December 1 – technical history

 

1847 – The London and North Western Railway along with the Caledonian Railway adopted London Time on instructions from the General Post office. Other railways followed suit and this was seen as the established of the first time zone.

1913 – Henry Ford added the moving-chassis assembly line to produce Model T’s in his Highland Park, Michigan factory. It was the crowning glory in his attempts to increase efficiency and production.

1913 – Colossus Team Member Chandler Born

W.W. Chandler is born in Bridport, England. He obtained his BSc from London University in 1938 by private study while working as a telephone engineer at the British Post Office Research Department. During the war he was responsible for the installation and maintenance of the colossus at Bletchley Park. The Colossus represented the first electronic computer; however it was programmed by a mechanical switchboard. It was used to communication. Winston Churchill characterized the Bletchley Park team as the geese who laid the golden eggs but never cackled.

After the war, Chandler participated in the development and installation of the MOSAIC computer and worked on optical character recognition. He died on September 11, 1989.

1941 – Microprocessor Co-Inventor Faggin Born

Dr. Federico Faggin is born in Vicenza, Italy. He graduated from Instituto Industriale at Vicenza in 1960. He received a doctorate in physics from the University of Padua in 1968.In 1968 he came to the US to join Fairchild in Palo Alto where he developed the original silicon gate technology. The 4004 project brought him to Intel in 1970. In 1974 he founded Zilog, Inc. which produced a new chip design for the fledgling personal computer industry. After a short stint with Exxon, he co-founded Cygnet Technologies in 1982 and Synaptics, Inc. in 1986 where he was president. He is a recipient of the Marconi fellowship and IEEE W. Wallace McDowell awards.

1971 – Project Gutenberg Launched

Michael Hart, founder of what is now known as Project Gutenberg, launches the project by making his first posting, the Declaration of Independence. Now known as the father of eBooks, earlier in the year Hart had been given an operator’s account on a mainframe at the University of Illinois, where he was a student. Having been given highly valuable computer time when few people had such opportunity, he decided to begin a project that would digitize and electronically preserve public domain books and texts and make them freely available. The Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois just happened to be one of the first 15 nodes on the early ARPANet, the beginning of the modern Internet. The ability to for anyone connected to this network to download information was a major inspiration for Hart to begin Project Gutenberg.

1977 – Time Warner launched QUBE in Columbus, Ohio, the first two-way interactive cable system. One of its channels called “The Pinwheel” would later be relaunched as Nickelodeon.

1996 – AOL Goes Unlimited

America Online launches a new subscription plan offering their subscribers unlimited dial-up Internet access for $19.95/month. Previously, AOL charged $9.95/month for 5 hours of usage. The new plan brought in over one million new customers to AOL within weeks and daily usage doubled among subscribers (to a whole 32 minutes per day!). This huge increase in usage overloads AOL’s infrastructure with the result being that many of their subscribers could not access the service. Class action lawsuits were filed by angry subscribers who could no longer access the service they were paying for. Regardless of their trouble, by offering unlimited Internet access for a reasonable fee, AOL helped facilitate increased adoption of Internet usage among a public still becoming acclimated to the “Information Superhighway”.

1999 – It was the most expensive internet domain name. Business.com was first bought in 1997 for $150,000 by Marc Ostrofsky. You might think that is pretty expensive, but economically, it was a great deal. On 12/01/99, Business.com sold to Jake Winebaum for $5.7 million. At that point, Business.com was officially founded. Jake was a chairman of the Walt Disney Internet group. This domain barely made it through the dot com bubble. They went through 2007 when R.H. Donnelley Corporation acquired the site for $345 million. R.H. Donnelley filed for bankruptcy in June 2009.

2013 – The Amazon Flying Drone Project

Jeff Bezos is interviewed on the show “60 Minutes” on CBS with Charlie Rose. During his interview he unveils a project Amazon has been working on – Flying drone delivery. This secret R&D project called “Octocopter” will have drones fly the packages from outposts in each city to the homes.

In a project Amazon is calling “Prime Air”, they expect the delivery system to be available in the next 4-5 years.

Charlie Rose’ reaction summed it up.”Oh! My God!”

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