1914 – The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is formed to regulate business in the US. President Wilson issued this to “Trust bust”. The FTC is controlled by a 5 member panel that serve in 7 year terms. They govern all fair trade practices.
Companies like Microsoft and IBM have been under the microscope with the FTC and the FCC.
1954 – Fortran is a blend from the IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System that started as the assembly language for the IBM 704. A general-purpose, procedural programming language that is suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.
1965 – Intelsat I, a.k.a. Early Bird, went into service. This geosynchronous satellite sent the first signal between nine different countries. A “One Hour TV Spectacular” was broadcast to Europe from the US, Canada, and Mexico.
Intelsat I went up in space on April 6, 1965 and had only 240 voice circuits, so it could only transmit one TV channel at a time. Early Bird was one of three satellites that broadcast the first landing on the moon in 1969.
2004 – Google files the S-1 form with SEC for their IPO. They said they wanted to raise US$2,718,281,828; a Mathematical algorithm based on the day they filed. The form can be found at SEC.gov
The stock finally started trading on August 19, 2004 at $85 a share in a unique online auction.
2003-Apple launches the iTunes Store. iTunes has been around since 2001, but without option to get new music. Before the iTunes store, users would have to burn from CD or copy previously made MP3 files. The store sold 1 million songs within a week. Apple became the biggest music vendor in the US in 2008.
With 28 million songs, over 1 million podcasts, 40,000 music videos, 3,000 shows and even the Beatles library, iTunes music store continues to dominate the market. Of course things exploded in 2007 when Steve Jobs put apps into the iTunes store. Apple just celebrated the 40 billion app mark and 25 billion song mark.
Today, Apple iTunes commands 63% of digital downloads.
1964– The Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) is retired after fifteen years. SEAC was the first to use all-diode logic. SEAC was bason on EDVAC. It had 747 vacuum tubes, and the clock rate was under 1 mHz.
1993 – The National Center for Supercomputing Applications releases version 1.0 (RTM) of the Mosaic Web Browser. It was the first browser with a Graphical user interface for content. Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark were the lead developers. The browser would take the internet by storm and continue to lead until 1998 when IE and Netscape came on the scene.
Connectix stops shipping the Virtual Game Station for Mac
eBay sues Craigslist over “Diluting of Share”Newsgroups: alt.hypertext,comp.infosystems
**Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 07:21:17 -0800
From: ma…@ncsa.uiuc.edu (Marc Andreessen)
By the power vested in me by nobody in particular, alpha/beta version
0.5 of NCSA’s Motif-based networked information systems and World
WidWeb browser, X Mosaic, is hereby released:
location removed
This release of X Mosaic is known to compile on the following
platforms:
SGI (IRIX 4.0.2)
IBM (AIX 3.2)
Sun 4 (SunOS 4.1.2 with stock X11R4 and Motif 1.1).
Binaries for these platforms are available on ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu in
/Web/xmosaic/binaries-0.5. More binaries will be supplied as I am
able to find other Motif-configured platforms to use (DEC MIPS
probably within the next half hour).
Although this is alpha/beta software, I’m looking more for feedback on design and functionality than bug reports right now — down the road
the bulk of the program will be rewritten in C++ anyway, so don’t
take the current code too seriously. But bug reports are welcome too.
New releases will probably come out about every 7-14 days until 1.0
arrives.
A list of current and future capabilities of X Mosaic follows this
message.
Cheers,
Marc
—
Marc Andreessen
Software Development Group
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
ma…@ncsa.uiuc.edu
1996– Nineteen year old Jennifer Kaye Ringley takes several webcams and places them within her house. For the next seven years, she would livestream her life to all on the Internet. Since Ringley was raised a nudist, she would appear on the video without clothes on. The site was not pornographic – although any sexual escapades would be caught live. Jennifer leads a Social media free life nowadays.