1980 – Otherwise known as “The 24th Man” (to join Microsoft, that is), Steve Ballmer came on as Microsoft’s first Business Manager. He made only $50k and stock options. Of course 30 years later, Steve succeeded Bill Gates as CEO of the Redmond based software company.
1964– John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz run the first BASIC program at 4 AM in Dartmouth. The duo used a General Electric 225 mainframe computer and ran a simple compiler program. The duo created different programming languages since 1956, including Darsimco (Dartmouth Simplified Code), Dope (Dartmouth Oversimplified Programming Experiment). It wasn’t until BASIC (Begginer’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) that became a success.
The first code ran at 4 A.M on May 1st. BASIC was easy to learn, could go past mainframes (as Bill Gates and Paul Allen adapted it for personal computers in 1975), and also allowed for batch processing.
Google owned Motorola Mobility for only 2 years before deciding to sell it off. They chose to sell to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. A major change in the $12.5 billion acquisition they made in 2011. But of course that was after Google striped the company down a little and sold items like their cable modem division to Arris Group.
The deal was completed on October 30, 2014. In return, Motorola developed the Nexus 6 – Google’s six-inch smartphone that debuted in November 2014.
2001– Dave Weiner added a new functionality to the RSS feed called “Enclosure“. It was defined as passing any audio file (mp3, wav, ogg, etc), video file (mpg, mp4, avi, mov, etc), PDF, or ePub (electronic publication) into the syndicated feed. Weiner demonstrated by enclosing a Grateful Dead song in his website at Scripting News. This was an idea that was proposed by Tristan Louis.
It wasn’t until Adam Curry and crew started iPodderX and in February 2004 the name “Podcasting” was coined by Ben Hammersley. But its roots all come back to this day when RSS 0.92 was demonstrated.
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).
1977 – Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak officially incorporate the Apple Computer Corporation. Mike Makkula jr. invests $250,000 in venture capital and becomes the first chairman of Apple.
They also decided to move operations of the company outside of Steve Jobs parent’s garage and rent a building in Coupertino. This was so they could improve production of the Apple II, which debuted on April 16,1977.
Of course, the third founder – Ronald Wayne – was not present as he sold his stake in the company earlier in 1976.
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…
2008 – Facebook made an initiative to remove any picture showing breastfeeding. In return, 11,000 women posted pictures in protest.
On June 15, 2014, after the #FreeTheNipple campaign brought success, Facebook officially changed their stance on the subject. According to their “Does Facebook Allow Breastfeeding” FAQ page:
Yes. We agree that breastfeeding is natural and beautiful and we’re glad to know that it’s important for mothers to share their experiences with others on Facebook. The vast majority of these photos are compliant with our policies.
Facebook’s policy also states if people complain or its too questionable, they have the right to remove the photos. Basically, the baby must be fully engaged in the feeding so the nipple is covered.
There is still a lot of controversy surrounding this issue.