During a one-hour test in 1955, Arco, Idaho became the first town to be fully electrically run on nuclear power. The small community was powered by the National Reactor Testing Station” (NRTS). NTRS later became the Idaho National Laboratory.
1938 – It is one of the geekiest days for people like me. Creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster introduced one of the comic heros in Action Comics. Interesting enough, Superman was suppose to be a bad guy.
The first form of him appeared in “Science Fiction #3” in 1933. He looked more like Lex Luthor than the caped crusader. But with a little re-tooling, Superman made the comics and a piece of geek history.
1984 – One billion points on one quarter. That was the reason for Tim McVey Day. At the Twin Galaxies arcade back on January 17th, Tim scored 1,000,042,270 points on one quarter to the game “Nibbler” – a hybrid Pac-Man and Centipede game.
McVey got his name in Computer Games Magazine for it, and so he became the first video gamer to get a civic day in his honor.
His record was broken eight months later by Enrico Zanetti.
Of course, this event gets overshadowed by the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing by Timothy McVeigh.
1998 – Sega releases their next generation console – the Dreamcast – in Japan. It didn’t get released in the US until Sept 9 1999, but it was one of the more successful console launches of it’s time.The Dreamcast had a 200 MHz processor with on-die 128-bit vector graphics engine. The graphics hardware is a PowerVR2 CLX2 chipset, sound was a Yamaha AICA Sound Processor and 16 MB 100 MHz RAM.
The Dreamcast was discontinued on Jan 31, 2001 as Sega announced they were getting out of the console market.
1889 – Congratulations to the first commercial jukebox which was installed in San Francisco, CA. It was called the “Nickel-in-the-Slot”, and played wax cylinder records. Within 6 months it would earn $1,000. The word “Juke” – by the way – means ‘disorderly house’ – therefore this is a disorderly box of music.Put another nickel in – in the Nickelodean – All I want is having you – and Music, music, music.
1980– The video game that changed it all debut in North America. The infamous yellow pie chart gobbling up little dots and avoiding ghosts for top scores was released to the Japanese arcades in May, but finally made it to North America in 1980.
Toru Iwatani developed the game with a nine-person team. The game was first called “Pakkuman”, inspired by the paku-paku phrase (which is what Pac-Man says whilst chomping Blinky (Oikake), Pinky (Machibuse), Inky (Kimagure), and Clyde (Otoboke).
The game had a major glitch at level 256, since it was never expected someone would get that far.
The 80’s era officially was in full swing. Pac Man fever was on the loose.
1995 – Sega launches the Saturn video game console in the US. The 32-bit Cartridge loading system contained the 2 x Hitachi SH-2 32-bit RISC (28.6 MHz). It was launched in Japan and Europe earlier in the year, but didn’t hit the US until this date.
We dealt with the big buyout bid fight between Microsoft and Yahoo back in 2008. Of course, the outcome was that Yahoo’s CEO Jerry Yang stepped down and Carol Bartz took the reigns. However, Carol did make a bold move in 2009 as she agreed to a deal with Steve Ballmer. Microsoft would get Yahoo Search engine technologies and create a search engine for Yahoo. In return, Yahoo would handle advertising for premium search advertisers. This was a ten year deal.BTW – Recent news stated that Yahoo.jp is using Google in Japan. While it did put a snag in the agreement this week, Yahoo Japan Chief Exec. Masahiro Inoue said Microsoft didn’t localize the service in Japan, therefore, they went with Google.