Today in Tech History – March 18

1931 – Jacob Schick began marketing his second electric razor. His first hadn’t caught on because of the bulky motor. This time the more practical design became a hit.

1965 – The Voskhod 2 launched and on the second orbit Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov left the capsule (on purpose) for 12 minutes, becoming the first person to walk in space.

1974 – Arcade Game of Many Firsts

             Atari Introduces Gran Trak 10. It is the first arcade game to use solid state read-only memory (ROM) to store sprites for each car, the game timer, the rack track, and the score. As such, it’s the first game to have defined characters rather than mathematically manipulated dots. The game’s controls, which include a four-position gear shifter, a steering wheel, and two foot pedals, are also all firsts for arcade games.

1986 – 17-Year Old American Discerns Mir Launch before Soviets Announce

             The New York Times reports that a 17-year-old student in New Jersey had tracked the launch of the new Soviet space station, Mir, before the Soviet Government formally announced it. With a group of friends, Phillip Naranjo tracked transmission between space vessels and control centers on Earth. Just before the Russian announced Mir on February 20, the teens had picked up some Cyrillic code.

1987 – Thousands of physicists crowded a ballroom at the New York Hilton at the meeting of the American Physical Society to hear speakers talk on high-temperature superconductivity. The session started in the evening and ran until 3:15 AM earning the nickname “Woodstock of Physics.”

2008 – LimeWire Tries to go Legal

             The free peer-to-peer file sharing program that was under major fire decided to set up a fully legal DRM music store. With over 500,000 mp3’s from artists who are not on any major labels, the store allowed you to get lossless versions of this music. They planned a party at SXSW 2008.

Downloads were on a pay-per-track pricing – from 30 cents (on up) per song. There were no mentions of how much an artist could get from these pricing. The RIAA was still going after the software itself at this point.

Ultimately on October 2010, an injunction was placed on the software and on May 13, 2011, Limewire settled for $105 million. Hence, the music service was also taken down.

2015 – Sony launched its Internet TV service called Playstation Vue in New York, Chicago and Philadelphia. For $50 a month subscribers got around 50 channels plus the ability to record shown in the cloud for up to 28 days. 

If you like this post kindly comment below and do share your response. Thanks for reading.