August 21, 2001 – using a 45 MBs line, Brazil became part of the Internet2, an internet connected to multiple academics. The connection went from Rio de Janerio to Miami Fl. Internet2 member rolls included over 200 higher education institutions, 40 members from industry, 30 research and education network and connector organizations and over 50 affiliate members.
On this day in 2009, the Day in Tech History started. I was running the show as “Week in Tech History”, then went to a daily format to increase listeners. The show has been running for over 1000 episodes, never missing a day. It is now entering into it’s 9th year.
It’s a great day for Apple in 2004 as they hit th one millionth song. They started back in 2001, so to hit 1 million songs in 3 1/2 years was a big milestone. Of course, since then and since the introduction of the iPhone, that number has increased exponentially.
In a four minute meeting, the stockholders voted 42 million to 11 thousand in favor to the merge Atari and JTS in 1996. Because of the decision, Sam Tramiel picks up the severance checks, but agrees to stay in office while the company transitions. JTS held the Atari name until March 1998 when Hasbro bought the brand for 5 million dollars.
2012 – Google ran a contest for people to tell them why they should have fiber installed in their city. After millions of entries and a lot of interesting videos trying to convince the judges, Google decided that Kansas City KS would be the first fiber city. On this same day, Google also showed off Fiber TV service.
Napster
2000 – The Recording Industry Association of America was after Napster ever since the site came on-line. It was the promotion of illegally searching and downloading music and sometimes video. in 2000, Judge Marilyn Hall Patel issued a preliminary injunction against Napster, ordering the company to cease operation by July 28th.
The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals would stay the injunction and raise questions to judge Patel and the injunction.
Back in 1886, Gottlieb Daimler gets into his new invention. It looks like a horse-drawn buggy, but it has a one cylinder 1.1 HP engine mounted in the back seat. The first car got up to 16 km/h Seventeen years later, in 1903, Ford Motor company sells it’s first car. A Model A to Dr. Ernst Pfenning of Chicago. It was a twin cylindar combustion engine.
Apple released a series of new items in 2000, including a new “button less” mouse, iMovie2 and the iMac DV series with the PowerPC G3 processor. But they also introduced the PowerMac G4 Cube – a 450 or 500 MHz computer with Velocity Engine – A Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) which operates concurrently with existing integer and floating-point. Add with it 2 Firewire ports, 10/100BaseT Ethernet, Modem and 20 GB hard drive and you had a serious system at the time. The cube could not take cards because of it’s case sizes and the DVD drive was located on the top of the device. It was designed with a case that made it possible to eliminate the fan.
Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.That was the first book Amazon sold on July 16th, 1995. The company ran from their garage in Bellevue, Washington. 3 SPARC machines was all they had and a cool little mechanism that rung a bell every time a book was sold. The business model was set to make profit in 5 years. It was a good thing, because that may have helped it survive the dot com bubble.
17 years later, Amazon is going strong. Purchases of companies like WOOT! and Zappos!, along with the introduction of Kindle e-reader and Amazon Prime, the company is one of the largest resellers of product on the web.
2006 – Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass and Evan Williams launch this 140 character “What are you doing” social network. The group first started production in March of 2006, but it launched on the 15th. Currently, over 200 million users are on Twitter.
The Enigma machine was the first electronic cipher machines, producing encrypted messages. German engineer Arthur Scherbius created this device in 1928 to turn a message into a jumble of code. Therefore, if the message got in the wrong hands, it could not be read.Of course, though time, the encryption was broken by British intelligence. However, it proved that we could put a level of security to a simple text message. Something we continue to strive for even today.