1926 – Sam Warner approved the sound-on-disc system created by Western Electric and created the Vitaphone company to develop the process to add sound to film.
1940 – Vladimir Zworykin and his team and RCA demonstrated the first electron microscope. It measured 10 feet high and weighed half a ton, achieving a magnification of 100,000X.
1951 – MIT “Whirlwind” Computer Seen on Television
MIT demonstrates its Whirlwind machine on Edward R. Murrow’s see it now television series. Project director Jay Forrester describes the computer as a “reliable operating system,” running 35 hours a week at 90-percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory that stores up to 2,048 16-digit words. The machine used 4,500 vacuum tubes and 14,800 diodes, taking up a total of 3,100 square feet.
1964 – The first AT&T picturephone transcontinental call was made between test displays at Disneyland and the New York World’s Fair.
1998 – Windows 98 is Plug and …. Whoa?
During the COMDEX Spring ’98 and Windows World shows in Chicago, a public demonstration of the soon-to-be released Windows 98 goes awry when Bill Gates’ assistant cause the operating system to crash after plugging in a scanner. Instead of showing the plug-and-play capabilities they were trying to demonstrate, a “Blue Screen of Death” is visible by the entire audience which immediately erupts in laughter. After several seconds, Bill Gates famously responded, “That must be why we’re not shipping Windows 98 yet.”
Ironically, the assistant, Chris Capossela, has moved up the executive ranks at Microsoft, recently being promoted to the position of Senior Vice President, Consumer Channels and Central Marketing Group. For Microsoft’s sake, hopefully he’ll present a much better marketing image then he did that fateful day!
2009 – Oracle Purchases Sun Microsystems
Oracle announces they have purchased Sun Microsystems in a $7.4 billion dollar deal. This includes stock at $9.50/ share. That would also be the acquisition of SPARC processors, Solaris OS, Java and MySQL, among other items. The deal would be finalized on January 27th 2010.
If you like this post kindly comment below and do share your response. Thanks for reading.
Comments
Post a Comment