Day in Tech History
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January 27, 2006: Western Union discontinued Telegram and Commercial Messaging services
2006– Founded in 1851, Western Union was responsible for getting the important messages from point A to B. Whether through telegram or commercial messaging, Western Union was synonymous with the service. But on January 27, 2006, that all ended.
January 26, 2006: Grand Theft Auto Lawsuit: Hot Coffee
2006 – Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was a game that changed perception of the industry. The grit and cruelty of the GTA franchise has not only brought controversy, its also brought the fans. One bit of controversy was the “Hot Coffee” minigame within ...
January 25, 1881: The Oriental Telephone Company
1881 – Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison establish the Oriental Telephone Company of New York and the Angle-Indian Telephone Company Ltd. These companies were licensed to sell telephones in other countries such as Greese, Turkey, India, Japan,
January 24, 1948: IBM Dedicated Poppa in New York City
1948 – At IBM world headquarters, IBM dedicated the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC). The machine – otherwise known as Poppa – was the first computer to combine electronic computation with stored instruction. The 13,
January 23, 1896: The First Public X-Rays
1896 – Although he was not the only person to be working on the technology and not the first X-ray, Wilhelm Roentgen gave the first public lecture and demonstration of his device. He photographed Dr. Albert von Kolliker’s hand at the Wurzburg Physical ...
January 22, 1998: Microsoft and US Department of Justice
1998 – Microsoft reached an agreement with the US Department of Justice regarding Internet Explorer on Windows 95. In the agreement, computer manufacturers could have the IE link removed. This was a small step in the antitrust suit against Microsoft an...
January 18, 1983: Franklin Ace 1200
1983 – During the CP/M Show, Franklin Electronic Publichers revealed the Franklin Ace 1200 computer. The main feature of this computer (like the other Franklin computers before) was the fact they copied Apple’s ROM and operating system code.
January 17, 2012: Jerry Yang Resignes from Yahoo!
2012 – Yahoo! had some turbulent times from 2007 when founder Jerry Yang was CEO. Of course the big debacle being the Microsoft bid, which took over 9 months to settle with Carl Icahn being a major instigator.
January 16, 1956: Semi-Automatic Ground Environment – SAGE Disclosed to Public
1956 – The U.S. Semi Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) was disclosed to the public. SAGE is a computer that connected hundreds of radar stations in the US and Canada as a one-stop monitoring of the sky. SAGE was commissioned and developed by MIT.
January 15, 1990: AT&T Reboots
1990 – AT&T suffers the oddest outage nationwide. A switch in New York crashed, then rebooted. This caused the other switches linked to the New York switch to also reboot. The cascade continued on until all 114 switches were rebooting on 6 second inter...