2000 – IBM unveiled the ASCI White – their fastest computer yet. This supercomputer was based on IBM’s commercial RS/6000 SP computer. 512 computers were connected to make this supercomputer. over 8 million processors, 5 Terabytes of memory and 160 TB of disk storage.
The computer was completed on this day in New York, and would go on-line on August 15, 2001 at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
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).
On this day, we basically crunch numbers. This is where you will see companies let you know how much of their products are out there. How many copies of Windows have been sold, how many PC‘s were bought – how much shareware has been downloaded. These stats will drive how the next year is to be written. Then, they blank the numbers and start the crazy cycle all over again.The majority of the podcast will go over these statistics. But don’t worry – there is still a lot of other history to go through. But it’s still cool to know that in 1981, 250 million floppy disk drives were shipped to date…
2012 – Apple began the lawsuits in the US of Samsung made Galaxy Nexus citing patent violations back in April 15, 2011. This would span across the Nexus S, Epic 4G, Galaxy S 4G and Galaxy Tab. A lawsuit that has gone back and forth between the two companies. The patents in question were for data tapping, a Siri search method, a slide-to-unlock patent and a word completion patent. On this day, Apple officially asks for a preliminary injunction for Samsung sales in the US .
1966 – The Johnniac Open Shop System (JOSS) was taken down by the RAND Corporation. JOSS was set up to relive bottlenecks in programming batches, but more and newer work pretty much took the JOSS to the limit and ultimately became a bottleneck. Therefore, JOSS was taken offline indefinitely.JOSS began operation in 1953.
On this day, we basically crunch numbers. This is where you will see companies let you know how much of their products are out there. How many copies of Windows have been sold, how many PC‘s were bought – how much shareware has been downloaded. These stats will drive how the next year is to be written. Then, they blank the numbers and start the crazy cycle all over again.The majority of the podcast will go over these statistics. But don’t worry – there is still a lot of other history to go through. But it’s still cool to know that in 1981, 250 million floppy disk drives were shipped to date…
2013 – AOL shocked a lot of geeks when they announced WinAmp.com would be shutting down and the software would be no longer available come December 20th. The next day rumors surfaced that Microsoft was planning to buy it – which didn’t go further than the inital report. The service did not shut down though.
On January 14th, 2014 it was announced a Belgian radio website called “Radionomy” had purchased the Nullsoft brand, including WinAmp and Shoutcast.
On this day, the word “hacking” was used in an issue of “the tech”, which is a massachusetts institute of technology newspaper.
Here is a snippet of the article:
Many telephone services have been curtailed because of so-called hackers, according to Prof. Carlton Tucker, administrator of the Institute phone system…
Basically, hackers were tying up phone lines between Harvard and MIT.
This Day in Tech History podcast show notes for November 20
1999– Priceline filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and its Expedia travel service. The suit outlined how they violated U.S. patent number 5,794,207, “Method and Apparatus for a Cryptographically Assisted Network System Designed to Facilitate Buyer-Driven Conditional Purchase Offers.” The two sites come to terms in 2001, in where Microsoft pays a fine.
This Day in Tech History podcast show notes for October 13
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.