The first software patent in the world, internet access expands and video games could be good for children. All on today’s On This Day from TestHuddle.
1947 – Hewlett-Packard Is Incorporated
Nine years after William Hewlett and David Packard sold their first oscillators from a garage in Palo Alto, California HP is incorporated. The company orginally began with just US$538 in capital. William and David determined the order of their names for the company by a coin toss. Moving from oscillators, the first of which they sold to Disney for the movie Fantasia, the Stanford graduates expanded the company into one of the world’s largest electronics companies. Today HP is worth about $12 billion.
1985 – QuickBASIC released
Microsoft releases first version of QuickBASIC. It was released on a single 5.25″ floppy disk for DOS.
1992 – Wang Laboratories is bankrupt 
Wang Laboratories, Inc., a former computer industry giant, files for bankruptcy. The company was founded in 1951 and in the late 1980’s was valued at $3 billion and employed over 33,000 people. The company manufactured typesetters, calculators before moving into computers. The company saw itself as a rival to IBM. The company’s fall was secured by rising debt and the failure to compete with IBM and others who were manufacturing personal computers whereas Wang had focused on building machines solely for word processing.
If you would like to add anything to these events, or know of other significant technology events that happened on this day in history, feel free to comment below.
