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May 14, 2011: The Return of Sony Playstation Network

Jeffrey Powers @geekazine 0514, birthday george, caption, course george, Disney, franchises, g4, Geek, geek history, George, George Lucas, Google, happy, happy birthday, history, IBM, lucasfilm, mobile solution, Playstation 3, Podcast, Recreation, sony, sony playstation, Sony Playstation network, star wars, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, stitcher, technology history, TechTV, texas instruments, zdtv 0 Comments May 14, 2025

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2011 – Hackers took down the Sony Playstation network on April 20th, 2011. Around 77 million accounts were comprimised and gamers couldn’t play online for over a month. On May 14, Sony started bringing the services back online on a country-by-country basis. North America was the first, and people could sign-in, play PS3 and PSP games, access rented content, play music already purchased, and use approved 3rd party apps such as Hulu and Netflix. A firmware update 3.61 was also available to update security for the users.

When it was all said and done, Sony had lost $171 million on this outage.

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Texas Instruments starts to compete with IBM
ZDTV (TechTV, G4) Channel begins operation
Google suffers a 1 hour outage
George Lucas Birthday

Day in Tech History/ Geek

May 13, 1987: Version 1.0 Turbo C Released

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1987 – Version 1.0 of the Turbo C programming language is released. It offers the first integrated edit-compile-run development environment for the C programming language for IBM-compatible personal computers. Turbo C was developed by Bob Jervis as “Wizard C”. It runs on just 384KB of memory and is capable of inline assembly with full access to C symbolic names and structures.

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Digital Equipment, Intel, and Xerox jointly announce the Ethernet network specification.
HP Acquires EDS
Iranian police close down more than four hundred Internet Cafes

Day in Tech History/ Geek

May 12, 1936: The Dvorak Keyboard Layout Patented

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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).

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MITS receives a restraining order for Microsoft on the 8080 BASIC
XBOX360 is unveiled
France passes the Three Strikes rule

Day in Tech History/ Software

May 11, 2011: Google Chromebook Introduced

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2011 – Eric Schmidt shows off the new Google Chrome OS but with an added feature as he introduced Google Chromebook – a personal computer with the Google Chrome OS built-in. The device loads straight to the browser where you can install applications for functionality on your Chromebook. The first Chromebook would begin selling on June 15, 2011.

Since then, Google has released the Pixelbook, Pixelbook 2, and the newest Pixel Slate – their tablet offering.

Other Events in the Day in Technology History

Sega begins shipping the Saturn system
AOL launches free webmail
Verizon sells part of Alltel to AT&T

Day in Tech History/ Internet

May 10, 2001 Trans Atlantic Cable TAT-14 Begins Service

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2001 – TAT-14, the Transatlantic cable begins commercial service. A dual, bi-directional ring configuration using Dense Wavelength-Division Multiplex (DWDM) – Sixteen wavelengths of STM-64 per fiber pair. It carried 640 Gbps, and connectedGermany, the UK, Denmark, France, and the Netherlands with the US.

Even though there have been a couple failures, TAT-14 is still in service.

BFS preview is released
Atari and MCA sign a joint venture

Day in Tech History/ Geek

2000: The GeoCaching Craze

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2000 – Up until May 1, all GPS signals were scrambled for protection. President Bill Clinton announced they would be turning off the Selective Availability (SA) because it didn’t propose a greater threat. But it also gave geeks something new to play with. But what to do?

Dave Ulmer ultimately started the GeoCaching phenomenon. He hid a bunch of trinkets out in the woods of Portland, Oregon. He then went to the USENET group sci.geo.satellite-nav and stated “If you take something, leave something”.

The Usenet message:
From: Dave ([email protected])
Subject: The Great American GPS Stash Hunt!
Newsgroups: sci.geo.satellite-nav
Date: 2000/05/03

—
The Great American GPS Stash Hunt !!
—

Now that SA is off we can start a worldwide Stash Game!! With
Non-SA accuracy it should be easy to find a stash from waypoint
information. Waypoints of secret stashes could be shared on the
Internet, people could navigate to the stashes and get some
stuff. The only rule for stashes is: Get some Stuff, Leave some
Stuff!! The more valuable the stuff the more stashes will be
started.

I’m thinking of half burying a five gallon plastic bucket with
lid at the stash point. Putting in some stuff. Adding a logbook
and pencil so visitors can record their find. The log should
contain: Date, Time, What you got, and What you put in. Scanning
the log book should give you a quick inventory of the stash.

I’ll look for a place near a road where few people would
normally go… Put in some cash, an old digital camera, and some
antique silverware!! I will come up with a cool name for my
stash and post coordinates soon!!!

Make your own stash in a unique location, put in some stuff and
a log book. Post the location on the Internet. Soon we will have
thousands of stashes all over the world to go searching for.
Have Fun!!

Dave…

He also made a video, which has the container and contents.

Dell Computer is founded
Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich produce a list of 335,000 Internet users who shared the band’s songs on Napster.
First Spam message

Apple/ Day in Tech History

April 28, 2003: Apple Launched iTunes Music Store

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2003-Apple launches the iTunes Store. iTunes has been around since 2001, but without option to get new music. Before the iTunes store, users would have to burn from CD or copy previously made MP3 files. The store sold 1 million songs within a week. Apple became the biggest music vendor in the US in 2008.

With 28 million songs, over 1 million podcasts, 40,000 music videos, 3,000 shows and even the Beatles library, iTunes music store continues to dominate the market. Of course things exploded in 2007 when Steve Jobs put apps into the iTunes store. Apple just celebrated the 40 billion app mark and 25 billion song mark.

Today, Apple iTunes commands 63% of digital downloads.

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Other Events in the Day in Technology History

3DO sells to Samsung for $20 Million
Sanford Wallace – the SPAM king – was sued by MySpace
Intel removes processor ID tracking technology

Day in Tech History/ Geek

April 26, 1983: TRS-80 Model 4

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1983– The Trash-80, as it was so admirably called in the day, a.k.a. the TRS-80 Model 4 is introduced. It contains a 4 MHz processor, 16 KB of RAM, a cassette interface, Keyboard and Monochrome monitor. $1000 for the base model, or $2000 if you upgraded the RAM to 64 KB and 5.25 disk drives. The first TRS-80 was released in 1977.