Tech History Today – June 11, 2013

In 1959 – The first experimental hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell’s SRN-1 made its first trials at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

In 1978 – Texas Instruments introduced the Speak & Spell, the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. It used linear predictive coding to make a mathematical model of the human vocal tract and predict a speech sample.

In 1983 – IRM took its Japan Capsule Computer subsidiary and formed Capcom Company, Limited “for the purpose of selling software..”

In 1997 – Philippe Kahn took the first cameraphone photograph of his newborn daughter and then wirelessly transmitted the photo to more than 2,000 people around the world. He had hacked together a digital camera and a phone. Kahn went on to form the company LightSurf.

In 1998 – Compaq Computer paid $9.1 billion to acquire what remained of Digital Equipment Corporation, the company that had brought the world PDP and VAX.

Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

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