1895 – The Lumiere brothers showed their
first film to an audience. It was a romantic comedy about a crowd of mostly
women leaving a building.
1960 – Frickin’s Laser Beams
Patented
The first
patent on a laser is issued to Arthur Leonard Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes,
who assign it to Bell Telephone Laboratories. Still, no one has figured out how
to attach these “lasers” to the heads of sharks. Throw me a frickin’bone here!
1981 – RCA Selectavision
Videodisc
The first
vinyl video record, a.k.a the videodisc, hit stores in the U.S. The
“Capacitance Electronic Disc” looked just like any other vinyl record protected
in a plastic caddy and held 60 minutes of NTSC video. That is approximately
27,000 frames per second.
However, the CED players did not make the impact RCA had
hoped. Only 100,000 were sold by the end of the year. The “BetaMax vs. VHS” war
was in full swing and the tapes were considerably smaller than the discs.
Laserdisc was also available to the public, which led to a lot of confusion of
formats.
The RCA Selectavision was retired in 1984 with the last
discs released in 1986.
1993 – Intel Begins Shipping
“Pentium” Chip
Intel
announces it is shipping its Pentium microprocessor. Engineers Federico Faggin,
Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor, and Masatoshi Shima, an engineer from the Japanese firm
of Busicom, invented the world’s first commercial microprocessor at Intel in
1971 – the Intel 4004.
2016 – Sony began taking orders for its
Playstation VR headset. The first pre-orders were for a $499 bundle including
the headset as well as Move controllers and a camera.
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