1912
The Titanic hits an Iceberg and sinks. 1,517 out of the 2,223 people on board did not survive.
1955
The first McDonald’s opens in Des Plaines, Illinois. On his first day, the restaurant sells US$366.12 worth of fifteen cent hamburgers and ten cent French fries. .
1970
Canon Business Machines of Japan announces the first hand-held pocket calculator in a press release. The four-function Canon Pocketronic features a built-in printer. At the heart of the device are integrated circuits developed by Texas Instruments (TI). The Pocketronic is one of the first calculators to use Large Scale Integrated (LSI) Circuits to miniaturize the device for portability. Price: US$400
1977
The First Annual West Coast Computer Faire features the debut of the Apple II from Apple Computer, which features 16KB of memory, BASIC, a built-in keyboard, and eight expansion slots. It also features several notable innovations, including built-in high-resolution color graphics. Price: US$1,300
1990
NASA deploys the Hubble Space Telescope, the first major orbiting observatory, from the Space Shuttle Discovery into orbit at an altitude of 381 miles above Earth. is is forty-three feet long and fourteen feet wide, and it is equipped with a 94.5 inch primary mirror and a range of instruments capable of recording the electromagnetic spectrum. The telescope is named for American astronomer, Edwin Powell Hubble, who proved the existence of galaxies outside the Milky Way. Despite an investment of US$1.5 billion dollars, there are initial difficulties caused by a flaw in the design of the mirror, but correcting optics will be installed on December 25, 1993.
Apple Computer releases the Macintosh IIfx, featuring a 40MHz Motorola 68030, 4MB RAM (expandable to 128MHz), a 40 – 160MB hard drive, single or dual 1.4MB super drives, and the System 6.0.5 operating system. Visit the official website of Apple Computer. Code-name: BlackBird, F-19, IIxi, Stealth, and Zone 5. Price: US$9,900
1996
Texas Instruments (TI) announces the Extensa 510, Extensa 570CD, and 570CDT Pentium-based notebook computers. All feature a 100MHz Pentium processor, 8 megabyte of Random Access Memory (RAM), and hard drive. The 570 line all include a CD-ROM drive.
1997
Disney Interactive lays off about twenty percent of its workforce, and discontinues the in-house production of video games.
Samsung Electronics agrees to acquire the remaining fifty-one percent of AST Research, for US$5.40 per share, worth about US$170 million.
1998
Intel introduces its new line of Pentium II processors, at 350 and 400MHz and the 266MHz Celeron processor.
IBM unveils a new line of personal computers, becoming one of the first companies to ship computers that integrate Intel’s newest chips, the high-speed BX core chipset.
Microsoft donates US$100,000 to the Republican National Committee, the company’s second sizable donation to the party within sixty days. The donations come amidst mounting concerns over the antitrust suits leveraged against the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) and twenty individual states. Visit the official Microsoft website.
1999
Bleem releases the bleem! PlayStation game emulator via download for Windows-based personal computers in the US. Visit the official Bleem website. Price: US$24.95
Gary Dale Hoke, age 25, is arrested for posting a fabricated story on the Internet that PairGain Technologies, Inc. is the target of a billion-dollar corporate takeover. The story causes PairGain stock to jump thirty-one percent in value before tumbling back down after the story was revealed to be fraudulent.
Ikenna Iffih, a twenty-seven year old computer science student at the Northeastern University College of Computer Science, obtains unauthorized access to a corporate internet account which he uses to illegally access systems at the US Department of Defense’s Logistics Agency (DDLA) and NASA. He conceals his IP address through a telnet proxy that makes it appear to be from a government computer. Using the connection, Iffih accesses the website of Zebra Marketing Online Services (ZMOS), a Washington state internet service provider (ISP), and causes a significant loss of business. Iffih will be arrested and charge on February 23, ==2000==.
A reported eight hundred thousand copies of the Klez virus are in circulation.
2004
The paper disc format is announced. The discs are a video format developed by Sony and Toppan Printing and intended to succeed the DVD. The discs are 51% paper by weight. Read the official press release.
Version 4.3.6 of the PHP programming language is released.
Version 9.5 of Maple, a popular general-purpose commercial mathematics software package, is released. .
2005
The first release of Damn Small Linux, version 1.0.1, is released. Damn Small Linux is a distribution of the open source Linux operating system specifically designed to occupy as little hard drive space as possible. The developer, John Andrews, claims that he will never allow the system to grow beyond a 50MB ISO.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) acquires the Snapfish online photo service. Visit the official SnapFish website.
2008
Google Earth gets “Street View” added to the newest version.
Microsoft buys Danger – a Smartphone maker. It was an undisclosed price.
Search engine Rival “Cuil” launches. The founders and ex-Google employees raise $25 million for the startup. They were spelled “CUILL”, but took off one L. I could see how that makes a difference. The site officially launched on July 28th.
2009
A study at Black Duck Software suggests that Open Source’s worth is 387 billion in savings.
AT&T launches a tracking feature for families. This allows people using the same cell phone account to track the others whereabouts.
Livio – a Wi-Fi Radio Appliance company – agrees to be the first to put Pandora streaming radio into their device.
The EU calls on the UK to toughen up and enforce data-protection laws. This came after the BT’s secret trials of Phorm’s ad-serving technology was revealed.
Virgin Mobile offers those who have been laid off a 3-month protection service, which they will pay for the service during that time while they look for new jobs.
eBay agrees to buy out Gmarket from Yahoo for $1.2 billion – 10 percent of the company.
Domino’s Pizza makes a public apology for a supposedly humorous video on YouTube of two Dominos employees in North Carolina stuck cheese up their nose and violated health standards. Because of this, the duo not only was fired from their jobs, but also arrested for public health code violations.
2012
FCC fines Google $25,000 for not respomding in time to the company’s data collection practices
2013
Dish bids $25.5 billion for Sprint
Red Hat announced a RDO and OpenStack Partner program to bring important tools to cloud application, resource monitoring and more.
Kodak announced they are selling their document imaging business to Brother for $210 million
Two bombs exploded at the Boston marathon finish line. Within days, we found that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were behind the bombing. Tamerlan died four days later in a shootout. Dzhokhar was seriously wounded but pulled through and is now gearing up for trial.