1998 – A Georgia man became the first person that ran a computer controlled by thought. The subject (known as J.R.) was paralyzed due to stroke. Dr Roy Bakay and Dr. Phillip Kennedy implanted a glass cone into J.R’s brain, which would allow him to mentally control the PC.
1889 – The Bundy Manufacturing Co., a maker of time recording equipment, is incorporated in Binghamton, N.Y. Willard L. Bundy created a new type of timeclock for business. Bundy Manufacturing Co. Bundy was acquired by the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, Inc. (C-T-R) in 1911. Thirteen years later, the name would change one more time to International Business Machines (IBM).
Back in 1886, Gottlieb Daimler gets into his new invention. It looks like a horse-drawn buggy, but it has a one cylinder 1.1 HP engine mounted in the back seat. The first car got up to 16 km/h Seventeen years later, in 1903, Ford Motor company sells it’s first car. A Model A to Dr. Ernst Pfenning of Chicago. It was a twin cylindar combustion engine.
2009 – Intel introduces the Nehalem Core i7 processor, code-named “Lynnfield”. The i7-950 and 975 models are 4-core processors with a speed of 3.06 GHz. The processor ran 64-bit instruction set and could take up to 24 GB of RAM at DDR3 800/1066. Price: $294.00
1985– Quantum Computer Services was founded. Technically, it was a reorganization of Control Video Corporation, a company that started in 1983. The company was selling online service “Gameline” to Atari 2600 users. You would pay $49.95 for the modem and also a one-time $15 setup fee. With the reorganization, Jim Kimsey became Chief Executive Officer and Marc Seriff took the CTO role. Ninety employees quit, ten remained. The company changed to sell Quantum Link for Commodore 64 and 128 consoles. Eventually, they would get into AppleLink and PC Link. Quantum Computer Services eventually (October 1989) changed their name to America Online (AOL).
Jim Kimsey left AOL in 1995, where he stayed under the limelight. He was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by President George W. Bush.
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 and helped raise annual revenues. Ballmer would remain CEO of Microsoft until February 2014, then take over as the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers.
Bill Gates continued on the board. In 2014 he stepped down to Technology Advisor. Gates is also co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation
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 live was added to the unit in 2002, but it was the ability to mod the XBox so people could turn their consoles into a XMBC (XBox Media Center).
2004 – Once Commodore dropped from the market in the 80’s, it pretty much started bouncing around the world from company to company. Ultimately it landed in the lap of KMOS – a Deleware company. However, on this day, Dutch Manufacturer Tulip sells the company to Yeahronimo Media Ventures for about US$32.7 million.