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Polaroid Instant Camera Goes on Sale
November 28, 1948 Just in time for the Christmas shopping season, 57 units of the first commercial instant camera, the Polaroid Land Camera Model 95, go on sale at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston. Producing sepia toned photographs in about one minute, the Model 95 became a hit almost as quickly. Polaroid believed that 57 units would be…
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Microsoft Ships Internet Explorer 2.0
November 27, 1995 Nearly 6 months to the day after Bill Gates sent his Internet Tidal Wave memo recognizing the importance of the Internet, and only 3 months after releasing version 1.0, Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 2.0 for Windows 95 and Windows NT 3.5. IE 2.0 was still based on licensed code from Spyglass Mosaic, but was the…
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MP3 Patented in US
There is no official logo for MPEG Audio Layer III, otherwise known as MP3 November 26, 1996 United States Patent 5,579,430 is granted to the Fraunhofer Institut in Germany for a “digital encoding process”, the technology used in MEPG Audio Layer III, more commonly known as MP3. MP3 technology paved the way for the digital music…
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Roxio Acquires Napster Legacy
November 25, 2002 Digital media software company Roxio purchases the assets of the former Napster, including name, logo, domain name, technology portfolio, and other intellectual property. Napster was the peer-to-peer file sharing service that changed the music industry forever, facilitating the easy sharing of music, much to the chagrin of the established music industry. The…
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AOL Buys Netscape
November 24, 1998 AOL announces it will buy Netscape Communications in a stock-for-stock deal worth approximately $ 4.2 billion. At the time it was considered a move by AOL and Netscape to merge forces to better compete with Microsoft in the browser and Internet provider markets. However, Microsoft’s dominance in the personal computer market could…
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Windows 1.0 Ships
November 20, 1985 Two years after initially being announced, Microsoft finally ships the first version of Windows. Originally slated to be shipped in April of 1984, the long delay caused skeptics to began to accuse Windows of being “vaporware”. Due to the relatively high demands of then-current PC technology, Windows 1.0 was generally considered too…
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Amazon Ignites the Kindle
November 19, 2007 Amazon introduces their Kindle e-book reader. Where other companies had released e-book readers in previous years with limited success, the Kindle’s integration with Amazon’s industry leading book distribution system helped catapult the e-reader into the the mainstream consciousness. The Kindle sold out within five hours of its debut. Previous post: Nintendo Releases…
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Computer Mouse Patented
November 17, 1970 Douglas Engelbart receives US patent 3,541,541 for his ”X-Y Position Indicator For A Display System”, more commonly known as the computer mouse. Engelbart called his device a “mouse” because the cord looked like a tail. The mouse was first prototyped in 1964, wasn’t demoed until 1968, and was not included with a commercial computer…
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Ethernet is Born
Robert Metcalfe’s Original Ethernet Concept November 11, 1973 As invented by Robert Metcalfe and David Boggs, an Ethernet network functions for the first time. From it’s humble beginnings as a research project at Xerox PARC, Ethernet has developed into the de facto standard for business and home networking. Previous post: The Day the Music Was…
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A Firefox Rises Out of the Ashes
This was the original Firefox logo from 2004 November 9, 2004 The Mozilla Foundation releases version 1.0 of the Firefox web browser. Firefox is significant in Internet history because it represented the first serious alternative to the dominance of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer in several years. By many estimations, Internet Explorer had risen to over 90%…