Today in Tech History – August 11

1942 – Hedy Markey and composer George Antheil received a US patent for a frequency-hopping device. The technique has led to many advancement in wireless technology including Wi-Fi. Markey was better known under her stage name of Hedy Lamarr.

1950 – Apple Inventor Wozniak Born
          Wozniak and jobs entered into business after Wozniak designed a single-board personal computer known as the Apple I. In 1976, with specifications in hand and an order for 100 machines at $500 each from the Byte Shop, he and Jobs began assembling computers in the basement of Steve Jobs’ parent garage.
While still studying at the University of California-Berkeley in 1972, Wozniak had shown his electronics skill as well as his sense of humor in building his blue box, a tone generator used to make free phone calls, which he sold in dormitories.

1965 – Shinji Mikami was born in Japan. He grew up to become a video game designer for Capcom, revolutionizing survival-horror games with his popular series, Resident Evil.

1993 – Red Hat Goes Public
          Red Hat is Linux distribution and a vendor. They are on the S&P 500 company list for it. Founded in 1993, this company has provided a more professional type of open source software – giving pay support and Enterprise editions for IT pros. CEO Bon Young brought the company to this point. They filed for IPO in 1999. It turned out to be one of the largest Wall Street Gains in history. They put up 900,000 shares of common stock. Red Hat spiked at $136 a share, but is currently at $57.

1994 – Net Market founder Dan Kohn watched his friend buy a Sting CD online from Net Market using his credit card. This is sometimes considered the first ecommerce transaction.

2003 – Windows Gets Blasted
          The Blaster worm, also known as MSBlast or Lovesan, begins to spread on the internet, infecting Windows XP and Windows 2000 computers. The primary symptom of the worm was the crashing of the RPC service, which would trigger the computer to shut itself down and reboot as shown in the graphic. Microsoft estimated the number of machines infected between 8 and 16 million. Damage caused by the worm was estimated at $320 million.

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