Search Results for "october 3"

Today in Tech History – – October 20, 2018

1975 – Atari filed for a patent on the sit-down “cockpit” arcade cabinet, literally putting you inside the game. The game Hi-Way with the slogan “Hi Way — All It Needs Is Wheels”, was the first Atari game to use the cabinet. It was a first-person driver in which you had to dodge cars and– well– drive.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2FD243626

1984 – The Monterey Bay Aquarium opened in Monterey, California. It not only provided a world-class place to learn about sea life, but inspired millions of screensavers and wallpaper images.

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/about/our-history

2004 – Mark Shuttleworth sent out an email to Ubuntu developers announcing the first official release of the Linux-based operating system, Warty Warthog. Every six months since, a new version of Ubuntu comes out with a new alliterative animal-inspired name.

http://lwn.net/Articles/107267/

2016 – Nintendo released a video showing off the Nintendo Switch game console for the first time. It demonstrated the hybrid tablet nature of the console and showed off the Joy-Con controllers.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/nintendos-next-console-switch-is-a-consoletablet-hybrid/

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

Today in Tech History – – October 18, 2018

1922 – Six telecom companies joined to found the British Broadcasting Company in order to provide radio broadcasts in Britain. The private company was later replaced by the non-commercial British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927.

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/1920s.pdf

1954 – Texas Instruments announced the Regency TR-1, the first transistor radio, produced jointly with the Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates in Indianapolis. TI executive Vice President Pat Haggerty hoped the product would show what transistors could do and spur demand.

http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/company/history/timeline/semicon/1950/docs/54regency.htm

1985 – Nintendo introduced the Nintendo Entertainment System aka the NES at FAO Schwarz in New York. A little game called Super Mario Brothers was introduced on the same day. The NES was the North American version of the Famicom sold in Japan. It was test-marketed in New York and eventually conquered the continent, becoming an 8-bit classic.

http://news.cnet.com/Nintendos-NES-game-console-turns-20/2100-1043_3-5900089.html

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

Today in Tech History – – October 16, 2018

1843 – Sir William Rowan Hamilton finally hit on the idea of Quaternions, and needing a bit more space than his hand to jot it down, he carved it into the stone of Brougham Bridge in Dublin. Why do you care about quaternions? Because calculations involving three-dimensional rotations are essential for 3D computer graphics and computer vision. Video games people.

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Hamilton.html

1923 – Distributor M. J. Winkler, contracted to distribute the “Alice Comedies” marking the founding of the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio which eventually changed its name to the Walt Disney Company, at Roy’s suggestion. So don’t expect anything after this date to ever go out of copyright.

http://d23.disney.go.com/archives/a-history-of-the-walt-disney-company/

1959 – Control Data Corp. released its model 1604 computer, the first from William Norris’s group that left Sperry Rand Corp.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/October/16/

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

Today in Tech History – – October 14, 2018

1884 – US inventor George Eastman received a patent on his new paper-strip photographic film. It would reign for more than 100 years until digital stole its thunder.

http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2001/01-44.jsp

1977 – The Atari 2600 was released in North America, though it may have been available in Macy’s and Sears on September 11.

http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/happy-35th-atari-2600-175216071.html

1985 – The first official reference guide for the C++ programming language was published. It was written by the language’s creator, Bjarne Stroustrup.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/10/1014cplusplus-released/all/1

1996 – Matthias Ettrich posted about his new project Kool Desktop Environment, or KDE, attempting to create a GUI for the enduser of Linux.

https://www.kde.org/announcements/announcement.php

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

Today in Tech History – – October 8, 2018

1860 – Telegraph lines opened between Los Angeles and San Francisco. This allowed gold miners to tell backers farther south that they still hadn’t found any gold.

http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/chron5.html

1921 – KDKA radio in Pittsburgh conducted the first live broadcast of a football game from Forbes Field. The University of Pittsburgh beat West Virginia University.

http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2010/04/01/kdka-firsts/

2003 – To allow IT departments to prepare for critical updates, Microsoft conducted the first regularly scheduled Windows patch release. It became lovingly known as “Patch Tuesday”.

http://www.zdnet.com/celebrating-10-years-of-patch-tuesday-7000021664/

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

Today in Tech History – – October 4, 2018

1957 -The Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, becoming the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, and motivating the US to get into gear and heat up the space race.

http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/

1985 – Richard Stallman started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation, dedicated to promoting the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF among other things, enforces the copyleft requirements of the GNU General Public License often referred to as the GPL.

http://www.linkedin.com/company/free-software-foundation

2004 – SpaceShipOne returned from its third journey, a reusable spacecraft that could carry passengers beyond the earth’s atmosphere. It won the $10 million Ansari X prize for private spaceflight.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2010/10/october-4-2004-spaceshipone-wins-10-million-x-prize/

2016 – Google announced two phones, the Pixel and Pixel XL, the first phones designed from the ground up by Google. The company also introduced a Google Home voice-activated assistant along with several other products.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37551413

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

Today in Tech History – – October 2, 2018

1925 – John Logie Baird performed the first test of a working television system. It delivered a grayscale 30-line vertically scanned image, at five frames per second. After a ventriloquist’s dummy appeared on screen, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton became the first person televised in full tonal range.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/research/general/tvstory2

1955 – ENIAC was shut down for the last time. After 11 years running at 5,000 operations a second and taking up 1,000 square feet of floor space, it had earned its retirement.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/October/2/

1996 – US President Bill Clinton signed amendments to the Freedom of Information Act requiring the US government to make electronic documents available online.

http://www.justice.gov/oip/foia_updates/Vol_XVII_4/page2.htm

2015 – Google officially reorganized, merging with a new parent company called Alphabet. Subsidiaries included Google, Google Fiber, Calico and Life Sciences, Google Ventures and Google Capital, Nest, and Google X. Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Google while Larry Page became CEO of Alphabet and Sergey Brin became President of Alphabet.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000119312515336577/0001193125-15-336577-index.htm

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

Today in Tech History – – October 1, 2018

1958 – The National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics was officially absorbed by the brand new National Aeronautics and Space Agency. Another expanded government bureaucracy that was only good for putting people on the moon.

http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/nasa.html

1971 – The first clinical human CT scan was performed on a middle aged lady with a suspected frontal lobe tumor, at Atkinson Morley’s Hospital in South London.

https://www.birpublications.org/doi/pdf/10.1259/bjr/29444122

1982 – Sony started selling the first CD players to the public, the CDP-101 for 168,000 yen (that’s about $730 US). At the time you could get Billy Joel’s album 52nd street on CD– and soon many more.

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory/2-09.html

2003 – 4Chan launched its main page, intended as a sister-site to the Japanese 2Chan for discussions of manga and anime. They provided the fertile ground for the growth of lolcats, Rickrolling, Anonymous, Pedobear and more.

http://www.4chan.org/news?all#2

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

Today in Tech History – – August 30, 2018

1885 – Gottlieb Daimler received a patent for adding an internal combustion engine to a bicycle to make the first gasoline-driven motorcycle.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2011/08/0830daimler-first-true-motorcycle/

1907 – John Mauchly was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He would grow up to pioneer the design and construction of ENIAC along with Presper Eckert as well as contribute to the creation of BINAC and UNIVAC.

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Mauchly.html

1963 – A direct line of communication between the leaders of the USA and USSR, dubbed “The Hotline” began operation.

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/aug-30-1963-communications-hot-line-connects-soviet-and-u-s-heads-of-state/

1969 – BBN delivered the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) to the Network Measurements Center at UCLA. It was built from a Honeywell DDP 516 computer with 12K of memory, and would be used in October to make the first Internet connection with Stanford. Graduate students Vinton Cerf, Steve Crocker, Bill Naylor, Jon Postel, and Mike Wingfield were charged with installation.

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_arpanet.htm

1982 – A copyright was issued to 16-year-old V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai for a computer program he called “EMAIL,” short for “electronic mail.” While Ayyadurai may not be considered the inventor of email he definitely deserves credit for establishing the name.

http://allthingsd.com/20120904/email-turns-30/

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

Monthly Tech Views – October 2017

Untitled drawing (1)

Real tech stories. Really shaky analysis.

As we all enjoy our eighth straight meal consisting exclusively of fun-sized Snickers Bars, how about some fun-sized October tech stories offering the same nutritional and informational value?

Democracy Is One Thing…
Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar’s Omidyar Group listed six aspects of social media that threaten democracy, including the spread of false information, political manipulation, and hate speech. In addition, while not technically affecting democracy, they do emphasize that it would be super cool if you’d knock off the Stranger Things spoilers.

Sometimes The Counter Is Juuuuust Too Far Away
Amazon’s new Kindle Oasis e-reader is waterproof in up to two meters of water. This is a long-awaited feature because there will be a time when you are awkwardly adjusting your clothing with the Oasis pinned between your chin and chest, and it will inevitably slip loose, but nobody’s toilet is two meters deep.

Is That A Nose?
PornHub is using facial recognition AI to identify the actors in its videos. This is a formidable undertaking, because not only are there ten thousand faces to identify, but they are so seldom where you expect a face to be.

Proving Once Again That Podcasting Is A Guaranteed Road To Riches
Google acquired podcast app 60dB. The app launched just one year ago and was known primarily for airing the hit business podcast Get Rich In One Year With A Podcast App!

Zigging When You Expect Them To Zag
You know how after a company gets hacked, people say, “this is the best time to deal with them because their security is going to be crazy high right now”? Well Equifax refuses to bend to your stereotype. Marching to the beat of a different drum, the credit reporting agency went ahead and got hacked for the second time in five months (their plan was to march to the beat of their usual drum, but it too was hacked and now sounds like a xylophone).

Let’s Pump Up The Volume! Of Insulin! But Only As Needed And In A Safe Manner!
A new insulin pump can determine how much of the drug to deliver by using an algorithm in a smart phone app that accounts for meals, sleep, and activity. The key to the algorithm’s accuracy is in automatically reducing reported activity levels by 75% because we’re all big fat liars and often attach activity monitors to our pets. As an added measure, it also delivers a severe electrical shock when we report a cherry Pop-Tart as “fruit.”

It’s Just A Harmless Buzz, Like That Venti Latte Macciato
A study shows people are more productive with 70 decibels of ambient noise in a coffee shop, though the same noise level at work does not achieve the same results. And some insist that coffee shop, office, or Kenny G concert, any noise is too much noise and silence is the perfect concentration environment.

I am with the coffee shop crowd—I find some degree of ambient noise critical to my blueberry scone focus. I write many of these pumpkin spice Tech Views in a coffee shop. Because I am latte disciplined enough to not actively decaf listen in on conversations, I find that the background noise serves as that barista is hot; I’m going to ask her out… Are you kidding? Why would she go out with you?… What do you mean? Why wouldn’t she go out with me?… You answered your own question—she’s hot… I’ve been out with hot girls before… Name one… Janice Wilson–she’s hot… Dude, you “dated” her in junior high. Once. And she only went out with you because your parents were friends and her mom made her do it to keep her from going to the dance with my productivity in a positive way.

Once Again—We Are No Longer Accepting Applications
The new iOS app Nude will scan your camera roll and use machine learning to identify nude photos and move them to a PIN-protected vault inside the app. The creators feel the artificial intelligence will provide much quicker identification than the previously utilized “network of jealous spouses,” allowing speed settings ranging from 1940’s School Librarian to Kardashian.

There’s Fast, And Then There’s Fast
Hyperloop One is now Virgin Hyperloop One after a significant investment from Richard Branson. The additional funding will certainly be helpful, but executives also think the Virgin name will help distinguish themselves from Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, “the slutty non-Virgin Hyperloop that will let anyone have a ride.”

Who Is The Real Winner Here?
Microsoft’s Surface Precision Mouse provides different functions depending on whether you use Windows, MacOS, or Android. While Linux users get no navigational functionality at all, you can rig it so left clicking dispenses a tiny Pez candy.

Don’t Mess With Cupcakes
Google Maps tested a feature that would estimate the calories you would burn if you walked your searched route, said calories indicated by the international standard of measurement known as “mini cupcakes.” So if your trek would burn 330 calories, that was three mini cupcakes. They removed the feature after overwhelmingly negative response, predominantly from exhausted users who finished their trek and waited in vain for Google to show up with the tiny treats.

 

For more empty literary calories, you can check out this selection of my recent short Medium posts (two of which appear in the Slackjaw humor publication) where I tackle the hard news, like…

  1.  CBS turning their whole schedule into versions of Young Sheldon bit.ly/Sheldonized
  2. Cookie-scented bathroom air fresheners bit.ly/CookieHell
  3.  Missing Stranger Things by being forced to walk in the park bit.ly/BingeBlocked

 

And remember, a diet of all Snickers isn’t good for you. Mix in a KitKat.

 

Mike Range
@MovieLeagueMike

 

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Monthly Tech Views by Mike Range is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.