Today in Tech History – May 28

1929 – First Modern Color Movie 

The Warner Brothers’ film on With the Show, the first talking movie that is all in color, debuts at New York City’s Winter Garden theater. The film uses two-color Technicolor and Vitaphone sound.

1936

 

Alan Turing submitted his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” for publication in which he postulated hypothetical Turing Machines would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.

 

1959 –Committee Forms to Develop New Language 

A committee formed to develop COBOL, or Common Business Oriented Language. The group of researchers drawn from several computer manufacturers and the Pentagon designed a program for business use that sought easy readability and as much machine independence as possible. Although programmer Howard Bromberg prematurely made a tombstone for COBOL out of fear that the language had no future, it continues to be used by business today. The tombstone is now part of the Computer History Museum’s collection.

1971   

The USSR launched Mars 3. It would arrive at Mars in December and its lander would become the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars.

1987 – GIF is Not Peanut Butter

 

CompuServe releases the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) standard as a new computer graphics file format. Due to color limitations, the GIF format is unsuitable for reproducing color photographs, but it is well-suited for more simple images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color. This made is probably the most popular graphics format “GIF licensing controversy” soured many designers to its use. The PNG format was developed in response as an alternative to GIF to get around the licensing issue. However, all relevant patents have since expired and the GIF format may now be freely used. Today it still sees widespread use, especially when simple animations are needed.

2014 – Apple Acquires Beats

 

Rumors flew high on this one, so when it happened, many people were not surprised. Apple announced they were going to acquire Beats Music and Electronics in a $3 billion deal. As part of the acquisition, co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy lovine would join Apple. Beats subscription service would continue to work as part of the service would be integrated with iTunes. Currently, Beats has a 20 million song library, and is available for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone for a $9.99 subscription.