Today in Tech History on Day in Tech History
January 20, 1885: the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway Patent
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1885 – Sounding like anything but a roller coaster, the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway was the first American designed amusement coaster designed by LaMarcus Adna Thompson.
Only 5 cents to ride, the Switchback was a simple coaster that took you about 600 feet to the next tower at six miles per hour. It had a height of 50 feet and a drop of 43 feet.
It opened on June 16, 1884 and eventually was replaced. But on this day, the roller coaster saw one of its first patents from this ride.
Learn more about Patents: Ingenious Inventions, How they work and How they came to be from Amazon
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January 20, 1885: the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway Patent
Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1885 – Sounding like anything but a roller coaster, the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway was the first American designed amusement coaster designed by LaMarcus Adna Thompson. Only 5 cents to ride, the Switchback was a simple coaster that took you about 600 feet to the next tower at six miles per […]
January 19, 1983: Apple Lisa is Introduced
Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More Happy Birthday to me. 1983 – at an introductory price of $9995, Apple introduces the Lisa computer – the first computer with a GUI (Graphical User Interface). The computer featured a 5 MHz 68000 microprocessor, 1 MB RAM, 12″ monochrome monitor, dual 5.25″ 860 KB floppy drives, a 5 […]
January 18, 1983: The Franklin Ace 1200 PC
Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1983 – During the CP/M Show, Franklin Electronic Publichers revealed the Franklin Ace 1200 computer. The main feature of this computer (like the other Franklin computers before) was the fact they copied Apple’s ROM and operating system code. The Ace 1200 came with a Zilog Z80 processor a 1 MHz, […]
January 17, 2012: Jerry Yang Resignes from Yahoo!
Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 2012 – Yahoo! had some turbulent times from 2007 when founder Jerry Yang was CEO. Of course the big debacle being the Microsoft bid, which took over 9 months to settle with Carl Icahn being a major instigator. Add to that the 2007 incident of the arrest of Shi Tao and […]
January 16, 1956: Semi-Automatic Ground Environment – SAGE Disclosed to Public
Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1956 – The U.S. Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was disclosed to the public. SAGE is a computer that connected hundreds of radar stations in the US and Canada as a one-stop monitoring of the sky. SAGE was commissioned and developed by MIT. The project started in 1950 and SAGE […]
January 15, 1990: The AT&T Reboot
Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1990 – AT&T suffers the oddest outage nationwide. A switch in New York crashed, then rebooted. This caused the other switches linked to the New York switch to also reboot. The cascade continued on until all 114 switches were rebooting on 6 second intervals. The continued failure lasted for 9 […]
January 14, 1973: Live Via Satellite – Elvis Presley!
Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1973 – Elvis is broadcast via satellite to over 1 billion viewers in over 40 countries. That is, except for the U.S. because Superbowl VII was being played. The U.S. finally got to see the concert on April 4, 1973 on NBC. The show, entitled “Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite”, […]
January 13, 2000: Steve Ballmer Takes the Microsoft Reins
Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 2000 – Microsoft CEO Bill Gates announces he will be stepping down from his role but remain on the Board and embrace a new role as Chief software architect. Steve Ballmer will take over the CEO role and also remain president. Love him or hate him, Ballmer kept Microsoft running […]
January 12, 1966: Batman on ABC
Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1966 – Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson entered our lives via ABC on Wednesdays. The television series “Batman” debuted with the episode Hi Diddle Riddle. Each half hour episode contained either part 1 or part 2 of the dynamic duo’s fight against the criminal of the week. Get Batman: The […]
January 11, 2001: Podcasting is Technically Created
Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 2001– Dave Weiner added a new functionality to the RSS feed called “Enclosure“. It was defined as passing any audio file (mp3, wav, ogg, etc), video file (mpg, mp4, avi, mov, etc), PDF, or ePub (electronic publication) into the syndicated feed. Weiner demonstrated by enclosing a Grateful Dead song […]
