1940
McDonald’s, which will grow into the world’s largest chain of fast-food restaurants, is founded when brothers Dick and Mac McDonald on Route 66 in San Bernardino, California. Its menu consists of twenty-five items, mostly barbecue. As is common at the time, they employ around twenty-five carhops. It becomes a popular and highly profitable teen hangout.
1974
The first UNIX Users Meeting organized by Lou Katz, Columbia University.
1982
Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI) initiates a promotion to offer a free TexNet subscription to purchasers of a modem, RS232, and Terminal Emulator II cartridge for the TI-99/4a home computer between May 15 and Saturday, October 16.
1984
In Beijing, China, William Millard of Computerland and officials of the government sign a letter of intent to create a network for microcomputer systems in China.
1985
The last Lisa/Mac XL is produced at a Carrollton, Texas factory. Sun Remarketing buys thousands of the last Lisas, and is able to sell most of them at fair prices after upgrading them with current Macintosh technology.
1987
Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI) splits their stock three-for-one.
1996
At (E3) in Los Angeles, California. Bandai Digital Entertainment announces the Pippin @World computer. The device includes a keyboard and CD-ROM player. It can be hooked up to a television and connected to the Internet. Bandai expects to ship the device in September, priced at US$599.
1997
ABCNEWS.com, produced by the Starwave Corporation, is launched. Starwave was a Seattle USA based software company, funded by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft. The company is responsible for a number of groundbreaking websites during the Internet explosion of the late nineties. Exponential Technologies ceases development of PowerPC processors.
Microsoft releases the Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3. Windows NT 4.0 is the fourth release of Microsoft’s Windows NT line of operating systems, released on July 29, 1996. It is a 32-bit Windows system available in both workstation and server editions with a graphical environment similar to that of Windows 95.
1999
Netscape Communications releases the Communicator 4.6 web browser. The new version includes the RealNetworks G2 multimedia player and 56-bit DES encryption.
A list of MI6 agents is released on a UK website. Though forced to remove the list from the site, the damage is done. The list has been replicated across the Net.
2000
America Online, Inc. AOL settles charges that it improperly accounted for specific advertising costs by agreeing to pay $3.5 million. Allegedly, the company deferred advertising expenses that should have been recorded immediately as current costs to attract new customers. The deferral enabled the company to present higher profits to its shareholders according to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
RemoteAccess Bulletin Board System (BBS) version 2.61 is released.
The Love Bug worm is sent from the AMA Computer College in the Philippines.
2001
Apple Computer, Inc. unveils plans to open twenty-five retail stores in the United States by year’s end. The first two locations will open on Saturday, May 19. One will be in McLean, Virginia and the other in Washington, D.C.
Cirrus Logic Inc., a semiconductor supplier specializing in analog, mixed-signal, and DSP chips, states plans to lay off 120 employees, or about nine percent of its work force.
eMerge Interactive Inc., a Sebastian, Florida-based firm that provides software for the US beef production industry, states it will close its Internet store and cut about sixty jobs, or about fifteen percent of its work force.
Analog Devices, Inc., reveals that they have produced the world’s first silicon chip that supports JPEG2000 image compression technology. The new chips enable digital camera owners to adjust the quality of their photos so they can expand available memory or increase the speed of Internet connections. The ADV-JP2000 co-processors will be made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.
Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) and AOL Time Warner, Inc. jointly announce an alliance to let PlayStation 2 users access the Internet.
Xdrive Technologies, Inc. stops providing free Internet storage space that users can access from home or office without warning. Thursday, May 24, the company will send their former users emails offering subscription service in the future.
2002
Intel releases the 1.4 GHz Celeron processor, featuring a 100 MHz bus and 256kB cache. Price: US$89
Intel releases the 1.7 GHz Celeron processor, featuring 8kB Level 1 data cache, 12 kB Level 1 instruction cache, 128 kB Level 2 cache, 400 MHz system bus, MMX, SSE, SSE2 instructions, 64GB address space, and two pipelined FPUs. The processor incorporates 42 million transistors in a 0.18-micron process. Code-name: Willamette Price: US$83
Netscape Communications Corporation releases the Netscape 6.2.3 browser.
2003
Microsoft releases the subscription-only MSN for Mac OS X browser, which uses an upgraded version of Tasman (version 0.9) as its layout engine.
2004
A portion of Cisco’s Internetwork Operating System (IOS) code is illegally copied and posted on the Internet by a Swedish teenager.
2006
Google Notebook becomes available online. It was originally announced on May 10.
2008
Jury ordered Nintendo to pay $21 million in a case involving controllers for the Wii and GameCube consoles.
CBS announces they will acquire CNet networks for 1.8 billion
Microsoft announces they will team up with OLPC on the next model of laptop.
Carl Icahn officially launches a Proxy fight against Yahoo
2009
Microsoft Launches a beta of their new test codenamed:Kumo – later to be known as Bing search.
Wolfram-Alpha goes live after a small snag. The search engine works a different angle – answer questions with information from the web. If you ask a mathematical question, it comes back with a answer rather than a website, but also lists websites you can find the answer on. WA won the innovation of the year award by Popular Science.
2013
A man who found what he believes to be the secret recipe for Coca-Cola at an estate sale sells the instructions on eBay for $15 million
NASA’s Kepler telescope suffers a critical hardware failure
Google+ received a face lift with 41 new features including an improved Hangout feature
Social reward company Klout tops 1 million perks