1972 – Andy Cappa’s tavern in CA was the site for the first Pong game was wheeled into the establishment. The coin-operated game was put in by Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell and game designer Al Alcorn. The duo decided that making their own game – rather than having 3rd parties do it – would help keep costs down. They then turned an old Roller rink and converted to a production line. Pong was the first successful video game system.
1894 – The first Sunday Comics section is printed by the New York World.
1985 – 91 years later, Bill Watterson syndicates a comic about a boy and his stuffed Tiger. Calvin and Hobbes will bring laughter to millions for the next ten years. It reached through 2,400 newspapers (at it’s height) and spun off 18 books. Bill Watterson ended the comic on December 31st, 1995 and has left it retired since.
2008 – After battle upon battle between Microsoft, Google and shareholders (including Carl Icahn), Jerry Yang finally announced to all he was stepping down as CEO of Yahoo! The previous days, Steve Ballmer said they are not going forward with any future purchase of Yahoo! Because of this, stock hit it’s lowest share price, $8. That, the failed Google affiliation (due to antitrust issues), and a very despondent group of investors, Jerry felt it best to step back in his roll.
2005 – In an effort to curb piracy, record companies began putting copy protection on the CD’s themselves. The electronic marking would cause CD’s to error out if they tried to copy. Unfortunately this idea was riddled with problems. Some players couldn’t read the disks, other people would find ways around the copy protection, such as different brand drives. However, it was found that the XCP copy protection standard became a backdoor for hackers as viruses could be introduced through the software.
The announcement came ten days after Sony had secretly put this system on the shelves.
2008 – A bill for $73 million dollars was sent to Microsoft, Google and Carl Icahn. This was for the operation costs (including incremental costs) for outside advertisers to acquire Yahoo!
1999 – It was over 12 years that we saw Microsoft go through the Department of Justice over Monopoly issues. US district Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued a 207 page Findings of fact on this day. In it, he ruled that Microsoft did have a Monopoly power over the OS in the Intel market. During the week we talked about what leads up to this 207 page ruling.
2011 – Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson was released on Kindle and iBookstore, with a full release at Midnight. The book was planned to be released a lot later. However due to Job’s health, they pushed it up as much as possible.
2001– Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod. Little did we know what that really meant for not only Apple, but also the change in technology. You were able to get either a 5 GB or 6 GB model. The original iPod connected via firewire and was touted to hold 1000 songs – most people’s entire music library.iPod actually was a reference from 2001: a Space Odyssey. The trademark was already taken by another company, but the product – an Internet Kiosk – was discontinued by 2001, so Apple finally received the Trademark in 2005.
From the Keynote to the iPod event, Steve Jobs said:
The choice we made was music. Now why music? Well, we love music. And it’s always good to do something you love. More important, music is a part of everyone’s life. EVERYONE. Music has been around forever, it will always be around – this is not a speculative market. And because it’s a part of everyone’s life, it’s a very large target market; all around the world. It knows no boundries.
Interestingly enough, in this whole new digital music revolution, there is no market leader. There are small companies like creative and sonic blue, and then there’s large companies like Sony that haven’t had a hit yet. They have found no recipe yet for digital music. We think not only can we find the recipe, but we think the Apple brand is going to be fantastic because people trust the Apple brand to get their great digital electronics from.
1999 – Its considered the one of the earliest publishing tools, Blogger personal website publishing system by Pyra Labs was released. The software was co-founded by Evan Williams and Meg Hourihan. The Blogger code was re-written in 2002 and in 2003, Google purchased Pyra for an undisclosed sum.
2002 – Mozilla releases Phoenix 0.1, the first release of what will become Firefox. The browser will change names because of trademark issues with Phoenix technologies. The initial first release of Firefox, though will be released on Nov. 9, 2004
2008 -Sarah Palin succumbed to a hacker in a different way – through her Yahoo! email. The infiltrator gained access by using common information to reset the password. David Kernell then posted her email and new password on 4chan.org under the alias “Rubico”. It showed that by using common information to set up an account, it could also turn into a “back door” for someone who would know that information.