1845 – Today, we’re travelling to the Geek side of things. It’s not everyday that I get to talk about my other passion – Music. The Euphonium – often mistaken for a Tuba – was created. It was also coined in later years as “P.T. Barnums’ Euphonium. The word itself comes from the Greek word Euphonos – or Sweet voiced.

The Euphonium is pitched in concert  B♭. Although a 3 valve instrument, professional Euphoniums have a 4th valve for compensation.

• Microsoft releases Excel 5.0
• Security- Enhanced Linux (SELinux) is released
• Electronic Arts (EA) removes the DRM from the game Spore

2000 – President Bill Clinton signs the Child Internet Protection Act into law. The law is implemented to set rules for the web to expose them to pornography and sexual content. In 2003 the law will be challenged, but will be upheld.

COPA required websites with “material harmful to minors”  to restrict their sites access with proof of age. “Material harmful to minors” was defined as material.  This included sexual acts or nudity.

• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs becomes the first Full length Animated feature
• Quake II becomes Open Source
• Python 2.2 is released

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 Steve Jobs. Of course, Jobs did not become CEO of Apple again – he reported to current CEO Dr. Gilbert F. Amelio.

NeXTstep OS would ultimately become Mac OS X.

• IBM 7040 and 7044 released
• CIS wins $1 Billion from Spammers
• Warner pulls music from YouTube

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1974 – Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) puts out the first ever “Do it yourself” Altair 8800. You would get it through Popular Mechanics Magazine, then assemble it yourself. This is a turning point in home computer setup. The price for an Altair 8800 kit – $397 – and it included Microsoft Altair BASIC.

• Samuel Clemens patents suspenders

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1926 – The term “Photon” is coined. Of course a photon is the basic “unit” of light and all other forms of electromagnetic radiation. Newton Lewis is the one who coins the term.

• HTML 4.0 is published
• .au goes back to auDA
• Dan Hesse becomes CEO of Sprint.

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1989 – The first full episode of the Simpsons airs on FOX TV network. 21 years and 1 movie later, the show still continues on strong. The cast stayed pretty much the same since 89. The Simpsons started on FOX as an animated short on the Tracy Ullman Show. It was on that show for 3 seasons when it was moved to their own prime time spot. The Simpsons is one of the longest running sitcoms and even has their own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

• PureBasic v.2.0 is released
• Sam Sethi puts Blognation up for auction
• Yahoo shuts down Jumpcut

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1994 – Although its only been in mainstream news for a couple years, the Large Hadron Collider has actually been around for many years now. On this day, for example,

• Kevin Mitnick charged with stealing $1 million from DEC
• The Transistor is first demonstrated to a small audience
• The Pepper Pad is released
• Steve Jobs and Apple back out of

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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, CA.

The original name was altavista.digital.com and used a multi-threaded crawler (Scooter). The back-end was running on advanced hardware, therefore it could gather information faster than any other web crawling software out there.

AltaVista was one of the top search engines out there until Google overtook them all. Ultimately, in 2003 AltaVista was purchased by Yahoo! who continued to run it until 2013 when it was shut down.

1983 – There is some debate whether this happened on Dec. 15h or 31st. If you were a citizen of Twin Falls, Idaho and up at 1 AM watching

• ISO C90 is released
• Fortran 95 is released
• Twitter rival

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1994 – The World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) held its first meeting at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Albert Vezza and HTML and other formats.

• Delta rolls out WiFi on flights
• Microsoft releases Windows NT 4.0 SP2
• Edward R. Murrow features the Whirlwind computer on See It Now

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1982 – After a decent success of the Atari 400/800 line the company noticed the console was looking a little “old”. After all, the Atari 400 actually discolors upon UV light. The 400’s non-tactile keyboard was replaced with the 800’s raised key keyboard. Still, Atari felt they needed to bring this personal computer into the 80’s.Therefore, the 1200XL was born. It was a hybrid computer – using what they called “Sweet 16” – a byte language developed by Steve Wozniak.  It was to manipulate 16-bit pointer data from an 8-bit system.

The Atari 1200XL also featured 64 KB of RAM and a redesigned cable port and keyboard layout. Unfortunately the community felt the 1200XL was poorly designed for certain ports were in the wrong place. There was also a color enhancement feature that couldn’t be used because it wasn’t connected to the monitor port.

The Atari 1200XL was $599.99

• Charles Dickens publishes A Christmas Carol
• Cyrix files lawsuits over others who were using their patented technologies
• Symantec licenses Java from Sun Microsystems.