This Week In Techdirt History: March 22nd - 28th

from the entertaining-bad-ideas dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, as is so often the case, there were lots of stupid and/or troublesome moves in the entertainment world. Hollywood was still making up statistics about piracy for the AP to parrot, Warner Bros. was working on a confusing release strategy that favored Blockbuster Video, Universal Music was funding another propaganda campaign against file sharing, and Sony Music somehow managed to take down Beyonce's official videos for piracy. Viacom's true intent in its YouTube lawsuit became clear — pretending that the DMCA requires filtering — and the band MGMT, following a leak of its album, was blocked by its label from releasing the official version for free. Additionally, FIFA was attacking an airline over an ad that didn't even mention FIFA, and the Olympics was trying to block ICANN from offering a .sports TLD. Amidst all this, we also wondered why the government can use the term "music piracy" in court.

This week also saw the full ACTA draft leaked to the public, raising serious constitutional questions. The UK was still grappling with the Digital Economy Bill, making extremely weak concessions to due process while some noted that it sets up a China-like censorship system. And while pushing for this bill that would enable kicking people offline, the government was also looking at moving all public services online.

Ten Years Ago

2005 was when Hollywood really started getting the FBI on board as its private police force. The movie business was even more confused then than it is now, with bizarre aims like trying to become more like the IRS, and muddled strategies like advertising on Grokster while also suing it. The Chinese film industry was realizing that movies are a social experience, while the US television industry was trying to figure out if TV really is. (Broadcast TV still wasn't digital, by the way). People were acknowledging the deaths of plastic discs and newsprint and trying to figure out what would come next, Clear Channel was hopping on the podcast bandwagon, and the world was starting to notice the unexpected impact of Skype.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2000, we were looking to the future. Some were discussing the new input devices heading towards the market, others were making better fiber-optics; Intel was showcasing VR, speech recognition and more while scientists were making unexpectedly fast progress on quantum computing; the convergence of phones and PDAs was on the horizon, as was the ascendance of ebooks. And China began taking its first baby steps towards the great firewall with a slew of new internet regulations.

Despite all this, one global survey found that 40% of people just didn't really care about the internet or have any interest in using it.

Twenty-Two Years Ago

My first family computer, when I was very young, had an Intel 286 processor. Eventually we upgraded to a 386, then a 486, and then we waited for the next iteration. The pattern was so well-established that I continued to casually call my first Pentium a "586" for quite some time. Why am I telling you all this? Because it was on March 22nd, 1993, that Intel released the very first Pentium processor, choosing that name because they were unable to secure a trademark on the numerical names and didn't like the fact that competitors were using them too, as with the AMD Am486. The name itself was coined by the same branding company that came up with BlackBerry, PowerBook, Zune, Swiffer, Febreze, DeskJet, Dasani, OnStar and many other brand names.

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  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 28 Mar 2015 @ 1:22pm

    With items this lame, you should welcome ANY comments.

    >>> Why am I telling you all this?

    Because you have bupkis otherwise.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Jake, 28 Mar 2015 @ 1:37pm

    The first PC my family ever owned was a Pentium, clocking in at a blazing fast 75MHz with a whopping 8MB of RAM and sporting a cutting-edge 4x CD drive. It cost about a thousand pounds and we had to go to the next county over to find a computer store.
    Twenty years later, I picked up a considerably better PC than that thing for a fiver at a car-boot sale.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 28 Mar 2015 @ 1:59pm

      GOML (was Re: )

      The first PC my family ever owned was a Pentium...
      Get off my lawn.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Old man jenson, 28 Mar 2015 @ 2:36pm

    Ours was a C64, I croak at clouds and the grass turned to dust a while back. Damn kids.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Thrudd, 29 Mar 2015 @ 7:08am

    kids and their grass. damn hippies.

    Apple IIc quickly followed by every iteration before and after due to running a basement service shop while still in high school.

    Still looking for an original apple =P

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    TheResidentSkeptic (profile), 29 Mar 2015 @ 7:25am

    Got all you kids beat..

    DigiComp 1 was my first. First Electronic was a kit built Sol-20. Added an 8" floppy and maxed it out to the full 64K of ram.

    And now I'm building clusters with Raspberry and Banana Pi boards...

    From 3-bit mechanical to a quad-core 1GB on a credit card sized board. Been a hell of a ride to be part of!

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    madasahatter (profile), 29 Mar 2015 @ 7:53am

    First

    The first computer I actually worked (did not own for obvious reasons) was an Univac 1108. The first programmable device I owned was an HP65? calculator. The first computer was an Apple IIe.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Cerberus, 29 Mar 2015 @ 10:01pm

    Greek penta/pente means five, I was wondering why you didn't mention that: 586.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Zonker, 30 Mar 2015 @ 1:11pm

    First was a TI-99/4 back in 1980, followed soon after by the TI-99/4A. It was a great little 16 bit, 3 Mhz machine with a speech synthesizer peripheral and a cassette tape drive. But unfortunately since it was originally designed for an 8 bit chip, only 256 bytes of RAM and system ROMs could bypass the 16-to-8-bit multiplexer and thus ran very slowly taking twice the cycles to access and additional 4-cycle wait state to process. Still fun to play with as a kid with lots of time to spare.

    I still have the old 99/4 and a couple of 99/4As in storage.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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