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.
1983– The Trash-80, as it was so admirably called in the day, a.k.a. the TRS-80 Model 4 is introduced. It contains a 4 MHz processor, 16 KB of RAM, a cassette interface, Keyboard and Monochrome monitor. $1000 for the base model, or $2000 if you upgraded the RAM to 64 KB and 5.25 disk drives. The first TRS-80 was released in 1977.
April 25, 1980: Activision Fantastic Four comes together
1980 – Activision was technically founded in 1979, but it wasn’t until April 25 that the “Fantastic Four” joined up as the first third-party software company for video games. David Crane and Alan Miller left Atari August 1979 to start programming under the Activision name. Larry Kaplan and Bob Whitehead stayed behind until April 25th when Activision came out. Richard Muchmore was the venture capitalist and Jim Levy rounded the group as Activision’s CEO.
1984 – Apple introduces the Apple IIc, their answer to a portable machine. It weighed 7 1/2 lbs and featured a 1.023MHz CPU and 128 KB RAM. $1,295. The device device had a built-in floppy and peripheral expansion ports. This was a closed system – no expansion slots to plug in cards. It was deemed an appliance computer, which meant was ready to go when you pulled it out of the box.
1964– The Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) is retired after fifteen years. SEAC was the first to use all-diode logic. SEAC was bason on EDVAC. It had 747 vacuum tubes, and the clock rate was under 1 mHz.
1993 – The National Center for Supercomputing Applications releases version 1.0 (RTM) of the Mosaic Web Browser. It was the first browser with a Graphical user interface for content. Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark were the lead developers. The browser would take the internet by storm and continue to lead until 1998 when IE and Netscape came on the scene.
Connectix stops shipping the Virtual Game Station for Mac
eBay sues Craigslist over “Diluting of Share”Newsgroups: alt.hypertext,comp.infosystems
**Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 07:21:17 -0800
From: ma…@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
By the power vested in me by nobody in particular, alpha/beta version
0.5 of NCSA’s Motif-based networked information systems and World
WidWeb browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released:
location removed
This release of X Mosaic is known to compile on the following
platforms:
SGI (IRIX 4.0.2)
IBM (AIX 3.2)
Sun 4 (SunOS 4.1.2 with stock X11R4 and Motif 1.1).
Binaries for these platforms are available on ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in
/Web/xmosaic/binaries-0.5. More binaries will be supplied as I am
able to find other Motif-configured platforms to use (DEC MIPS
probably within the next half hour).
Although this is alpha/beta software, I’m looking more for feedback on design and functionality than bug reports right now — down the road
the bulk of the program will be rewritten in C++ anyway, so don’t
take the current code too seriously. But bug reports are welcome too.
New releases will probably come out about every 7-14 days until 1.0
arrives.
A list of current and future capabilities of X Mosaic follows this
message.
Cheers,
Marc
—
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
ma…@ncsa.uiuc.edu
1977 – Two days prior, Microsoft send MITS a letter with the allegation that they were not up on royalty payments and if they didn’t catch up, MITS would be in breach and the 8080 BASIC would be pulled. MITS sends a letter stating that they are not correct. Ultimately, this would begin a debate that would end in November when Microsoft pulled the 8080 BASIC out.
2009 – Oracle announces they have purchased Sun Microsystems in a $7.4 billion dollar deal. This includes stock at $9.50 / share. That would also be the acquisition of SPARC processors, Solaris OS, Java and MySQL, among other items. The deal would be finalized on January 27th 2010.
2000– Before smartphones, Personal Digital Assistants were the device to have. You could store contacts, write memos, set up, read and send email and even play a nice game of Solitaire, or the game where you eliminated color marbles. I – in my IT career – not only had a Palm III, but also ran with an iPAQ 3650, Handspring Visor and Jornada. Well, while this was not the first handheld, we would see a day where many vendors would release the new versions of their devices. It all hovered around Microsoft and their release – the Pocket PC specification: Windows CE 3.0 with mobile IE, Windows Music Player and Mobile Word. Compaq then releases the iPAQ, HP releases the Jornada 545 and Casio introduced the Cassiopeia E-115.
0426, caption, cassette interface, flea flicker, Google, gotomeeting, Hardware, Hertz, Historical, IBM, mobile solution, model, ram, stitcher, Tandy, TRS-80, TRS-80 Model 100
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