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January 15, 1990: The AT&T Reboot

1990 – AT&T suffers the oddest outage nationwide. A switch in New York crashed, then rebooted. This caused the other switches linked to the New York switch to also reboot. The cascade continued on until all 114 switches were rebooting on 6 second intervals.

The continued failure lasted for 9 hours, leaving 60,000 customers without long distance calling. The problem was resolved when engineers found a bug in the latest update dealing with 4ESS long distance switches. They applied a patch which stopped the crash-reboot cycle.

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January 15, 1990: The AT&T Reboot

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1990 – AT&T suffers the oddest outage nationwide. A switch in New York crashed, then rebooted. This caused the other switches linked to the New York switch to also reboot. The cascade continued on until all 114 switches were rebooting on 6 second intervals. The continued failure lasted for 9 […]

January 14, 1973: Live Via Satellite – Elvis Presley!

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1973 – Elvis is broadcast via satellite to over 1 billion viewers in over 40 countries. That is, except for the U.S. because Superbowl VII was being played. The U.S. finally got to see the concert on April 4, 1973 on NBC. The show, entitled “Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite”, […]

January 13, 2000: Steve Ballmer Takes the Microsoft Reins

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 2000 – Microsoft CEO Bill Gates announces he will be stepping down from his role but remain on the Board and embrace a new role as Chief software architect. Steve Ballmer will take over the CEO role and also remain president. Love him or hate him, Ballmer kept Microsoft running […]

January 12, 1966: Batman on ABC

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1966 – Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson entered our lives via ABC on Wednesdays. The television series “Batman” debuted with the episode Hi Diddle Riddle. Each half hour episode contained either part 1 or part 2 of the dynamic duo’s fight against the criminal of the week. Get Batman: The […]

January 11, 2001: Podcasting is Technically Created

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 2001– Dave Weiner added a new functionality to the RSS feed called “Enclosure“. It was defined as passing any audio file (mp3, wav, ogg, etc), video file (mpg, mp4, avi, mov, etc), PDF, or ePub (electronic publication) into the syndicated feed. Weiner demonstrated by enclosing a Grateful Dead song […]

January 10, 1996: TI-83 Graphing Calculator

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1996 – Texas Instruments announced it would release the TI-83 and became one of the most popular calculators. The TI-83 had many graphing modes including polar, parametric, sequence and function graphs. It could also run statistics, trigonometry and algebraic functions. The TI-83 was replaced by the 83 Plus in 1999 […]

January 9, 2001: Mac OSX, iTunes Media Platform Announced

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More At MacWorld 2001, Steve Jobs announced Mac OSX – the base OS for Apple for the next couple decades. With Darwin, an open source BSD Unix service, 2D (Quartz), 3D (OpenGL) and Quicktime (QT5). The programming language of Classic, Carbon and Cocoa allowed programs from OS9 to run. Cocoa […]

January 8, 1940: Bell Labs Complex Computer

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1940 – a full-scale relay calculator designed by Bell Labs engineer Dr. George Stibitz, becomes operational. The machine was first designed in February 1938, and construction began in April, 1939. Although the device was ready by October, 1939, it didn’t go into operation until this day. The Complex Computer used […]

January 7, 1943: Nikola Tesla Passed Away

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More Born in 1856, Nikola Tesla was the inventor of alternating current. Tesla even worked for Edison from 1882 to 1886. He then started the Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing company in where he worked more on AC electricity. This started the “War of Currents”, which we talked about on January […]

January 6, 2001: Microsoft XBox Unveiled

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 2001– It was CES where Microsoft unveiled the XBox video game system. The system had a 733 MHz processor, hard drive and 250MHz graphics processor. The console didn’t release until November 15, 2001. XBox was the first American gaming system since the Atari Jaguar, which folded in 1996. XBox […]

SAGE - Semi-Automatic Ground Environment

January 16, 1956: Semi-Automatic Ground Environment – SAGE Disclosed to Public

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1956 – The U.S. Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was disclosed to the public. SAGE is a computer that connected hundreds of radar stations in the US and Canada as a one-stop monitoring of the sky. SAGE was commissioned and developed by MIT. The project started in 1950 and SAGE […]

January 17, 2012: Jerry Yang Resignes from Yahoo!

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 2012 – Yahoo! had some turbulent times from 2007 when founder Jerry Yang was CEO. Of course the big debacle being the Microsoft bid, which took over 9 months to settle with Carl Icahn being a major instigator. Add to that the 2007 incident of the arrest of Shi Tao and […]

January 18, 1983: The Franklin Ace 1200 PC

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1983 – During the CP/M Show, Franklin Electronic Publichers revealed the Franklin Ace 1200 computer. The main feature of this computer (like the other Franklin computers before) was the fact they copied Apple’s ROM and operating system code. The Ace 1200 came with a Zilog Z80 processor a 1 MHz, […]

January 19, 1983: Apple Lisa is Introduced

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More Happy Birthday to me. 1983 – at an introductory price of $9995, Apple introduces the Lisa computer – the first computer with a GUI (Graphical User Interface). The computer featured a 5 MHz 68000 microprocessor, 1 MB RAM, 12″ monochrome monitor, dual 5.25″ 860 KB floppy drives, a 5 […]

January 20, 1885: the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway Patent

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1885 – Sounding like anything but a roller coaster, the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway was the first American designed amusement coaster designed by LaMarcus Adna Thompson. Only 5 cents to ride, the Switchback was a simple coaster that took you about 600 feet to the next tower at six miles per […]

January 21, 1981: The First Delorean DMC-12

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1981 – While getting this up to 88 miles per hour doesn’t take you back in time, it was still a cool car to have. The First production Delorean DMC-12 was built. A prototype was made back in 1976 and all Deloreans were made in Ireland. 9,000 Deloreans were […]

January 22, 1998: Microsoft and US Department of Justice

Subscribe! Spotify | RSS | More 1998 – Microsoft reached an agreement with the US Department of Justice regarding Internet Explorer on Windows 95. In the agreement, computer manufacturers could have the IE link removed. This was a small step in the antitrust suit against Microsoft and using bundled software and drive out competition. The Microsoft […]