May 14

This list was created with hours upon hours of research and dedication. Thank you.

1944
George Walton Lucas, Jr., better known simply as George Lucas, is born. Lucas will go on to become the four-time Academy Award nominated American film director, producer, and screenwriter made famous by his epic Star Wars trilogy. He will be one of American film industry’s most financially successful independent directors and producers.

1963
CBS uses a laser light beam link to transmit a network television program for the first time anywhere. The program broadcast is “I’ve Got a Secret“. The studio uses a camera to modulate a laser beam that travels two feet to a receiver that decodes the signal. That signal is then relayed via the control room to be broadcast nationally. This demonstration is based on the work of GTE scientists Samuel M. Stone and Louis Richard Bloom.

1984
Ashton-Tate introduces the dBase III relational database program for 16-bit IBM PC-compatible computers.

Mark Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, NY

1992
Texas Instruments (TI) announces that it will begin selling an advanced microprocessor to compete with the Intel 80486 processor, known as the the “486″. The TI processor will also be called the 486, however, it will ultimately fail to weaken Intel’s grip on the microprocessor industry. The chip was designed by the Texas-based company Cyrix.

1993
Gleason Sackmann establishes the Net-happenings listserv to distribute announcements about the latest Internet resources. It is one of the first popular internet newsletters.

1998
Microsoft agrees not to ship the latest version of its Windows operating system until Monday, and in exchange, regulators agree not to file any related suits related to the system before its official release.

Ziff-Davis announces plans to launch twenty-four hour hour cable television channel dedicated to information technology called ZDTV. Established at a cost of US$100 million, the channel will be produced in state-of-the-art studios located South of San Francisco’s Market district.

2001
AMD announces 800 and 850MHz Duron processors, with integrated caches, PowerNow technology, and Streaming SIMD Extensions. Code name: Morgan

AMD introduces the Athlon 4 processor, at speeds ranging from 850MHz to 1GHz, with a 256KB integrated cache, a 200MHz system bus, PowerNow technology, and Streaming SIMD Extensions. The processors are made using a 0.18-micron manufacturing process. Code name: Palomino

2004
Version 2 of the CentOS Linux distribution is released. CentOS stands for Community ENTerprise Operating System. The operating system is based on version 2.1 of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

2005
Nintendo opens its first retail store, Nintendo World, in Manhattan’s Rockefeller Center in New York City. The store is two stories and features an array of kiosks demonstrating available Game Boy Advance, GameCube, and Nintendo DS games. There are also many cases displaying historical Nintendo memorabilia, including Hanafuda playing cards, the Nintendo corporation’s very first product. The grand opening is celebrated with a block party at Rockefeller Plaza.

2006
Microsoft releases the first public preview version of Expression Web on their website. Microsoft Expression Web is a WYSIWYG HTML editor and general web design application intended to succeed Microsoft FrontPage. It included in the Expression Studio suite. Code name: Quartz

2008
Ask.com buys Dictionary.com for an undisclosed sum. Included in the deal – Thesaurus.com, and Reference.com.

Comcast purchases Plaxo for an undisclosed amount.

2009
Google’s 1 hour outage was due to a networking error while attempting to roll out a new service as part of the IPv6 transistion.

70,000 HP notebook batteries are recalled for overheating. 2 had caught on fire before recall.

Shazam – a popular application to determine the song and artist – along with Apple, AT&T, Verizon and others were sued by Tune Hunter, who claimed they owned the patents on the technology behind the ID service.

Micron turns it’s direction to add graphics memory chips to their popular DRAM line.

2011
After being offline for weeks, Sony begins to relaunch Playstation Network