It is the birthdays of AOL co-founder Steve Case and Google co-founder Sergey Brin and a patent for videogames was granted. All on today’s On This Day from TestHuddle.
1958 – Steve Case is born
Steve Case co-founder and former CEO of AOL is born. He founded AOL in 1991 with programmer Marc Seriff. AOL was born out of an online service for Commadore 64, Apple, IBM and other personel computers which catered for email and online chat. AOL quickly grew. At its peak, it had 26 million subscribers. The company mergerd wil Time-Warner in 2001 to creat one of the largeset information and entertainment companies in the world. Since leaving AOL in 2003, Case has fosuced on his investment company.
1969 – A patent for videogames
Ralph Baer files a US Patent describing playing games on a television, later becoming part of the Magnavox Odyssey. Baer started development of the “Brown Box” console video game system and several other prototypes in 1966 for the defense-electronics company Sanders Associates. In 1971, it was licensed to Magnavox, and after being renamed Magnavox Odyssey, the console was released to the public in 1972. For a time it was Sanders’ most profitable line, though many in the company looked down on game development. Baer was also responsible for creating the first light gun and game for home television use. These were sold grouped with a game expansion pack for the Odyssey, and collectively known as the Shooting Gallery. The light gun itself was the first peripheral for a video game console
1971 – Sergey Brin is born
Born on this day in 1971 in Moscow, Sergey Brin emigrated, with his family to the United States at the age of six. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Maryland, studying mathematics and computer science. After graduation, he moved to Stanford University to study for a PhD in computer science. It was there he met Larry Page, also a PhD student. The two became friends and soon started work on building a search engine based on Brin’s data mining system. After the engine became popular in Stanford, the two left University to focus on the the serach engine full-time. Today Sergey Brin has a net worth of about $32 billion.
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.
Images: Blogger/Wikipedia
