1996 – Steve Jobs started Apple. When he left Apple, he started NeXT. When Apple started to fall, Steve Jobs came back. Of course, having 2 computer companies is not a good idea – So why not buy it out?That is what Apple did. In a $400 Million deal, they got a new OS and Steve Jobs. Of course, Jobs did not become CEO of Apple again – he reported to current CEO Dr. Gilbert F. Amelio.
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1982 – After a decent success of the Atari 400/800 line the company noticed the console was looking a little “old”. After all, the Atari 400 actually discolors upon UV light. The 400’s non-tactile keyboard was replaced with the 800’s raised key keyboard. Still, Atari felt they needed to bring this personal computer into the 80’s.Therefore, the 1200XL was born. It was a hybrid computer – using what they called “Sweet 16” – a byte language developed by Steve Wozniak. It was to manipulate 16-bit pointer data from an 8-bit system.
The Atari 1200XL also featured 64 KB of RAM and a redesigned cable port and keyboard layout. Unfortunately the community felt the 1200XL was poorly designed for certain ports were in the wrong place. There was also a color enhancement feature that couldn’t be used because it wasn’t connected to the monitor port.
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Charles Dickens publishes A Christmas Carol
Cyrix files lawsuits over others who were using their patented technologies
2002 – The trial of Jon Lech Johansen, better known as “DVD Jon,” begins with Johansen pleading not guilty. DVD Jon has been a pioneer in “Reverse engineering”. O.K, so that is a fancy way of saying “Pirating”, but without his efforts, advances might not have been made. He was acquitted on January 7, 2003.
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1985 – The Cray X-mp/48 Supercomputer begins operation in San Diego Supercomputer Center in California. The $15 million dollar supercomputer could process 400 megaflops (200 per processor). It was a shared-memory parallel vector processor and supported 2 or 4 million 64-bit words of main memory in 16 or 32 banks.
The first Cray didn’t get installed until October 1986.
Cray X-MP/48 replaced the Cray-1. It was succeeded by the Cray Y-MP8/864 in 1990.
Movies such as “the Last Starfighter” were rendered using the Cray Supercomputer.
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1991 – What was first a Multimedia add-on for System 6, Quicktime has spent 21 years being Apples’ proprietary player. The original version contained graphics, animation and Video codecs – What was refered to as “Road Pizza”. Since then Quicktime had developed on both Mac and Windows sides (starting in 1992). The current version is called Quicktime X but there are signs the technology is either moving a new direction or possibly retired.
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1972 – Andy Cappa’s tavern in CA was the site for the first Pong game was wheeled into the establishment. The coin-operated game was put in by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell and game designer Al Alcorn. The duo decided that making their own game – rather than having 3rd parties do it – would help keep costs down. They then turned an old Roller rink and converted to a production line. Pong was the first successful video game system.
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1998 – Sega releases their next generation console – the Dreamcast – in Japan. It didn’t get released in the US until Sept 9 1999, but it was one of the more successful console launches of it’s time.The Dreamcast had a 200 MHz processor with on-die 128-bit vector graphics engine. The graphics hardware is a PowerVR2 CLX2 chipset, sound was a Yamaha AICA Sound Processor and 16 MB 100 MHz RAM.
The Dreamcast was discontinued on Jan 31, 2001 as Sega announced they were getting out of the console market.
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2002 – While in Bankruptcy since the following September, Roxio – along with the Private Media Group – came in and took over the $2.43 million dollar company. They took all logos and names and rebranded it “Napster 2.0”. This time, Napster was a pay site – merging technologies with Roxio Pressplay.The sale completed in 2003Ultimately, the company was purchased by Best Buy in 2008.
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