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Last IBM “Stretch” Computer Shut Down
September 5, 1980 The last IBM 7030 “Stretch” mainframe in active use is decommissioned at Brigham Young University. The first Stretch was was delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1961, giving the model almost 20 years of operational service. The Stretch was famous for many things, but perhaps most notably it was the first…
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Google Files for Incorporation
September 4, 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin file incorporation papers for Google in California. Filing on a Friday, the date of official incorporation would be marked as Monday, September 7th. Starting out as a privately held company, Google would hold their IPO about 6 years later on August 19, 2004. Previous post: First Commercial Hard Drive This Day in…
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eBay Founded
September 3, 1995 The online auction site, eBay, is launched as “AuctionWeb” by Pierre Omidyar. The first item sold, a broken laser pointer, wasn’t actually intended to sell, but rather to test the new site, itself started as a hobby. Surprised that the item sold for $ 14.83, Omidyar contacted the buyer to make sure he…
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First Search Engine
September 2, 1993 The world’s first primitive web search engine is started. Known as W3Catalog or the CUI WWW Catalog, it was started by Oscar Nierstrasz at the Centre Universitaire d’Informatique (CUI) of the University of Geneva. This search site lasted for about 3 years before more modernized search engines began appearing. I could not find an actual picture…
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Aldus – Adobe Merger Finalized
August 31, 2004 Aldus, the company that created PageMaker – considered the world’s first desktop publishing application – merges with Adobe, the company that created PostScript – which was the page description language powering many early laser printers. The combination of Pagemaker running on Apple’s Macintosh and printing to the Apple’s PostScript-powered LaserWriter sparked the desktop publishing revolution in the 1980′s. This Day…
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Aldus – Adobe Merger Finalized
August 31, 2004 Aldus, the company that created PageMaker – considered the world’s first desktop publishing application – merges with Adobe, the company that created PostScript – which was the page description language powering many early laser printers. The combination of Pagemaker running on Apple’s Macintosh and printing to the Apple’s PostScript-powered LaserWriter sparked the desktop publishing revolution in the 1980′s. This Day…
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First Building Block of the Internet
August 30, 1969 The first Interface Message Processor (IMP) is delivered to Leonard Kleinrock’s research group at UCLA. The IMP was the device that would interconnect networks between research facilities on the developing ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. As a packet-switching device, the IMP can be considered the first generation of what we now…
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Snow Leopard Released; The End of AppleTalk
August 28, 2009 Apple releases Mac OS X 10.6, “Snow Leopard” for their Macintosh computers. Snow Leopard was an important release as it was the first to drop support for PowerPC-based Macs and focus optimization for the Intel processor-based Macs. The networking protocol that Apple had used since the 1980′s, AppleTalk, was also discontinued in…
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World’s Largest Battery Backup
August 27, 2003 The city of Fairbanks, Alaska connected to what was at the time the world’s largest battery backup. Designed to help prevent serious blackouts that plagued the city every two to three years, the batteries could provide power to the city for a few minutes – enough time to start up the city’s…
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First Use of Tape Recorder in Radio
August 26, 1938 Radio station WQXR in New York City broadcasts a program using a tape recorder for the first time. The tape recorder used was the Phillips-Miller recording system, also known as Millertape, invented by James Arthur Miller. Previous post: The Birth of Linux This Day in Tech History