Sunday, June 27, 2010

EDS

Ross Perot establishes Electronic Data Systems (EDS) on June 27, 1962 by incorporating the company in the state of Texas for $1,000. EDS signs an agreement to buy unused time on Southwestern Life Insurance’s IBM 7070 mainframe computer. Two months and 78 sales calls later, Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids, Iowa becomes EDS’ first customer.
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Tuesday, June 22, 2010

J.C.R. Licklider

"It seems reasonable to envision a 'thinking center' that will incorporate the functions of present-day libraries. With the anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval, the picture readily enlarges itself into a network of such centers, connected to one another and to individual users by wide-band communication lines." J.C.R. Licklider, 1960.
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Saturday, June 19, 2010

FCC

The Federal Communications Commission is created by U.S. Congress in June 1934. A month later, the FCC begins merging regulations from the Federal Radio Commission, the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Postmaster General into one agency. Today, the agency has extensive oversight of new communications technologies, such as satellite, microwave, and private radio communications.
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Saturday, June 12, 2010

Lee De Forest's vacuum tube

American inventor and physicist Lee De Forest develops the vacuum tube triode in 1906. The triode is a three terminal device that allows him to develop an amplifier for audio signals, making AM radio possible. The vacuum tube triode also helps push the development of computers forward as the tubes are used in several computer designs in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
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Tuesday, June 8, 2010

SETI@home

SETI@home is introduced to the public on June 8, 1998. SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Users participate by downloading and running a free software screen saver program that provides unused CPU cycles from their computers for the project. SETI@home is based in Berkeley, California.
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Sunday, June 6, 2010

Bill Gates

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates becomes the wealthiest person in the world in 1997. At the age of 41, William H. Gates III tops everyone with an estimated net worth of nearly forty billion dollars. His fantastic run begins with the development of a BASIC language interpreter for the Altair microcomputer in 1975.
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Saturday, June 5, 2010

The Osborne 1

The Osborne 1 is released in 1981 and is considered to be the first portable computer. The computer features a 5-inch display, 64K of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives. The twenty-four pound machine sells for $1,795 and comes with the CPM operating system, SuperCalc spreadsheet application and WordStar word processing application.
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Friday, June 4, 2010

Xerox

The Haloid Company is founded in 1906 to manufacture and sell photographic paper. Haloid acquires Chester Carlson's Xerography license in 1947 and sells the first xerographic copier in 1950. In 1958, the company changes its name to Haloid Xerox, and three years later, to Xerox Corporation.
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Thursday, June 3, 2010

Mobile telephone service

The first commercial mobile telephone service begins in June 1946. A driver in St. Louis, Missouri uses a handset from under his car's dashboard to place the world's first mobile telephone call. A team from Bell Labs works for more than a decade to develop the service. By 1948, mobile telephone service is available in almost 100 cities and 30,000 calls are being made each week.
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Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Biggest computer hacker

Gary McKinnon, described as the world's biggest computer hacker, is arrested in June 2005. The unemployed computer engineer is accused of causing $1 billion in damage by breaking into the most secure computers at the Pentagon and NASA. McKinnon allegedly breaks into the networks from his home computer to try to prove his theory that the United States is covering up the existence of UFO's.
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Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Open Directory Project

Rich Skrenta sets out in spring of 1998 to create the web's most comprehensive directory. By late June, there are 200 editors, 27,000 sites, and 2,000 categories on what is dubbed the "GnuHoo" directory. Netscape acquires GnuHoo in 1998 and subsequently renames it the Open Directory Project. Today, this directory is the largest directory on the web and is used by more than twenty major search engines.
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