Tech History

At 7:00 p.m. on August 20, 1911, a commercial telegram was sent by the telegraph operator at the Times, working on the seventeenth level of the newspaper’s headquarters in Times Square. The message made a westward journey from New York, and shortly afterwards, the very same operator received his transmitted message back, having arrived back…

Hewlett-Packard registered HP.com back in 1986 but did you know that it could so easily have been PH.com instead? This $40 Billion brand was incorporated this month (August 18th) back in 1947. You’ll have heard of HP for their printers because the HP LaserJet series launched in 1984 rapidly became the world’s most popular. But less well-known is that…

Steve Wozniak – business partner of Steve Jobs and co-founder of Apple – was born on August 11, 1950. Most people know that Apple went on to become one of the most valuable companies in the world and even though Steve the company way back in left in 1985, there are numerous other projects and…

By the mid-1990s, Apple was in dangerously bad shape. The company’s market share was dwindling, its product line was confused, and it was bleeding money. Their future looked bleak, and it needed a lifeline and they all knew it. Enter Microsoft, led by Bill Gates (the then-richest man in the world). On August 6, 1997,…

On July 17, 1821, Spain ceded Florida to the United States. From this State, almost exactly 148 years later (July 16 1969), the first men to land on the moon were launched into space from Cape Canaveral, as part of the Apollo 11 Space Program. If you were around at the time, you may even…

Computing was a lot more challenging before July 4th 1956 because that’s when MIT revolutionised their Whirlwind Computer … by introducing a keyboard ! Before that, interacting with computers was a laborious, time-consuming process. Programmers would offer instructions to these mammoth machines by the manual insertion of punched cards, an operation requiring meticulous accuracy. They…

Next week on June 28th 1965, ‘Early Bird’ (Intelsat I) was activated. It wasn’t just another satellite; it was the first commercial communications satellite to be nestled in a geosynchronous orbit. This is where it ‘parked’  at 22,236 miles above the equator in the line of the earth’s rotation, appearing stationary to observers on the ground.…

At midnight on June 18th, 1997, the DESCHALL Project bore fruit. The challenge had been to use ‘Brute Force’ to discover the meaning of a message which had been encrypted. Going through up to seven billion possibilities per second, the key was cracked after 96 days by thousands of computers running simultaneously. The message was…

On June 8th, 1978, a technological milestone was born, significantly shaping the future of computing because this was the day that marked the introduction of the Intel 8086, Intel’s inaugural 16-bit microprocessor. In the world of computing and microprocessors, the term “bit” signifies the basic units of data a processor can process simultaneously. Transitioning from…

On May 16th, 1960, a new kind of light existed that nobody had ever seen before. This kind of light has unique properties and doesn’t exist in nature and as far as we know, it had never existed anywhere in the universe since it began, 13.8 billion years ago. Theodore Maiman had successfully fired the…