On This Day in Tech History

Charles Goodyear was an American chemist who invented the process of vulcanization in 1839, which revolutionized the rubber industry. Vulcanization is a process of treating natural rubber or other similar materials with sulfur or other chemicals to make them more durable, elastic, and resistant to temperature changes. Goodyear had been experimenting with rubber for many years, trying to find a way to make it more useful and practical. He accidentally discovered the vulcanization process when he accidentally dropped some rubber mixed with sulfur onto a hot stove. He observed that the resulting material was much more durable and elastic than regular rubber. After perfecting the process, Goodyear applied for a patent on his invention in 1844. His patent was granted on June 15, 1844, and it revolutionized the rubber industry, making rubber products more durable and useful. The process of vulcanization is still used today in the production of a wide variety of rubber products, from tires to shoe soles to industrial hoses.

On June 15th, over two decades ago, IBM announced the release of two groundbreaking hard drives - the MicroDrive and Deskstar 37GXP. The MicroDrive, which had a capacity of 340MB and was only the size of a matchbox, was specifically designed for use in handheld devices and digital cameras. At the time, its small size and high storage capacity were impressive, but with advancements in technology, the MicroDrive has since become outdated. Nowadays, there are much smaller and more capable storage solutions available on the market. The Deskstar 37GXP, on the other hand, was designed for use in desktop computers and servers and had a capacity of 37GB. This was a significant improvement over its nearest competitor, which was also an IBM product, and had a capacity of only 25GB. However, similar to the MicroDrive, the Deskstar 37GXP's specifications are now outdated, and consumers have access to much larger capacity hard drives and faster and more durable SSDs. In conclusion, while the MicroDrive and Deskstar 37GXP were groundbreaking products at the time of their release on June 15th, they have since been surpassed by newer and more advanced data storage solutions.

Apple launched the iTunes Music Store in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom with a price of 79p or 99c per track. In just one week, European customers had purchased 800,000 songs, with 450,000 songs sold in the UK alone. This launch represented a significant expansion of the iTunes Music Store, which had previously only been available in the United States. The availability of the store in these three major European countries likely helped to further establish Apple's dominance in the digital music market.

In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge, an English photographer, developed a system of multiple cameras to capture motion in a sequence of photographs. This system, which involved setting up a series of cameras along a track and triggering them in rapid succession, allowed for the first time the visualization of human and animal motion in detail. Muybridge's groundbreaking work on motion photography caught the attention of Leland Stanford, a businessman and racehorse owner, who commissioned him to document the motion of his horses. Muybridge used his multi-camera setup to capture a sequence of photographs of a galloping horse, which he then projected in rapid succession using a zoopraxiscope, a device he invented that created the illusion of motion. This demonstration, which took place in 1879, is widely regarded as the first motion picture and marked the birth of multi-camera filmmaking. Muybridge's work paved the way for the development of motion picture technology, which has since revolutionized the entertainment industry. Today, multi-camera filmmaking is a common technique used in movies and television shows to capture a scene from multiple angles simultaneously. But it all began with Muybridge's innovative use of multiple cameras to capture the motion of a galloping horse more than a century ago.

Jay Forrester's proposal for core memory in 1951 revolutionized the computer industry. Core memory improved the reliability and speed of computers, and was easier and less expensive to produce than other memory technologies of the time. This new storage system remained popular until the development of semiconductors in the 1970s. Forrester's contributions to computer hardware had a significant impact on the evolution of technology and paved the way for further advancements in computer memory. Today, his legacy lives on as core memory is recognized as a crucial innovation in the history of computing.