1999– America Online(AOL) completes the acquisition of Netscape Communications Corporation. The acquisition started in Nov. 24, 1998. The acquisition was a $10 million arrangement in stock and cash.Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark were the founders of Netscape. The Netscape browser would be discontinued in December 2007, and ultimately end support on March 1, 2008.
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Apple files suit to Microsoft and HP
Office 97 Small Business Edition is released
Tim Paterson contacts Microsoft on intent to sell MS-DOS
2012 – Facebook – trying to get a hold on photosharing – decides to not wait for their iPhone app to come out but instead purchase Instagram for 1 billion dollars ($300 million and 23 million shares of Facebook stock). The reason Facebook made the purchase was for the close to 50 million Instagram users. Facebook had plans to keep both companies separate, but found later that joining the two via databases would help both companies grow. The companies finalized the deal on September 6, 2012.
1998 – Seiko Instruments introduces the world’s first wrist wearable Personal Computer called the Ruputer. This wristwatch was planned to be released June 10, 1998 and cost $285. The Ruputer featured a 16-bit, 3.6 MHz processor and 2 MB of non-volatile storage memory, 128 KB of main memory, a full graphic display, and a small joystick.The Ruputer connects to Windows 95 via infrared, and can download pictures and other simple data. The Ruputer came with three applications. The watch also had an SDK, so you could program in the C programming language.
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1996 – Corel not only gets WordPerfect form Novell, but also Quattro Pro for $180 million in stock and cash. Michael Cowpland (Founder of Corel) called WordPerfect the “Pepsi to Microsoft’s Coke”. I guess that was not the case as OpenOffice (RC maybe?) surpassed WordPerfect users.WordPerfect and Corel have been in flux since 2006, when Vector Capital purchased 72% of the company. Just this last year, they bought up the remaining stock and became privately held once again.
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Related articles
Mistrial in WordPerfect antitrust case against Microsoft (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
January 15: Ralph Baer Patents First Video Game (dayintechhistory.com)
This is an interesting parallelism:1990 – Time Inc. acquires Warner Communications for $14.1 Billion.
2000 – AOL purchases Time Warner for $165 Billion in stock. The merger would finally complete on Jan 11 2001 when the Federal Trade Commission approves the merger.
AOL and Time Warner continue a relationship until 2009 when the two companies finally split.