June 6, 2011 Steve Jobs gave his last keynote for Apple
2005 – Steve Jobs spoke in front of the masses at the WWDC announcing that Apple will switch their processors from PowerPC to Intel. He then showed off the Mac OS X running on aPentium 4 CPU. The reasoning was that PowerPC chips took too much power to run and also ran hotter than an Intel chip.
2006– Founded in 1851, Western Union was responsible for getting the important messages from point A to B. Whether through telegram or commercial messaging, Western Union was synonymous with the service. But on January 27, 2006, that all ended. As Western Union wrote:
“Effective 2006-01-27, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative.”
1981 – While getting this up to 88 miles per hour doesn’t take you back in time, it was still a cool car to have. The First production Delorean DMC-12 was built. A prototype was made back in 1976 and all Deloreans were made in Ireland.
9,000 Deloreans were made before financial issues got to the company in 1983. A revival was attempted and announcements of an all-electric Delorean (with prototype), but as of this point has not come out of Vaporware.
There is one gold-plated Delorean in Reno, NV. I also got to experience the original “Back to the Future” Delorean at CES 2014 (video below).
2001 – One problem with technology is that you hit limitations, mostly due to materials used or how small machines can make parts like transistors. For instance, today’s multi-core x86 processors will eventually be replaced because we won’t be able to put anymore transistors on the die – It’s called “Moores Law“. Intel and AMD work hard to get around this law – which is why x86 technology has been around since the 90’s.One thing scientists do to circumvent is to change the restructure the transistor. In 2001, Intel did just that. They launched the TeraHertz – a new transistor, using several new materials – including Zirconium Dioxide (which is used to reduce leakage issues). The new THz transistors brought processing to a new level; High process tasks like facial recognition could be achieved. The TeraHertz also worked on 0.6 Volts, so it vastly reduced power needs.
Intel expected this technology to be implemented by 2005. However, as to this date, the TeraHertz transistor has not been, nor seems to be planned for implementation in processors.
1971 – Intel announced the 4004 microprocessor in an ad in Electronic News Magazine. Intel called it a micro-programmable computer on a chip, this was the first single-chip processor. It was also concidered to be the precursor to the x86 processor. The 4004 was followed with the 8008, 8080 and 8085 processors. Federico Faggin was the chip lead designer. He holds 2 of the chip’s patents.The 4004 could run 60,000 interactions per second (0.06 MIP). The clock rate on the chip was 108 KHz and was accompanied by the Intel RAM chip. It only cost $200. The chip made it’s debut on March 2, 1973 – More information on the Intel 4004
2008 – It was hailed as a “Mistake” on their blog. With that, Google Chrome is released in Beta on Windows machines. The new browser takes a lot of people by surprise as this was a pretty secretive project – that is, until the comic was released. Google then blogged about it saying:
At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit “send” a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we’ve now made the comic publicly available — you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.
So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.
The browser was suppose to be announced on Sept 3rd. The download was available to the general public on Sept 2nd.
1965– You may have heard about Moore’s Law. This states that every 18 months, a processor will double in speed. The law’s name is coined after Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore. He said:
It can’t continue forever. The nature of the exponential is that you push them out and eventually disaster happens.
The law started with the Integrated circuit. It has continued to this day – especially since we switched ideas and, instead of speeding up, we double the amount of processors.
2008– Intel launches their newest processor: the ATOM processor. It’s codename was Silverthorne. It is a ATOM Z single processor using the 45 nm die processes (the processor was smaller than a penny). The ATOM processor would run at 800 MHZ with a 512 L2 cache and 533 Front side bus. The most current ATOM processor is the S1220, S1240 and S1260 for servers (released December 2012). ATOM processors can run 32 bit and 64 bit hardware and software.