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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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Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar Released
August 23, 2002 Apple releases Mac OS X 10.2, code-named Jaguar. For the first time, the “Happy Mac” icon is not part of a Mac operating system’s startup process, replaced instead by the gray Apple logo that is still in use today. Jaguar was also the first Mac operating system where Apple publicly used the…
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Palm Pre Released
June 6, 2009 Palm, Inc. releases the Palm Pre smartphone through Sprint in an attempt to regain marketshare, after their Treo line of smartphones is dwarfed by Apple’s iPhone. Featuring the Linux-based Palm webOS operating system, the Pre receives some praise from technical reviewers, but due to poor marketing and the rapid pace in which…
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Windows 3.1 Released
April 6, 1992 Microsoft releases Windows 3.1, priced at $ 149.00, selling three million copies over the next two months. Windows 3.1 added multimedia extensions allowing support for sound cards, MIDI, and CD Audio, Super VGA (800 x 600) monitors, and increased the speed of modem it would support to 9600 bps. For many of us that…
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Windows 2.0 Released
December 9, 1987 Microsoft releases version 2.0 of Windows. The most notable feature of Windows 2.0 was that application windows could overlap each other, unlike in Windows 1.0. The terminology of “Minimize” and “Maximize” was also introduced in Windows 2.0. Windows 2.0 was a relatively obscure operating system, as the popularity of Windows did not…
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Windows XP Released
October 25, 2001 Microsoft releases the operating system Windows XP, the successor to both Windows 2000 and Windows ME. Designed to unify the Windows NT line and Windows 95 line of operating systems, Windows XP was not replaced by Microsoft until January 2007 with Windows Vista. However, with a nearly six-year run and the public debacle…
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VisiCalc Officially Released
October 19, 1979 According to Dan Bricklin, the first “real” release of VisiCalc was completed and packaged for shipment. VisiCalc was the first commercially available spreadsheet software and quickly became the first “killer app” of the personal computer market. Previous post: NES Hits North America This Day in Tech History
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CDC 1604 Released
October 16, 1959 Control Data Corporation (CDC) releases their CDC 1604 computer, the world’s fastest computer at the time and the first commercially successful fully-transistorized computer. The 1604 was CDC’s first computer, primarily designed by engineer Seymour Cray, who would later go on to found Cray Research and be called the “father of the supercomputer”.…
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NeXTSTEP OS Released
September 18, 1989 NeXT Computer releases version 1.0 of NeXTSTEP, an object-oriented, multitasking operating system. Originally designed to run on NeXT’s brand of computers, it was later ported to other architectures such as the Intel x86. Often considered years ahead of its time, NeXTSTEP brought to market many advanced features that were not seen together in…
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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…