1984 – Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT to begin the writing of GNU software. GNU – a recursive acronym for “Not Unix” and reference to the song “the Gnu” – is an operating system that is compatible with Unix software. Stallman wanted to bring a free software operating system for the masses to use as they needed. The open source community would then be able to grow the OS with their own code additions.
Even though no real stable version of GNU yet exists, Linux is based on the GNU kernel.
1975 – Bill Gates and Paul Allen write a letter to the Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry System (MITS) stating they have BASIC language for the Intel 8080 processor and would like to incorporate on the Altair computer in exchange for royalty payments. MITS agrees and Micro-soft was born. Later it would become Microsoft.
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.
1995 – Compuserve blocks access to over 200 sites that have explicit content. They do it to avoid issue with the German Government. The sites would be blocked until Feb 13, 1996 when all but 5 sites were restored.
2007 – With iTunes just signing a deal with FOX and their content for iTunes, stocks pushed upward to $200 a share. It was the first time Apple hit that barrier, and promptly dropped after. The company has been up and down, and in mid-2008 were at only $90 a share. However, after March 6th, 2008, the stock started to rise to the $400 / Share mark. Since then Apple climbed up to $700/share and then on June 9th, 2014 the stock was split 7-to-1. Currently, the stock is at $111 (technically $777 for those who purchased before the split).
1845 – Today, we’re travelling to the Geek side of things. It’s not everyday that I get to talk about my other passion – Music. The Euphonium – often mistaken for a Tuba – was created. It was also coined in later years as “P.T. Barnums’ Euphonium. The word itself comes from the Greek word Euphonos – or Sweet voiced.
The Euphonium is pitched in concert B♭. Although a 3 valve instrument, professional Euphoniums have a 4th valve for compensation.
1989 – The first full episode of the Simpsons airs on FOX TV network. 21 years and 1 movie later, the show still continues on strong. The cast stayed pretty much the same since 89. The Simpsons started on FOX as an animated short on the Tracy Ullman Show. It was on that show for 3 seasons when it was moved to their own prime time spot. The Simpsons is one of the longest running sitcoms and even has their own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
1995 – At the turn of the Internet age, researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation, led by Paul Flaherty, Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, created a web crawler and indexer algorithm. The web program was launched on December 15th and called “AltaVista”. The name was chosen because of the surrounds of their company in Palo Alto, CA.
The original name was altavista.digital.com and used a multi-threaded crawler (Scooter). The back-end was running on advanced hardware, therefore it could gather information faster than any other web crawling software out there.
AltaVista was one of the top search engines out there until Google overtook them all. Ultimately, in 2003 AltaVista was purchased by Yahoo! who continued to run it until 2013 when it was shut down.
1983 – There is some debate whether this happened on Dec. 15h or 31st. If you were a citizen of Twin Falls, Idaho and up at 1 AM watching KMVT channel 11, then you got a treat. You saw an ad that changed the Superbowl. You saw an ad that changed a computer company.That’s right. You were the first to see the famous 1984 Superbowl Advertisement for Apple Macintosh. The Chiat/Day advertising company pre-ran ads to make sure they would be acceptable for a big release. Therefore, 1 AM on Thursday, December 15th – chances of people catching the ad are slim.
Of course, the ad went on to be one of the most influential ads of the 20th century and turned Superbowl commercials into a hot commodity. Interesting note: Apple didn’t put a commercial in the 2012 Superbowl.