Developed by id Software in the early 90s and released in 1992, Wolfenstein 3D helped launch a genre that would influence generations of gamers and shape the modern world of video games – the first person shooter. Inspired by the Castle Wolfenstein series by Muse Software, the game was a…
Developed in 1992 at the University of Kansas, Lynx was a text based hypertext tool for use as part of a campus wide information server and as a Gopher browser. It was released to UseNet in July, and later added an internet interface the following year. Support for other protocols…
Gopher was developed in the early 1990s at the University of Minnesota, and is considered one of the predecessors to the modern web. One of the earliest protocols for searching and retrieving documents over the internet, it was the de-facto engine for online users prior to the rise of web…
Created by NewTek, the Video Toaster was a software and hardware based tool used for video editing and debuted on the Commodore Amiga 2000 PC in 1990 as an add-on card. It’s ability to work with standard definition video made it a revolutionary hit in television and film production, earning…
A U.S. Navy team had built some early code-breaking computers during World War II similar to the Colossus machine in Britain. After the war, the group formed Engineering Research Associates (ERA) to continue building computers for the military and commercial sectors. The first “Alpha” models initially funded by the U.S….
Radio Shack was founded in Boston by brothers Theodore and Milton Deutschmann in 1921. Aimed at the growing field of amateur/ham radio, they opened a storefront and mail order business and named it after the common nickname for the location of a ship’s radio equipment. The first catalog was published…
Introduced in 1959, the Xerox 914 was the first commercially available paper copier. This completely changed the document copying industry and was shown on national television in a live demo. So named because it could print originals up to 9×14, the 914 was so successful, the company that created it…
Electrophotography, or xerography, was Invented by Chester Carlson in 1938 using an originally cumbersome dry photocopying process. Awarded a patent in 1942, it was later renamed to xerography by the Haloid Photographic Company (later Xerox Corporation) who had agreed to jointly develop a commercial product with Carlson. The new name…
Printed circuit boards were originally invented in 1936 by Austrian engineer Paul Eisler while working on a radio set. The PCB as it later became known, would revolutionize electronic circuit design and assembly a few decades later. By World War II they were secret technology being used in proximity fuses…
The Automatically Programmed Tool (APT) programming language was invented at MIT’s legendary Servomechanisms Lab by Douglas T. Ross. The high level code was used to generate instructions for machine tools used in manufacturing. APT is used to calculate a path that a tool must follow to generate a desired form,…