Day in Tech History

1981 While getting this up to 88 miles per hour doesnt take you back in time, it was still a cool car to have. The First production Delorean DMC-12 was built. A prototype was made back in 1976 and

1885 Sounding like anything but a roller coaster,the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway was the first American designed amusement coaster designed by LaMarcus Adna Thompson. Only 5 cents to ride,

Happy Birthday to me. 1983 at an introductory price of $9995, Apple introduces the Lisa computer the first computer with a GUI (Graphical User Interface). The computer featured a 5 MHz 68000 micro

1983 During the CP/M Show, Franklin Electronic Publichers revealed the Franklin Ace 1200 computer. The main feature of this computer (like the other Franklin computers before) was the fact they copi

2012 Yahoo! had some turbulent times from 2007 when founder Jerry Yang was CEO. Of course the big debacle being the Microsoft bid, which took over 9 months to settle with Carl Icahn being a major in

1956 The U.S. Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was disclosed to the public. SAGE is a computer that connected hundreds of radar stations in the US and Canada as a one-stop monitoring of the

1990 AT&T suffers the oddest outage nationwide. A switch in New York crashed, then rebooted. This caused the other switches linked to the New York switch to also reboot. The cascade continued on unt

1973 Elvis is broadcast via satellite to over 1 billion viewers in over 40 countries. That is, except for the U.S. because Superbowl VII was being played. The U.S. finally got to see the concert on

2000 Microsoft CEO Bill Gates announces he will be stepping down from his role but remain on the Board and embrace a new role as Chief software architect. Steve Ballmer will take over the CEO role a

1966 Bruce Wayne and Dick Graysonentered our lives via ABC on Wednesdays. The television series Batman debuted with the episode Hi Diddle Riddle. Each half hour episode contained either part 1 or

2001 Dave Weiner added a new functionality to the RSS feed called Enclosure. It was defined as passing any audio file (mp3, wav, ogg, etc), video file (mpg, mp4, avi, mov, etc), PDF, or ePub (elect

1996 Texas Instruments announced it would release the TI-83 and became one of the most popular calculators. The TI-83 had many graphing modes including polar, parametric, sequence and function graph

At MacWorld 2001, Steve Jobs announced Mac OSX the base OS for Apple for the next couple decades. With Darwin, an open source BSD Unix service, 2D (Quartz), 3D (OpenGL) and Quicktime (QT5). The prog

1940 a full-scale relay calculator designed by Bell Labs engineer Dr. George Stibitz, becomes operational. The machine was first designed in February 1938, and construction began in April, 1939. Alt

Born in 1856, Nikola Tesla was the inventor of alternating current. Tesla even worked for Edison from 1882 to 1886. He then started theTesla Electric Light & Manufacturing company in where he worked

2001 It was CES where Microsoft unveiled the XBox video game system. The system had a 733 MHz processor, hard drive and 250MHz graphics processor. The console didnt release until November 15, 2001.

1984 Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT to begin the writing of GNU software. GNU a recursive acronym for Not Unix and reference to the song the Gnu is an operating system that is compatib

1904 To show the effects of how dangerous Nikolai Teslas Alternating current was, Thomas Alva Edison filmed the electrocution of the elephant, Topsy. This was falsely advertised as the first Elephan

1977Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak officially incorporate the Apple Computer Corporation. MikeMakkula jr. invests $250,000 in venture capital and becomes the first chairman of Apple. They also decid

1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen write a letter to the Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry System (MITS) stating they have BASIC language for the Intel 8080 processor and would like to incorporate on

Happy New Year! 1994 It was a 6 year office romance that ended in marriage. Best part where we hear marriages dissolve, this one has continued on for over 20 years. So we wish Bill and Melinda (Fr

On this day, we basically crunch numbers. This is where you will see companies let you know how much of their products are out there. How many copies of Windows have been sold, how many PCs were boug

2008 Facebook made an initiative to remove any picture showing breastfeeding. In return, 11,000 women posted pictures in protest. On June 15, 2014, after the #FreeTheNipple campaign brought success,

2004 Once Commodore dropped from the market in the 80s, it pretty much started bouncing around the world from company to company. Ultimately it landed in the lap of KMOS a Deleware company. Howe

1995 Compuserve blocks access to over 200 sites that have explicit content. They do it to avoid issue with the German Government. The sites would be blocked until Feb 13, 1996 when all but 5 sites w

2001 Yahoo announces that they will acquire 98.6 percent of the outstanding stock to

2007 With iTunes just signing a deal with FOX and their content for iTunes, stocks pushed upward to $200 a share. It was the first time Apple hit that barrier, and promptly dropped after. The compan

1998 during the last couple years of the 20th century, the race was on to fix an oversight in multiple computer systems. The problem was dubbed Y2K or the Millennium bug. Bottom line was that all

An interesting fact: Russian folklore believed that December 24th was the day people could be turned into Werewolves. Any child that is born on December 24th would beconsidereda werewolf. There are

2008 Santa Claus is spotted on Google Earth. Of course the story of St. Nicholas is an interesting one that doesnt really involve religion. But now we know where he resides, thanks to Google! Of co

1845 Today, were travelling to the Geek side of things. Its not everyday that I get to talk about my other passion Music. The Euphonium often mistaken for a Tuba was created. It was also coi

2000 President Bill Clinton signs the Child Internet Protection Act into law. The law is implemented to set rules for the web to expose them to pornography and sexual content. In 2003 the law will b

1996 Steve Jobs started Apple. When he left Apple, he started NeXT. When Apple started to fall, Steve Jobs came back. Of course, having 2 computer companies is not a good idea So why not buy it ou

1974 Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) puts out the first ever Do it yourself Altair 8800. You would get it through Popular Mechanics Magazine, then assemble it yourself. This is

1926 The term Photon is coined. Of course a photon is the basic unit of light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation. Newton Lewis is the one who coins the term. HTML 4.0 is published

1989 The first full episode of the Simpsons airs on FOX TV network. 21 years and 1 movie later, the show still continues on strong. The cast stayed pretty much the same since 89. The Simpsons starte

1994 Although its only been in mainstream news for a couple years, the Large Hadron Collider has actually been around for many years now. On this day, for example,

1995 At the turn of the Internet age, researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation, led by Paul Flaherty, Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, created a web crawler and indexer algorithm. The web progr

1994 The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) held its first meeting at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Albert Vezza and

1982 After a decent success of the Atari 400/800 line the company noticed the console was looking a little old. After all, the Atari 400 actually discolors upon UV light. The 400s non-tactile key

1980 Apple Computer goes up for their Initial Public Offering and makes a statement in the market. Using the symbol

1967 The Concorde was a British and French venture. It wa the first supersonic airliner. The prototype (Concorde 001) was rolled out to 1100 present. British technology minister Anthony Wedgwood Ben

1993 20 years ago, a Shareware copy was uploaded through a server at the University of Wisconsin (and although I was going to school there at the time, it wasnt me HONEST). The end result was the

2002 The trial of Jon Lech Johansen, better known as DVD Jon, begins with Johansen pleading not guilty. DVD Jon has been a pioneer in Reverse engineering. O.K, so that is a fancy way of saying

2004 It was an interesting day in the Tech community when we heard the news. IBM was getting out of the desktop and laptop markets and focus on server and infrastructure. They started by selling all

1978 It is one of the most infamous pictures in tech today. This is the Microsoft crew. Can you guess which one is Bill Gates? The picture was updated in 2008 when the group (except Bob Wallace, who

1768 Encyclopedia Britannica began publishing the first print otherwise known as part I. It was the brain child of Colin Macfarquhar, andAndrew Bell, and was a conservative reaction to the Fre

1965 Richard Wexelblat was the first candidate to complete his doctoral dissertation, hence giving him a degree in Computer Science. It was presented at the University of Pennsylvania Moore Scho

1985 The Cray X-mp/48 Supercomputer begins operation in San Diego Supercomputer Center in California. The $15 million dollar supercomputer could process 400 megaflops (200 per processor). It was a s

1981 For many years, whenever something came out, it was IBMs Data Processing Division releases Well, on Dec 3rd 1981, IBM decided and announced that the Data Processing Division was going to be