1984 – One billion points on one quarter. That was the reason for Tim McVey Day. At the Twin Galaxies arcade back on January 17th, Tim scored 1,000,042,270 points on one quarter to the game “Nibbler” – a hybrid Pac-Man and Centipede game.
McVey got his name in Computer Games Magazine for it, and so he became the first video gamer to get a civic day in his honor.
His record was broken eight months later by Enrico Zanetti.
Of course, this event gets overshadowed by the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing by Timothy McVeigh.
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Yahoo buys Geocities
Radio Shack chooses Compaq over IBM
Ann Marie Linscott uses Craigslist to hire a hitman
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.”
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1896 – Although he was not the only person to be working on the technology and not the first X-ray, Wilhelm Roentgen gave the first public lecture and demonstration of his device. He photographed Dr. Albert von Kolliker’s hand at the Wurzburg Physical Medical Society.
The first X-ray he ever took was of his wife’s hand (with wedding ring on). The practice is also known as Röntgen rays.
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1983 – at an introductory price of $9995, Apple introduces the Lisa computer – the first computer with a GUI (Graphical User Interface). The computer featured a 5 MHz 68000 microprocessor, 1 MB RAM, 12″ monochrome monitor, dual 5.25″ 860 KB floppy drives, a 5 MB hard drive and more.
Lisa cost Apple Computer US$50 million to develop. The software for it cost Apple Computer US$100 million to develop.“Lisa” is an acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture.
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1983 – During the CP/M Show, Franklin Electronic Publichers revealed the Franklin Ace 1200 computer. The main feature of this computer (like the other Franklin computers before) was the fact they copied Apple’s ROM and operating system code.
The Ace 1200 came with a Zilog Z80 processor a 1 MHz, 48K RAM, 16K ROM,2 – 5.25 Floppy disks and four expansion slots. The computer was announced here but didn’t come out until 1984. It cost the consumer $2,200
At that same show, Radio Shack introduced the TRS-80 Model 12 for $3,200
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2012 – Yahoo! had some turbulent times from 2007 when founder Jerry Yang was CEO. Of course the big debacle being the Microsoft bid, which took over 9 months to settle with Carl Icahn being a major instigator.
Add to that the 2007 incident of the arrest of Shi Tao and Yahoo’s stance. Tao was arrested for divulging trade secrets and Yang put out a statement saying “We have to comply with Chinese Law”.
During this whole time, Yahoo shares were declining. Yang was replaced in 2009 by Carol Bartz, but remained on the board until 2012 when Yang fully resigned from all positions in the company.
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Other Historical Events in Technology
The infamous “Apple Ad” shows up in movie theatres
1956 – The U.S. Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was disclosed to the public. SAGE is a computer that connected hundreds of radar stations in the US and Canada as a one-stop monitoring of the sky.
SAGE was commissioned and developed by MIT.
The project started in 1950 and SAGE became fully operational on June 26, 1958 (DC-01). By 1980, many SAGE sites were fully dismantled as other airborne detection systems took its place.
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1990 – AT&T suffers the oddest outage nationwide. A switch in New York crashed, then rebooted. This caused the other switches linked to the New York switch to also reboot. The cascade continued on until all 114 switches were rebooting on 6 second intervals.
The continued failure lasted for 9 hours, leaving 60,000 customers without long distance calling. The problem was resolved when engineers found a bug in the latest update dealing with 4ESS long distance switches. They applied a patch which stopped the crash-reboot cycle.
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Intel acquires Xircom
Wikipedia is launched
Coveritlive and Twitter goes down for Steve Jobs Keynote