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 […]

1996– Famous hacker Kevin Mitnick is indicted on 25 charges for a 2 and a half year hacking spree. Police believed Mitnick had stolen Millions of dollars in software from different corporations. Mitnick faced up to 200 years in prison if found guilty. He was first arrested on February 15th, 1995.  He was sentenced to […]

2006 – The book iWoz: from Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-founded Apple and had Fun Doing it. (**WHEW!**) came out. It was a book that was written to dispel some of the rumors and misconceptions on many different items. iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon at Amazon.com Red Hat […]

1989 – 4 years after resigning from Apple, Steve Jobs and his newest company NeXT finally release the NeXTstepOS. It is a Unix based system, with some aspects of BSD and using the Mach kernal. This is the OS that will eventually merge into Apple when Jobs comes back. 1990 – The NeXTstation is finally […]

1985 – After an interesting power struggle with John Sculley, Steve Jobs decides to throw in the towel and tenders his resignation at Apple. He announces at the Board meeting he and other low level employees will be starting a new company – NeXT. The next day, Jobs tells John Sculley that Bud Tribble, Dan’l Lewin, […]

2008– A letter was published from the creator of “Pull my Finger” iPhone application from Apple. The program was simple – you pull the finger and a sound was created (You can guess the sound). The letter read: We’ve reviewed your application Pull My Finger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility […]

August 28, 2008 – Psystar came on the scene earlier in the year with a machine that would contain Windows, Linux or Mac software. Of course, this has not been without controversy. Apple finally put together a lawsuit, but instead of Psystar accepting, they decided to countersue. The reason why: Anticompetitive Nature. The SCO Group […]

August 26, 2008 – Judge Neil Wake ruled: The Defendant – Jeffery Howell had willfully and intentionally destroyed evidence related to his peer-to-peer activities after being notified of pending legal action by the RIAA. Furthermore, since it was done in bad faith, it “therefore warrants appropriate sanctions. The RIAA went after Pamela and Jeffrey Howell […]

August 24, 2011 – Steve Jobs, unable to continue due to failing health, officially puts his resignation in to Apple. He asks for his successor to be Tim Cook, then COO of Apple. The Board of Directors agree and announce the changing of CEO. The official resignation letter read: To the Apple Board of Directors […]

August 20, 2008: When the 3G iPhone released, some people started complaining about the connection. Apple wasn’t saying anything. An independant company stated that the “Infineon” chip that helped control 3G was to blame for the issue. It was suspected that a software update would fix the problem.However the 2.0.2 software update didn’t really help with […]

On this day in 2009, the Day in Tech History started. I was running the show as “Week in Tech History”, then went to a daily format to increase listeners. The show has been running for over 1000 episodes, never missing a day. It is now entering into it’s 9th year. It’s a great day […]

Apple has always controlled it’s products – The Application store is no different. This might be a great case why. An application was put into the store – Called the $1000 app. It did cost $1000, which means after Apple’s 30%, the developer received $700 per purchase. The application simply showed a ruby.Apple took the […]

It was the day that will live in infamy. Apple on the verge of collapse. Steve Jobs in dire need. So he calls on the only person that can help – Bill Gates. Well, it didn’t happen that way. But in 1997, at MacWorld Expo, the two come together to announce a five year alliance. […]

The Apple Mighty Mouse was first released in 2005. It was the first mouse since Apple Lisa that had multi-button functionality. A $49 price tag made it a real addition to your machine.However, this mouse was not without controversy. Another company – Called “Man and Machine” – created a mouse for the medical field. It […]

Apple released a series of new items in 2000, including a new “button less” mouse, iMovie2 and the iMac DV series with the PowerPC G3 processor. But they also introduced the PowerMac G4 Cube – a 450 or 500 MHz computer with Velocity Engine – A Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) which operates concurrently with […]

No, this isn’t a case of the office and this is not how Michael Scott  (Steve Carell) leaves the show… In a case that was refered as “Black Wednesday”, CEO Michael Scott felt that there was a lot of redundancy. Therefore he decided to fire 40 employees, including half of the Apple II engineering team. […]

1991 – IBM’s Jim Cannavino met with John Sculley of Apple. They worked out a deal and signed a sharing agreement. It would allow Mac to integrate with IBM enterprise systems. It would also allow Apple to use the PowerPC with their RISC based Mac to work together.Power PC stands for Performance Optimization with Enhanced […]

1998 – Seiko introduces the world’s first wearable PC watch called the Ruputer. It was marketed under the OnHand PC name. The Ruputer had a 3.6 MHz processor and 2 MB of non-volitile storage. The 102×64 monochrome LCD could display data or play games. a joystick with six function buttons were on the Ruputer. This […]

2005 – Steve Jobs spoke in front of the masses at the WWDC announcing that Apple will switch their processors from PowerPC to Intel. He then showed off the Mac OS X running on aPentium 4 CPU. The reasoning was that PowerPC chips took too much power to run and also ran hotter than an […]

2014 – Rumors flew high on this one, so when it happened, many people were not surprised. Apple announced they were going to acquire Beats Music and Electronics in a $3 billion deal. As part of the acquisition, co-founders Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine would join Apple. Beats subscription service would continue to work as part […]

2001 – Apple released the Mac OS X Server, based on Rhapsody, which was a hybrid of NeXT OPENSTEP. The server ran file services, Macintosh Manager, Quicktime Streaming Server, WebObjects, NetBoot and more. Each new version of OS X Server then coincided with the desktop release name – Jaguar, Panther, Leopard, etc. “Built on Mac OS […]

2003-Apple launches the iTunes Store. iTunes has been around since 2001, but without option to get new music. Before the iTunes store, users would have to burn from CD or copy previously made MP3 files. The store sold 1 million songs within a week. Apple became the biggest music vendor in the US in 2008. […]

1984 – Apple introduces the Apple IIc, their answer to a portable machine. It weighed 7 1/2 lbs and featured a 1.023MHz CPU and 128 KB RAM. $1,295. The device device had a built-in floppy and peripheral expansion ports. This was a closed system – no expansion slots to plug in cards. It was deemed […]

1977 – Apple Computer shows off the Apple II home computer at the West Coast Computer Faire. The $1,298 Home machine featured a 6502 processor, 4kb RAM 16kb ROM and for the first time – A home computer with color graphics.  Apple II was the most recognizable home and school computers in the 80s and […]

1976– What a position Ronald Wayne was in. He was the 3rd co-founder of Apple Computer on April 1 with 10% share. However, after two weeks Wayne sells his share for $800 back to Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. The reason why was because if the company was to go under, he would be liable […]

1983 – John Sculley, who was president of PepsiCo at the time, decides to leave to become president and CEO of Apple Computer at request of Steve Jobs. Sculley’s campaign of “the Pepsi Challenge” was new thinking and helped Pepsi gain market share over Coca Cola. Steve Jobs wanted that passion so he could beat […]

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! 1988 – The Graphical User Interface (GUI) is what we use daily to open up email, our web browser and even those apps on your smartphone or tablet. With the first real GUI came the first copyright infringement for it as Apple sued both Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard for stealing features from Macintosh’s […]

1994 – Apple computer released a new line of MacIntosh computers in the Power Macintosh 6100. With a 60-66 MHz PowerPC 601 RISC processor – the first time Apple used this processor line – up to 32 MB of RAM, and options such as a composite and S-Video input/output, along with full 48 kHz 16-bit DAT […]

2000 – Apple concluded their iMac trade dress infringement against Daewoo and eMachines. The two companies made machines too similar to the iconic iMac look – the eMachines eOne computer and the Daewoo E-Power. Apple was granted an injunction for the two machines. Daewoo didn’t even get their unibody computer form out to the public. eMachines took […]

February 27, 1998: Apple Newton is discontinued[/caption] 1998 – After Steve Jobs takes the role of Acting CEO (After the firing of Gil Amelio) he decides to trim some of the product fat. In result, the Apple Newton – it’s attempt at a PDA – was officially discontinued after 5 years.  But not all was […]

Feb 21, 2001 – Apple released iMac Special Edition[/caption] 2001 – At Macworld Expo in Tokyo, Japan, Apple Computer introduced the iMac Special Edition. It would be available in Flower Power, Dalmatian Blue, or Graphite designs. This special edition would only be available for 1 year as chip technology was climbing fast. “iMac has evolved into an […]

2012 – Apple began the lawsuits in the US of Samsung made Galaxy Nexus citing patent violations back in April 15, 2011. This would span across the Nexus S, Epic 4G, Galaxy S 4G and Galaxy Tab. A lawsuit that has gone back and forth between the two companies. The patents in question were for data […]