Before the transistor, a portable radio was a heavy box of hot, fragile vacuum tubes that needed two separate batteries, one just to heat the filaments. That changed after December 1947, when William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen demonstrated the first working transistor at Bell Laboratories. The first commercial transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, arrived in November 1954 from an unlikely partnership between Texas Instruments and an Indianapolis maker of TV antenna boosters. It cost

In 1991, a 13-year-old Tom Fulp cut and pasted together a fanzine about the Neo Geo console called New Ground and mailed it to about 100 members of a Prodigy club. By 1995 he had moved the idea online, and as a Drexel University student he began making crude games such as Club a Seal and Assassin. In 1999 he released Pico's School, a Flash game far more polished than the web of that era was used to, and gathered his scattered projects under a single domain with a page he called the Portal.This

In 1987, a 21-year-old Rick Astley released a debut single that hit number one in the US, the UK, and Australia, its booming baritone at odds with the boyish singer shuffling in a trench coat. The video was shot in a week, and he wore his own clothes. By 1994, worn down by the pop machine, he retired at 28 to raise his family. This episode tells what happened next: 14 quiet years, then a bait-and-switch prank that made him the most famous person online without his doing a thing.The prank grew out of

In November 1992 there were exactly 26 websites in the world. By August 1995 there were more than 10,000. The difference was NCSA Mosaic, a browser begun in December 1992 by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in a lab funded through the High Performance Computing Act of 1991. Mosaic was not the first graphical browser, but it was the first to place images inline with text on the same page, and by September 1993 it ran on Windows and the Macintosh.This

In 1985, Microsoft asked Encyclopaedia Britannica to partner on a CD-ROM edition. Britannica said no. Its business rested on door-to-door salesmen persuading parents to spend $1,000 to $1,500 on leather-bound prestige, and a cheap plastic disc looked like a toy that would eat its own profits. So Microsoft licensed the text of Funk and Wagnalls, the encyclopedia sold volume by volume at the grocery store, and built a multimedia shell around it under the code name Gandalf.Encarta launched in 1993 at

Microsoft Bob arrived in early 1995 as the answer to a real problem: home computers were moving into living rooms, and nested gray folders scared beginners. Code-named Utopia, designed by researcher Karen Fries and marketed by Melinda Gates, it drew on the Stanford theory of Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves that people treat computers like real people in real places. So Bob replaced the desktop with a cartoon house. Click the wall clock for a calendar, the pen and paper for a word processor, and let

Grumpy Cat was born Tardar Sauce on April 4, 2012, in Morristown, Arizona, to an ordinary calico mother. Feline dwarfism, a flattened face, and a pronounced underbite gave her a permanent scowl, though her owner Tabatha Bundesen described a sweet, docile pet. On September 22, 2012, Tabatha's brother Bryan posted a photo to Reddit. Users buried the fluffy kitten under pessimistic captions, and within months the family was running a company.This episode traces how that happened. Tabatha took leave

Before Gangnam Style, Park Jae-sang, known as Psy, was no rookie. He was a veteran South Korean artist working on his sixth studio album, with national hits like Champion and a home audience that expected a fresh, memorable dance every time. To deliver one, he and his choreographer went without sleep for 30 nights, testing panda moves and kangaroo bounces before landing on the invisible horse trot. The goal was simply to make local fans laugh.This episode explains the joke and how it escaped

Digg launched in 2004 as an experiment by Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Owen Byrne, and Ron Gorodetzky: take the front page away from editors and hand it to the crowd. Users submitted links, then dug them up or buried them. Creative director Daniel Burka's little yellow thumb with a number beside it became the ancestor of every like button. By 2008 the site drew over 236 million visitors a year, and a front page spot could melt a target site's servers.This episode follows the twenty year arc from that

Annie Jean Easley helped write the code behind the Centaur rocket stage that launched Voyager and the Cassini probe to Saturn, and her employer once cut her face out of a promotional photo display. This episode follows her 34-year career from Birmingham, Alabama, where she was born in 1933 and raised by a single mother who told her she could be anything if she outworked everyone. Valedictorian at Holy Family High School, she studied pharmacy at Xavier University, moved to Cleveland, found no

AltaVista launched on December 15th, 1995 as the first full-text searchable index of the World Wide Web, and it was never meant to be a consumer product. Researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation built it to show off server hardware: Paul Flaherty had the idea, Louis Monier wrote the multi-threaded crawler nicknamed Scooter, and Michael Burrows wrote the indexer. With 64-bit Alpha processors holding the index in memory, it handled 300,000 hits on its first day and more than 80 million a day by

In April 2003, signs reading "You have no chance to survive make your time" appeared around Sturgis, Michigan, just as the United States entered the war with Iraq. Police chief Eugene Alley warned of a possible borderline terrorist threat. It was an April Fools prank quoting Zero Wing, a 1989 Toaplan arcade shooter whose July 1991 Sega Mega Drive port for Europe gained an intro cutscene translated by a member of the export department with notoriously poor English. The villain CATS announces the

On June 1st, 1990, KIIS-FM in Los Angeles promised a Porsche 944 S2 to its 102nd caller. Kevin Poulsen, known online as Dark Dante, did not dial fast. He took over Pacific Bell's central office switches, seized the station's 25 phone lines, blocked every other caller in the city, and counted his way to number 102. He had been at this since his teens in Pasadena, when he broke into the ARPANET at 17 using a TRS-80.This episode follows Poulsen from fugitive to reporter. The FBI found his trail after

In 1995, programmer Pierre Omidyar listed a broken laser pointer on his hobby site, AuctionWeb, for less than $15. It sold to a collector of broken laser pointers, and the sale proved a theory: with a big enough network, there is a buyer for anything. This episode follows the 30 years that came after, from a site whose first employee, Chris Agarpao, was hired to open envelopes of mailed checks, to a company that went public in 1998 with shares opening at $18 and closing the first day at $53.The

In the late 1960s, a single slipped finger on page 49 of a legal brief meant pulling the paper out of the typewriter and starting the page again. Evelyn Berezin ended that. Born in the East Bronx in 1925 to Belarusian Jewish immigrants, a furrier and a seamstress, she grew up reading her brother's copies of Astounding Science Fiction, enrolled at Hunter College at 16, and studied physics while working full time in the rheology department of a printing ink company.This episode follows her path from a

Erste Briefmarke des Königreichs Sachsen... Mach's dir bequem und kuchel dich ein! Dieser Podcast wird durch Werbung finanziert. Weitere Podcasts, Infos und Angebote unserer Werbepartner: https://linktr.ee/EinschlafenMitPodcast Die Episode basiert auf Inhalten von Wikipedia: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachsendreier Inhalte wurde mithilfe künstlicher Intelligenz erstellt oder bearbeitet. CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

European powers, missionaries, and foreign merchants seeking influence over her kingdom.She responded by closing much of her country to outsiders, strengthening royal authority, and using methods that made her one of the most feared and controversial monarchs of her age. Her reign would later be remembered as both brutal and fiercely independent. Learn more about Queen Ranavalona I, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. ⁠Shop the store at

On October 11, 1776, General Benedict Arnold faces overwhelming odds to take on the British fleet on Lake Champlain.For more details, check out Episode 110 and Episode 111 at blog.amrevpodcast.com. https://blog.amrevpodcast.com/2019/08/episode-110-battle-of-valcour-island.html https://blog.amrevpodcast.com/2019/08/episode-111-retreat-from-lake-champlain.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

October 8, 1871. A barn fire in Chicago, Illinois, sparks a conflagration that burns for more than a day and devastates the city. This episode originally aired in 2024.Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more. History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.Go to HistoryDaily.com for more history, daily.

In July of 1881, Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Pat Garrett in a darkened bedroom at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. He was just twenty-one years old, possibly younger, and had spent the better part of three years among the young women of Fort Sumner, earning a reputation as something of a ladies' man. That same year, rumors swirled that Paulita Maxwell, the teenage sister of the man in whose bedroom Billy died, was carrying the Kid's child. More than a century later, a book by Elbert Garcia would