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 Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
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 ...
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 ...
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. Full Day in ...
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 Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
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 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 Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
2000 – Five arial images of Area 51 are leaked onto Terraserver from a Russian satellite called “Sovinformsputnik. The amount of traffic that went to the site brought the server down, so they had to take the photos off until they could handle the traffic. Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for April 17 Qualified schools got copies of the new LOGO programming language Toshiba releases the Libretto sub-notebook Sweden finds the four defendants in the Pirate Bay case guilty of hosting illegal downloads Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
1912 – The RMS Titanic strikes an iceberg at 11:40 pm (7:40 pm EST). Of course from that, over 1,500 lost their lives to the cold, dark water, when the ship took the immortal dive. The ship had a passenger manifest of 2,223. The wreck was finally discovered on September 1st, 1985. 2005 – It was the release of the Damn Small Linux program, a Linux distribution that was designed to take up as little drive space as possible. John Andrews – DSL’s developer – Never allowed the ISO to go past 50 MB in size. You would be able to put DSL onto a CD or USB drive if needed. You can get the DSL ISO to install here ...
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