Day in Tech History

1999 Priceline filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and its Expedia travel service. The suit outlined how they violated U.S. patent number 5,794,207, Method and Apparatus for a Cryptographically Assist

1988 Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, California. Steve Jobs shows off the NeXT Computer featuring the Motorola 68030 microprocessor at 25 MHz. The computer introduces several new features incl

1979 Visicalc is released by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston. The spreadsheet application is called the first killer app for personal computers. It turned the PC from a hobby to a business tool. The s

1980 The video game that changed it all debut in North America. The infamous yellow pie chart gobbling up little dots and avoiding ghosts for top scores was released to the Japanese arcades in May, b

1998 We all remember the modem, right? Dial into the internet through an ISP? Some of you may still have that technology, but if you have dealt with modems for a while, you remember Hayes. The Hayes

1991 The second lawsuit of Apple vs. Apple was settled: Apple computers vs. Apple records (the Beatles label). The suit was about producing music. Of course there was a fine line between the lawsuit

1954 IBM created the first calculating machine to use solid-state transistors. This was the first nail in the coffin for vacuum tubes. The end result was a 2,000 transistor calculator no smaller in

1997 Gil Amelio just was just removed as CEO of Apple. People were calling for Steve Jobs to return, but others thought that would be a bad investment. At a Garner Symposium, Michael Dell was asked

2011 Steve Jobs passes away in his home at 3 pm Pacific. He went into respritory failure due to the pancreatic cancer he was fighting for over 10 years. Twitter exploded with over 10,000 tweets per s

Hewlett Packard came out with their first Programmable calculator in 1979. The HP-41c was the first to give alphanumeric display capabilities. It would actually tell you what to do (ex. ENTER RADIUS

This is an especially Geeky day, for not only in 1955was Captain Kangaroo and the Mickey Mouse Club debuting on CBS and ABC, but in 1964the first Buffalo Wings were made in Buffalo, New York. Hence

1997 MCI was under a bid to be purchased by British Telecommunications. Worldcom came in and outbid BT to snag up the company. What made this the coup de grace is it would make Worldcom the #2 teleco

1979 Activision was founded by four ex-Atari, Inc. game designers: David Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead. They teamed up with Jim Levy to produce game cartridges for the Atari 2600

1889 The Bundy Manufacturing Co., a maker of time recording equipment, is incorporated in Binghamton, N.Y. Willard L. Bundy created a new type of timeclock for business. Bundy Manufacturing Co. Bun

2001 With one version of the Apple OS X under its belt, Puma or OS X 10.1 is released to the public. Updates would include extended DVD support and the ability to burn DVD RW. There were still

2011 Jeff Bezos announces a new line of Kindle products including the Kindle Fire. This 10 inch tablet was Amazons rival to the iPad. It ran a version of Android that connected with Amazon store. T

1996 Famous hacker Kevin Mitnick is indicted on 25 charges for a 2 and a half year hacking spree. Police believed Mitnick had stolen Millions of dollars in software from different corporations. Mitni

1914 The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is formed to regulate business in the US. President Wilson issued this to Trust bust. The FTC is controlled by a 5 member panel that serve in 7 year terms.

2006 The book iWoz: from Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-founded Apple and had Fun Doing it. (**WHEW!**) came out. It was a book that was written to dispel some

1998 In 3 years since its inception, eBay grew to be a powerful auction site. Therefore, eBay decided to go public. They offered 9 million shares on NASDAQ starting at $18 a share. When all is said

1999 Its considered the one of the earliest publishing tools, Blogger personal website publishing system by Pyra Labs was released. The software was co-founded by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. The

1999 an ebay user (litterally) puts 500 pounds of Marijuana on the auction block. The auction itself hits up to 10 million dollars. eBay finds out and pulls down the auction, but it does say somethi

1994 Microsoft releases the second version of the Windows NT OS Windows NT 3.5 in two flavors; NT Workstation and NT Server. This replaced NT 3.1 and was the first Windows NT version to have a Ser

1954 Fortranis a blend from theIBM Mathematical Formula Translating System that started as the assembly language for the IBM 704. Ageneral-purpose,proceduralprogramming language that is suited

2011 Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made one of the biggest blunders of 2011 when he announced not only was the DVD section of Netflix getting a new name, but also that section was up for sale. Qwikster

1989 4 years after resigning from Apple, Steve Jobs and his newest company NeXT finally release the NeXTstepOS. It is a Unix based system, with some aspects of BSD and using the Mach kernal. This is

2008 -Sarah Palin succumbed to a hacker in a different way through her Yahoo!email. The infiltrator gained access by using common information to reset the password. David Kernell then posted her em

1997 Microsoft purchased WebTV back in April for $425 Million. It didnt take long for the Justice department to clear the purchase, so Microsoft geared down to integrate the WebTV machine. Today,

2008 Napster has been trying to solidify their name since they went legit. They forged the way with music downloads in the 1990s but struggled after. Enter Best Buy. They saw the opportunity and lai

1973 IBM had a suit filed in January of 1972 by Telex. They accused IBM of monopolizing the plug compatible equipment market. This included tape and disk drives, along with other add-on memories.

1983 The Osbourne I was a computer introduced by Adam Osbourne in 1981. It featured a Z80 microprocessor and the computer would run at least $1800. However, the computer company did not fair too wel

1985 After an interesting power struggle with John Sculley, Steve Jobsdecides to throw in the towel and tenders his resignation at Apple. He announces at the Board meeting he and other low level em

Remembering 9-11 Day 2008 TiVO and Research in Motion (RIM) announce they will collaborate to give people another option to record their favorite shows. Coming soon, you would be able to set your DV

1984 Alex Jeffreys of Leicester, England noticed and deduced that DNA is a unique item from person to person and could possibly be used to identify someone. Hence, Genetic Fingerprinting was born. A

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 Harvar

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

1981 It was called the Illiac IVILLIAC IV and was the first large parallel processing computer. The computer was first planned by the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency who cont

2011 Carol Bartz sends an email to her (former) staff at Yahoo! To all: I am very sad to tell you that Ive just been fired over the phone by Yahoos Chairman of the board. It has been my pleasure t

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

2008 A letter was published from the creator of Pull my Finger iPhone application from Apple. The program was simple you pull the finger and a sound was created (You can guess the sound). The let

1995 The online auction site eBayofficially was 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

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 (28.6MHz). It was launched in Japan and Europe earlier in

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 pr

August 31, 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 c

August 30, 1995:Just a few days after the launch of Windows95, Microsoft puts out the newest version of the Office software. Technically, its called Office 7.0, but Microsoft wanted to brand it as

August 29, 2003: Jeffrey Lee Parson was arrested from his home in Minneapolis MN. He was suspected to be developer of the b. variant of the Blaster virus. The virus would turn infected computers into a unit that would give windowsupdate.microsoft.

August 28, 2008 Psystar came on the scene earlier in the year with a machine that would contain Windows, Linux or Mac software. Of course, this has not been without controversy. Apple finally put to

August 27, 2008 AMC asked for the takedown of some Fans of the TV Show Mad Men who decided to create Twitter profiles of the fictional characters. Don Draper, Peggy Olson, Pete Campbell and others

August 26, 2008 Judge Neil Wake ruled: The Defendant Jeffery Howell had willfully and intentionally destroyed evidence related to his peer-to-peer activities after being notified of pending legal

August 25, 1991 Linus Torvalds mentions in a message on comp.os.minix with the simple question: What would you like to see most in Minix This is the official announcement of the Linux project. Of co