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). ...
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 Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
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 Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
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 ...
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” Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
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 ...
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. 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 ...
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 Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
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