1975 – The Homebrew
Computer Club, held its first meeting in the garage of Gordon French in Menlo
Park, California. 32 people showed up for the first meeting. John Draper, Steve
Wozniak and Steve Jobs were some of the more famous member of the club.
1981 – Timex Sinclair ZX81 launched
The successor to the Sinclair ZX80, Britain’s most popular home computer
– the Sinclair ZX81 was launched by Sinclair Research – a Timex Corporation. It
was a popular computer mostly because of the price - £69.95 ($99) or £49.95 in
kit form.
The cheap computer had only a fraction of
components that an Apple II did. Yet the Apple II was around £699. The Sinclair
ZX81 only had 1kn RAM with option to upgrade to 16 kB. The graphics were only
in monochrome and the Z80 CPU ran at 3.25 MHz – 8 bit. This was actually faster
than the Apple II processor (1.08 MHz) and only outbested by the IBM PC (4.77
MHz at 16-bit). The TI99/4A processor was a 3 MHz 16-bit chip.
1982 – Four days after it’s
twin, the second of two Soviet probes to Venus, the Venera 14 landed on the
planet. Venera 13 and 14 would continue to send data until 1983.
1993 – Talking Laptop Helps Blind Students Earn
College Degree
In an early demonstration of the
impact computers could have on people’s lives, the Los Angeles Times reports
that a blind student was talking advantage of a talking Toshiba T1000 laptop
computer to help him complete courses necessary to graduate from UCLA. After 15
years of going to college on and off, the computer provided Robert Antunez the
independence and aid he needed to complete a bachelor’s degree in political
science.
1995 – Yahoo! Officially Launches
The Yahoo! search engine officially launches on the Internet. 13 months
later, Yahoo! will hold its IPO at price of $13 per share. Yahoo!’s stock will
peak at $475 in January 2000, and fall to $8.02 in September 2001.
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