28 years ago, 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 […]
April 4, 1994. Ironically, 19 years to the day after Microsoft was formed, Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark create the Mosaic Communications Corporation, which will later be renamed Netscape Communications Corporation. Andreessen had developed the Mosaic web browser while working at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.
April 4, 1975. Microsoft is founded as a partnership between Bill Gates, age 19, and Paul Allen, age 22, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The company is founded to develop BASIC for the MITS Altair 8800. MITS is headquartered in Albuquerque so Gates and Allen move there from Boston to launch their company. Eventually they decide to move Microsoft to the […]
March 16, 1995 . The worlds first Wiki, WikiWikiWeb was created as Ward Cunningham invites people to add and edit content. A Wiki is a database that can be a community collaboration. Cunningham has said the inspiration for the name Wiki came from the Wiki Wiki Shuttle bus he learned of during a trip to Hawaii. Six years later, […]
35 years ago today, the first Internet domain symbolics.com is registered by Symbolics, a Massachusetts computer company. The rest is pretty much history.
On this day, 34 years ago Microsoft Corporation stock goes public at $21 per share. The stock, which eventually closed at $27.75 a share, peaked at $29.25 a share shortly after the opening. It is said that the rising value of Microsoft stock has made an estimated 4 billionaires and 12,000 millionaires of Microsoft employees.
144 years ago, Alexander Graham Bell makes the fateful call to his assistant, Mr. Watson, which is considered the first phone call in history: “Mr. Watson come here I want you.”
37 years ago. IBM introduces the IBM Personal Computer XT, which stands for eXtended Technology. For a price of $4,995(!) it features a Intel 8088 processor, a 10MB hard drive, eight expansion slots, serial port, 128 kB RAM, 40Kb ROM, a keyboard, and one double-sided 360kB floppy drive.
The prototype unit for the mega-rare console Nintendo PlayStation Super NES CD-ROM has now been sold at auction. The console was sold, with all auction costs, for $ 360,000, which is quite a lot lower than previously thought. It has previously been reported that the owners had been offered $ 1.2 million for the unit, […]
