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.
1802 – A patent for the first steam engine was issued to Richard Trevithick and Andrew Viviane. The machine was called the “Puffing Devil” or “Puffer”. The engine could produce 145 psi to push the car forward.
Richard had two versions of the engine – one as a car and the other as a locomotive. The car was first demonstrated on December 24, 1801, unfortunately, the puffer engine suffered catastrophic failure as it overheated and caught fire.
Eventually in 1804, Trevithick’s patent gave way to the first locomotive where he pulled ten cars along a track. He continued his work until 1833 when he passed away.
2001 – It’s called the “Deorbit” – Space Station Mir was a controlled re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Ultimately, the space station burned up over the ocean by New Zeland. Some parts of Mir could survive the re-entry process, so putting the ship over a large body of water was the best way to reduce casulties. Still, New Zeland was at full alert if winds brought large pieces inland.
The official statement had Mir at complete Deorbit around 5:59:24 GMT.
1981 – The first vinyl video record, a.k.a. the videodisc, hit stores in the U.S. The “Capacitance Electronic Disc” looked just like any other vinyl record protected in a plastic caddy and held 60 minutes of NTSC video. That is approximately 27,000 frames per second.
However, the CED players did not make the impact RCA had hoped. Only 100,000 were sold by the end of the year. The “BetaMax vs. VHS” war was in full swing and the tapes were considerably smaller than the discs. Laserdisc was also available to the public, which led to a lot of confusion of formats.
The RCA Selectavision was retired in 1984 with the last discs released in 1986
2006 – Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone and Noah Glass launch Twitter (a.k.a. Twttr) with Jack’s first Tweet. “Just setting up my Twttr” went across the network of only a few followers. Similar to Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson, come here” statement or “Mary Had a Little Lamb” into a wax cylinder.
Twitter was officially founded, but still in beta. The group at first didn’t acquire the highly priced “Twitter.com” until they had a proof of concept. Six months in, Twttr needed their “i” and “e”.
1916 – Albert Einstein sent a paper off to Annelen Der Physik. The paper was called “Die Grundlage der Allgemeinen Relativitatstheorie” – translated as “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity”.
The paper included the Principle considerations about the Postulate of Relativity, Mathmatical auxiliiaries for establishing the general covariant equations, theory of gravitational fields, and Newton’s theory as first approximation.
For years thereafter, people studied this theory and tried to prove or disprove it.
1997 – Toshiba – a member of the DVD consortium – put out the first consumer DVD player on November 1, 1996 in Japan as the SD-3000. After some initial changes (and having to change the DVD region code for U.S. based DVD players), Toshiba debuted two U.S. models – the SD-2006 and the SD-3006.
The SD-3006 had two more analog outputs and a Y-Cr-Cb video out with selector. Both players could run in 16:9 or 4:3 mode, but had to be selected when not in use. The SD-2006 sold for $599 and the SD-3006 sold for $699.
There are questions as to the first DVD titles available (since it was for sale in Japan Since November). The first U.S. DVD titles included Twister, Bonnie & Clyde and The Mask.
2008 – The free peer-to-peer file sharing program who was under major fire decided to set up a fully legal DRM music store. With over 500,000 MP3’s from artists who are not on any major labels, the store allowed you to get lossless versions of this music. They planned a party at SXSW 2008 .
Downloads were on a pay-per-track pricing – from 30 cents (on up) per song. There were no mention of how much an artist could get from those prices. The RIAA was still going after the software itself at this point.
Ultimately on October 2010, an injunction was placed on the software and on May 13, 2011, Limewire settled for $105 million. Hence, the music service was also taken down.