1997– MCI was under a bid to be purchased by British Telecommunications. Worldcom came in and outbid BT to snag up the company. What made this the coup de grace is it would make Worldcom the #2 telecom provider, under AT&T. The $37 Billion dollar merger would finalize on November 10th. Then, September 1998 – MCI Worldcom would officially launch. This all crumbled in 2002 when Worldcom filed for bankruptcy.
I was an employee of Worldcom and had been since its original namesake LDDS. At the time we were awestruck.
2011 – Netflix CEO Reed Hastings made one of the biggest blunders of 2011 when he announced not only was the DVD section of Netflix getting a new name, but also that section was up for sale. Qwikster brought a lot of attention rapidly for two reasons – 1. It was close to Amway’s spin-off Quixster, and 2. Qwikster used to be the twitter handle of a pot-smoking Elmo character. Since then, Hastings apologized and the company reeled back the statement. However, it was not before they lost 2/3 of their stock and over 800,000 subscribers. Currently, their stock is at $57 a share (from $295 back in July 2011).
ATT Logo
1995 – The National Cash Register Company (NCR) Started in 1884 with Point of Sales registers. The company deals in all types of POS, but had financial problems. In 1991, AT&T purchased NCR for $7.4 billion. NCR has been the only AT&T acquisition that retained their original name. on Sept. 201995 AT&T would spin NCR back into it’s own company due to the antitrust issues put forward
2008 -Sarah Palin succumbed to a hacker in a different way – through her Yahoo! email. The infiltrator gained access by using common information to reset the password. David Kernell then posted her email and new password on 4chan.org under the alias “Rubico”. It showed that by using common information to set up an account, it could also turn into a “back door” for someone who would know that information.
2008– Napster has been trying to solidify their name since they went legit. They forged the way with music downloads in the 1990’s but struggled after.
Enter Best Buy. They saw the opportunity and laid down $121 Million for the company. Best Buy owned the service until 2011 when Napster merged with Rhapsody. Best Buy still has a minor stake in the music sharing software.
1981 – It was called the Illiac IVILLIAC IV and was the first large parallel processing computer. The computer was first planned by the Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency who contracted the University of Illinois to build it. It was up and running until 81, when the Illiac IV was shut down.
2008 – It was hailed as a “Mistake” on their blog. With that, Google Chrome is released in Beta on Windows machines. The new browser takes a lot of people by surprise as this was a pretty secretive project – that is, until the comic was released. Google then blogged about it saying:
At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.
So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.
The browser was suppose to be announced on Sept 3rd. The download was available to the general public on Sept 2nd.
August 23, 1999: Pyra Labs launched a program called “Blogspot” in 1999 that would let people run their own blogs. The program was bought by Google in 2003, and changed to Blogger in 2006.What is most interesting about this tidbit will be that I don’t mention it in the Podcast. It was brought to my attention after the weekend recordings were made. Nonetheless, it is what brought us to a Social Network world of today and needed to be talked about.
The Apple Mighty Mouse was first released in 2005. It was the first mouse since Apple Lisa that had multi-button functionality. A $49 price tag made it a real addition to your machine.However, this mouse was not without controversy. Another company – Called “Man and Machine” – created a mouse for the medical field. It was also given a trademark for the Mighty Mouse name a year before Apple. Yet Apple still received a Trademark for the mouse.
Now some may say “What about the mouse that saves the day”. According to trademark laws, their trademark was for a cartoon character, whereas Apple and Man and Machine made a mouse.
![Worldcom[1]](https://dayintechhistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Worldcom1-340x250.jpg "Worldcom[1]")
