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  • Posted Aug. 30, 2013, 10:19 a.m. - 10 years, 7 months ago

Events in Computing History – September

September 2nd


Year: 2008

Event: The first initial release of Google chrome web browser.

Interesting Facts:

  • Although it was released after Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, Chrome is the most used web browser in the world, taking 39% of the market for usage.
  • Google Chrome is the only web browser with a built in language translator and able to convert up to 53 different languages.

Before chrome was released the chairman of Google (Eric Schmidt) was against the idea of a web browser as he considered the company too small to compete with the likes of Internet Explorer and Firefox and the idea was suspended for 6 years.

September 3rd


Year: 1995

Event: The multi-billion dollar business eBay Inc. auction website was founded.

Interesting Facts:

  • eBay was created by Pierre Omidyar who built the site as a hobby and was originally called “Auction Web”, he had no idea how big the idea was at the time.
  • The first ever product he sold on Auction Web was a broken laser pointer which he couldn’t understand why anyone would buy it, so he contacted the buyer asking why he bought it, the buyer replied saying he was a collector of laser pointers. Pierre then realised that people were buying all sorts of items and the growth of the business escalated rapidly from there.

 

September 4th

 

Year: 1998

Event: Google Inc. was founded Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Menlo Park, California.

Interesting Facts:

  • The first idea of Google was to have it to organise the world’s information and make it easily accessible and useful, having no idea how rapidly the company would grow to one of the biggest companies in the world.
  • Before the name Google, PageRank was used as it would sort and analyse the relationships between websites. Then it became Backrub as it would check backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.
  • The Name Google then came from an intended misspelling of “googol” with is the largest number known, which is a 1 followed by a hundred zeroes.
  • The company was run from a friends garage in Menlo Park.

 

 

September 7th

 

Year: 1912

Event: David Packard was born, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard Company (HP)

Interesting Facts:

  • David Packard and William Hewlett first meet at Stanford University while both studying electrical engineering.
  • When David and William thought of the idea of the company, they flipped a coin to see whose name to use first, so it turned out Hewlett-Packard was used.
  • The two started the company from Packard’s garage.

 

September 7th

Year: 2011

Event: The multi-billion dollar computer hardware company Seagate released the world’s first external 4 Terabyte hard disk drive.

Interesting Facts:

  • Seagate was first formed in 1979 as was known as Shugart Technology
  • 1 terabyte is the equivalent to 1 trillion bytes
  • The first ever hard disk drive (HDD) was introduced in 1956 and was the size of two refrigerators.

 

September 9th


Year: 1941
Event: Dennis Ritchie was born, an American computer scientist who created the C programming computer language and the Unix operating system.
Interesting Facts:

  • C programming language is the most used programming language of all time, it is what a computers architecture and operating systems including windows and OS X are based on.
  • Many other programming languages including Java, JavaScript, Perl and PHP were all based on the success of Dennis’ C programming language and use his language as the base architecture.
  • Ritchie sadly died on October 12th 2011, but didn’t receive much media attention because of the death of Steve Jobs a week earlier.

 

September 11th

 

Year: 1939

Event: The birth of Charles Geschke a computer scientist who is the co-founder of Adobe Systems.

Interesting Facts:

  • Adobe was initial designed for Apple computers which displayed documents to then be edited or printed. Later on Adobe and Apple had a disagreement and Adobe stopped certain programs from being compatible for the Apple computers operating systems, and still today Apple Mac computers are unable to run Adobe Flash files.
  • On May 26th 1992 Charles Geschke was kidnapped at gunpoint from the Adobe car park and was held for 4 days before rescued by the FBI.

 

September 13th

 

Year: 1952

Event: Mark Davis was born, co-founder of Unicode a computer industry standard for the consistent encoding.

Interesting Facts:

  • Mark Davis along with his Unicode business partner Lee Collins both worked for Apple before leaving to make their own company.

 

September 14th

 

Year: 2000

Event: The Microsoft Disk Operating System (MS-DOS) discontinued

Interesting Facts:

  • MS-DOS was originally named 86-DOS as it was made for x86 based computers, but it wasn’t made by Microsoft, it was written by Tim Paterson and Microsoft bought the operating system for $75,000 because it was the only system that ran on the Intel 8086 processor which was brand new at the time in 1978.
  • Microsoft hired Tim Paterson to work on improving the 86-DOS, then this is when Microsoft changed it to MS-DOS.

 

September 14th

 

Year: 2000

Event: Windows Millennium Edition or Windows ME was released.

Interesting Facts:

  • When Windows ME released it was the end of MS-DOS when was discontinued the same day.
  • Windows ME was the last of the Windows 9x operating systems, older versions were MS-DOS, Windows 95 and 98.
  • Windows ME came with its own digital media such as the familiar Windows Media Player, DVD Player and Movie Maker.

 

 

September 15th

 

Year: 1939

Event: James Kimsey better known as Jim was born, founder of America Online (AOL).

Interesting Facts:

  • Jim Kimsey was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army and served for his country in the Dominican Republic and the Vietnam War. Jim served two combat tours as an Airborne Ranger in the Vietnam War and earned various awards for his service and went down in the hall of fame for most extraordinary Ranger in the USA.
  • AOL started out as a short-lived Control Video Corporation which hosted an online service for computer games machines such as the Atari 2600, Commodore 64 and Quantum Link games consoles.

 

September 18th

 

Year: 1989

Event: The operating system NeXTSTEP was released

Interesting Facts:

  • NeXTSTEP was actually based on the Unix operating system and was very similar in appearance it also ran off the same C programming language.
  • NeXTSTEP made writing C programming languages far easier than any of the other operating systems even better than the rival Unix even though the creator of Unix created C programming.
  • The current Apple OS X operating system used today is based on NeXTSTEP as it was known as such a good system for its time and was often pointed to as a paragon of computer development even a decade later.

 

September 23rd

Year: 2002

Event: The web browser Mozilla Firefox was released.

Interesting Facts:

  • Firefox currently has around 21% of the worldwide usage share of the entire web browsers just behind Google Chrome and Internet Explorer.
  • Firefox counts for over 450 million users around the world, and is partially popular in Indonesia, Germany and Poland with 57%, 45% and 44% of the total market in those countries.
  • The browser was originally named Phoenix when Mozilla first started the project, it had to be renamed because of trademark issues with the company Phoenix Technologies.
  • It also was called Firebird, by the company came across trademark issues again after there was a database software company under the same name.
  • Firefox is received awards and recognition for being the safest and best security web browser available.

 

 

September 23rd

 

Year: 2008

Event: Google’s Android operating system for mobile phones and tablets was released.

Interesting Facts:

  • The company first developed the operating system idea for the use of smart digital cameras but realised the digital camera industry was failing, so they diverted their efforts to making a smartphone operating system to rival Symbian and Windows mobile. Apple iOS wasn’t released at the time.
  • After the smartphone market domination by Apple, Google Android teamed up with many various mobile phone companies including Samsung which now hold the largest number of sales in the world with a huge contribution by Asia taking a whopping 64% of the market.
  • As of this year over 900 million android devices have been activated around the world and 48 billion apps have been installed.

 

September 26th

 

Year: 1954

Event: Larry Wall was born, a computer programmer who created the Perl programming language.

Interesting Facts:

  • Larry first created Perl while working as a programmer for Unisys in 1987, the programming language was later discovered as a huge success and it expanded rapidly over the years.
  • Perl had an unofficial symbol made for it by O’Reilly Media which featured a picture of a camel. It has occasionally been used by Perl and also by hacking groups.

 

September 27th

 

Year: 1930

Event: The American engineer, entrepreneur and business executive Alan Shugart was born, founder of Shugart Technology.

Interesting Facts:

  • Shugart changed the world by inventing disk storage products. He and his team were the first to invent the floppy disk drive.
  • Shugart Technology was recognised around the world and the company was bought out by a firm called Xerox in 1979 and renamed the company Seagate and appointed Shugart as the Chief Executive.

 

September 28th

 

Year: 1925

Event: The Birth of Seymour Cray, an electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed the fastest computer in the world and held the title for two decades.

Interesting Facts:

  • Seymour was given the title as “the father of supercomputing” for his outstanding research into developing a computer so advanced for its time.
  • Seymour’s father was a civil engineer and fostered his interest in science and engineering. At just ten years old Seymour started building devices out of Erector Set components making punched paper into Morse code signals.

 

September 30th

 

Year: 1977

Event: The world’s first Apple computer, the Apple I was discontinued just 17 months after its release.

Interesting Facts:

  • Each Apple I computer was designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple.
  • Steve Wozniak and close friend Steve Jobs had to sell their possessions to fund the project.
  • The computer first went on sale in July 1976 for $666.66 US dollars because Steve Wozniak liked repeating numbers.

 

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