April 2

This list was created with hours upon hours of research and dedication. Thank you.

1968
Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey premieres at the Uptown Theatre in Washington, D.C. The critically acclaimed film has what is believed to be a record number of 70-millimeter wide gauge prints made for a film during the roadshow era.

1978
Velcro is released.

1980
Microsoft announces the Z80 SoftCard their first hardware product, a microprocessor on a printed circuit board that plugged into the Apple II personal computer. The SoftCard allowed programs running under the CP/M operating system (included with the card, as was Microsoft BASIC) to run on the 6502-based Apple II with only minor modifications. In particular, the word processor WordStar was so popular that people bought the SoftCard and a companion “80-column card” just to run it. At one point, SoftCard will bring in about half of Microsoft’s total revenue. It will be discontinued in 1986. Price: US$349.00

1986
IBM introduces the IBM PC Convertible laptop computer, featuring ab 80C88 processor, 256 kB RAM, an LCD screen, and two 3.5-inch 720 kB floppy disk drives. The detachable LCD screen can be replaced by a high-resolution monitor. Price: US$2000 Weight: 12 pounds

IBM announces a new version of the IBM PC AT, with an 8 MHz 80286 processor.

1987
IBM Makes some major announcements:

IBM introduces the IBM Personal System/2 (PS/2) line, with IBM’s first 386 PC, and 3.5-inch floppy drives as standard. The Model 30 features an 8 MHz 8086 processor, 640 kB RAM, a 720 kB 3.5-inch floppy drive, a 20 MB hard drive, three expansion slots, PC-DOS 3.3, for US$1695-2295. Model 50 features a 10 MHz 80286 processor, 1 kB RAM, a 1.44 MB 3.5-inch floppy drive, a 20 MB hard drive, three expansion slots, and PC-DOS 3.3, OS/2, for US$3595. Model 60 features a 10 MHz 80286 processor, 1 kB RAM, a 1.44 MB 3.5-inch floppy drive, a 44 or 70 MB hard drive, seven expansion slots, and PC-DOS 3.3, OS/2, for US$5295-6295. Model 80 features a 20 MHz 80386 processor, 2 kB RAM, a 1.44 MB 3.5-inch floppy drive, a 44/70/115 MB hard drive, seven expansion slots, and PC-DOS 3.3, OS/2, for US$6995-10995.

IBM unveils its Video Graphics Array (VGA) in Models 50 and higher of the PS/2 line. VGA offers 256 simultaneous colors at a resolution of 320×200, and 16 colors at 640×480. The colors displayed have six bits of depth for each primary color, giving a palette of 262,144 different colors to select from.

IBM unveils its Multicolor Graphics Array (MCGA) on its PS/2 Model 30. The MCGA is limited to 64K of memory, limiting 640×480 resolution to just 2 colors, but still allowing 320×200 in 256 colors.

IBM introduces its Micro Channel Architecture (MCA) on its Model 50 and higher of the PS/2 line.

IBM announces the 8514/A Display Adapter, a high-resolution graphics card for the MCA PS/2 line. The 8514/A adds 1024×768 in 16 colors to the standard VGA, at a cost of US$1290. With the addition of a US$270 Memory Expansion Kit, 640×480 and 1024×768 resolutions can reach 256 colors.

IBM and Microsoft announces Operating System/2 (OS/2), Standard Edition for the IBM PS/2 computer line.

IBM announces DOS 3.3 for PCs, for US$120. It adds support for 1.44 MB floppy disks, and multiple 32 MB hard drive partitions.

Windows 2.0Microsoft announces the release of Microsoft Windows 2.0.

1997
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduces the K6 processor, featuring MMX instructions and dual 32 kB on-chip caches. The processor incorporates 8.8 million transistors in a 0.35 micron process, and is based on the NexGen Nx686. Price: 166 MHz (US$244), 200 MHz (US$349), 233 MHz (US$469) in 1000-unit quantities

1998
[Intel] introduces the Mobile Pentium II processor, in speeds of 233 and 266 MHz. It features a 66 MHz memory bus, and a bus to the Level 2 cache at half the processor clock speed. Code-name during development was Mobile Deschutes.

1999
Ruby 1.3.2 is released.

2000
Gary Kopp becomes iWin.com’s first one million dollar winner in an online lottery designed to lure Internet surfers to the web sites of sponsoring advertisers.

2001
GateKeeper, a company in Leesburg, Virginia, announces a challenge for hackers to get malicious code past their firewall applications. A successful hack might earn up to $10,000. Meanwhile, the anti-virus community offers sharp criticism for offering any type of reward for performing, what would otherwise be illegal acts.

2002
Intel releases the 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 processor, with 400 MHz front-side bus. Price: US$562 in 1000-unit quantities

2003
Apple Remote Desktop Version 1.2 is released. This version adds a number of features designed to ease administration of a large number of computers.

2008
Leo Apotheker is appointed co – CEO of SAP

Lawrence Lessig, Founder and CEO of Creative Commons, steps down

Yahoo announces version 2.0 of “OneSearch”

2009
Clearwire launches a developers network. Anyone in Silicon Valley could get a year of free WiMax service.

Yelp releases an iPhone application of their popular social network.

2013
Microsoft launched a Windows Quickstart Kit for Mac developers which included a USB stick with Windows 8 and Parallels for Mac.

Rosetta Stone Acquires Online Language Learning Community Livemocha For $8.5M In Cash

Outlook.com refreshed their calendar options with social integration

Tony Hsieh launched Project 100 for his Downtown Las Vegas project. This is a fleet of Tesla cars people could pay to use.

Mozilla launched Firefox 20 adding a download manager, improved private browsing and added HTML5 features

2014
Alex Kibkalo, the Microsoft employee who leaked Windows 8 to a French Blogger plead guilty to theft of trade secrets. He will serve 3 months in jail, then be deported to Russia.

Amazon launched FireTV to compete with set-top box market. The $99 box would focus on Amazon Prime but also have multiple apps including Netflix and HuluPlus.