1999 – AMD releases the AMD K6-III Processor in speeds of 400 and 450 MHz. It would feature a 64KB Level 1 cache and a 256KB Level 2 cache. The 3DNow! graphics instructions would be supported, along with Direct X 6.0. There were 21.3 million transistors on the 0.25 micron process wafer.
1981 – While getting this up to 88 miles per hour doesn’t take you back in time, it was still a cool car to have. The First production Delorean DMC-12 was built. A prototype was made back in 1976 and all Deloreans were made in Ireland.
9,000 Deloreans were made before financial issues got to the company in 1983. A revival was attempted and announcements of an all-electric Delorean (with prototype), but as of this point has not come out of Vaporware.
There is one gold-plated Delorean in Reno, NV. I also got to experience the original “Back to the Future” Delorean at CES 2014 (video below).
1990 – AT&T suffers the oddest outage nationwide. A switch in New York crashed, then rebooted. This caused the other switches linked to the New York switch to also reboot. The cascade continued on until all 114 switches were rebooting on 6 second intervals.
The continued failure lasted for 9 hours, leaving 60,000 customers without long distance calling. The problem was resolved when engineers found a bug in the latest update dealing with 4ESS long distance switches. They applied a patch which stopped the crash-reboot cycle.
1973 – Elvis is broadcast via satellite to over 1 billion viewers in over 40 countries. That is, except for the U.S. because Superbowl VII was being played. The U.S. finally got to see the concert on April 4, 1973 on NBC.
The show, entitled “Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite”, cost $2.5 million to produce. Presley taped a backup two days prior in case any problems arose. Presley performed many of his hits such as “Burning Love”, “My Way”, “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Hound Dog”, “Suspicious Minds”, and “Can’t Help Falling in Love”.
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.
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.
2001 – One problem with technology is that you hit limitations, mostly due to materials used or how small machines can make parts like transistors. For instance, today’s multi-core x86 processors will eventually be replaced because we won’t be able to put anymore transistors on the die – It’s called “Moores Law“. Intel and AMD work hard to get around this law – which is why x86 technology has been around since the 90’s.One thing scientists do to circumvent is to change the restructure the transistor. In 2001, Intel did just that. They launched the TeraHertz – a new transistor, using several new materials – including Zirconium Dioxide (which is used to reduce leakage issues). The new THz transistors brought processing to a new level; High process tasks like facial recognition could be achieved. The TeraHertz also worked on 0.6 Volts, so it vastly reduced power needs.
Intel expected this technology to be implemented by 2005. However, as to this date, the TeraHertz transistor has not been, nor seems to be planned for implementation in processors.