labels, or carbon copies.


title: Punched card

text: According to the IBM Archive: "IBM's Supplies Division introduced the Port-A-Punch in 1958 as a fast, accurate means of manually punching holes in specially scored IBM punched cards. Designed to fit in the pocket, Port-A-Punch made it possible to create punched card documents anywhere. The product was intended for "on-the-spot" recording operations—such as physical inventories, job tickets and statistical surveys—because it eliminated the need for preliminary writing or typing of source documents."


title: Punched card

text: In 1969 IBM introduced a new, smaller, round-hole, 96-column card format along with the IBM System/3 low-end business computer. These cards have tiny (1 mm), circular holes, smaller than those in paper tape. Data is stored in 6-bit BCD, with three rows of 32 characters each, or 8-bit EBCDIC. In this format, each column of the top tiers are combined with two punch rows from the bottom tier to form an 8-bit byte, and the middle tier is combined with two more punch rows, so that each card contains 64 bytes of 8-bit-per-byte binary coded data. As in the 80 column card, readable text was printed in the top section of the card. There was also a 4th row of 32 characters that could be printed. This format was never very widely used; it was IBM-only, but they did not support it on any equipment beyond the System/3, where it was quickly superseded by the 1973 IBM 3740 Data Entry System using 8-inch floppy disks.


title: Punched card

text: The Powers/Remington Rand card format was initially the same as Hollerith's; 45 columns and round holes. In 1930, Remington Rand leap-frogged IBM's 80 column format from 1928 by coding two characters in each of the 45 columns – producing what is now commonly called the 90-column card. There are two sets of six rows across each card. The rows in each set are labeled 0, 1/2, 3/4, 5/6, 7/8 and 9. The even numbers in a pair are formed by combining that punch with a 9 punch. Alphabetic and special characters use 3 or more punches.


title: Punched card

text: The British Powers-Samas company used a variety of card formats for their unit record equipment. They began with 45 columns and round holes. Later 36, 40 and 65 column cards were provided. A 130 column card was also available - formed by dividing the card into two rows, each row with 65 columns and each character space with 5 punch positions. A 21 column card was comparable to the IBM Stub card.


title: Punched card

text: Mark sense (electrographic) cards, developed by Reynold B. Johnson at IBM, have printed ovals that could be marked with a special electrographic pencil. Cards would typically be punched with some initial information, such as the name and location of an inventory item. Information to be added, such as quantity of the item on hand, would be marked in the ovals. Card punches with an option to detect mark sense cards could then punch the corresponding information into the card.


title: Punched card

text: Aperture cards have a cut-out hole on the right side of the punched card. A piece of 35 mm microfilm containing a microform image is mounted in the hole. Aperture cards are used for engineering drawings from all engineering disciplines. Information about the drawing, for example the drawing number, is typically punched and printed on the remainder of the card.


title: Punched card

text: IBM's Fred M. Carroll developed a series of rotary presses that were used to produce punched cards, including a 1921 model that operated at 460 cards per minute (cpm). In 1936 he introduced a completely different press that operated at 850 cpm. Carroll's high-speed press, containing a printing cylinder, revolutionized the company's manufacturing of punched cards. It is estimated that between 1930 and 1950, the Carroll press accounted for as much as 25 percent of the company's profits.


title: Punched card

text: Discarded printing plates from these card presses, each printing plate the size of an IBM card and formed into a cylinder, often found use as desk pen/pencil holders, and even today are collectible IBM artifacts (every card layout had its own printing plate).


title: Punched card

text: While punched cards have not been widely used for a generation, the impact was so great for most of the 20th century that they still appear from time to time in popular culture. For example:


title: Punched card

text: A common example of the requests often printed on punched cards which were to be individually handled, especially those intended for the public to use and return is "Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate" (in the UK "Do not bend, spike, fold or mutilate"). Coined by Charles A. Phillips, it became a motto for the post–World War II era (even though many people had no idea what spindle meant), and was widely mocked and satirized. Some 1960s students at Berkeley wore buttons saying: "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate. I am a student". The motto was also used for a 1970 book by Doris Miles Disney with a plot based around an early computer dating service and a 1971 made-for-TV movie based on that book, and a similarly titled 1967 Canadian short film, "Do Not Fold, Staple, Spindle or Mutilate".


title: Brain death

text: Brain death is the permanent, irreversible, and complete loss of brain function which may include cessation of involuntary activity necessary to sustain life. It differs from persistent vegetative state, in which the person is alive and some autonomic functions remain. It is also distinct from comas as long as some brain and bodily activity and function remain, and it is also not the same as the condition locked-in syndrome. A differential diagnosis can medically distinguish these differing conditions.


title: Brain death

text: Brain death is used as an indicator of legal death in many jurisdictions, but it is defined inconsistently and often confused by the public. Various parts of the brain may keep functioning when others do not anymore, and the term "brain death" has been used to refer to various combinations. For example, although one major medical dictionary considers "brain death" to be synonymous with "cerebral death" (death of the cerebrum), the US National Library of Medicine Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) system defines brain death as including the brainstem. The distinctions are medically significant because, for example, in someone with a dead cerebrum but a living brainstem, spontaneous breathing may continue unaided, whereas in whole-brain death (which includes brainstem death), only life support equipment would maintain ventilation. In certain countries, patients classified as brain-dead may legally have their organs surgically removed for organ donation.


title: Brain death

text: Differences in operational definitions of death have obvious medicolegal implications (in medical jurisprudence and medical law). Traditionally, both the legal and medical communities determined death through the permanent end of certain bodily functions in clinical death, especially respiration and heartbeat. With the increasing ability of the medical community to resuscitate people with no respiration, heartbeat, or other external signs of life, the need for another definition of death occurred, raising questions of legal death. This gained greater urgency with the widespread use of life support equipment and the rising capabilities and demand for organ transplantation.


title: Brain death

text: Since the 1960s, laws governing the determination of death have been implemented in all countries that have active organ transplantation programs. The first European country to adopt brain death as a legal definition (or indicator) of death was Finland in 1971, while in the United States, the state of Kansas had enacted a similar law earlier.


title: Brain death

text: An "ad hoc" committee at Harvard Medical School published a pivotal 1968 report to define irreversible coma. The Harvard criteria gradually gained consensus toward what is now known as brain death. In the wake of the 1976 Karen Ann Quinlan case, state legislatures in the United States moved to accept brain death as an acceptable indication of death. In 1981, a presidential commission issued a landmark report entitled "Defining Death: Medical, Legal, and Ethical Issues in the Determination of Death", which rejected the "higher-brain" approach to death in favor of a "whole-brain" definition. This report formed the basis for the Uniform Determination of Death Act, since enacted in 39 states. Today, both the legal and medical communities in the US use "brain death" as a legal definition of death, allowing a person to be declared legally dead even if life support equipment maintains the body's metabolic processes.


title: Brain death

text: In the UK, the Royal College of Physicians reported in 1995, abandoning the 1979 claim that the tests published in 1976 sufficed for the diagnosis of brain death, and suggesting a new definition of death based on the irreversible loss of brain-stem function alone. This new definition, the irreversible loss of the capacity for consciousness and for spontaneous breathing, and the essentially unchanged 1976 tests held to establish that state, have been adopted as a basis of death certification for organ transplant purposes in subsequent Codes of Practice. The Australia and New Zealand Intensive Care Society (ANZICS) states that the "determination of brain death requires that there is unresponsive coma, the absence of brain-stem reflexes and the absence of respiratory centre function, in the clinical setting in which these findings are irreversible. In particular, there must be definite clinical or neuro-imaging evidence of acute brain pathology (e.g. traumatic brain injury, intracranial haemorrhage, hypoxic encephalopathy) consistent with the irreversible loss of neurological function." In Brazil, the Federal Council of Medicine revised its regulations in 2017, including "a requirement for the patient to meet specific physiological prerequisites and for the physician to provide optimized care to the patient before starting the procedures for diagnosing brain death and to perform complementary tests, as well as the need for specific training for physicians who make this diagnosis."


title: Brain death

text: In 2020, an international panel of experts, the World Brain Death Project, published a guideline that:provides recommendations for the minimum clinical standards for determination of brain death/death by neurologic criteria (BD/DNC) in adults and children with clear guidance for various clinical circumstances. The recommendations have widespread international society endorsement and can serve to guide professional societies and countries in the revision or development of protocols and procedures for determination of brain death/death by neurologic criteria, leading to greater consistency within and between countries.


title: Brain death

text: Natural movements also known as the Lazarus sign or Lazarus reflex can occur on a brain-dead person whose organs have been kept functioning by life support. The living cells that can cause these movements are not living cells from the brain or brain stem; these cells come from the spinal cord. Sometimes these body movements can cause false hope for family members.


title: Brain death

text: A brain-dead individual has no clinical evidence of brain function upon physical examination. This includes no response to pain and no cranial nerve reflexes. Reflexes include pupillary response (fixed pupils), oculocephalic reflex, corneal reflex, no response to the caloric reflex test, and no spontaneous respirations.


title: Brain death

text: Brain death can sometimes be difficult to differentiate from other medical states such as barbiturate overdose, acute alcohol poisoning, sedative overdose, hypothermia, hypoglycemia, coma, and chronic vegetative states. Some comatose patients can recover to pre-coma or near pre-coma level of functioning, and some patients with severe irreversible neurological dysfunction will nonetheless retain some lower brain functions, such as spontaneous respiration, despite the losses of both cortex and brain stem functionality. Such is the case with anencephaly.


title: Brain death

text: Brain electrical activity can stop completely, or drop to such a low level as to be undetectable with most equipment. An EEG will therefore be flat, though this is sometimes also observed during deep anesthesia or cardiac arrest. Although in the United States a flat EEG test is not required to certify death, it is considered to have confirmatory value. In the UK it is not considered to be of value because any continuing activity it might reveal in parts of the brain above the brain stem is held to be irrelevant to the diagnosis of death on the Code of Practice criteria.


title: Brain death

text: The diagnosis of brain death is often required to be highly rigorous, in order to be certain that the condition is irreversible. Legal criteria vary, but in general require neurological examinations by two independent physicians. The exams must show complete and irreversible absence of brain function (brain stem function in UK), and may include two isoelectric (flat-line) EEGs 24 hours apart (less in other countries where it is accepted that if the cause of the dysfunction is a clear physical trauma there is no need to wait that long to establish irreversibility). The patient should have a normal temperature and be free of drugs that can suppress brain activity if the diagnosis is to be made on EEG criteria.


title: Brain death

text: Also, a radionuclide cerebral blood flow scan that shows complete absence of intracranial blood flow must be considered with other exams – temporary swelling of the brain, particularly within the first 72 hours, can lead to a false positive test on a patient that may recover with more time.


title: Brain death

text: Confirmatory testing is only needed under the age of 1. For children and adults, testing is optional. Other situations possibly requiring confirmatory testing include severe facial trauma where determination of brainstem reflexes will be difficult, pre-existing pupillary abnormalities, and patients with severe sleep apnea and/or pulmonary disease. Confirmatory tests include: cerebral angiography, electroencephalography, transcranial Doppler ultrasonography, and cerebral scintigraphy (technetium Tc 99m exametazime). Cerebral angiography is considered the most sensitive confirmatory test in the determination of brain death.


title: Brain death

text: While the diagnosis of brain death has become accepted as a basis for the certification of death for legal purposes, it is a very different state from biological death – the state universally recognized and understood as death. The continuing function of vital organs in the bodies of those diagnosed brain dead, if mechanical ventilation and other life-support measures are continued, provides optimal opportunities for their transplantation.


title: Brain death

text: When mechanical ventilation is used to support the body of a brain dead organ donor pending a transplant into an organ recipient, the donor's date of death is listed as the date that brain death was diagnosed.


title: Brain death

text: In some countries (for instance, Spain, Finland, Wales, Portugal, and France), everyone is automatically an organ donor after diagnosis of death on legally accepted criteria, although some jurisdictions (such as Singapore, Spain, Wales, France, Czech Republic, Poland and Portugal) allow opting out of the system. Elsewhere, consent from family members or next-of-kin may be required for organ donation. In New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom (excluding Wales) and most states in the United States, drivers are asked upon application if they wish to be registered as an organ donor.


title: Brain death

text: In the United States, if the patient is at or near death, the hospital must notify a designated Organ Procurement Organization (OPO) of the details, and maintain the patient while the patient is being evaluated for suitability as a donor. The OPO searches to see if the deceased is registered as a donor, which serves as legal consent; if the deceased has not registered or otherwise noted consent (e.g., on a driver's license), the OPO will ask the next of kin for authorization. The patient is kept on ventilator support until the organs have been surgically removed. If the patient has indicated in an advance health care directive that they do not wish to receive mechanical ventilation or has specified a do-not-resuscitate(DNR) order and the patient has also indicated that they wish to donate their organs, some vital organs such as the heart and lungs may not be able to be recovered.


title: Brain death

text: Brain death is responsible for 2% of all adult and 5% of pediatric in-hospital deaths in the United States. In a nationwide survey of pediatric intensive care units (PICU) in the United States in 2019; there were more than 3,000 pediatric brain deaths out of a total of more than 15,344 children who died in PICUs. According to a national study, "brain death evaluations are performed infrequently, even in large PICUs."


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: Margaret Heafield Hamilton (born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo program. She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: Hamilton has published more than 130 papers, proceedings, and reports, about sixty projects, and six major programs. She is one of the people credited with coining the term "software engineering".


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA's Apollo Moon missions.


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: Margaret Elaine Heafield was born August 17, 1936, in Paoli, Indiana, to Kenneth Heafield and Ruth Esther Heafield (). The family later moved to Michigan, where Margaret graduated from Hancock High School in 1954. She studied mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955 before transferring to Earlham College, where her mother was a student; she earned a BA in mathematics with a minor in philosophy in 1958. She cites Florence Long, the head of the math department at Earlham, as helping with her desire to pursue abstract mathematics and become a mathematics professor. She says her poet father and headmaster grandfather inspired her to include a minor in philosophy in her studies.


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: In Boston, Hamilton initially intended to enroll in graduate study in abstract mathematics at Brandeis. However, in mid-1959, Hamilton began working for Edward Norton Lorenz, in the meteorology department at MIT. She developed software for predicting weather, programming on the LGP-30 and the PDP-1 computers at Marvin Minsky's Project MAC. Her work contributed to Lorenz's publications on chaos theory. At the time, computer science and software engineering were not yet established disciplines; instead, programmers learned on the job with hands-on experience. She moved on to another project in the summer of 1961, and hired and trained Ellen Fetter as her replacement.


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: From 1961 to 1963, Hamilton worked on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) Project at the MIT Lincoln Lab, where she was one of the programmers who wrote software for the prototype AN/FSQ-7 computer (the XD-1), used by the U.S. Air Force to search for possibly unfriendly aircraft. She also wrote software for a satellite tracking project at the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories. The SAGE Project was an extension of Project Whirlwind, started by MIT to create a computer system that could predict weather systems and track their movements using simulators. SAGE was soon developed for military use in anti-aircraft air defense. Hamilton said:


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: It was her efforts on this project that made her a candidate for the position at NASA as the lead developer for Apollo flight software.


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: Hamilton then joined the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory at MIT, which worked on the Apollo Space Mission. Hamilton was initially hired as a programmer for this process but moved on into systems design. By 1965, she was in charge of all Command Module software, which was all the software for navigation and lunar landing guidance. Hamilton's team was responsible for developing in-flight software, which included algorithms designed by various senior scientists for the Apollo command module, Apollo lunar module, and the subsequent Skylab. Another part of her team designed and developed the systems software. This included error detection and recovery software such as restarts and the Display Interface Routines (also known as the Priority Displays), which Hamilton designed and developed. She worked to gain hands-on experience during a time when computer science courses were uncommon and software engineering courses did not exist. Hamilton also served as Director of the Software Engineering Division.


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: Her areas of expertise include: systems design and software development, enterprise and process modeling, development paradigm, formal systems modeling languages, system-oriented objects for systems modeling and development, automated life-cycle environments, methods for maximizing software reliability and reuse, domain analysis, correctness by built-in language properties, open-architecture techniques for robust systems, full life-cycle automation, quality assurance, seamless integration, error detection and recovery techniques, human-machine interface systems, operating systems, end-to-end testing techniques, and life-cycle management techniques. These made her code incredibly reliable because they helped programmers identify and fix anomalies before they became major problems.


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: In one of the critical moments of the Apollo 11 mission, the Apollo Guidance Computer, together with the on-board flight software, averted an abort of the landing on the Moon. Three minutes before the lunar lander reached the Moon's surface, several computer alarms were triggered. The on-board flight software captured these alarms with the "never supposed to happen displays" interrupting the astronauts with priority alarm displays.


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: By some accounts, the astronauts had inadvertently left the rendezvous radar switch on, causing these alarms to be triggered (the claim that the radar was left on inadvertently by the astronauts is disputed by Robert Wills with the National Museum of Computing). The computer was overloaded with interrupts caused by incorrectly phased power supplied to the lander's rendezvous radar. The program alarms indicated "executive overflows", meaning the guidance computer could not complete all of its tasks in real time and had to postpone some of them. The asynchronous executive designed by J. Halcombe Laning was used by Hamilton's team to develop asynchronous flight software:


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: Hamilton's priority alarm displays interrupted the astronauts' normal displays to warn them that there was an emergency "giving the astronauts a go/no go decision (to land or not to land)". Jack Garman, a NASA computer engineer in mission control, recognized the meaning of the errors that were presented to the astronauts by the priority displays and shouted, "Go, go!" and they continued. Paul Curto, senior technologist who nominated Hamilton for a NASA Space Act Award, called Hamilton's work "the foundation for ultra-reliable software design".


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: In 1976, Hamilton co-founded with Saydean Zeldin a company called Higher Order Software (HOS) to further develop ideas about error prevention and fault tolerance emerging from their experience at MIT working on the Apollo program. They created a product called USE.IT, based on the HOS methodology they developed at MIT. It was successfully used in numerous government programs including a project to formalize and implement C-IDEF, an automated version of IDEF, a modeling language developed by the U.S. Air Force in the Integrated Computer-Aided Manufacturing (ICAM) project. In 1980, British-Israeli computer scientist David Harel published a proposal for a structured programming language derived from HOS from the viewpoint of and/or subgoals. Others have used HOS to formalize the semantics of linguistic quantifiers, and to formalize the design of reliable real-time embedded systems.


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: Hamilton was the CEO of HOS through 1984 and left the company in 1985. In March 1986, she founded Hamilton Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language (USL) and its associated automated environment, the 001 Tool Suite, based on her paradigm of development before the fact for systems design and software development.


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: Anthony Oettinger, Barry Boehm, and Hamilton have been credited with naming the discipline of "software engineering". Hamilton details how she came to make up the term "software engineering":


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: When Hamilton started using the term "software engineering" during the early Apollo missions, software development was not taken seriously compared to other engineering, nor was it regarded as a science. Hamilton was concerned with legitimizing software development as an engineering discipline. Over time the term "software engineering" gained the same respect as any other technical discipline. The IEEE Software September/October 2018 issue celebrates the 50th anniversary of software engineering. Hamilton talks about "Errors" and how they influenced her work related to software engineering and how her language, USL, could be used to prevent the majority of "Errors" in a system. Writing in "Wired", Robert McMillan noted: "At MIT she assisted in the creation of the core principles in computer programming as she worked with her colleagues in writing code for the world's first portable computer". Hamilton's innovations go beyond the feats of playing an important role in getting humans to the Moon. According to "Wired"s Karen Tegan Padir: "She, along with that other early programming pioneer, COBOL inventor Grace Hopper, also deserve tremendous credit for helping to open the door for more women to enter and succeed in STEM fields like software."


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: In 2019, to celebrate 50 years to the Apollo landing, Google decided to make a tribute to Hamilton. The mirrors at the Ivanpah plant were configured to create a picture of Hamilton and the Apollo 11 by moonlight.


title: Margaret Hamilton (software engineer)

text: She met her first husband, James Cox Hamilton, in the mid-1950s while attending college. They were married on June 15, 1958, the summer after she graduated from Earlham. She briefly taught high school mathematics and French at a public school in Boston, Indiana. The couple then moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where they had a daughter, Lauren, born on November 10, 1959. They divorced in 1967 and Margaret married Dan Lickly two years later.


The Black Knight satellite conspiracy theory claims that a spacecraft of extraterrestrial origin is in near-polar orbit of the Earth, and that NASA is covering up its existence and origin. This conspiracy theory combines several unrelated stories into one narrative.


title: Black Knight satellite conspiracy theory

text: A photo taken during the STS-88 mission claimed by some to show the Black Knight satellite is catalogued by NASA as a photo of space debris, and space journalist James Oberg considers it as probable debris of a thermal blanket confirmed as lost during the mission.


text: According to some UFO conspiracists, the Black Knight is an artificial satellite of extraterrestrial origin that has orbited Earth for approximately 13,000 years; the "satellite" story is most likely a conflation of several disconnected stories about various objects and their interpretations, all of them well documented independently and none using the term "Black Knight" upon their first publication. According to senior education support officer Martina Redpath of Armagh Planetarium in Northern Ireland:


text: The origin of the Black Knight legend is often "retrospectively dated" back to natural extraterrestrial repeating sources supposedly heard during the 1899 radio experiments of Nikola Tesla and long delayed echoes first heard by amateur radio operator Jørgen Hals in Oslo, Norway, in 1928. Brian Dunning of the "Skeptoid" podcast attributes Tesla's 1899 radio signals to pulsars, which were not identified until 1968.


text: In 1954, UFO researcher Donald Keyhoe told newspapers that the United States Air Force had reported that two satellites orbiting Earth had been detected. At that time, no country had the technology to launch a satellite. Skeptics have noted that Keyhoe had been promoting a UFO book at the time, and the news stories were likely written "tongue-in-cheek" and not intended to be taken seriously.


text: A British rocket called the Black Knight rocket was used in conjunction with the Blue Streak missile program between 1958 and 1965, to test re-entry vehicles. A "Black Knight satellite launcher" project announced in 1964 was considered a priority by the Ministry of Aviation. The program never put anything into orbit, and it is unrelated to the Black Knight satellite legend.


text: In February 1960, "Time" reported that the U.S. Navy had detected a dark object thought to be a Soviet spy satellite in orbit. A follow-up article confirmed that the object was "the remains of an Air Force Discoverer VIII satellite that had gone astray."


text: In 1963, astronaut Gordon Cooper supposedly reported a UFO sighting during his 15th orbit in Mercury 9 that was confirmed by tracking stations, but there is no evidence that this happened. Neither NASA's mission transcripts nor Cooper's personal copies show any such report being made during the orbit.


text: In 1973, Scottish author Duncan Lunan analyzed the long delayed radio echoes received by Hals and others and speculated that they could possibly originate from a 13,000 year old alien probe located in an orbit around the Earth's Moon. He suggested that the probe may have originated from a planet located in the solar system of star Epsilon Boötis. Lunan later retracted his conclusions, saying that he had made "outright errors" and that his methods had been "unscientific".


text: Space debris photographed in 1998 during the STS-88 mission has been widely claimed to be the Black Knight satellite. Space journalist James Oberg considers it probable that the photographs are of a thermal blanket that was confirmed as lost during an EVA by Jerry L. Ross and James H. Newman.


title: Shenyang

text: Shenyang (, ; ; ), formerly known as Fengtian () or by its Manchu name Mukden, is a major Chinese sub-provincial city and the provincial capital of Liaoning province. Located in central-north Liaoning, it is the province's most populous city, with a total population of 9,070,093 inhabitants as of the 2020 census. Among the resident population of the city, the male population is 4,521,021, accounting for 49.85%; the female population is 4,549,072, accounting for 50.15%. The sex ratio of the total population (with women as 100, the ratio of men to women) dropped from 102.10 in the sixth national census in 2010 to 99.38. Its built-up (or metro) area encompassing 8 Shenyang urban districts and the 4 Fushun urban districts, was home to 8,192,848 inhabitants in 2020. It is also the largest city in Northeast China by urban population, with 7.49 million people (2020 census).


title: Shenyang

text: Shenyang is also the central city of one of the major megalopolises in China, the Greater Shenyang Metropolitan Area, which has a total population over 23 million. The city's administrative region includes the ten metropolitan districts of Shenyang "proper", the county-level city of Xinmin, and two counties: Kangping and Faku.


title: Shenyang

text: The Manchu people conquered Shenyang in the 17th century and briefly used it as the capital of Qing-dynasty China. The Battle of Mukden took place in 1905 during the Russo-Japanese War. Japan's subsequent victory allowed Tokyo to annex the region west of the old city and to increase Japanese influence on Shenyang; in September 1931 the Mukden Incident led the Japanese to further invade and occupy the rest of Northeast China, forming the puppet state of Manchukuo. After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Shenyang remained a Kuomintang stronghold, but the Communists captured it in 1948 after the Liaoshen Campaign.


title: Shenyang

text: Along with its nearby cities, Shenyang is an important industrial center in China, and serves as the transportation and commercial hub of China's northeast—particularly involved in links with Japan, Russia and Korea. A center of heavy industry in China since the 1930s, and the spearhead of the Chinese central government's Northeast Area Revitalization Plan, the city has been diversifying its industry, including expanding into the service sector. Growing industries include software, automotive and electronics.


title: Shenyang

text: Shenyang is also a major city for scientific research, appearing among the top 200 science cities in the world as tracked by the Nature Index.


title: Shenyang

text: The city is home to several major universities, notably Northeastern University and Liaoning University, members of China's prestigious universities in the Double First Class University Plan.


title: Shenyang

text: "Shenyang" literally means "the "yang" side of the Shen River" and refers to the location of the Hun River (formerly called the Shen River, ), on the southern side of the city. According to Chinese naming tradition, a river's north bank and a mountain's south slope are angled more towards direct sunlight and thus are considered the "sunny", or "yang", side.


title: Shenyang

text: Archaeological findings show that humans resided in present-day Shenyang as early as 8,000 years ago. The remains of the Xinle culture, a late neolithic period society over 6,800–7,200 years old, are located in a museum in the north part of Huanggu District. It is complemented by a recreated village on site. A wood-sculptured bird unearthed there is the earliest cultural relic in Shenyang, as well as one of oldest wood sculptures found anywhere in the world.


title: Shenyang

text: The city, now known as Shenyang, was first established in about 300 BCE during the Warring States period by Yan general Qin Kai, who conquered the Liaodong region from Gojoseon, and was then named Hou City (). However, around 350 years later during the reign of Emperor Guangwu of Han, the city was sacked and burnt by the Donghu nomads and subsequently abandoned. The area of modern Shenyang was divided between two commanderies called Liaodong and Xuantu around 107 CE. Liaodong was seized by a Han governor in 189. Liaodong and Xuantu were briefly united under the Wei Dynasty and Jin Dynasty. The region was in disarray during the fourth century until the Koguryo occupied both commanderies in 404. They established the cities of Xuantucheng and Gaimoucheng in the region. The Sui dynasty recaptured the area and established a new Liaodong Commandery in what is now modern Shenyang. In 645, the Tang sent forces to fight against Koguryo and they captured Xuantucheng and Gaimoucheng. Soon after, Liaodong was administratively reorganized and enjoyed nearly 250 years of stability and development.


title: Shenyang

text: In 916, the Shenyang region was ruled by the Liao dynasty and was known as the Shen Prefecture () through to the end of Jin dynasty (who conquered the region in 1116), and became the Shenyang Circuit () during the Yuan dynasty. During the Ming dynasty, it was designated as a "guard town" (militarized settlements, such as walled/heavily garrisoned cities or towns) named Shenyang Central Guard () and gradually became one of the most important strongholds beyond the Shanhai Pass.


title: Shenyang

text: In 1625, the Jurchen leader Nurhaci captured Shenyang and decided to relocate his entire administrative infrastructures to the city, or hoton () as it is called in Manchu language. The official name was changed to Shengjing (), or Mukden (), in 1634. The new name derives from the Manchu word, "" (), meaning "to rise" as reflected also by its Han Chinese name. Under Nurhaci's orders, the Imperial Palace was constructed in 1626, symbolizing the city's emerging status as the Jurchen political center. The palace featured more than 300 ostentatiously decorated rooms and 20 gardens as a symbol of power and grandeur.


title: Shenyang

text: After the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 and the routing of the Shun army in the Battle of Shanhai Pass merely a day later, the Manchus successfully entered the Shanhai Pass to establish the Qing dynasty in China proper, with the capital relocated to Beijing. However, Shenyang retained considerable importance as the secondary capital and the spiritual home of the Qing dynasty through the centuries. Treasures of the royal house were kept at its palaces, and the tombs of the early Qing rulers were once among the most famous monuments in China. In 1657, Fengtian Prefecture (; or ) was established in the Shenyang area, and Fengtian () was sometimes used synonymously with Shenyang/Mukden.


title: Shenyang

text: After the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895, Japan coerced the annexation of the Liaodong Peninsula with the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895, but had to give it up due to diplomatic pressure from the 1895 Triple Intervention. In the aftermath of the Japanese threat, Qing viceroy Li Hongzhang visited Moscow in 1896 and signed a secret treaty with Russian foreign minister Aleksey Lobanov-Rostovsky, allowing the Russian Empire to build a Russian-gauge railway through Manchuria, which opened the door towards further Russian expansionism in the form of another lease convention in 1898, effectively allowing Russia to annex Port Arthur in all but name. However, after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, Russian forces used that anti-foreigner insurgency as a pretext to formally invade and occupy most of Manchuria, and Mukden became a Russian stronghold in the Far East with the building of what would become the South Manchurian Railway - from Harbin via Mukden to Dalny.


title: Shenyang

text: During the Russo-Japanese War (1904—1905), Mukden became the site of the Battle of Mukden from February 19 to March 10, 1905. Involving more than 600,000 combat participants, it was the largest battle since the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, and also the largest modern-era battle ever fought in Asia before World War II. Following this Japanese victory, Mukden became one of the chief bases of Japanese presence and economic expansion into southern Manchuria. It also became the government seat of Fengtian province in 1910. Mukden became one of the main epicenters of the Manchurian plague (1910—1911), which ultimately resulted in approximately 60,000 deaths.


title: Shenyang

text: In 1914, the city changed back to its old name Shenyang, but continued to be known as Mukden (sometimes spelled Moukden) in some English sources and in Japan through much of the first half of 20th century. The postmark of the Chinese postal administration kept the spelling "MOUKDEN/" for usage on international mails until the late 1920s. After that, a Chinese–Manchurian bilingual type "SHENYANG (MUKDEN)/ ()" datestamp was used until 1933.


title: Shenyang

text: In the early 20th century, Shenyang began expanding out of its old city walls. The Shenyang Railway Station on the South Manchurian Railway and the Shenyang North Railway Station on the Jingfeng Railway, both west of the old city, became the new commercial centers of Shenyang. In the 1920s, Mukden was the capital of the warlord Zhang Zuolin, who was later assassinated when his train was blown up on 4 June 1928 at a Japanese-guarded railway bridge. At the time, several factories were built by Zhang to manufacture ammunition in the northern and eastern suburbs. These factories laid the foundation for Shenyang's industrial development.


title: Shenyang

text: At around 10:20 pm on 18 September 1931, a small quantity of dynamite was detonated close to a railway line near Mukden owned by the Japanese South Manchuria Railway Company by Kwantung Army Lt. Kawamoto Suemori. The Imperial Japanese Army, accusing Chinese dissidents of the act, then used the false flag explosion as pretext to launch a full attack on Mukden, and captured the city the following morning (September 19). After the Mukden Incident, the Japanese further invaded and occupied the rest of Northeast China, and created the puppet state of Manchukuo with the deposed emperor Aisin Gioro Puyi as the figurehead. During the Manchukuo era (1932–1945), the city was again called Fengtian (and Mukden in English), and was developed by the Japanese into a center of heavy industry. Japan was able to exploit resources in Manchuria using the extensive network of railroads. For example, vast expanses of Manchurian forest were chopped down. The development of Shenyang was also unbalanced in this period; municipal facilities were mostly located in Japanese residential areas, while Chinese residential areas had poor living conditions.