Day in Tech History

2006 Swedish police raid the host of the Pirate Bay BitTorrent. On the same day, the Pirate Bay political party increased their numbers by 500, with an additional 930 joining the following day. The

1987 North American Phillips Company introduced the compact disc video format. Using the same technology as LaserVision, the CDs with Pictures would be gold in color and the same size as an audio

1999 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 a

2014 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 ac

2003 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 an

1998 At the beginnings of the AMD / Intel 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 olde

1999 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 80s and 90s. I remembe

1985 Quantum Computer Services 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 Ata

1995 MySQL releases their SQL database program for web pages. This is known as a Relational Database Management System(RDBMS). MySQLuses C and C++, the SQL parser used yacc and a hybrid of lexer c

1973 Robert Metcalfe writes a thirteen-page memo describing a new type of data transmission method. His memo was entitled Ether Acquisition, which would connect Hawaiis ALOHA Network. Alto Ethern

2001 Apple released the Mac OS X Server, based on Rhapsody, which was a hybrid of NeXT OPENSTEP. The server ran file services, Macintosh Manager, Quicktime Streaming Server, WebObjects, NetBoot and

2013 In a $1.1 billion deal, Yahoo acquired the blogging site Tumblr. This caused many concerns for those using the service especially those who curate blogs with pornographic content. However, Ya

1999 Sixteen years after Return of the Jedi, George Lucas finally moves his vision forward with Star Wars: Episode I the Phantom Menace. The story of young Anakin Skywalker and how Obi-Wan Ken

2001 The computer animated movie Shrek hits theaters. The 90 minute movie was produced on a $60 million budget and although its first weekend only saw $42 million , the overall theatrical run bro

1902 The Antikythera mechanism was found off the coast of Greece. They only found a part of it, and wasnt really sure what it did. Eventually, this device was declared to be the oldest known analog

1965 The Campbell soup company, under their Franco-American brand, introduce SpaghettiOs pasta in a can. The ring-shaped pasta and cheese blend was an easy way (and less messy) to make the kids a m

1940 The first Corporate McDonalds restaurant opened in San Bernardino, CA by Richard and Maurice McDonald. Speedee was the mascot back then a hamburger-chef that was poised upon the McDonalds s

2011 Hackers took down the Sony Playstation network on April 20th, 2011. Around 77 million accounts were comprimised and gamers couldnt play online for over a month. On May 14, Sony started bringin

1987 Version 1.0 of the Turbo C programming language is released. It offers the first integrated edit-compile-run development environment for the C programming language forIBM-compatible personal c

1936 When typewriters first came out, many different people worked on keyboard layouts to become the standard. QWERTY was a popular systembut was not efficient. August Dvorak and William Dealey dec

2011 Eric Schmidt shows off the new Google Chrome OS but with an added feature as he introduced Google Chromebook a personal computer with the Google Chrome OS built-in. The device loads straight

2001 TAT-14, the Transatlantic cable begins commercial service. A dual, bi-directional ring configuration using Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplex (DWDM) Sixteen wavelengths of STM-64 per fiber p

2014 Foursquare tried to re-organize and turn into a review-based app more than a check-in app. They moved the check-in over to a new app called Swarm. Because of this, they froze all mayorship sp

2006At a press conference before E3, Sony announced the Playstation 3 gaming console. This would be for a November 17 release and would feature items like Bluetooth wireless controllers, Wi-Fi and H

1967 Video game developer Ralph Baer plays the first two-player video game. Fox and Hounds was a game where the fox (a red dot) was chased by the hounds (white dots). The controller were two knobs

2004 A free raster graphics editor, Paint.NET was created and released by Rick Brewster as a school project at Washington State University. The software was released under the MIT License and was at

1999 In an effort to fix some minor issues, improve USB support and upgrade Internet Explorer, Microsoft launched Windows 98 SE (Second Edition). The upgrade version also improved WDM audio and mode

2008 After months of bid negotiations and Yahoos Jerry Yang saying No, Microsoft decided to take their $50 billion dollar offer off the table. Although Microsoft pulled the offer, it was not the

2000 Up until May 1, all GPS signals were scrambled for protection. President Bill Clinton announced they would be turning off the Selective Availability(SA) because it didnt propose a greater thr

1965 Intelsat I, a.k.a. Early Bird, went into service. This geosynchronous satellite sent the first signal between nine different countries. A One Hour TV Spectacular was broadcast to Europe from

1993 You may see www, but its true meaning is World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb during the 1990, while working for CERN. He did it on a NeXT Computer and developed it for the NeXTS

2004 Google files the S-1 form with SEC for their IPO. They said they wanted to raise US$2,718,281,828; aMathematicalalgorithmbased on the day they filed. The form can be found at SEC.gov The sto

2003-Apple launches the iTunes Store. iTunes has been around since 2001, but without option to get new music. Before the iTunes store, users would have to burn from CD or copy previously made MP3 files. The store sold 1 million songs within a week.

1998 Using AOL chat, a sign language interpreter and an active audience, a female gorilla named Koko answered questions to the public. Koko resides at the Gorilla Foundation and with a vocabulary of

1983 The Trash-80, as it was so admirably called in the day, a.k.a. the TRS-80 Model 4 is introduced. It contains a 4 MHz processor, 16 KB of RAM, a cassette interface, Keyboard and Monochrome monito

1980 Activision was technically founded in 1979, but it wasnt until April 25 that the Fantastic Four joined up as the first third-party software company for video games. David Crane and Alan Mill

1984 Apple introduces the Apple IIc, their answer to a portable machine. It weighed 7 1/2 lbs and featured a 1.023MHz CPU and 128 KB RAM. $1,295. The device device had a built-in floppy and peripher

1964 The Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) is retired after fifteen years. SEAC was the first to use all-diode logic. SEAC was bason on EDVAC. It had 747 vacuum tubes, and the clock rate wa

1993 The National Center for Supercomputing Applications releases version 1.0 (RTM) of the Mosaic Web Browser. It was the first browser with a Graphical user interface for content. Marc Andreesen an

1977 Two days prior, Microsoft send MITS a letter with theallegationthat they were not up on royalty payments and if they didnt catch up, MITS would be in breach and the 8080 BASIC would be pulle

2009 Oracle announces they have purchased Sun Microsystems in a $7.4 billion dollar deal. This includes stock at $9.50 / share. That would also be the acquisition of SPARC processors, Solaris OS, Ja

2000 Before smartphones, Personal Digital Assistants were the device to have. You could store contacts, write memos, set up, read and send email and even play a nice game ofSolitaire, or the game wh

2006 Toshiba launches the HD DVD format in the US. The first HD DVD players were the HD-A1 and HD-XA1. RCA would rebrand the A1 to the HDV-5000. The first HD DVD with TrueHD soundtrack was the Phant

2000 Five arial images of Area 51 are leaked onto Terraserver from a Russian satellite called Sovinformsputnik. The amount of traffic that went to the site brought the server down, so they had to t

1977 Apple Computer shows off the Apple II home computer at the West Coast Computer Faire. The $1,298 Home machine featured a 6502 processor, 4kb RAM 16kb ROM and for the first time A home compute

2005 It was the release of the Damn Small Linux program, a Linux distribution that was designed to take up as little drive space as possible. John Andrews DSLs developer Never allowed the ISO t

1996 Nineteen year old Jennifer Kaye Ringley takes several webcams and places them within her house. For the next seven years, she would livestream her life to all on the Internet. Since Ringley was

1965 You may have heard about Moores Law. This states that every 18 months, a processor will double in speed. The laws name is coined after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore. He said: It cant conti

1976 What a position Ronald Wayne was in. He was the 3rd co-founder of Apple Computer on April 1 with 10% share. However, after two weeks Wayne sells his share for $800 back to Steve Jobs and Steve W

2009 Susan Boyle takes the Stage at Britians Got Talent. A person that most would write-off at first glance, sings I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miserables. Once she was done, the 48 year-old Scot