2006 – Swedish police raid the host of the Pirate Bay BitTorrent. On the same day, the Pirate Bay political party increased their numbers by 500, with an additional 930 joining the following day.
The site stayed down for 3 days, but came back to double the traffic due to the media coverage.
1987 – North American Phillips Company introduced the compact disc video format. Using the same technology as LaserVision, the “CD’s with Pictures” would be gold in color and the same size as an audio CD. They could hold up to 800 MB – which would allow for a full length movie in SD, or a video music album.
The CD-V didn’t last that long, dissolving by 1991.
1999 – Believeinkids.com became the five-millionth domain name in the world. At the time, a domain name cost $70 for the first year, $35 a year thereafter.
The domain name was abandoned and is still available to this day.
2014 – Rumors flew high on this one, so when it happened, many people were not surprised. Apple announced they were going to acquire Beats Music and Electronics in a $3 billion deal. As part of the acquisition, co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine would join Apple.
Beats subscription service would continue to work as part of the service would be integrated with iTunes. Currently, Beats has a 20 million song library, and is available for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone for a $9.99 subscription.
2003 – Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little created a Fork of B2/cafelog. From there, WordPress was born. Since its release, WordPress has taken over Content Management Systems (CMS) with its ease of use and plethora of programmers that have made plugins, themes and other tweaks to the system since. The current version is 3.5.1 which has been downloaded over 18 million times.
1999 – A program first developed by Brigham young University for Data General minicomputers, WordPerfect was the word processing application for anyone using a computer in the 80’s and 90’s. I remember writing reports and papers using this software growing up, along with Quattro Pro for bookkeeping and printing daily reports at work. However, in 1994, WordPerfect started to gain some major competition when computers turned to GUI, and DOS was getting put on the back burner.
Corel, the owners of WordPerfect since 1996, wanted to ramp up production of not only the word processor, but also their other products in Quattro Pro, Presentations, Paradox and Corel Central. They company always said they wanted to be the “Pepsi version of MS Word (Coke)”.
Therefore, WordPerfect Office 2000 was released. It was not their first attempt of a suite (first rel. 1993), but was the first version released by Corel, and a path to their current version of the WordPerfect Office X7.
Like MS Office, WordPerfect Office can be purchased in Home and Student, Standard and Pro versions. Other features in the pack are Corel WinZip, Nuance Paperport, and NaturallySpeaking 3.
1985– Quantum Computer Services was founded. Technically, it was a reorganization of Control Video Corporation, a company that started in 1983. The company was selling online service “Gameline” to Atari 2600 users. You would pay $49.95 for the modem and also a one-time $15 setup fee. With the reorganization, Jim Kimsey became Chief Executive Officer and Marc Seriff took the CTO role. Ninety employees quit, ten remained. The company changed to sell Quantum Link for Commodore 64 and 128 consoles. Eventually, they would get into AppleLink and PC Link. Quantum Computer Services eventually (October 1989) changed their name to America Online (AOL).
Jim Kimsey left AOL in 1995, where he stayed under the limelight. He was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by President George W. Bush.
1995– MySQL releases their SQL database program for web pages. This is known as a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS). MySQL uses C and C++, the SQL parser used yacc and a hybrid of lexer called “sql_lex.cc”. Many different websites to this day use versions of MySQL, including us at Geekazine and the Day in Tech History.