Archive for the ‘WITH - Week in Tech History’ Category

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Just a reminder – this will be the last “Week in Tech History” produced. Please add “Day in Tech History” to your RSS or iTunes. A new segment will fill this spot shortly.

After Apple ’s release of iPhone 3G, people were noticing connectiviy issues. This was due to the Infineon chip within (the chip that governs the 3G). It would ultimately cause the cutout. Apple quietly tried to resolve the matter, but eventually they had to just simply let people know what is going on. Steve Jobs sent out a letter saying “I’m sorry” and announcing how they are going to fix the problem.

This is one of many different articles within the Geekazine Quickcast.’

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:46 — 17.7MB)

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For the last year and a half, the Quickcast has been running a podcast every Monday reviewing the past history of Technology. The show has been a fun one, but for the last couple months I felt it needs it’s own space. Therefore, WITH will be spinning off into the Day in Tech History – a Daily look at the Historical events in Technology.

WITH will continue on. For the first couple weeks, we will continue with the same format. Afterwards, WITH will take a new shape, highlighting one historical event and how it plays on events today. It should be a new, powerfully informative look in the IT industry.

Information for this weeks’ WITH:

• Smithsonian is established
• Netscape Lawyers send a letter about Microsoft anticompetitive nature
• Twitter’s “2000″ ceiling
• Apple Fire at Building #6
• Atari Files Lawsuit against Amiga
• Netflix 3 day outtage

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 43:39 — 20.0MB)

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It was something that people talked about for months, but on August 6, 2008, CEO Jeff Bewkes confirms the rumor. AOL will be split off into it’s own company by the next year (which came to fruition on May 28th, 2009)

Other Items in Tech History, the Trash-80 is announced, SQL Server 2008 is released. Ebay and Craigslist experience outages while the first Olympic events are streamed through NBC. We also saw Bill Gates and Steve Jobs together on a 5 year deal which gave Microsoft 1oo,000 non-voting shares of Apple.

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It was the best of times, it was the worst of times – for Yahoo, anyway. It was the botched 6 month drama between them and Microsoft that made things so stressful. With Carl Icahn nipping at the heels for a takeover – then subsequent seat offering as a settlement – Yahoo had to create a great first impression to their stockholders so they could move on.

It was a long meeting. There was some debate on who should stay on the board and who should exit. There was even concern over the new seats and who would occupy them.

By the end of the day of August 1st, the meeting had resulted in a switch of power, ultimately leading to Jerry Yangs’ step down as CEO. By the next day, T. Boone Pickens had gotten rid of all his Yahoo stock.

Other items in the Week in Tech History – Fingerprints are used, The TRS 80 line is introduced and Windows Millenium Edition is dubbed “Millenium Alzheimers”.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:20 — 14.3MB)

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It was the system that would rival the Wiki world. Google launched a Beta of their online knowledge system called “Knol”. It was a lot like Wikipedia, except this system would have online advertising. The advantage (at least that some would call): contributors had an opportunity to actually make money off their knowlegde.

Knol stands for “A unit of Knowledge”. It was in Beta until January 2009

Other items in Tech History this week:

• IBM Goes Open Source – Sort of.
• Google and Digg were rumored to be in talks
• Carl Icahn joins Yahoo’s Board of Directors
• Trans Atlantic TV Broadcast with host Walter Cronkite.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:15 — 16.6MB)

Had some technical difficulties with the Podcast rig. Something that I will have to work on tomorrow. For now, WITH will have to hold off until next week. In the meantime – here is the last years’ WITH.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:26 — 10.3MB)

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July 8th: In 2007, developer Dan Kaminsky found a flaw in the addressing of the Domain Name System, or DNS. DNS is found on home to commercial routers around the world. The issue was so severe, that they were not divulging the issue until a patch could be implemented on a wide scale.

On March 31st, Kaminsky – along with 16 other developers – gathered at Microsoft to work on a massive patch and synchronize the release so all details could be released as well. Today was the day that patch was released. Microsoft also released patch MS08-037 on the Windows side to counter the issues. Cisco, Sun and BIND fixes would come out shortly after.

Other historical notes: The first Sundae was created (Ok, geeky note). Commodore’s rebirth from the Netherlands. Captain and Tennile on a TI99/4a. Check out the Podcast for all the info

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:55 — 32.9MB)

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July 4th, 2008 – The company that used to be called “Ask Jeeves”, but is now Ask.com officially announced they acquired the Lexico Publishing Group. The LPG is a company that built a series of reference websites. Most notably Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com. The transaction was an all cash one, and undisclosed.

Other items in Tech history this week: Hotmail is launched, AOL buys Mapquest, the eBay Baby, in 2001 the P4 1.6 was released at $294 and a lot more in the Geekazine Quickcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 32:12 — 14.7MB)

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We announce the 3rd step in the Summer of Geekazine contest

June 27th – William Gates officially hands the keys over to Steve Ballmer and goes on his retirement. Well, sort of.

Bill announced that he will be stepping down as CEO of Microsoft and letting Steve Ballmer take the reins. He will have interaction with Microsoft. After all, it is his company.

Lots of other cool historical events from Atari, Commodore, Microsoft, Apple and IBM within the podcast

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:21 — 16.2MB)

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Mozilla broke free and created Firefox back in 2004. Since then, they have been growing in browser popularity. Being the major browser in Linux, but also downloadable for Windows and Mac helps a lot. The ability to install Add-ons also makes this browser very flexable.

On June 17th, 2008, Mozilla released version 3.0 of the browser (with version 1.9 of the Gecko engine). They wanted to put a big dent into the Internet Explorer market, so they created a “Download party”. The idea was to get a record number of downloads for the launch – a Guiness World record, that is. They created Download Day to promote the record.

However, the day of the launch was not good to Mozilla. They got ready to push out the browser, but a website glitch caused the download to be delayed. Within a couple hours the site was back up and running, but Twitters abroad told of other locations you could go to download the software.

Could this hamper the World record efforts? Well, since there was no world record before, the answer is No.

But what Mozilla DID do is 8 million downloads in the 24 hour period. That was more traffic than Mozilla ever has seen. The Linux community did their part in getting the new browser, but it was really the “average user” that helped bring this number so high.

The Mozilla – IE battle still goes on. Also with Safari, Opera and Chrome in the picture. But did you know that AT&T also put out a Browser? Well, you will find out all these great facts and more in the Week in Tech History.

Also, we mention the 3rd step in the Summer of Geekazine contest. #Geekazine Rocks.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 30:12 — 27.6MB)

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This was a pivitol week on the Yahoo Proxy battle as everything was approved to go. Carl Icahn was given the green light to lobby shareholders and possibly win control to ready for a new Yahoo. The previous week, we saw all the reports of Carl Icahn making the statement: Jerry Yang must go. This week was no different.

In the meantime, Microsoft made one more offer. This time it wasn’t for the whole company – it was only for the search engine. $35 a share for Yahoo Search. This was significant because this was the same bid Microsoft did back in February for the whole company.

Other great items in the Week in Tech History Quickcast – TI/99 restructures, Jacques Cousteau was born. We also saw Commodore, new Intel and AMD processors and the Ruputer was introduced. All this on the Geekazine Quickcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 26:43 — 12.2MB)