1919
Presper Eckert was born in Philadelphia. He helped design the ENIAC computer
1943
John Maulchy, J Presper Eckert, Professor John Grist Brainerd, and Dean of Moore School Dr. Harold Pender, demonstrate the “Report on an Electronic Diff.* Analyzer, submitted to the Ballistic Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, by the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania.” to Captain Paul N. Gillon of the US Army. Concluding that demonstration, the Army granted a contract to the Moore School to build a large general-purpose electronic computer. It was code-named “Project PX” and was placed under the supervision of Brainerd, with Eckert as chief engineer and Mauchly as principal consultant. Captain Gillon then gave it the name ENIAC [1] [2] [3] [4] The paper was finished on April 8, but wasn’t presented until April 9th.
1982
Atari Inc. opens the offices of Atari Far East Ltd. in Japan, at the Fukide Building, 2nd Floor, 4-1-13, Toranomon, MinatoKu, Tokyo, Japan 105. In celebration, a reception is held at the Hotel Okura hosted by John Farrand, president of Atari’s Coin Games International Division and Rivington Hight, president of Atari Far East.
1997
Kilauren Gibb of Toronto reveals that she surfed the Internet to determine that celebrity musician Joni Mitchell is the birth mother who gave her up thirty-two years prior. By way of Mitchell’s Internet home page, Gibb discovers fourteen “points of comparison” to find confirm her suspicions.
1998
Playboy is awarded US$3.74 million plus court costs in a judgment against a San Diego-based firm called Five Senses Productions and its owner, Francesco Sanfilippo. According to the suit heard in federal court, the commercial Internet company used almost 7,500 Playboy-owned photographs on their service without permission.
Seiko Instruments introduces the world’s first wrist wearable Personal Computer (PC). The watch, planned for release Wednesday, June 10, has been named Ruputer and will sell for US$285. It features a 16-bit, 3.6 MHz processor and 2 MB of non-volatile storage memory, 128 KB of main memory, a full graphic display, and a small joystick. It can download pictures and data via infrared signals from other PCs and will be provided with three applications that run on Windows ‘95.
The Stanford University Graduate School of Business, sysadmins install additional disk capacity on their servers. They then reload files from a corrupt backup tape, destroying many faculty and graduate student research files. This very public incident demonstrates yet again the importance of verifying the readability of backups. It also underscores the wisdom of making two backups before attempting to reload a system.
1999
David Herpolsheimer, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for Bleem!, LLC (www.bleem.com) announces that a San Francisco Federal District Court has rejected a request submitted by Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) to block sales of their PlayStation emulator, BLEEM!, for IBM compatible computers. Sony denies that such a request was submitted to the courts.
2001
Intel releases the 850 MHz Celeron processor. Price: US$138 in 1000-unit quantities
2002
Yahoo! Launches a new small business site, http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com. The site is a centralized resource for online small business services and solutions. .
2004
In the Lybia top level domain, one of the .ly nameservers stops responding, causing the other nameserver to go offline, making the domain completely inaccessible.
2007
Apple announces that it has sold its 100 millionth iPod, cementing it as the fastest selling music player. On average, one iPod has been sold every 1.7 seconds for the five and a half year duration of the device. In total, 10 different versions of the player have been released, and about 2.5 billion tracks have been downloaded from the accompanying iTunes music store. In March, Apple announced the sale of its 90 millionth iPod – evidence of the continued momentum of the product. The product line was reinvigorated when Apple introduced the new iPod Shuffle, one of the smallest MP3 players in the US.
2008
After a long delay, AMD finally releases the Quad Core “Barcelona” chip.
Motorola named former AT&T Chief Executive David Dorman as its new chairman.
Symantec purchases AppStream for an undisclosed amount. Symantec had been using the Software Virtualization Solution for a while.
Yahoo announced Wednesday that it plans to acquire Tensa Kft., a Hungarian company known professionally as IndexTools, which makes marketing analytics tools for the Web.
Microsoft promotes Sam Ramji to Chief of Open-Source
Yahoo will test the use of Google advertisements on some of its search pages, the companies said Wednesday. Some believed it was a move that raised the possibility of moving off their current ideals and possibly create a new fold in the Microsoft offer.
In another fold, Yahoo starts talking with AOL to merge their internet operations.
Finally, a report saying NewsCorp might join Microsoft in a joint acquisition of Yahoo.
2009
The “Connect” project – a Federal assistance program for the US national health information network begins using open source to tie departments like Defence and Veterans Affairs together.
Cisco purchases Tidal Software for $150 million in cash. This is a Data center software company and it will be used to push their corporate centers.
2012
Facebook purchases Instagram for 1 billion dollars
Jack Tramiel, founder of Commodore, passes away.
2014
Rick Osterloh is named president, COO of Motorola Mobility.