1998 – Microsoft reached an agreement with the US Department of Justice regarding Internet Explorer on Windows 95. In the agreement, computer manufacturers could have the IE link removed. This was a small step in the antitrust suit against Microsoft and using bundled software and drive out competition.
The Microsoft antitrust trial would begin on May 18, 1998 and go until November 5, 1999.
1885 – Sounding like anything but a roller coaster, the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway was the first American designed amusement coaster designed by LaMarcus Adna Thompson.
Only 5 cents to ride, the Switchback was a simple coaster that took you about 600 feet to the next tower at six miles per hour. It had a height of 50 feet and a drop of 43 feet.
It opened on June 16, 1884 and eventually was replaced. But on this day, the roller coaster saw one of its first patents from this ride.
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.
1984 Apple Superbowl Commercial
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<a href="http://www.KMVT.com/”> 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.
Twitter rival <a class="zem_slink" title="Pownce” href=”http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pownce” rel=”wikipedia”>Pownce closes down after sale to Six Apart
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.
1991 – IBM’s Jim Cannavino met with John Sculley of Apple. They worked out a deal and signed a sharing agreement. It would allow Mac to integrate with IBM enterprise systems. It would also allow Apple to use the PowerPC with their RISC based Mac to work together.Power PC stands for Performance Optimization with Enhanced RISC. It is also known as PPC. The RISC architecture processor was first meant for personal computers, yet embedded machines adopted them for use. Computers such as the AmigaOS 4, POSIX, BeOS all used PowerPC. Even Windows machines used PowerPC for their NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 OS.
Power PC came in 32 and 64 bit versions. Sony Playstation, Nintendo Wii and XBox 360 all have PowerPC inside.
2004 – A free raster graphics editor, Paint.NET was created and released by Rick Brewster as a school project at Washington State University. The software was released under the MIT License and was at first Open Source. After multiple cases of plagiarism, the software moved to Creative Commons, then in version 3.36 was turned to closed-source (but still free).
The latest version of Paint.Net 4.0 uses NET framework 4.5.1.
2007 – The Energy Policy Act of 2005 ammended Daylight savings time 3 weeks . The theory was to move clocks forward 1 hour 3 weeks earlier than usual and Fall back in the first week of November (instead of last week in October). From a previous study, it was concluded this change would save households 1% of energy each day of DST.
The history of Daylight Savings Time dates back to Benjamin Franklin. He noticed people had their shutters closed to keep out the morning sun, then burned more candles in the evening. Through time he convinced others to change the times so people would get up earlier and enjoy the summer sunlight.
With more energy efficient devices, some have debated that Daylight Savings Time is not needed anymore. However, reports state that when we spring forward, our energy bill reduces 2-4%.
1998 – Microsoft reached an agreement with the US Department of Justice regarding Internet Explorer on Windows 95. In the agreement, computer manufacturers could have the IE link removed. This was a small step in the antitrust suit against Microsoft and using bundled software and drive out competition.
The Microsoft antitrust trial would begin on May 18, 1998 and go until November 5, 1999.