The IBM Roadrunner is a supercomputer built for the Los Alamos National Laboratory and is the world’s second fastest supercomputer and the first supercomputer to boast petaflop performance. A unique system built with off the shelf parts, it achieved 1.026 petaflops on May 25th, 2008. Costing $133 million, it’s also…
The da Vinci Surgical System was approved by the U.S. FDA in 2000 and was the product of development and research in the late 1980s by SRI International. In 1991 the National Institutes of Health provided funding and a prototype robotic surgical system was created. This caught the attention of…
Vista was the first desktop operating system by Microsoft since Windows XP in 2001. It was a radically different architecture from XP and introduced major new features and changes. Released worldwide Jan. 30th, 2007, it was panned by business and consumer users for a number of reasons including poor performance…
Windows 2000 was released by Microsoft February 17th, 2000 as the successor to Windows NT. It was used for desktop, notebooks and servers. It was initially released in four versions: Professional, Server, Advanced Server, and Datacenter Server. It is the final release to display the Windows NT designation. Originally called…
The Ruby programming language was conceived on Feb 24th, 1993 by Yukihiro Matsumoto. It combined Perl-like syntax with object oriented features. Matsumoto has often stated that he wanted a scripting language more powerful than Perl but more object-oriented than Python. Similar to other languages including Lisp, it’s written in C…
The IBM System/38 was part of the Future Systems Project at IBM, and was developed by Dr.Frank Soltis under the codename “Pacific”. It was released to the public in August, 1979 and featured one of the first relational database management systems using SQL, System R, also developed by the company….
Windows 7 is the latest version of the computer desktop operating system from Microsoft. Based on the previous release, Vista, it is intended to be an improved version after the disastrous results of the release of Vista which garnered many negative reviews. Although Vista introduced many new features, Windows 7…
Microsoft’s Exchange Server was born out of the company’s move from a Xenix based messaging system to a new client-server based application that delivered electronic mail, calendaring, contacts, and tasks. This was originally used internally as Exchange Server Beta 1, and by April of 1996, a large portion of the…
Originally conceived in Japan in 1986, the first PlayStation was the result of Nintendo trying to work with disc technology. With the invention of CD-ROMS in 1985 by Sony and Philips, Nintendo approached Sony to develop a cd-rom addon to the SNES. For the next few years the two companies…
Founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, all three having worked for PayPal at the time. Venture firm Sequoia Capital invested $11.5 million in 2005, helping fund the startup, who’s early headquarters was above a pizzeria in California. The domain name was registered in Feburary…