October 2

Podcast Episode

Day in Tech History: October 2nd

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SPECIAL

Eyebrow Day - Celebrate the birthday of Groucho Marx. Perhaps you can trim your eyebrows.

1836

Charles Darwin returns from his voyage on 'HMS Beagle'

1950

Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz is first published

1955

After eleven years of calculating and processing programs, the ENIAC was retired. Designers John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert had unveiled the machine in February 1946, showing off its 1,000-time improvement in speed over its contemporaries. The ENIAC ran at 5,000 operations a second with a system of plug boards, switches, and punch cards. It occupied 1,000 square feet of floor space.

1962

Johnny Carson starts his run as host of the Tonight Show

1986

Microsoft Works for Mac is shipped.

1991

The Apple/IBM alliance becomes official. Among the many agreements, Apple and IBM will create PowerPC-based machines and produce two companies, Taligent and Kaleida. The former a now-defunct company that worked on the now-defunct Pink, the latter a company that produces multimedia tools.

1996

The Electronic Freedom of Information Act Amendments are signed by U.S. President Bill Clinton.

1997

WorldCom Inc. topped British Telecommunications PLC multibillion-dollar bid for MCI Communications Corp. This move would instantly make WorldCom the #2 phone carrier under AT&T.

RAY OZZIE, IBM'S BRIGHTEST software star, is leaving Big Blue to start his own venture, Rythmix. Ozzie invented Lotus Notes, the software that led IBM to acquire Lotus Development in 1995 for $3.5 billion.

2005

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has filed 757 lawsuits against people for illegally sharing music online. Most are for those who used peer-to-peer file-sharing networks such as eDonkey and LimeWire to exchange music files. And 64 are against students at 17 different universities who used the peer-to-peer file sharing program called i2hub.

2006

Atari Inc. announced that it had sold off Shiny Entertainment to Foundation 9 Entertainment, which culminated in the completion of their strategic divesture.

2007

Microsoft purchases Jellyfish for $50 Million

Google opens an office in San Francisco.

Google has been ordered to pay 10,000 euros (about $14,000) for using the "m.gmail.com" domain for mobile search in Germany in violation of a court order in a trademark case. German venture capitalist Daniel Giersch runs an electronic postal delivery business that goes by the name G-mail, which is short for "Giersch mail." Google uses “Googlemail” in Germany.

2009

Pirate Bay's site was unavailable on Google, but the company said that was a mistake. The site was back up by the end of the day.