Today in Tech History – May 25

1945 – Arthur C. Clarke began privately circulating copies of his paper “The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications” which suggested geostationary space stations could be used for worldwide television broadcasts.

1949 – Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia. He would later go by the name Joybubbles and develop a talent to whistle at 2600 Hz, allowing him to control phone switching equipment.

 1961 – US President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech to Congress declaring the United States would go to the moon.

1977 – A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away…...

             The motion picture Star Wars is released in thirty-two US theaters. The film will immediately break records unlike any before it, essentially becoming the first blockbuster in history. The film’s unprecedented use of special effects sparked a revolution of movies using technology-based visual effects. Perhaps the film’s greatest contribution to technology was the creation two years earlier of the company Industrial Light and Magic, which is still the leading special effects house in the industry.

1983 – Return of the Jedi
             The third installment in the original Star Wars trilogy, Return of the Jedi, is released six years to the day after the first Star Wars movie. Return of the Jedi continued to raise the bar in special effects technology that its predecessor set. The film’s final space battle, for example was of a size and scale unprecedented at the time.

1989 – The first Magellan GPS NAV 1000s were shipped to retailers. They ran for a few hours on six AA batteries, and sold for $3,000.

1994 – First International World Wide Web Conference

                CERN hosted the first international World Wide Web conference, which continued through May 27. At the conference, researchers expanded on Tim Berners-Lee’s concept of a single storage facility for a variety of information – a design that would greatly aid his research at CERN, where he previously had to use a number of different programs and locations to collect what he needed. While participants understood the usefulness of Berners-Lee’s concept and Hyper Text Markup Language, few guessed how quickly the Web would expand to millions of users globally.

1999 – Corel WordPerfect Office 2000

             A program first developed by Brigham young University for Data General Minicomputers, WordPerfect was the word processing application for anyone using a computer in the 80’s and 90’s. I remember writing reports and papers using this software growing up, along with Quattro Pro for bookkeeping and printing daily reports at work. However, I 1994, WordPerfect started to gain some major competition when computers turned to GUI, and DOS was getting put on the back burner. Corel, the owners of WordPerfect since 1996, wanted to ramp up production of not only the word processor, but also their products in.

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