Apple stores

Apple Computer opens its first retail computer store in a shopping mall in McLean, Virginia in May 2001. Within five years, Apple opens more than 150 stores in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and Canada. The unique design of the stores coupled with Apple's highly acclaimed products gives Apple an unlikely retail success story.
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Compute

The origin of the word "compute" dates back to the French language of the early 1600s. The French derived the word from the Latin phrase "computare," meaning to count or sum up. The term "computer" came into use in the English language in 1646 as a word for a "person who computes."
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Java

The Stealth Project gets underway in January 1991 at Sun Microsystems with the goal of developing "smart" consumer electronic devices. After a couple of years of moderate success, the project's programming language is renamed Java and its focus is redirected toward the emerging World Wide Web. Commercial introduction of Java in 1995 marks a new era in the history of the web.
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Cookies

A "cookie" is a packet of data that travels between a web browser and a web server. The data is used to customize a user's website experience. The term comes from Lou Montulli, a programmer who is well known for his work in producing web browsers. Lou adapted the phrase from "magic cookie," which in the UNIX world is a token or short packet of data passed between communicating programs.
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Amazon.com

Amazon.com records its first profitable quarter in January 2002. Beginning with online book sales in 1996 and expanding into general merchandise a few years later, the company reports a net income of $5 million on sales of $1.2 billion. The profit announcement is well ahead of Wall Street analysts' expectations and is attributable to growth in international sales and company cost cutting.
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Netscape

Hoping to reverse a market slide, Netscape announces in January 1998 that its web browser will thereafter be free. They also announce that the development of the browser will move to an open-source process. Later in 1998, AOL purchases Netscape with a $4.5 billion stock transaction. The longer than expected merger process slows down new browser releases and Netscape never recaptures its momentum.
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Y2K

Paul Gillin makes the first printed reference to the Y2K problem in Computerworld magazine in February 1984. The belief is that the use of the last two digits of a year value by old computer programs will lead to worldwide disruptions on January 1, 2000. From 1993 to 1999, governments and businesses worldwide spend somewhere between $300 billion and $900 billion fixing Y2K bugs.
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