July 21, 1925: John Scopes found guilty for teaching evolution
John Scopes was an activist and a teacher. In what was called the “Scopes Monkey Trial“, John was charged on May 5th, 1925 of teaching evolution in his Tennessee classroom. On July 21 he was found guilty and fined $100. The central argument in the case was the Butler Act, prohibiting that human evolution, or any Biblical account of origin could be taught.Scopes verdict was overturned, but only because of a technicality. The Judge fined Scopes and not a jury.
The Butler Act was repealed in 1967.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for July 21
Apple released a series of new items in 2000, including a new “button less” mouse, iMovie2 and the iMac DV series with the PowerPC G3 processor. But they also introduced the PowerMac G4 Cube – a 450 or 500 MHz computer with Velocity Engine – A Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) which operates concurrently with existing integer and floating-point. Add with it 2 Firewire ports, 10/100BaseT Ethernet, Modem and 20 GB hard drive and you had a serious system at the time. The cube could not take cards because of it’s case sizes and the DVD drive was located on the top of the device. It was designed with a case that made it possible to eliminate the fan.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for July 19
During a one-hour test in 1955, Arco, Idaho became the first town to be fully electrically run on nuclear power. The small community was powered by the National Reactor Testing Station” (NRTS). NTRS later became the Idaho National Laboratory.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for July 17
No, this isn’t a case of the office and this is not how Michael Scott (Steve Carell) leaves the show…
In a case that was refered as “Black Wednesday”, CEO Michael Scott felt that there was a lot of redundancy. Therefore he decided to fire 40 employees, including half of the Apple II engineering team. The move caused Apple to replace Scott almost imediately. On July 10, 1981, Scott officially resigned from Apple stating that this was a “Learning experience” for him.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for July 10
July 9, 1982: Both the movie and video game Tron were released
It was a movie that became a cult classic. Tron – The story of Kevin Flynn who tries to figure out if ENCOM stole his game ideas. While hacking into the mainframe, the company sets a trap where Flynn gets sucked into the video game.
The movie debuted in 1982 along with the video game by Bally. Tron starred Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan. It took 17 million to make the movie, it grossed 33 million in return. Tron’s sequel of sorts – called Legacy – was released on Dec 17, 2010. Unfortunately, it did not receive the same status as the original did.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for July 9
In a very bold move, Jack Tramiel laid off the majority of his staff outside of engineering. This comes in 1984, 3 days after Tramiel buys Atari for $240 million in 10 and 12 year notes.
The employees note that it wasn’t a Hard layoff. One employee stated that no one cared if they looted the building, so they did.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for July 6
1991 – IBM’s Jim Cannavino met with John Sculley of Apple. They worked out a deal and signed a sharing agreement. It would allow Mac to integrate with IBM enterprise systems. It would also allow Apple to use the PowerPC with their RISC based Mac to work together.Power PC stands for Performance Optimization with Enhanced RISC. It is also known as PPC. The RISC architecture processor was first meant for personal computers, yet embedded machines adopted them for use. Computers such as the AmigaOS 4, POSIX, BeOS all used PowerPC. Even Windows machines used PowerPC for their NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 OS.
Power PC came in 32 and 64 bit versions. Sony Playstation, Nintendo Wii and XBox 360 all have PowerPC inside.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for July 3
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.
Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for June 29
![Arco-Idaho[1]](https://dayintechhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Arco-Idaho1-340x250.jpg "Arco-Idaho[1]")
