Day in Tech History Podcast - Apple History

1984 – Apple announced they would split up the Cupertino based company into three divisions – Apple II (handling all Apple III computers as well), the Apple 32 division (Lisa, and new Macintosh line of computers) and Accessory Products (Printers, keyboards, etc). Delbert Yocam led the Apple II group which Steve Jobs would take care of […]

1998 – Microsoft reached an agreement with the US Department of Justice regarding Internet Explorer on Windows 95. In the agreement, computer manufacturers could have the IE link removed. This was a small step in the antitrust suit against Microsoft and using bundled software and drive out competition. The Microsoft antitrust trial would begin on May […]

1885 – Sounding like anything but a roller coaster, the Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway was the first American designed amusement coaster designed by LaMarcus Adna Thompson. Only 5 cents to ride, the Switchback was a simple coaster that took you about 600 feet to the next tower at six miles per hour. It had a height of […]

Happy Birthday to me. 1983 – at an introductory price of $9995, Apple introduces the Lisa computer – the first computer with a GUI (Graphical User Interface). The computer featured a 5 MHz 68000 microprocessor, 1 MB RAM, 12″ monochrome monitor, dual 5.25″ 860 KB floppy drives, a 5 MB hard drive and more. Lisa […]

1966 – Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson entered our lives via ABC on Wednesdays. The television series “Batman” debuted with the episode Hi Diddle Riddle. Each half hour episode contained either part 1 or part 2 of the dynamic duo’s fight against the criminal of the week. Get Batman: The Complete Television Series (Limited Edition) [Blu-ray] […]

At MacWorld 2001, Steve Jobs announced Mac OSX – the base OS for Apple for the next couple decades. With Darwin, an open source BSD Unix service, 2D (Quartz), 3D (OpenGL) and Quicktime (QT5). The programming language of Classic, Carbon and Cocoa allowed programs from OS9 to run. Cocoa is an object oriented API for […]

1984 – Richard Stallman quit his job at MIT to begin the writing of GNU software. GNU – a recursive acronym for “Not Unix” and reference to the song “the Gnu” – is an operating system that is compatible with Unix software. Stallman wanted to bring a free software operating system for the masses to use […]

1977 – Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak officially incorporate the Apple Computer Corporation. Mike Makkula jr. invests $250,000 in venture capital and becomes the first chairman of Apple. They also decided to move operations of the company outside of Steve Jobs parent’s garage and rent a building in Coupertino. This was so they could improve production of the […]

2007 – With iTunes just signing a deal with FOX and their content for iTunes, stocks pushed upward to $200 a share. It was the first time Apple hit that barrier, and promptly dropped after. The company has been up and down, and in mid-2008 were at only $90 a share. However, after March 6th, […]

1996 – Steve Jobs started Apple. When he left Apple, he started NeXT. When Apple started to fall, Steve Jobs came back. Of course, having 2 computer companies is not a good idea – So why not buy it out?That is what Apple did. In a $400 Million deal, they got a new OS and […]

1995 – At the turn of the Internet age, researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation, led by Paul Flaherty, Louis Monier and Michael Burrows, created a web crawler and indexer algorithm. The web program was launched on December 15th and called “AltaVista”. The name was chosen because of the surrounds of their company in Palo Alto, […]

1980 – Apple Computer goes up for their Initial Public Offering and makes a statement in the market. Using the symbol “FidoNet #1 Hard drive failure Gawker.com is hacked and full email, password information was up on the Pirate Bay

1991 – What was first a Multimedia add-on for System 6, Quicktime has spent 21 years being Apples’ proprietary player. The original version contained graphics, animation and Video codecs – What was refered to as “Road Pizza”. Since then Quicktime had developed on both Mac and Windows sides (starting in 1992). The current version is […]

1983 – Windows 1.o was announced at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in New York City. It was one of the most elaborate product introductions to date. Gates says Windows 1.0 will officially release in 1984, yet it didn’t release until June, 1985. 1986 – Back in that day, Comdex was the big computer show. There […]

2011 – Steve Jobs by Walter Issacson was released on Kindle and iBookstore, with a full release at Midnight. The book was planned to be released a lot later. However due to Job’s health, they pushed it up as much as possible. 2001– Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod. Little did we know what that […]

1988– Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, California. Steve Jobs shows off the NeXT Computer featuring the Motorola 68030 microprocessor at 25 MHz. The computer introduces several new features including optical storage disk, voice recognition, and object-oriented languages. The system came with the NeXT STep operating system and cost $6,500. NeXT computer sold around 50,000 […]

1991– The second lawsuit of Apple vs. Apple was settled: Apple computers vs. Apple records (the Beatles label). The suit was about producing music. Of course there was a fine line between the lawsuit – after all Apple Computers is in the computer business and Apple Records was in the music making business. Nonetheless, the […]

1997 – Gil Amelio just was just removed as CEO of Apple. People were calling for Steve Jobs to return, but others thought that would be a bad investment. At a Garner Symposium, Michael Dell was asked what he would do with Apple. He came back in saying: “I’d shut it down and give the […]

2011– Steve Jobs passes away in his home at 3 pm Pacific. He went into respritory failure due to the pancreatic cancer he was fighting for over 10 years. Twitter exploded with over 10,000 tweets per second on this event (Osama Bin Laden death was 5,000). Vigils were held in his memory and Cupertino office […]

2001– With one version of the Apple OS X under it’s belt, “Puma” – or OS X 10.1 is released to the public. Updates would include extended DVD support and the ability to burn DVD – RW. There were still a lot of people against this new version of software. A lot of Mac users […]