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

June 8, 1887: Herman Hollerith gets Patent for  Hollerith Punch Card Reader

1887 – Herman Hollerith is a pioneer. His creations in the 19th century were detrimental in modern computing. Herman Hollerith’s creations helped the United States create a Census. On June 8th he received a patent for a punch card reader, which was used in many fashions, including school attendance, for almost 100 years. Hollerith’s Punch card system also has been at the point of controversy – IBM was sued using the Alien Tort Claims Act because Hollerith machines were used in the 1933 census. This ultimately gave Adolf Hitler a full list of Germans and Jews in Germany. It was so useful to the Nazis, apparently a machine was set at each concentration camp. Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 8

• Intel introduces the 8086 processor
• Yahoo acquires Viaweb
• Apple introduces the iPhone 3GS

June 7: the first Legoland opens in Denmark

1968, 45 years ago, the first Legoland Park opened in Denmark – called Legoland Billund. This park was right across the street from the Lego factory. It featured expansive cityscapes modeled in Lego bricks. 625,000 will visit the park within the first year.

The rich story of LEGO is a Pixar Video I talked about on Dorkazine

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 7

• Commodore Executive 64 is released
• Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson orders the breakup of Microsoft into two companies

June 6, 2011 Steve Jobs gave his last keynote for Apple

2005 - Steve Jobs spoke in front of the masses at the WWDC announcing that Apple will switch their processors from PowerPC to Intel. He then showed off the Mac OS X running on aPentium 4 CPU. The reasoning was that PowerPC chips took too much power to run and also ran hotter than an Intel chip.

2011 – It was also a sad day, as Apple CEO Steve Jobs gave what was to become his last keynote at WWDC. He introduced us to iCloud – a new service so you do not need a computer to connect your iPad or iPhone. iOS got an upgrade to version 5, and Jobs announced Mac OSX Lion. Also announced was iTunes Match, a way to keep your music in the cloud.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 6

• TI 99/8 is introduced
• The first Internet connection
• Palm releases the Palm Pre

June 5, 1938: Pedro the Voder Computer

1938 – Pedro, the Voder is the name for the first computer that could produce speech. Bell Telephone brought out Pedro to the Franklin institute to show the new option off. Of course, years later, we can replicate a persons sound, which was shown off when Roger Ebert was on Oprah taking for the first time since his surgery.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 5

• Apple II goes on sale
• Bob Hope was declared dead on the Internet – which was not true
• Jeff Moss joined the Homeland Security Advisory Council

June 4, 1896: Henry Ford tests the  Quadricycle

1896 - Henry Ford gets ready to test drive the first Quadricycle (a.k.a. Car). Only one problem – They didn’t make the garage door big enough. Out comes the Ax – A couple chops and a wider door was created. The car ran 2 speed, but could not go in reverse.

It’s all in the book – the ford century

2003 – Palm board of directors announce they have unanimously approved an agreement for Pam to purchase Handspring – one of its rivals in the PDA market. The deal is all stock realted where Handspring stockholders would get .09 cents of a share of Palm and no shares of PalmSource (Palm shares were at $13.89 and Handspring were at $1.27). The deal would be worth $169 million.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 4

• Patent for DRAM
• Nintendo introduced the Game Boy
• Packard Bell and NEC merge

Commodore

1984 – Commodore adds to their line of computers. The Plus/4 – originally called the 264 – was released for $300. The Commodore 16 or TED-16 looked like a Commodore 64 with 16KB of RAM. It was called the “Learning Machine” and sold for $100

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 3

• Nintendo sues Lewis Galoob over the Game Genie
• AT&T offers Wi-Fi at Starbucks
• Microsoft releases “Nehalem” Core i7

Pointcast

1997 - If anyone remembers the Windows 95 days, you may have had Pointcast playing as the screensaver. It was a push notification site that would send you content. Pretty innovative for it’s time, yet, time ended up getting the best of it. Creator and CEO Chris Hassett stepped down and Pointcast was re-organized.Ultimately, AOL purchased the company and incorporated it into their systems.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 1

• IBM PS/2 Model 70
• The CIH Computer Virus surfaces
• Safari Carpet Bomb attack

June 1, 2009: Psion Released Netbook trademark

2009 - Back in 1996, Psion trademarked the term “Netbook” to reflect a line of sub-notebook computers. Equipped with a StrongARM processor, the netbook debuted in 1999. However, Psion decided to shelve the device after the 2003 version (Netbook Pro) didn’t meet expectation. Therefore, when Intel decided to dub the term “Netbook”, Psion brought forward the trademark. However, after weighing in on options, Psion decided to drop the case and let Intel use the netbook name.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 1

• Steve Jobs becomes the major apple shareholder with 1.5 million
• MN city makes Google remove Street view pictures
• The first batch of Scotch Whiskey is made by Friar John Cor
• Google Launches Google+ Local

May 31, 1943: ENIAC

1943- The building of the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) begins at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The Army financed the project during World War II, which cost almost $500,000. John Mauchly was the chief consultant and John Presper Eckert was the chief engineer.ENIAC was code named “Project PX”. The consent to build was signed on June 5. ENIAC was completed on February 14, 1946. This was a modular computer, designed in “panels”. You could build to suit. Of course, this machine was so big, it took up whole rooms. It ran hot, too – using Octal based radio tubes. ENIAC could be programmed to perform complex sequences of operations, including loops, branches, and subroutines.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 31

• Apple restructures, removes Steve Jobs
• Microsoft Office XP is released
• Swedish Police raid the Pirate Bay

May 30, 2008: Firefox Makes Guiness Record

2008 - The Mozilla foundation made an interesting statement – They want to be in the Guinness book of world records as the most downloaded browser with Firefox 3.0. Download day was June 17th. After a problematic start, they hit their record over 8 million. Enough to make the Guinness book of World Records.Mozilla broke off of Netscape and created Firefox on November 9, 2004. Mozilla is currently the #3 browser, behind Internet Explorer and Google Chrome. Mozilla 12 is the current revision. Firefox uses the Gecko engine, and is open source, so it can be customized. It can be downloaded at Mozilla.org, and also comes included in certain Linux distributions.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 30

• TurboLinux OS 7 released
• Windows NT 3.51 released (adding Power PC support)
• The Pennsylvania Evening Post was the first paper in the US

May 29, 2002: Netflix initiated Public Offering at $15/share

2002- Netflix, the rental movie-by-mail service, initiated their Public offering. They sold 5,500,000 starting at $15 a share. They sold an additional 825,000 the next day. Of course, the Netflix stock has fluctuated over the years, including 2011, when CEO Reed Hastings tried to split their online and DVD rentals, then announced Qwikster – with hopes to sell that side of the company. Of course, he retracted that statement, but not before loosing 2/3 of stock price (was at $291 in 2011, now at $70 / share).

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 29

• Vim 4.0 is released
• believeinkids.com became the 5 millionth domain name
• IEEE 1394 officially becomes “Firewire”

GIF

1987 – Compuserve releases the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) standard. Using 256 colors, it could greatly reduce pictures for the web. Photos in the GIF format would look pixelated and posturized, though.

“‘GIF’ ™ is CompuServe’s standard for defining generalized color raster images. This ‘Graphics Interchange Format’ ™ allows high-quality, high-resolution graphics to be displayed on a variety of graphics hardware and is intended as an exchange and display mechanism for graphics images. The image format described in this document is designed to support current and future image technology and will in addition serve as a basis for future CompuServe graphics products.” – From the Official text of GIF standard.

GIF files are used to this day, mostly for animation purposes. Google Chrome, for example, allows you to post animated gif files, which brought a flood of “Google over Facebook” shorts.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 28

• Steve Jobs is removed as General Manager of Macintosh Division
• Yahoo! completes Acquisition of Geocities
• 3DO gaming filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy
• Time Warner separates from AOL.

WordPress

2003 – Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little created a Fork of B2/cafelog. From there, WordPress was born. Since its release, WordPress has taken over Content Management Systems (CMS) with its ease of use and plethora of programmers that have made plugins, themes and other tweaks to the system since. The current version is 3.5.1 which has been downloaded over 18 million times.

Microsoft Released Windows 286 and Windows 386 on May 27, 1988

1988 – In competition to IBM OS/2, Microsoft releases 2 versions of Windows 2.1x – One version for x286 computers (aka Windows 286) and one for x386 computers (aka Windows 386). Windows 2/x386 introduced the protected code Kernal – applications would run as a virtual 8086 mode, and MS-DOS programs could run in parallel. Windows 2/x386 also provided EMS emulation, which would give Windows memory management features. System RAM beyond 640k could be used, and felt like banked memory. Finally, it has a Presentation Manager mode, to compete with OS/2

Windows updated this software to 2.11. It was finally retired when Windows 3.0 was released in 1990.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 27

Windows 386 Promo Video (Full video)

Windows 386 full video. Linda needs to save the client, so she loads Windows 386 with Presentation Manager

This was the promo video for Windows 386. It starred Victoria Carver (as Linda) as an executive who had to save a client. She was given a task to make a presentation by 5 pm. She decided to load and use Windows 386 to build this presentation. Using the “Mission Impossible” theme throughout, Linda is confronted by a fellow employee – Mike the mainframe guy. He wants to help Linda out, but Linda knows that the mainframe subroutines simply take too long to write. He then spots Windows 386.

“You are not suppose to be running OS/2 – we haven’t finished evaluating it” Said Mike, the mainframe guy.

“It’s not OS/2. It’s Microsoft Windows 386. It has the same interface as the OS/2 Presentation Manager. So, when OS/2 is recommended, I’ll be ahead of the learning curve.”

“As usual. What else does it do, besides look like OS/2?”

At this point, Linda shows Mike the interface. Of course, Linda then creates the presentation and keeps the client. The video is written like a cheesy 80′s soap opera, and goes on for twelve minutes.

Other Events in the Day in Technology History

• Wang introduces: Wang Personal computer
• Batman Debuts in Detective comics #27
• Google gives away 4,000 Android phones at Google I/O

Bill Gates

1995 - Bill Gates sends out a memo to his staff saying that Microsoft needs to “Get back on track” to the Internet. The memo was entitled “The Internet Tidal wave.”  Gates emphasizes that this is as important as IBM was to the personal computer.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 25

• AMD released the K6-2 processor
• Samsung announces the 256 SSD
• Psystar files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy

Star Wars

1977 - in a theater not too far away…

Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope) was first released to theaters. Opening weekend sees $6 million of the $11 million budget in return, however, the longevity of the movie has grossed over $797 million (for Ep. IV only). This surpassed Jaws as the nominal highest-grossing film and remained that way until being surpassed by E.T. the Extra Terrestrial in 1983. Add to that, George Lucas was the first movie maker to keep the rights of the toy creation – netting billi0ns in revenue. The film starred Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing, and Alec Guinness, among others.

Star Wars: A New Hope was followed by Empire Strikes Back, then in 1983, the Third (technically 6th) movie in the series – Return of the Jedi – was released. That had a budget of $32 million and netted $23 million opening weekend and $656 million worldwide.

Of course, George Lucas also released Episode I: the Phantom Menace (1999), Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002) and Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith (2005)

Happy 35th anniversary to a historic franchise!

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 25

• Phillips electronics released the Laservision
• CERN holds the first World Wide Web conference
• Google Street view is launched in the US

May 24, 1985: Quantum Computer Services was founded (AOL)

1993 - Microsoft unveils at COMDEX a new line of Operating System. Dubbed Windows NT (New Technology) this software would be geared toward businesses. With a NT Server and NT Workstation, Windows could deliver a secure environment while also allowing connections using the Windows 3.11 and later Windows 95 Operating systems. NT would become available on July 27, 1993.

1985- Quantum Computer Services was founded. Technically, it was a reorganization of Control Video Corporation, a company that started in 1983. The company was selling online service “Gameline” to Atari 2600 users. You would pay $49.95 for the modem and also a one-time $15 setup fee. With the reorganization, Jim Kimsey became Chief Executive Officer and Marc Seriff took the CTO role. Ninety employees quit, ten remained. The company changed to sell Quantum Link for Commodore 64 and 128 consoles. Eventually, they would get into AppleLink and PC Link. Quantum Computer Services eventually (October 1989) changed their name to America Online (AOL).

Jim Kimsey left AOL in 1995, where he stayed under the limelight. He was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by President George W. Bush.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 24

• MIDAS II
• Sega introduces a rating system for games
• Microsoft launches Windows NT 3.1

Sun

1995- Sun releases the Java Programming language. James Gosling at Sun Microsystems originally developed the language as a core component to Sun’s Java platform. It uses C and C++ syntax. It used the theory of “Write Once, Run Anywhere” (WORA). By doing this, a programmer didn’t need to recompile a program to run it or test for bugs. Most of Java Programming Language is under a GNU General Public License

On the same day, MySQL releases their SQL database program for web pages. This is known as a  Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). MySQL uses C and C++, the SQL parser used yacc and a hybrid of lexer called “sql_lex.cc”. Many different websites to this day use versions of MySQL, including us at Geekazine and the Day in Tech History.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 23

• Windows Vista Beta 2 is released
• Kevin Mitnick is arrested
• NEC gets into the home video game market
• Twitter purchased Tweetdeck

May 22, 1980: Pac Man was installed in a movie theater in Tokyo.

1980 - The first Pac-Man machine was installed. Namco installed the first Pac-Man machine in a movie theater in Tokyo. Created by Toru Iwatani, the game has been one of the most popular in Arcades around the world.  Of course, Pac-Man was one of the most popular games in history and created many spin-offs including Ms. Pac-Man. Pac-Man was released in North America October of that year.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 22

• Robert Metcalfe describes a new device called the Laser Printer
• Adobe ships Illustrator 7.0
• Apple splits Newton into it’s own division
• SpaceX Launched and docks with Space Station

May 21, 2003: Caldera International becomes the SCO Group

2003- Caldera International finished the acquisition of the Server Software and Services divisions of Santa Cruz Operation. They turned around and officially renamed to the SCO group. The focus was more to the UNIX platform. The SCO group was in a major lawsuit with Novell until Masrch 2010 when the courts ruled that Novell had the proper rights to the SCO properties in the Linux OS.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 21

• The IBM 701 is announced
• Atari stock splits 2-for-1
• Apple releases Mac OS X Server

Craigslist

2009 - Craigslist was under fire for their erotic services. Reports of prostitution and other illegal activities were being conducted in the category. Craigslist revamped their site to remove the erotic services and add an “Adult” section – with more moderation. However, South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster was given an injunction for threatening executives of Craigslist with criminal prosecution for aiding prostitution in the state.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 20

• AppleLink is created
• Microsoft and Intuit discontinue their merger due to Antitrust issues
• Intel makes the Pentium processor available

May 19, 1980: Apple “Failure” III was released

1980 – The machine was code named “Sara”. It was the Apple III and was planned to be the successor to the Apple II. However, the machine had enough failures that Apple had to re-launch this computer in August. Therefore, it was refered to as “Apple Failure III”. Then IBM came out with the PC and Apple switched gears with their Macintosh line. Apple III saw modest numbers before it was retired on April 24th, 1984.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 19

• Star Wars Episode I
• Apple opens the first Apple Stores
• Intel debuts the pineview Atom chip

May 18, 2001: Shrek is released

2012 – After much speculation, Facebook shares go public under “FB”. The stock started at $38 a share but instantly dropped. Stock dropped to $26 / share by years end. It currently hovers around that price.

2001 - The computer animated movie “Shrek” hits theaters. The 90 minute movie was produced on a $60 million budget and although it’s first weekend only saw $42 million , the overall theatrical run brought in $487 million. Shrek was the first computer animated film to win an Academy Award (Best Animated Feature).

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 18

• Sony establishes: Sony Computer Entertainment of America
• Dell add AMD processors
• Facebook adds OpenID

May 17, 1991: Tim Berners-Lee sets up HTML

1991- Tim Berners-Lee sets up HyperText Markup language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) at CERN. He put the protocol on a NeXTStep machine. The server was then launched onto the word wide web, effectively making this the first day you could get a website that could support more than text.

That is when CERN and Berners-Lee release the World Wide Web standard. However, there was a long way to go. It wasn’t until August 6th, that Berners-Lee put up the first webpage.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 17

• Ars Technica sold to Conde Nast
• Lawrence Welk passes away
• Intel Introduced the Pentium III 55o

May 16, 2006: Phantom Console called a “Pump and dump” scheme

2006 - Phantom Entertainment former CEO Timothy Roberts was accused of running a Pump and dump scheme on the Phantom console – a Game system that never came to market. In 2004, he hired a promoter to send faxes stating the Phantom system would ship January 2005. Of course that drove up stock prices in which investors could profit on, including Roberts and the promoter (who got 4 million shares of restricted stock)

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 15

• Spaghetti-O’s are introduced
• Sugar Labs extends Sugar OS to EeePC
• OS X Tiger vs. Tiger Direct ruling.

May 15, 1985: The Last Apple Lisa is completed

1985 - The last Lisa Mac XL computer rolls off the assembly line. It was first introduced on Jan 19th, 1983 for $9,995. Sun remarketing purchased about 5,000 Macintosh XLs and upgraded them. Some leftover Lisa computers and spare parts are still available today.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 15

• The First McDonalds
• The Love Bug strikes
• Carl Icahn officially launches a Proxy fight against Yahoo
• CBS Acquired CNet

George Lucas

George Lucas was born on May 14th, 1944. Of course, George went on to create one of the biggest franchises in geek history. Lots of geek news this last year as George Lucas sold Lucasfilm and Star Wars to Disney.  Happy birthday to George.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 14

• Texas Instruments starts to compete with IBM
• ZDTV (TechTV, G4) Channel begins operation
• Google suffers a 1 hour outtage
• Sony Playstation relaunched after being offline for weeks

May 13, 1987: Turbo-C Programming Language Released

1987 – Version 1.0 of the Turbo C programming language is released. It offers the first integrated edit-compile-run development environment for the C programming language for IBM-compatible personal computers. Turbo C was developed by Bob Jervis as “Wizard C”. It runs on just 384KB of memory and is capable of inline assembly with full access to C symbolic names and structures.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 12

• Digital Equipment, Intel, and Xerox jointly announce the Ethernet network specification.
• HP Acquires EDS
• Iranian police close down more than four hundred Internet Cafes

May 12, 1996: Prodigy is taken over by Prodigy Management

1996 – IBM and Sears and Roebuck lose Prodigy due to takeover. They sell their interests to a group of investors – led by Prodigy Management: founders of Boston Technology and International Wireless.  Ed Bennett, CEO of Prodigy takes the lead in this acquisition. Carlos Slim Helu – Owner of Telmex – then provided Internet access for Mexico and Latin America.Ultimately, Prodigy went public in 1999 and stayed that way until bought out by SBC (AT&T).

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 12

• MITS receives a retraining order for Microsoft on the 8080 BASIC
• XBOX360 is unveiled
• France passes the Three Strikes rule

Google Chromebook

2011 – Eric Schmidt shows off the new Google Chrome OS but with an added feature as he introduced Google Chromebook – a personal computer with the Google Chrome OS built-in. The device loads straight to the browser where you can install applications for functionality on your Chromebook. The first Chromebook would begin selling on June 15, 2011.

1979 – Daniel Bricklin and Robert Frankston demonstrate the spreadsheet program “Visicalc”. Of course, it will become the “killer app” for PC’s. 100 cells could be calculated in 20 seconds. By the first year, sales will hit on hundred thousand and seven hundred thousand in six years. VisiCalc will fall to clones and ultimately to products like Lotus 1-2-3 and Microsoft Excel

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 11

Other Events in the Day in Technology History

• Sega begins shipping the Saturn system
• AOL launches free webmail
• Verizon sells part of Alltel to AT&T

May 10, 2001: TAT-14 Begins Service

2011 – Microsoft goes underneath Google and Facebook and puts in a $8.56 billion dollar deal for Skype. It was Microsoft’s biggest purchase to date and competed with their own Windows Live Messenger – which in 2013 they retired in the US.

2001 – TAT-14, the Transatlantic cable begins commercial service. A dual, bi-directional ring configuration using Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplex (DWDM) – Sixteen wavelengths of STM-64 per fiber pair. It carried 640 Gbps, and connectedGermany, the UK, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands with the US.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 10

• BFS preview is released
• Atari and MCA sign a joint venture

May 9, 1996: Tux the Penguin becomes mascot of Linux

1996 - Linus Torvelds adopts Tux the Penguin as the official mascot of Linux. Tux was first suggested by Alan Cox, then officially created by Larry Ewing. After a little refinement, Tux came to represent not only Linux, but also Open Source. James Hughes named the penguin TUX – for Torveld’s UniX. The image of Tux was submitted in previous Linux Logo contests, but never won. They then adopted Tux as the mascot, where he is loved by all who live and work in this space.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 9

• uMax SuperMac
• Facebook lifts the 5000 friend mark

Kaypro-II

1982 – Non-Linear Systems wasn’t into building computers. However, they decided to get into the PC market with this portable machine. The Kaypro II was all metal with a 9″ screen – So it was a good paperweight. It had predecessors, including, the Kaypro I.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 8

• JavE 6.0 is released
• Citirix XenServer 5.5 released
• Apple introduces the Powerbook 2400c

May 7, 1997: Intel releases the Pentium II – Slot 1 processor

1997 - Intel changes the processor game a bit with the Pentium II processor. Starting at speed of 200 MHz / 66 MHz bus, the proc had a new design. What was called “Slot 1″ processor, Intel got away from the pin architecture to a card slot. You would insert the PII to the slot just like you would memory, an ISA or PCI card.

What was Code-named Klamath, the processor incorporated 7.5 million transistors using 0.35 micron process technology, contained a 512kB Level-2 external cache,  performs at 613 MIPS (300 MHz), and is able to address 64GB of memory. MMX instruction was included on the processor. Prices started at $636  for 233 MHz, $775 for 266 MHz and US$1981 for 300 MHz).

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 7

• The Millionaire Calculating Machine
• Telstar II Satellite is launched
• Microsoft lays off 3,000

iMac G3

1998 – Steve Jobs, just fresh out of his return to Apple, announces one of the many changes in the Mac line. The iMac G3 computer. The iMac was the first computer to offer USB ports as a standard. The “All in one” computer had a front loading CD drive – but no floppy drive, built in speakers and came in 13 different colors. The iMac mouse was a disc shaped device with one button. A standard Mac keyboard was also included.

The G3 came with a Power PC 233 to 333 MHz. The L2 cache could run at 512 or 1MB and came loaded with Mac OS 8.1. The price was given of $1,299 and Jobs expected this computer to be out within 90 days, although it didn’t officially start shipping until August 15th.

The G3 was discontinued on March 18, 2003.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 6

• The Sierra Network is announced
• Paint.NET v.1 is released
• Sprint, Nextel and Clearwire announce WiMAX under the Clearwire name

May 5, 1995: Chris Lamprect was the first banned from the Internet

1995 - Most people didn’t even really know what the internet was at this point, but Chris Lamprecht did – And he got banned for life from using it. Funny thing is, he didn’t do a crime on the internet. He sold stolen circuit boards belonging to Southwest Bell. He would be banned from the Internet until 2003 (which he got out of in 2002). Lamprecht did write a program called ToneLoc. The movie War Games used this program as a basis to the movie.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 5

• Happy Cinco De Mayo!
• THQ acquires GameFX
• T-Mobile launches a 3G network
• Wordperfect 5.0 ships

Image via CrunchBase

Player vs. Player

1998 - My first attempt at a website back then was self publishing comics. I started with a website I called “Toonzed“. Other website were popping up. GPF, College Roomies from Hell, Penny Arcade. One of those website was called Player vs Player (PvP). Still going strong today, they have made some pretty funny comics. There are a lot of great web comics out there, too. I only scratched that surface.

The first PvP Strip

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 4

• “I Love You” virus hits computers
• AOL repairs glitch so Apple Macs can use the service
• Microsoft pulls their offer to Yahoo. Jerry Yang sends a memo to employees on what happened.

May 3, 1978: The first SPAM email

1978 - DEC Marketing manager Gary Thuerk is known as the first e-mail spammer and he didn’t even do it himself. Carl Gartley sent out the first spam mail message on the ARPAnet. Standard practice was to send an email, but Thuerk wanted to do something faster and easier. So he sent the one message and everyone saw it. Of course, the recipients were not happy.  The full message can be found at Templetons.com; but went like this:

DIGITAL WILL BE GIVING A PRODUCT PRESENTATION OF THE NEWEST MEMBERS OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY; THE DECSYSTEM-2020, 2020T, 2060, AND 2060T. THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY OF COMPUTERS HAS EVOLVED FROM THE TENEX OPERATING SYSTEM AND THE DECSYSTEM-10
COMPUTER ARCHITECTURE. BOTH THE DECSYSTEM-2060T AND 2020T OFFER FULL ARPANET SUPPORT UNDER THE TOPS-20 OPERATING SYSTEM. THE DECSYSTEM-2060 IS AN UPWARD EXTENSION OF THE CURRENT DECSYSTEM 2040 AND 2050 FAMILY. THE DECSYSTEM-2020 IS A NEW LOW END MEMBER OF THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AND FULLY SOFTWARE COMPATIBLE WITH ALL OF THE OTHER DECSYSTEM-20 MODELS.

WE INVITE YOU TO COME SEE THE 2020 AND HEAR ABOUT THE DECSYSTEM-20 FAMILY AT THE TWO PRODUCT PRESENTATIONS WE WILL BE GIVING IN CALIFORNIA THIS MONTH.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 3
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• Dell Computer is founded
• Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich produce a list of 335,000 Internet users who shared the band’s songs on Napster.
• Happy birthday to GeoCaching

May 2, 1983: Microsoft Releases the first 2-button mouse for PC

1983 - Microsoft releases the 2-button mouse. It was designed for Microsoft Word 1.0. The first mouse would fail, but the second version in 1985 would solidify the mouse on PC’s. Of course, Microsoft launched Microsoft Word v. 1.0for $229.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 2

Other Events in the Day in Technology History

• Excel launches for Macintosh
• Intel releases 3600MHz Pentium D processor

May 1, 2011: Twitter reports Bin Laden death hours before President Obama

2011 – The first tweets on the raid came from Sohaib Athar, a.k.a. @ReallyVirtual. At the time he didn’t know what he was tweeting about, just there was a helicopter hovering over Abbottabad at 1AM. Shortly after, Twitter went a buzz because inside that bunker was Osama Bin Laden. However, it was determined the first tweet actually came from  @keithurbahn (aka Keith Urbahn, Chief of Staff for Donald Rumsfeld).

So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.

— Keith Urbahn (@keithurbahn) May 2, 2011

This caused Twitter to explode and soon after, 14.8 million tweets were posted even before President Obama could take the podium to address the nation.

1964- John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz run the first BASIC program at 4 AM in Darthmouth. The duo used a General Electric 225 mainframe computer and ran a simple compiler program.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 1

• AMD is founded
• Tamagotchi is released in the US
• Lenovo takes over IBM desktop and notebook divisions for $655 million in cash and $600 million in stock.

April 30, 1993: World Wide Web enters in Public Domain

1993 - You may see www, but it’s true meaning is World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb during the 1990, while working for CERN. He did it on a NeXT Computer and developed it for the NeXTSTep platform (which Apple bought and turned into Mac OS X). But it was today that was most momentous, as the World Wide Web entered in the public domain. That meant anyone could access without license fees. Now a person could apply style sheets or post media on the web. The initial web browser was also the web editor.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 30

Other Events in the Day in Technology History

• Ubuntu 4.10 “Warty Warthog” is released
• Microsoft announces ten million copies of Windows 3.0
• ABC joins Hulu

April 29, 2004: Google file IPO

2004 – Google files the S-1 form with SEC for their IPO. They said they wanted to raise US$2,718,281,828; a Mathematical algorithm based on the day they filed. The form can be found at SEC.gov

The stock finally started trading on August 19, 2004 at $85 a share in a unique online auction.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 29

Other Events in the Day in Technology History

• Apple discontinues Macintosh XL
• Commodore declares bankruptcy
• Oracle finalizes their merger of BEA

April 28, 2003: iTunes Music Store Launches

2003-Apple launches the iTunes Store. iTunes has been around since 2001, but without option to get new music. Before the iTunes store, users would have to burn from CD or copy previously made MP3 files. The store sold 1 million songs within a week. Apple became the biggest music vendor in the US in 2008.

With 28 million songs, over 1 million podcasts, 40,000 music videos, 3,000 shows and even the Beatles library, iTunes music store continues to dominate the market.  Of course things exploded in 2007 when Steve Jobs put apps into the iTunes store. Apple just celebrated the 40 billion app mark and 25 billion song mark.

Today, Apple iTunes commands 63% of digital downloads.

iTunes

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 28

Other Events in the Day in Technology History

• 3DO sells to Samsung for $20 Million
• Sanford Wallace – the SPAM king – was sued by MySpace
• Intel removes processor ID tracking technology

April 27, 1998: Koko the gorilla does AOL chat

1998 - Using AOL chat, a sign language interpreter and an active audience, a female gorilla named Koko answered questions to the public. Koko resides at the Gorilla Foundation and with a vocabulary of 2,000 words, was able to respond to the chat room.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 27

• Xerox introduces the 8010 Star Information System.
• Captain Midnight hijacks an HBO satellite
• Giants Pitcher Brian Wilson’s Twitter is shut down due to posts that could give advantage

April 26, 1983: TRS 80 Model 4 Released

1983- The Trash-80, as it was so admirably called in the day, a.k.a. the TRS-80 Model 4 is introduced. It contains a 4 MHz processor, 16 KB of RAM, a cassette interface, Keyboard and Monochrome monitor. $1000 for the base model, or $2000 if you upgraded the RAM to 64 KB and 5.25 disk drives. The first TRS-80 was released in 1977.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 26

• IBM 7030 – the Stretch Supercomputer
• Last release of the Nemesis
• AOL purchases Flea-Flicker

April 25, 1980: Activision Fantastic Four comes together

1980 - Activision was technically founded in 1979, but it wasn’t until April 25 that the “Fantastic Four” joined up as the first third-party software company for video games. David Crane and Alan Miller left Atari August 1979 to start programming under the Activision name. Larry Kaplan and Bob Whitehead stayed behind until April 25th when Activision came out. Richard Muchmore was the venture capitalist and Jim Levy rounded the group as Activision’s CEO.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 25

• Sun Microsystems announces project JXTA
• XP x64 OS
• Yahoo begins the national TV ad campaign

Apple IIc

1984 - Apple introduces the Apple IIc, their answer to a portable machine. It weighed 7 1/2 lbs and featured a 1.023MHz CPU and 128 KB RAM. $1,295. The device device had a built-in floppy and peripheral expansion ports. This was a closed system – no expansion slots to plug in cards. It was deemed an appliance computer, which meant was ready to go when you pulled it out of the box.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 24

Other Events in the Day in Technology History

• IBM PC first announced (but wouldn’t be released until Aug 12th)
• Amiga 3000 announced
• Cnet / Yahoo deal
• Google Drive is released

April 23, 1964: SEAC is retired

1964- The Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) is retired after fifteen years. SEAC was the first to use all-diode logic. SEAC was bason on EDVAC. It had 747 vacuum tubes, and the clock rate was under 1 mHz.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 23

• Internet Explorer 2.0 is released for Mac 7.0.1
• Carnegie Mellon warns users of the CIH virus
• Ubuntu 9.04 is released

April 22, 1993: Mosaic Web Browser was released

1993 – The National Center for Supercomputing Applications releases version 1.0 (RTM) of the Mosaic Web Browser. It was the first browser with a Graphical user interface for content. Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark were the lead developers. The browser would take the internet by storm and continue to lead until 1998 when IE and Netscape came on the scene.

Mosaic was originally released in Beta (0.1) on January 23, 1993 – as a post in the newsgroup indicate**

Here is the official RTM thread

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 22

• Juno launches Juno free e-mail
• Connectix stops shipping the Virtual Game Station for Mac
• eBay sues Craigslist over “Diluting of Share”Newsgroups: alt.hypertext,comp.infosystems

**Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 07:21:17 -0800

From: ma…@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)

By the power vested in me by nobody in particular, alpha/beta version
0.5 of NCSA’s Motif-based networked information systems and World
WidWeb browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released:

location removed

This release of X Mosaic is known to compile on the following
platforms:

SGI (IRIX 4.0.2)
IBM (AIX 3.2)
Sun 4 (SunOS 4.1.2 with stock X11R4 and Motif 1.1).

Binaries for these platforms are available on ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in
/Web/xmosaic/binaries-0.5. More binaries will be supplied as I am
able to find other Motif-configured platforms to use (DEC MIPS
probably within the next half hour).

Although this is alpha/beta software, I’m looking more for feedback on design and functionality than bug reports right now — down the road
the bulk of the program will be rewritten in C++ anyway, so don’t
take the current code too seriously. But bug reports are welcome too.
New releases will probably come out about every 7-14 days until 1.0
arrives.

A list of current and future capabilities of X Mosaic follows this
message.

Cheers,
Marc

–
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
ma…@ncsa.uiuc.edu

April 21, 1977: Microsoft sends notice to MITS

1977 - Two days prior, Microsoft send MITS a letter with the allegation that they were not up on royalty payments and if they didn’t catch up, MITS would be in breach and the 8080 BASIC would be pulled. MITS sends a letter stating that they are not correct. Ultimately, this would begin a debate that would end in November when Microsoft pulled the 8080 BASIC out.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 21

Geek Smack Sponsor board!

• The Tanday 5000MC
• Intel 3 GHz Pentium 4
• Firefox 3.0.9 is released

April 20, 2009: Oracle purchases Sun Microsystems

2009 - Oracle announces they have purchased Sun Microsystems in a $7.4 billion dollar deal. This includes stock at $9.50 / share. That would also be the acquisition of SPARC processors, Solaris OS, Java and MySQL, among other items. The deal would be finalized on January 27th 2010.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 20

Geek Smack Sponsor board!

• Compaq and Sears-Roebuck offer Presario line of personal computers
• Bill Gates and Paul Allen write the letter to MITS on breach of contract
• IBM opens it’s first PC store in New York City

PDA

2000- Before smartphones, Personal Digital Assistants were the device to have. You could store contacts, write memos, set up, read and send email and even play a nice game of Solitaire, or the game where you eliminated color marbles. I – in my IT career – not only had a Palm III, but also ran with an iPAQ 3650, Handspring Visor and Jornada. Well, while this was not the first handheld, we would see a day where many vendors would release the new versions of their devices. It all hovered around Microsoft and their release – the Pocket PC specification: Windows CE 3.0 with mobile IE, Windows Music Player and Mobile Word. Compaq then releases the iPAQ, HP releases the Jornada 545 and Casio introduced the Cassiopeia E-115.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 19

Geek Smack Sponsor board!

• Simpsons debut on Tracey Ullman show
• Assassin’s Guild BBS is seized
• Mandrakesoft releases MandrakeLinux v. 8.0