1997– MCI was under a bid to be purchased by British Telecommunications. Worldcom came in and outbid BT to snag up the company. What made this the coup de grace is it would make Worldcom the #2 telecom provider, under AT&T. The $37 Billion dollar merger would finalize on November 10th. Then, September 1998 – MCI Worldcom would officially launch. This all crumbled in 2002 when Worldcom filed for bankruptcy.
I was an employee of Worldcom and had been since its original namesake LDDS. At the time we were awestruck.
1998 – At the beginnings of the AMD / Intel battle, AMD brought out a processor to dual with Pentium II. The AMD K6-2 processor was a Super Socket 7 pin structure, which also was compatible with older Socket 7 motherboards.
With 9.3 million transistors, the K6-2 had a CPU clock rate of 266 to 550 MHz. Of course, these were single-core processors and had front side bus of either 66 or 100 MHz. The K6-2 also featured the MMX and 3DNow! instruction set.
The K6-2+ was added to keep up with Pentium III processors. The processor line only lasted a year and was ultimately replaced with K6 III.
2001 – Apple released the Mac OS X Server, based on Rhapsody, which was a hybrid of NeXT OPENSTEP. The server ran file services, Macintosh Manager, Quicktime Streaming Server, WebObjects, NetBoot and more.
Each new version of OS X Server then coincided with the desktop release name – Jaguar, Panther, Leopard, etc.
“Built on Mac OS X’s incredibly stable and robust foundation, Mac OS X Server has the power of UNIX, yet is simple and easy to install, administer and maintain,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Mac OS X Server is Apple’s most powerful server ever and can easily integrate into Mac, Windows and UNIX networks.”
2013 – In a $1.1 billion deal, Yahoo acquired the blogging site Tumblr. This caused many concerns for those using the service – especially those who curate blogs with pornographic content. However, Yahoo insisted they will be running Tumblr as a separate company and will not interrupt any account unless it breaks laws (such as child pornography).
Yahoo did de-list a lot of those blogs in their search a couple months later to give others a clean-search experience.
In 2017, Verizon bought Yahoo, and all remaining assets thereof. Tumblr is an “Oath Subsidiary”, meaning it works independent to Verizon. In March, 2019, Tumblr removed any adult content, trying to boost their SEO, and advertising options.
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).
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 like they hoped.
Foursquare brought back the mayor option in Swarm, and then revamped it into the “Mayorships Game”.
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.
1964– John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz run the first BASIC program at 4 AM in Dartmouth. The duo used a General Electric 225 mainframe computer and ran a simple compiler program. The duo created different programming languages since 1956, including Darsimco (Dartmouth Simplified Code), Dope (Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment). It wasn’t until BASIC (Begginer’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) that became a success.
The first code ran at 4 A.M on May 1st. BASIC was easy to learn, could go past mainframes (as Bill Gates and Paul Allen adapted it for personal computers in 1975), and also allowed for batch processing.