1934 – The world’s first drive-in movie theater opened in Camden, New Jersey. Richard Hollingshead Jr. had developed the system by using a 1928 Kodak projector mounted on the hood of his car and aimed at a screen pinned to some trees.
1984 – Tetris is Born
Alexey Pajitnov first releases the game Tetris in the USSR. Tetris will become one of the most popular puzzle video games of all time. Originally programmed for a Soviet-built Elektronika 60 computer, the game was soon ported to the IBM PC, where it spread quickly throughout Moscow and the rest of the USSR. Eventually making its way to Hungry, from there the game was discovered and questionable attempts to license it for sale by various software companies were made. By 1989, half a dozen different companies claimed rights to create and distribute the Tetris software for home computers, game consoles, and handheld systems. Several highly complex and drawn out legal battles ensued in the following years to settle who had the rightful licenses and authority to sell the Tetris game in various formats and countries around the world. Ironically, Pajitnov himself was not able to make any money on Tetris for years because as an employee for the Soviet government, the soviet state ended up owning the rights. It was only when the rights reverted from the old Soviet government to Pajitnov and he moved to the US in 1996 that he was able to form a company and collect royalties. Then he went on to work for Microsoft … trading one oppressive regime for another it would seem!
1995 – Vatican Library to Be on the Web
The Los Angeles Times report on the merging of religion and technology in Vatican City, where Father Leonard Boyle was working to put the Vatican’s library on the World Wide Web – “bringing the computer to the Middle Ages and the Vatican library to the world.” Boyle computerized the library’s catalog and placed manuscripts and paintings on the website, which was in part funded by IBM. Today, thousands of manuscripts and incunabula have been digitized and are publicly available on the Vatican Library website. A number of other offerings are available, which include images and descriptions of the Vatican’s extensive numismatic collection that dates back to Roman times.
2005 – Apple Switches to Intel
Steve Jobs spoke in front of the masses at the WWDC announcing that Apple will switch their processors from PowerPC to Intel. He then showed off the Mac OS X running on aPentium 4 CPU. The reasoning was that PowerPC chips took too much power to run and also ran hotter that an Intel chip.
2009 – Palm Pre Released
Palm, Inc. releases the Palm Pre smartphone through Sprint in an attempt to regain marketshare, after their Treo line of smartphones is dwarfed by Apple’s iPhone. Featuring the Linux –based Palm webOS operating system, the pre receives some praise from technical reviewers, but due to poor marketing and the rapid pace in which Apple dominates the New World of smartphones, Palm’s series of phones and the webOS never really have a chance to gain a foothold. Within the course of one year, Palm is purchased by HP for $1.2 billion. One year later, after just 2 months of abysmal sales of their TouchPad tablets, HP halts production of all webOS-based devices. HP has announced they will release the source code for webOS under an open source license, but the future of this once-promising mobile operating system looks bleak.
2013 – The Guardian published another leak from Edward Snowden about the PRISM project used to gather data held by Google, Facebook, Apple and other US tech companies. The tech companies denied “back door access” to their systems.
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