Today in Tech History – February 28

1885 – AT&T Incorporated

             The American Telephone and Telegraph Company is incorporated in New York State as the subsidiary of American Bell Telephone. Eventually the companies would “merge” and thus AT&T was born.  

1947 – The first closed-circuit broadcast of a surgical operation showed procedures to observers in classrooms at Johns Hopkins University.

1954 – The Westinghouse H840CK15 went on sale in the New York area. It is generally agreed to be the first production television receiver using NTSC color offered to the public. Only 30 sets were sold at $1,295 a pop.

1956 – MIT’s Forrester Receives Patent on “Core” Memory

             Jay Forrester at MIT is awarded a patent for his coincident current magnetic core memory. Forrester’s invention, given Patent No. 2,736,880 for a “multicoordinate digital information storage device,” became the standard memory device for digital computers until supplanted by solid state (semiconductor) RAM in the mid-1970s.

1959 – Discoverer 1 was launched on a Thor-Agena A rocket and became the first man-made object ever put into a polar orbit.

1966 – Right to Privacy

             With all these ways to listen in on a conversation, the FCC has to make a ruling to protect the rights of US citizens. They create the Right to Privacy act which bands evesdropping or direct and indirect use of radio – controlled devices.

2002 – Disney CEO Claims Apple Encourages Theft

             Disney CEO Michael Eisner testifies at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on the protection of digital content from piracy. Eisner lobbies for sterner enforcement of copyright laws, claiming that Apple Computer advertisements for the iPod encourage copyright violation. “Rip. Mix. Burn. … they buy this computer.”

A little over 3 years later, Eisner was later replaced as CEO by Robert Iger, who quickly arranged the buyout of Pixar Animation Studios, of which Steve Jobs was CEO. This move made Steve Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder and a member of Disney’s board. I guess it’s a small world after all!

2017 – A typo in a command to take some servers offline for maintenance caused an outage in Amazon’s S3 service that took millions of websites offline.

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