A lot has changed in the past 15 years. Ultra-thin TVs that hang on the wall have replaced bulky tube and rear-projection TVs. DVD and CD players have become quaint relics of the early days of digital. The list goes on…
You have to go back 117 years to find the origins of the jukebox. But that early machine (left) is nothing at all like the iconic Wurlitzer 1015 jukebox from 1946 (right) or the ’60’s-era Zodiak (middle).” The primitive contraption wasn’t even called a jukebox…
Thirty-four years ago this week, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs asks McIntosh Labs for rights to use “Macintosh” as the brand name of a computer it was developing, a year after settling a trademark infringement suit brought by The Beatles’ holding company Apple Corps.
Google introduced its Android mobile platform nine years ago this month, which set the stage for the 2008 launch of world’s first Android-based smartphone: T-Mobile’s G1 (also known as the HTC Dream).
Twenty-six years ago this month, English computer programmer and obsessive movie fan Colin (Col) Needham launched the Internet Movie Database, now known as IMDb.
Thirty-one years ago this week, 29-year-old entrepreneur David Cook opened the first Blockbuster video store in Dallas, Texas. An investment group later bought the company and parlayed it in to a national powerhouse that became synonymous with movie rentals—from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray.
Whether or not you’re old to enough to have lived through the Sixties and Seventies, here’s a momentous occasion in the history of electronic entertainment that takes us back to 1980, the year Ronald Reagan was elected president: Pac-Man makes its debut in U.S. arcades and goes on to become not only the first mega-hit video game in history but an icon in pop culture.
Sixty-six years ago this week AT&T Bell Laboratories researchers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley were granted a U.S. Patent for a device that would become a fundamental building block of modern electronics for decades to come—the transistor.
My how times have changed. Fifteen years ago in the September 2001 issue we reviewed Samsung’s Tantus 32-inch HDTV Monitor. It was the early days of high-def and, yes, those clunky vacuum tube TVs that dominated TV for half a century were still around.
Eleven years ago this week, Apple introduced the ultra sleek iPod Nano. The Nano was a replacement for the hugely popular iPod Mini, which drove the number of iPods sold from 2 million to 10 million by the end of 2004, just 12 months after it was introduced.
Fifteen years ago Al Griffin and David Ranada teamed up to conduct a double-blind listening test with a half dozen $300-a-pair bookshelf speakers. (Gotta love those Sam Sisco caricatures!) Models from Acoustic Energy, Boston Acoustics, Jamo, KEF, Monitor Audio, and NHT were set up in two groups of three with each stereo pair situated so the “listener only had to turn his head slightly to bring the sonic image of each pair into focus.”
A promising new movie format called DVD was the theme of the August 1998 issue of Stereo Review, the 40-year-old magazine that would take on a new identity six months later with the debut of Sound & Vision.
Say what you will about Abba but the ‘70s pop band is able to lay claim a small but significant piece of tech history. The Swedish group’s final studio album The Visitors was the world’s first commercially produced CD when it rolled off the production line 34 years ago this week at the Philips/Polygram-owned CD manufacturing plant in Langenhagen, Germany.