1926 – BASIC Language Co-Inventor Born

BASIC co-developer John Kemeny was born in Budapest, Hungry. In his 66-year life, Kemeny had a significant impact on the history of computers, particularly during his years at Dartmouth college, where he worked with Thomas Kurtz to create BASIC, an easy-to-use programming language for his computer students. Kemeny earlier had worked with John von Neumann in Los Alamos, New Mexico, during the Manhattan Project years of World War II.

 

1941 – Electric eye detectors were first used to measure high-jumping height. A track meet of the Schenectady, NY, Patrolmen’s Association used equipment designed by General Electric, comprising of a movable light source and four electric eyes.

 

1943 – Chief consultant John Mauchly and chief engineer John Presper Eckert began leading the military commission on the new computer ENIAC. They could take one year to design the computer and 18 months to build it.

 

1991 – All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Sega releases the video game Zero Wing for the Sega Mega Drive system in Europe. The game was never released in North America, and was relatively unknown until years later when the poorly translated opening scene was popularized on the internet. The most famous mistranslation is the phrase “All your base are belong to us,” which has become a very popular internet meme.

 

2006 – Pirate Bay Raided, Swedish Political Party Increased

Swedish police raid the host of the Pirate Bay Bit torrent. On the same day, the Pirate Bay political party increased their numbers by 500, with an additional 930 joining the following day. The site stayed down for 3 days, but came back to double the traffic due to the media coverage.

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1896 – The first auto accident on record occurs in New York City when a Duryea Motor Wagon driven by Henry Wells collides with a bicycle ridden by Evylyn Thomas. New Yorkers probably accused Henry of being from jersey, but he was actually from Massachusetts.

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1966 – NASA launched Surveyor 1. It achieved the first soft landing on the Moon by the United States and demonstrated the technology necessary to achieve landing and operations on the lunar surface for the manned missions to follow.

 

1979 – IRM was founded in Japan with the purpose of selling electric applied game machines. Two years later they started a subsidiary called Japan Capsule Computer. They eventually spun that division off as Capcom.

1987 – Compact Disc Video (CD-V) Format

        North American Philips Company introduced the compact disc video format. Using the same technology as LaserVision, the “CD’s with Pictures” would be gold in color and the same size as an audio CD. They could hold up to 800 MB – which would allow for a full length movie in SD, or a video music album. The CD-V didn’t last that long, dissolving by 1991.

1996 – AT&T Announces Video Phone Call System

AT&T held a meeting to announce a system that would allow personal computers to make and receive video phone calls over standard telephone lines. In years of efforts by AT&T system made use of Intel’s Pentium processors and compression software to allow both video and audio information to share a phone line rather than a high-capacity ISDN, T-1, or T-3 line.

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1919 – Sir Arthur Eddington led a team in Africa to observe the total eclipse, while another team observed it in Brazil, to measure how the sun bent star light during a solar eclipse. The results confirmed Einstein’s theory of Relativity.

1935 – Workers poured the last concrete at the iconic Hoover Dam hydroelectric site. Four months later the concrete was well and truly set, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the dam.

1985 –Eastman Kodak Co. Introduces Electronic Publishing System

            The Eastman Kodak Co. introduced an electronic publishing system called Ektaprint Electronic Publishing System, designed to allow companies to edit, print, and update text and graphics for publications. The $50,000 system included parts designed by Sun Microsystems Inc., Canon Inc., and Interleaf Inf. In an early version of what now is available to any computer user for a few hundred dollars.

1992 – Apple Newton Announced

         At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Chicago, Apple Computer CEO John Sculley first announces the coming release of the Newton personal digital assistant to a group of reporters, explaining that the Newton “is nothing less than a revolution.” Although there was not a fully functioning prototype available, the Newton technology is demonstrated, including how to order a pizza by moving topping icons onto a pie and then faxing the order from the device.

The Newton is Apple’s first major new product line since the Macintosh was released eight years earlier. The Newton unveiling generates immediate buzz, but due to several factors, Sculley’s announcement will ultimately be considered a major mistake. The announcement itself tipped the company’s hand to its competitors and widely inflated consumer expectation. The Newton’s release was delayed until August of 1993, and when it was released, it was not as user-friendly as expected. Specifically the core hand-writing recognition feature was widely criticized as buggy and inaccurate. While the technology was greatly improved in subsequent revisions, the Newton never gained much commercial success, and shortly after his return Steve Jobs discontinued the Newton in 1998.

1999 – Space Shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with the International Space Station.

1999 – Five Million Domain Names

Believeinkids.com became the five-millionth domain name in the world.  At the time, a domain name cost $70 for the first year, $35 a year thereafter. The domain name was abandoned and is still available to this day.

2015 – Google announced Levi’s as the first partner for Project Jacquard, a way of weaving electronics into clothing to do things like turn cloth into a touchscreen controller.

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1929 – First Modern Color Movie

The Warner Brothers’ film on With the Show, the first talking movie that is all in color, debuts at New York City’s Winter Garden theater. The film uses two-color Technicolor and Vitaphone sound.

1936 – Alan Turing submitted his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” for publication in which he postulated hypothetical Turing Machines would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.

1959 – Committee Forms to Develop New Language 

A committee formed to develop COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language. The group of researchers drawn from several computer manufacturers and the Pentagon designed a program for business use that sought easy readability and as much machine independence as possible. Although programmer Howard Bromberg prematurely made a tombstone for COBOL out of fear that the language had no future, it continues to be used by business today. The tombstone is now part of the Computer History Museum’s collection.

1971 – The USSR launched Mars 3. It would arrive at Mars in December and its lander would become the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars.

1987 – GIF is Not Peanut Butter

CompuServe releases the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) standard as a new computer graphics file format. Due to color limitations, the GIF format is unsuitable for reproducing color photographs, but it is well-suited for more simple images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color. This made is probably the most popular graphics format “GIF licensing controversy” soured many designers to its use. The PNG format was developed in response as an alternative to GIF to get around the licensing issue. However, all relevant patents have since expired and the GIF format may now be freely used. Today it still sees widespread use, especially when simple animations are needed.

2014 – Apple Acquires Beats

Rumors flew high on this one, so when it happened, many people were not surprised. Apple announced they were going to acquire Beats Music and Electronics in a $3 billion deal. As part of the acquisition, co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy lovine would join Apple. Beats subscription service would continue to work as part of the service would be integrated with iTunes. Currently, Beats has a 20 million song library, and is available for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone for a $9.99 subscription.

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1931 – Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took the first manned trip into the stratosphere when they rode in a pressurized cabin attached to a balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet.

1959 – NIT Shuts Down “Whirlwind” Computer

After almost a decade of service, MIT shut down its Whirlwind computer. The machine debuted on Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now television series in 1951, showing off its quick speed and large memory compared to other systems at the time. Project director Jay Forrester described the computer as a “reliable operating system,” running 35 hours a week at 90-percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory.

1986 – Dragon Quest was released in Japan. It combined the full-screen map of Ultima with the battle and statics-oriented screens of Wizardry and paved the way for RPG games.

1988 – Windows Hits Version 2.1

Microsoft release a 2 versions of Windows 2.1 – one for 286 computers and one for 386 computers. It wasn’t until version 3 that Windows had any sort of appreciable user base.

2003 – WordPress Released

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.

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1969 – Apollo 10 returned to Earth after a successful eight-day test of all the components needed for the manned moon landing.

1981 – Satya Pal Asija received the first US patent for a computer software program. It was called Swift-answer. The patent took seven years to issue, and the validity of software patents has been debated ever since.

1995 – Bill Gates’ Internet Tidal Wave

Bill Gates’ Internet Tidal Wave- Realizing his company had missed the boat in estimating the impact and popularity of the Internet, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates issue a memo titled, “The Internet Tidal Wave,” which signaled the company’s focus on the global network. In the memo, Gates declared that the internet was the “most important single development” since the IBM personal computer – a development that he was assigning “the highest level of importance.” Still, it is curious why it took someone who was regarded as a technology “innovator” so long to realize this.

1998 – AMD K6-2 Processor

At the beginnings of the AMD/ Inter battle, AMD brought out a processor to dual with Pentium II. The AMD K6-2 processor was a Super Socket 7 pin structure, which also was compatible with older Socket 7 motherboards. With 9.3 million transistors, the K6-2 had a CPU clock rate of 266 to 552 MHz. Of course, these were single-core processors and had frond=t side bus of either 66 or 100 MHz. The K6-2 also featured the MMX and 3DNow! Instruction set. The K6-2+ was added to keep up with Pentium III processors. The processor line only lasted.

 

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1945 – Arthur C. Clarke began privately circulating copies of his paper “The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications” which suggested geostationary space stations could be used for worldwide television broadcasts.

1949 – Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia. He would later go by the name Joybubbles and develop a talent to whistle at 2600 Hz, allowing him to control phone switching equipment.

1961 – US President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech to Congress declaring the United States would go to the moon.

1977 – A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away……

The motion picture Star Wars is released in thirty-two US theaters. The film will immediately break records unlike any before it, essentially becoming the first blockbuster in history. The film’s unprecedented use of special effects sparked a revolution of movies using technology-based visual effects. Perhaps the film’s greatest contribution to technology was the creation two years earlier of the company Industrial Light and Magic, which is still the leading special effects house in the industry.

1983 – Return of the Jedi

The third installment in the original Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi, is released six years to the day after the first Star Wars movie. Return of the Jedi continued to raise the bar in special effects technology that its predecessor set. The film’s final space battle, for example was of a size and scale unprecedented at the time.

1989 – The first Magellan GPS NAV 1000s were shipped to retailers. They ran for a few hours on six AA batteries, and sold for $3,000.

1994 – First International World Wide Web Conference

CERN hosted the first international World Wide Web conference, which continued through May 27. At the conference, researchers expanded on Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of a single storage facility for a variety of information – a design that would greatly aid his research at CERN, where he previously had to use a number of different programs and locations to collect what he needed. While participants understood the usefulness of Berners-Lee’s concept and Hyper Text Markup Language, few guessed how quickly the Web would expand to millions of users globally.

1999 – Corel WordPerfect Office 2000

A program first developed by Brigham young University for Data General Minicomputers, WordPerfect was the word processing application for anyone using a computer in the 80’s and 90’s. I remember writing reports and papers using this software growing up, along with Quattro Pro for bookkeeping and printing daily reports at work. However, I 1994, WordPerfect started to gain some major competition when computers turned to GUI, and DOS was getting put on the back burner. Corel, the owners of WordPerfect since 1996, wanted to ramp up production of not only the word processor, but also their products in.

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1844 – First Telegraph Service Launched

Samuel Morse sends the first telegraphic message over a line from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore. The message, “What hath God wrought!” was transmitted to his partner, Alfred Vail, who retransmitted the same message back to Morse. This formally opened America’s first telegraph line, launching America’s first form of instant communication in history. The biblical text was selected by Annie Ellsworth, the teenage daughter of the U.S. Commissioner of Patents.

1935 – General Electric Co. sold the first spectrophotometer. It could detect two million different shades of color and make a permanent record chart of the results.

1940 – Igor Sikorsky performs the first successful single rotor helicopter flight.

1961 – MIT’s Clark Begins Work on LINC Computer

Wes Clark began his work on LINC, or the Laboratory Instrument Computer, at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. His plan was to create a computer for biomedical research, that was easy to program and maintain, that could be communicated with while it operated, and that could process biotechnical signals directly. Building on his previous experience in developing the Whirlwind, TX-0, and other early computers, Clark set to work on one of the earliest examples of a “user friendly” machine – setting the standard for personal computer design in the following decades.

1985 – Quantum Computer Services (AOL) Founded

Quantum Computer Service 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 modern 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 Service eventually (October 1989) changed their name to America Online (AOL).

 

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1825 – William Sturgeon exhibited the electromagnet in a practical form for the first time. The exhibition accompanied the reading of a paper, recorded in the Transactions of the Society of Arts for 1825 (Vol xliii, p.38).

1903 – The Old World Gets Connected

Paris, France and Rome, Italy are connected by telephone for first time.

1908 – John Bardeen was born. He grew up to win the Nobel Prize twice, once for inverting the transistor, and once for figuring out superconductivity.

1994 – Java Development Begins in Earnest

Sun Microsystems Inc. formally announced its new programs, Java and HotJava at the SunWorld’95 convention. Java was described as a programming language that, combined with the HotJava World Wide Web browser, offered the best universal operating system to the online community. The concept behind the programs was to design a programming language whose applications would be available to a user with any kind of operating system, eliminating the problems of translation between Macintoshes, IBM-compatible computers, and Unix machines.

1995 – MySQL Released RDBMS

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 uses yacc and a hybrid of lexer called “sql_lex.cc”.

2002 – Netflix began selling its stock publicly on the NASDAQ. It rose from it’s initial price, unusual for the time when tech company stocks were generally in poor shape.

2006 – Windows Vista Beta 2 was released to Microsoft Developer Network subscribers and Microsoft Connect testers in conjunction with Bill Gates’s keynote presentation at the WinHEC conference.

2011 – Twitter purchased TweetDeck for $40 million.

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1906 – The Wright Patent

Orville and Wilbur Wright are granted the first airplane patent in the U.S. for their “new and useful improvement in Flying Machines.”(US No. 821,393).

1973 – Xerox Researchers Proposes “Ethernet”

               Robert Metcalfe writes a thirteen-page memo describing a new type of data transmission method. His memo was entitled “Ether Acquisition”, which would connect Hawaii’s ALOHA Network. Alto Ethernet was born on paper, but didn’t see operation until November 11, 1973 when it was implemented. Metcalfe was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1996 for his work on inventing Ethernet. He was also inducted into the National Inventor Hall of Fame in 2007. Robert Metcalfe describes a new device called the Laser Printer Adobe ships Illustrator 7.0 Apple splits.

1980 – Happy Birthday, Pac-Man!

Namco’s upcoming game “Puck-Man” is location tested in a movie theater complex in Japan. After favorable initial testing, the game slightly tweaked, with the most major change the renaming of the game to “Pac-Man”. Midway, Namco’s U.S. distributor, thought that vandals would alter the letter “P” to an “F”. While the game was not officially released until later the year (October 10^th in the US), the creators of the game consider May 22 to Pac-Man’s birthday because it was the first time the game was shown to the general public.

One of the little known facts about Pac-Man is that it was specifically developed to be popular with women. Most video games of that time had a war or sports theme to them and women were generally not interested in those games. Pac-Man would be the first game popular with both men and women and was the first video game to become a social phenomenon. Pac-Man generated over $2.5 billion by the 1990’s, becoming one of the highest grossing video games of all time.

1990 – Microsoft released Windows 3.0. It featured big improvements in interface and multitasking. It’s Control Panel feature caught the eye of Apple which sued, and lost.

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