2002– The .aero domain, or domain on aviation, begins registering. The first resolution of the .aero domain would happen on Sept 2nd. Of course, aero is a derivative of Aeronautics and is the first sponsored top-level domain. Three letter codes were airports (example: LAX.aero = Los Angeles airport). The initial trial of .aero was under a 5 year contract that continued to extended until 2019.
1985– 25 years ago, Symbolics.com became the first domain registered on the World Wide Web. In fact, if you go to their website, they have a countdown clock to the historic event. The company made Lisp machines (workstations), most notably, the 3600 series. Since then, the site was purchased by XF.com Investments (now, XF.com) – Aron Meystedt. No purchase price was disclosed for the domain.Note – the first domain ever created was Nordu.net, but was never registered.
1988 – It’s the song that found it’s rebirth and the term “Rick Rolled” became a urban saying. Of course, we are talking about Rick Astley and the song: Never Gonna Give You Up. It hit #1 on the charts. Of course, it’s internet fame has turned this into a whole new beast.
1986-$21.00 a share was the first price for stock in Microsoft. 2.5 million shares were sold, raising the price to 27.75 and netting the company 61 million initially. Since then, the highest it has gone was 57.91 on Dec 24th, 1999. Yet with about 10 stock splits and several dividends in the 24 years, people definitely got their money’s worth. If you would have purchased 100 shares in 1986 and let those shares ride until today, you would have 102,400 shares of stock at appx. $29 a share.
1988– Ignatius T. Foobar launches one of the more interesting and long-lasting Bulletin board systems in the Uncensored BBS. Of course, his name was really Art Cancro, but Ignatius used an Altos 586 running Citadel/UX software. This BBS is still running to this day, even though dial-up access has been discontinued since 2001.
1993 – The PowerOpen Association is formed to conform to the PowerOpen environment, which is an open standard for running forms of Unix on PowerPC platforms. Apple, IBM, Motorola are all in on this group.
1933– Charles Darrow creates the game Monopoly, with designers Elizabeth Magie, Louis Thun, and Fred Thun. There were a few other board games before Monopoly, like “The Landlord game“, which Monopoly was loosely derived from. The board is based on Atlantic City and the playing pieces were models from items around Charles Darrow’s’ house. Parker Brothers would pick the game up in 1935 and turn it into a household name.Since then, multiple variations of the board game have been introduced. Everything from Star Wars Monopoly to Bratz Jr Monopoly game. The game has gone through many revisions, and some families have made “unofficial rules” – such as what happens when you land on Free Parking.
1956 – An Wang patented Ferrite Core Memory on May 17, 1955. However, IBM used Ferrite cores in their systems and the patent issue started an interesting legal battle. One that ended in IBM purchasing the patent outright for “Several million dollars”. Wang took the funds to build up Wang Laboratories.