Today in Tech History – October 9

1876 – First Phone Call Over Outdoor Wires

           Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson demonstrate the first two-way phone call over outdoor wires. Bell and Watson made their call between the cities of Boston and Cambridge.

                                        

1947 – BINAC Computer to Be Built

           A contract was signed to develop the BINAC. The “Binary Automatic Computer” was the only computer ever built by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer co., founded by ENIAC pioneers J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. The company became a division of Remington Rand Corp. before completing its next project, the UNIVAC. The first electronic digital computer with a stored-program capability to be completed in the United States, the BINAC had a capacity of 512 words. At a price of $278,000, the BINAC improved on the ENIAC primarily by improving speed and power with only 700 vacuum tubes instead of 18,000.

                                          

2001 – AMD announces a new branding scheme. Instead of identifying processors by their clock speed the AMD XP will bear monikers of 1800+,1700+,1600+, and 1500+, with each lower model  number representing a lower clock speed.

                                          

2006 – Google announces plans to purchase YouTube for 1.65 Billion.

                                           

2006 – Raymond J. Noorda, a co-founder of Novell Inc., a software company that helped pioneer computer networking, died at 82 at home in Orem, Utah.

                                            

2009 – The first lunar impact of the Centaur and LCROSS spacecrafts kicked up some dust as part of NASA’s Lunar precursor Robotic program. The impact led to greater certainty that is water on the moon.

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