Archive for the ‘Day in Tech History’ Category

bug

1945 - Grace Hopper is forever immortalized in the computer world as the first person to find a bug in a computer system. Litterally. The bug was a moth in between Relay #70 on Panel “F” of the Harvard Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator.

From there on end, “Bug” meant a problem in a computer system. I guess once the moth was removed, the word “Debug” was also added.BTW – The relay functioned properly after the moth was removed.

1947 – It sounds like that same relay finally failed 2 years later.

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Other Historical Events in Technology

• The first TRS-80 is sold
• Sony releases the Playstation
• 9/9/99 (in 1999 that is)

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 9:19 — 4.3MB)

RealDVD

2008 -Real launches a new program that will allow you to put your DVDs and other format movies onto the hard drive. It instantly became a hotbed of controversy as the software raised the question: can you legally copy the data to another media? The battle started in court and at this current point, RealDVD is on an injunction of sales.

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Other Day in Tech History items:

• Realtime updates of VDNS
• RIAA sues 261 including Brianna LaHara, a 13 yo girl
• Richard Kenadek pleads not guilty on Davy Jones Locker BBS

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:08 — 3.3MB)

1996 – Sergey Brin and Larry Page get together for the first time to put together an algorhthm to search on the internet. The search engine is called “Backrub”, which was a way to analyze back links. Then:

1998 – Google co-founds their search engine. The program was found on Stanfords’ web – found at google.stanford.com. This link is still valid.

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Other Historical Events in Technology

• Spore releases
• Seganet launches
• IVILLIAC IV is shut down

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:16 — 3.3MB)

HDNet

2001 - Mark Cuban and Phillip Garvin launch HDNet, the first High Definition TV signals. It was available both through cable and satellite television. The channel got some news for their exclusive HD coverage of the US invasion of Afghanistan.

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Other Day in Tech History items:

• Facebook Botnets
• NBC changes from Silverlight to Flash
• MP3.com pays 250 Million

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:22 — 3.8MB)

LuLu.com

2007 - Lulu.com is a site that allows people to publish their own books. Hulu.com is an online video site. Still, Lulu felt that Hulu was way too close to their name, so they decided to file a lawsuit for similarity.

Similarity of what?

Now if you want to go sue someone who is backed by NBC Universal, you have a lot of marbles. Nonetheless, it sounds more like a publicity stunt for Lulu to get their name out. Well, the lawsuit was dropped on Oct. 22, and Hulu.com launched in Beta. Ultimately, by March 12th, 2008, Hulu.com was officially launched.

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Other Day in Tech History items:

• Jerry Seinfeld / Bill Gates commercials start
• Mytunes Redux
• STRETCH is decommissioned.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:22 — 3.8MB)

Apple

2008 - A letter was published from the creator of “Pull my Finger” iPhone application. The program was simple – you pull the finger and a sound was created (You can guess the sound). The letter read:

We’ve reviewed your application Pull My Finger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published to the App Store. It may be very appropriate to share with friends and family, and we recommend you review the Ad Hoc method on the Distribution tab of the iPhone Developer Portal for details on distributing this application among a small group of people of your choosing.

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Other Historical Events in Technology

• Palm cancels the Foleo
• RAMAC 305 is introduced
• Internet Demo Site

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:22 — 3.8MB)

ebay

1995 – The online auction site eBay has had a lot of success in it’s 15 year run. The company officially founded on this day by Pierre Omidyar, but it was known back then as “AuctionWeb”. The first auction was for a broken laser pointer. It was sold for $14.83.

Makes me wonder how much that laser pointer would be worth if it went back up on the auction block.

Since then the company has grown to a juggernaut in the online Auction business. They even have an ebay slot machine. Just like the auction site, I personally didn’t do too well in profiting from it…

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Other Day in Tech History items:

• Lotus ships “Lotus 1-2-3″
• HP acquires Compaq
• Hubble photographs HUDF

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:22 — 3.8MB)

1995 – Sega launches the Saturn video game console in the US. The 32-bit Cartridge loading system contained the 2 x Hitachi SH-2 32-bit RISC (28.6 MHz). It was launched in Japan and Europe earlier in the year, but didn’t hit the US until this date.

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You could get the system with Virtua Fighter for $399. Below is the teaser commercial for the game system.

Other items in Day in Tech History:

• Ultima I released
• The first Interface Message Processor is connected to the ARPANET
• eBay stops an auction of a human kidney

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:22 — 3.8MB)

Google Chrome

2008 - It was hailed as a “Mistake” on their blog. With that, Google Chrome is released in Beta on Windows machines. The new browser takes a lot of people by surprise as this was a pretty secretive project – that is, until the comic was released. Google then blogged about it saying:

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

The browser was suppose to be announced on Sept 3rd.

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Other items in Day in Tech History:

• The iMac starts shipping
• IBM announces Copper based processors
• The first meeting of the “Virtual Library” project is held

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 8:26 — 3.9MB)

Adobe Aldus

1994 – Adobe finalizes the merger with Aldus to try and create a new powerful desktop manager. Aldus brought to the table a desktop publishing program in “PageMaker”. The program was first created in 1985 and used the emerging Graphical User Interface in both Mac and PC environments. This also allowed Adobe to control the TIFF file format.

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Other items in Day in Tech History:

• Apple announces 2 million iMac
• Emulex Corporation hoax
• PHPMyAdmin released

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 10:04 — 4.6MB)

Office 95

1995 – Just a few days after the launch of Windows95, Microsoft puts out the newest version of the Office software. Technically, it’s called “Office 7.0″, but Microsoft wanted to brand it as a companion to the newest operating system. Therefore, it became “Office 95″.

The newest version included Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Mail software. This new version ran in 32 bit, so Windows 95 could utilize it to the best of it’s ability.

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Other items in Day in Tech History:

• Apple unveils the PowerMac G4
• Facebook “Live Feed”
• Sony shuts down “Connect”

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:54 — 3.6MB)