2002 – The trial of Jon Lech Johansen, better known as “DVD Jon,” begins with Johansen pleading not guilty. DVD Jon has been a pioneer in “Reverse engineering”. O.K, so that is a fancy way of saying “Pirating”, but without his efforts, advances might not have been made. He was acquitted on January 7, 2003.
2004 – It was an interesting day in the Tech community when we heard the news. IBM was getting out of the desktop and laptop markets and focus on server and infrastructure. They started by selling all their assets to Lenovo – China’s largest computer manufacturer. Lenovo wasn’t a household name in the US, but this pretty much changed that overnight.The deal was for $650 million in cash and $600 million in stock. Lenovo would also acquire $500 million in IBM liabilities, which would put the total to $1.75 billion. In return, Lenovo would instantly become the 3rd largest PC vendor with $12 billion in revenue, not to mention major markets in both China and the U.S.
1978 – It is one of the most infamous pictures in tech today. This is the Microsoft crew. Can you guess which one is Bill Gates?
The picture was updated in 2008 when the group (except Bob Wallace, who passed away in 2002) got back together for Bill Gates last few days at Microsoft (below).
The staff picture includes: Bill Gates, Andrea Lewis, Marla Wood, Paul Allen (2nd row) Bob O’Rear, Bob Greenberg (who helped launch Cabbage Patch Kids), Marc McDonald, Gordon Letwin, (3rd row) Steve Wood, Bob Wallace (passed away in 2002) and Jim Lane.
1768 – Encyclopedia Britannica began publishing the first print – otherwise known as “part I”. It was the brain child of Colin Macfarquhar, and Andrew Bell, and was a conservative reaction to the French Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot. The first volume would be completed Edinburgh, Scotland by 1771. The 3rd edition would become popular and also expand for the first time. Since then, the Britannica would be digitized and put on CD, then DVD format. Today’s current version has 400 editors and 1,000 contributors. The Encyclopedia also saw several pirate copies during it’s 242 year run.The Encyclopedia would move to the US in 1901. Today, Britannica is produced as a digital version.
1965 – Richard Wexelblat was the first candidate to complete his doctoral dissertation, hence giving him a degree in “Computer Science“. It was presented at the University of Pennsylvania – Moore School of Electrical Engineering. Richard went on to write the “History of Programming Languages” (ISBN:0-12-745040-8)
1985 – The Cray X-mp/48 Supercomputer begins operation in San Diego Supercomputer Center in California. The $15 million dollar supercomputer could process 400 megaflops (200 per processor). It was a shared-memory parallel vector processor and supported 2 or 4 million 64-bit words of main memory in 16 or 32 banks.
The first Cray didn’t get installed until October 1986.
Cray X-MP/48 replaced the Cray-1. It was succeeded by the Cray Y-MP8/864 in 1990.
Movies such as “the Last Starfighter” were rendered using the Cray Supercomputer.
1991 – What was first a Multimedia add-on for System 6, Quicktime has spent 21 years being Apples’ proprietary player. The original version contained graphics, animation and Video codecs – What was refered to as “Road Pizza”. Since then Quicktime had developed on both Mac and Windows sides (starting in 1992). The current version is called Quicktime X but there are signs the technology is either moving a new direction or possibly retired.
2013 – Jeff Bezos is interviewed on the show “60 Minutes” on CBS with Charlie Rose. During his interview he unveils a project Amazon has been working on – Flying drone delivery. This secret R&D project called “Octocopter” will have drones fly the packages from outposts in each city to the homes.
In a project Amazon is calling “Prime Air”, they expect the delivery system to be available in the next 4-5 years.
Charlie Rose’ reaction summed it up. “Oh, my God!”.
1999 – It was the most expensive internet domain name. Business.com was first bought in 1997 for $150,000 by Marc Ostrofsky. You might think that is pretty expensive, but economically, it was a great deal. On 12/01/99, Buisness.com was sold to Jake Winebaum for $7.5 million. At that point, buisness.com was officially founded.Jake was a chairman of the Walt Disney Internet group.This domain barely made it through the dot com bubble. They went through 2007 when R.H. Donnelley Corporation acquired the site for $345 million. R.H. Donnelley filed for bankruptcy in June 2009.