1976 – Microsoft Pioneer CROMEMCO Is Incorporated
Harry Garland and Roger Melen, two
roommates at Stanford University, from CROMEMCO, a company to manufacture
microprocessor-based computers. CROMEMCO was an acronym for their college
residence: CROthers MEMorial Hall + CO (company). A year before, in December
1975, the proposed to attach their Cyclops camera to the Altair, for use as a
security camera, and a month later they received Altair number 0002. In October
1976, CROMEMCO advertised their Z80 S- 100 processor board. In 1983, the
business grew to a maximum size of 450 employees and $45,000,000 in sales. In
1986, CROMEMCO merged with Dynatech, Inc. In 1990, Dr. Garland and professor
Melen founded of Canon Research Center American Inc., an entrepreneurial
subsidiary of Canon KK of Japan, dedicated to developing imaging technologies
and products.
1993 – Microsoft Releases Windows 3.11
Microsoft releases version 3.11 of
Windows, a minor upgrade to Windows 3.1. It became the last stable version of
Windows before Windows 95 was released in August of 1995.
1999 – Y2K Looms
The world waits in anticipation of
the year 2000 and the potential disasters that might be brought about by the
Y2K bug. Personally, having worked years in a corporate environment getting
ready for Y2K, I was pretty confident that nothing major would happen. So just
for fun, I set up my home with a remote control to turn off all the lights in
my house and the TV our friends would be watching at our New Years’ Eve party.
Seconds after midnight, I pushed the remote control in my pocket and everything
went out. There were definitely a few people at my house that night who thought
the apocalypse had come. Technology practical jokes are so much fun!
2008 – Zune 2K Day
Playfully nicknamed “Zune 2K” day
after Y2K day, owners of Microsoft Zune devices began reporting that their
devices had malfunctioned and refused to boot up. The problem turned out to be
a “a bug in the internal clock driver related to the way the device handles a
leap year.” As described by Microsoft. The problem would fix itself on Jan 1,
2009 if users let the battery run down and then reset the device on that day.
Certainly, the publicity from the gaffe couldn’t have helped the perception of
the Zune in the marketplace, as by this time Apple’s iPhone had started its
dominant rise. Microsoft said it would issue a bugfix for the device so that
this problem wouldn’t re-occur in 2012, but by that time, Microsoft had already
killed the Zune line of devices so I’m not sure if the problem was ever
actually fixed.
If you like this post kindly comment below and do share your response. Thanks for reading.
Comments
Post a Comment