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.
1987 – Version 1.0 of the Turbo C programming language is released. It offers the first integrated edit-compile-run development environment for the C programming language for IBM-compatible personal computers. Turbo C was developed by Bob Jervis as “Wizard C”. It runs on just 384KB of memory and is capable of inline assembly with full access to C symbolic names and structures.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 12
1936 – When typewriters first came out, many different people worked on keyboard layouts to become the standard. QWERTY was a popular system but was not efficient. August Dvorak and William Dealey decided to create and patent an alternative to this style, the end result – the Dvorak keyboard was born.
The keyboard was more efficient, too. Key letters were together so you would “roll” words. T was next to H, N was next to S. The sub-dominant hand would take care of vowels and lesser-used consonants, while the dominant hand took care of most of the consonants. Therefore, a left-hand and right-hand Dvorak keyboard was designed.
More interesting – People would type twice as fast as with a QWERTY style (120 words per minute). However, the people were typing so fast, the hammers on the typewriter would get stuck together. With those two major issues, the Dvorak keyboard did not get accepted.
One can switch to a Dvorak keyboard, though. Simply change the keyboard settings, and don’t look down at your keyboard (because the letters will be all wrong).
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 12
2011 – Eric Schmidt shows off the new Google Chrome OS but with an added feature as he introduced Google Chromebook – a personal computer with the Google Chrome OS built-in. The device loads straight to the browser where you can install applications for functionality on your Chromebook. The first Chromebook would begin selling on June 15, 2011.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 11
2001 – TAT-14, the Transatlantic cable begins commercial service. A dual, bi-directional ring configuration using Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplex (DWDM) – Sixteen wavelengths of STM-64 per fiber pair. It carried 640 Gbps, and connectedGermany, the UK, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands with the US.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 10
2014 – Foursquare tried to re-organize and turn into a review-based app more than a check-in app. They moved the check-in over to a new app called “Swarm”. Because of this, they froze all mayorship spots so people would start moving to the new Swarm app, then writing reviews on Foursquare.
Unfortunately, people didn’t “swarm” to the new app.
Since then (two days ago), Foursquare announced they were bringing mayorships back to the native app.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 9
2006– At a press conference before E3, Sony announced the Playstation 3 gaming console. This would be for a November 17 release and would feature items like Bluetooth wireless controllers, Wi-Fi and HDMI video output, and more. The system also will contain a Blu-ray disc system and pre-installed HDD.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 8
1967 – Video game developer Ralph Baer plays the first two-player video game. Fox and Hounds was a game where the fox (a red dot) was chased by the hounds (white dots). The controller were two knobs – horizontal and vertical. You would see how long you could avoid the hounds.
From his own website: 7 May 1967 – Played first two-player video game (I lost!)
This was part of a series of more complex video games including shooting games, handball and Ping Pong. Ultimately leading to the Magnavox Odyssey TV game system in 1972.
Baer passed away on December 8, 2014.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 7
2004 – A free raster graphics editor, Paint.NET was created and released by Rick Brewster as a school project at Washington State University. The software was released under the MIT License and was at first Open Source. After multiple cases of plagiarism, the software moved to Creative Commons, then in version 3.36 was turned to closed-source (but still free).
The latest version of Paint.Net 4.0 uses NET framework 4.5.1.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 6