John Sculley

1993 - After a 10 year run and new focus on Politics – along with a failed promise to catch up to the PC market – John Sculley was removed of his CEO role at Apple by the board of directors. They immediately hire Michael Spindler, who was instrumental in the introduction of the PowerPC. However, he eventually would get ousted and replaced by Gil Amileo, which would get ousted and replaced by Steve Jobs.

2007 - Terry Semel was under pressure  by the board because of dissatisfaction of his compensation. Terry was brought in to create a partnership with Hollywood, which really didn’t happen. He handed the reigns over to Jerry Yang, who started promising revitalized talks with Microsoft. There are a few that even speculate that was when the buyout of Yahoo began. Jerry Yang stepped down in 200

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 18

• Happy Phi Day! Phi is the Golden Ration - 1.61803398874989484820458683436564
• 1999 – Palm announces the m100
• 2009 - Jammie Thomas-Rasset was found guilty of copyright infringement and ordered to pay 1.92 million to the RIAA.
• Microsoft announced the Surface Tablet

June 17, 2008: Firefox Guinness World Record Download Day

2008 – Mozilla takes a new marketing step as they announce they want to break the Guinness world records for downloads in a 24 hour period of release. A grand idea, however, it was slightly hampered by the fact that the servers didn’t come up at 10 AM. The bug was fixed and they got the record of 7 million downloads. It was expected to be around 10 million if the bugs did not creep up, for some downloaded 3.0 from other sites.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 17

• Linus Torvolds announces he will leave Transmetta to work for the Open Source Development Labs
• Flickr co-founders leave the company
• Compaq announces the Armada line of computers

June 16: SDL (Oracle) is Incorporated

1977 - Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates incorporate Software Development Laboratories (SDL). Of course, SDL’s big program was Oracle. It was a codename for a CIA funded project.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 16

• 1657 - The first Pendulum Clock
• 1884 – Coney Island’s first gravity powered Roller Coaster
• 1988 - Intel releases the i386DX
• 1999 - Windows 98 SP1 is released
• 2008 - Google Docs gets PDF Support
• 2009 -iPhone OS 3.0

CTR

1911 - The Computing Tabulating Recording Company (CTR) is incorporated. It was built between the Computing Scale Company of America, The Tabulating Machine Company and The International Time Recording Company of New York. Later, this company would be renamed to International Business Machines (IBM)

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 15

• 1752 - Benjamin Franklin flies a Kite
• 1983 - Microsoft eXtended Basic (MSX)
• 1982 - Arcades and the First Amendment
• 2006 - Bill Gates announces he is stepping down from CEO of Microsoft

June 14, 1951: Univac I was Unveiled

1951 - It was the first commercial general-use computer. The UNIVAC I was unveiled in Washington DC. It was developed for the US census bureau. It stood 8 foot high and used magnetic tape at 10,000 characters a second.UNIVAC is an acronym for the Universal Automatic Computer. The computer itself was delivered to the United States Census Bureau on March 31st, 1951. UNIVAC I was also used to predict the result of the 1952 Presidential election.

UNIVAC I cost around 1.2 million to build, which was a lot larger than their estimated price of $159,000. 46 units were built and delivered. 5,200 vacuum tubes were used to run UNIVAC I. It performed 1,905 operations per second.

Want more info on UNIVAC? Check out A Few Good Men From Univac (History of Computing) on Amazon

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 14

• 1938 - The First Superman comic
• 1985 - Apple lays off 1,200 employees
• 1997 - Tamapittchi, a cellular phone with a Tamagotchi built into it, is released in Japan
• 2006 - Google Maps for Enterprise
• 2009 - #CNNFail

June 13, 1993: Microsoft and Time-Warner Create Interactive TV

1993 - Microsoft teamed up with Tele-communications and Time Warner to start the revolution known as “Interactive TV”. The ability to buy product right through the set during a show. iTV would give users a Digital Set Top Box in which they would use to browse, go back and watch video. It even connected to a telephone to let you know who is calling and possibly get SMS messages.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 11

• 1983 - Pioneer Crossed Neptune
• 1986 - Activision finalizes the merger with Infocom
• 2003 - 2.4.21 of LINUX kernal released
• 2003 - IE for Mac is shut down
• 2005 - Fedora Core 4 is released
• 2006 - Vincent Ferrari tries to cancel his AOL account, but the agent wouldn’t
• 2007 - Jeffrey Goodin is the first to be sentenced because of the CAN-SPAM act. He was posing as an AOL billing agent

DTV

2009 - After much planning and a couple set backs, the Digital TV transition is completed in the US. Stations will Non-profit status or emergency bands could broadcast using analog signal. 2.8 million users were still not ready for the conversion. 

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 11

• Swiss Army Knife is patented
• Mr. Wizzard passes away
• First 500,000 watt power radio station – W8XAR – begins tests

June 11, 1980: Steve Ballmer is hired as Microsoft’s first Business Manager

1980 - Otherwise known as “The 24th Man” (to join Microsoft, that is), Steve Ballmer came on as Microsoft’s first Business Manager. He made only $50k and stock options. Of course 30 years later, Steve succeeded Bill Gates as CEO of the Redmond based software company.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 11

• 

  First Cameraphone picture

  Speak and Spell debuts

• Compaq purchases DEC for $9 million
• The first cameraphone photo – Philippe Kahn taking a picture of his newborn daughter
• Apple releases Safari for Windows
• 1st generation iPhone gets put on the Obsolete list

June 10, 1998: The Ruputer was released

1998 – Seiko introduces the world’s first wearable PC watch called the Ruputer. It was marketed under the OnHand PC name. The Ruputer had a 3.6 MHz processor and 2 MB of non-volitile storage. The 102×64 monochrome LCD could display data or play games. a joystick with six function buttons were on the Ruputer. This watch could download pictures and had three applications that ran on Windows 95. Ruputer cost $285

1977 – Apple Computer Inc. ships the first Apple II personal computers. The computers feature a MOS Technology 6502 processor, 4 kilobytes of RAM, two game paddles, an RF cable for connection to a standard television, and a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drive.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 10

• Intel releases the 200 MHz pentium processor
• Microsoft announces they will discontinue MS Money
• IBM and Microsoft sign a joint development agreement

June 9, 1986: Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center opens

1986 – The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center opens. It links 5 supercomputer centers together – Princeton, San Diego, Illinois, and Cornell University. PSC is a leading partner in the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation’s cyberinfrastructure program.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 9

• Linux Kernel 2.0 is released
• iPhone 2.0 launches
• MessageMedia and Revnet join to become North America’s largest e-mail marketer