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The First Electric Christmas Tree Lights
December 22, 1882 Edward Johnson, an associate of Thomas Edison, has walnut-sized bulbs made specifically for him to wire his Christmas Tree with electric light. The 80 red, white, and blue bulbs formed the first set of electric Christmas Tree lights in history. Prior to this, people would traditionally decorate their trees with wax candles.…
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Snow White Premieres
December 21, 1937 Walt Disney premiers the animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It was the first full-length animated feature film taking 3 years and nearly $ 1.5 million to produce, a massive amount for a feature film in 1937. Walt Disney had to mortgage his house to help finance the film. Snow…
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Apple Announces Purchase of NeXT
December 20, 1996 In a surprise move at the time, Apple Computer Inc. announces their intention to purchase Steve Jobs’ company, NeXT, and bring Steve Jobs on board as an advisor to CEO Gil Amelio. The purchase was completed on February 4th of the next year and brought with it the core technology that formed…
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Altair 8800 Goes on Sale; Inspires PC Era
December 19, 1974 Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, otherwise known as MITS, begins selling the Altair 8800 microcomputer kit. As the base computer used toggle switches for input and LEDs for output, it was far from a personal computer as we know it today. However, it is one of the most important computers in history,…
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The Internet Goes Hollywood
December 18, 1998 The Warner Brothers motion picture You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, is released to theaters. While mostly known as a romantic comedy, the film was chock-full of technology symbolism. Primarily I find interesting that the movie’s themes of business and technology was foreshadowing larger charges to come. Starting with the…
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Wright Brothers First Powered Flight
December 17, 1903 Orville and Wilbur Wright make their famous first controlled and sustained flights with a heavier than air, powered aircraft. Orville made the very first flight which lasted about 12 seconds. Three more flights were made that day by both brothers, with the most successful being the fourth and final flight in which Wilbur flew…
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Canning Spam
December 16, 2003 The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 is signed into United States law. Passed in an attempt to control the growing deluge of junk e-mail, the law’s effectiveness is dubious at best, especially considering political spam is exempt from the law. Canning Spam is original content of This Day in Tech History. This Day in…
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AltaVista Launches
December 15, 1995 Developed by researchers at Digital Equipment Research Laboratories, the AltaVista search engine is launched. It was the first world wide web search service to gain significant popularity. One of the most popular search engines in the early world wide web, Google didn’t overtake AltaVista until 2001. AltaVista was eventually purchased by Yahoo!…
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The First Transpacific Telegraph Cable
December 14, 1902 The cable ship Silvertown begins laying the first Transpacific telegraph cable from San Francisco, destined for Honolulu, Hawaii. After laying 2,227 nautical miles of cable, the Silvertown will land in Honolulu on January 1, 1903. Public messages will begin transmitting on January 5. The First Transpacific Telegraph Cable is original content of…
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Relay I Launched
December 13, 1962 NASA launches the active repeater communication satellite Relay I from Cape Canaveral. One of the earliest communication satellites to be launched, Relay I’s mission was primarily experimental, but it nonetheless was used for some notable events. On November 22, 1963 Relay I was the first satellite to broadcast television from the United…