The Day in Technology History is a podcast detailing what happened in Tech. This is a daily podcast, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. We look at stories of the Information Age, dates of artifacts, creation of Silicon Valley and the history of companies like Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Commodore, Facebook, Twitter and more. It’s a Computer museum in a podcast.
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 (28.6 MHz). It was launched in Japan and Europe earlier in the year, but didn’t hit the US until this date.
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 project – that is, until the comic was released. Google then blogged about it saying:
At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.
So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.
The browser was suppose to be announced on Sept 3rd. The download was available to the general public on Sept 2nd.
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 created in 1985 and used the emerging Graphical User Interface in both Mac and PC environments. This also allowed Adobe to control the TIFF file format.
August 30, 1995: Just a few days after the launch of Windows95, Microsoft puts out the newest version of the Office software. Technically, it’s called “Office 7.0”, but Microsoft wanted to brand it as a companion to the newest operating system. Therefore, it became “Office 95”.The newest version included Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Mail software. This new version ran in 32 bit, so Windows 95 could utilize it to the best of it’s ability.
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.com a Denial of Service by simply flooding it with requests.
The Secret Service worked by tracing this virus to the source via the information super highway. That is what wound them to Jeffrey Lee Parson.
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 together a lawsuit, but instead of Psystar accepting, they decided to countersue. The reason why: Anticompetitive Nature.
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 were restored to their original stature. Of course, you realize you are only getting Twitters from a fictional character, but what the hey! It’s a great show.
The Defendant – Jeffery Howell had willfully and intentionally destroyed evidence related to his peer-to-peer activities after being notified of pending legal action by the RIAA. Furthermore, since it was done in bad faith, it “therefore warrants appropriate sanctions.
The RIAA went after Pamela and Jeffrey Howell for copyright infringement back in 2006. They claimed Kazaa was used to make copyrighted files available for download. Jeffrey then tried to cover his tracks by erasing the hard drive. Not a good practice, there.