The first Computer User group, Legend of Zelda is released and the worlds first webcam goes offline. All on today’s On This Day from TestHuddle.
1955 – The First Computer User Group
The First Computer User Group is founded by a group of representatives that had ordered the IBM 704 mainframe computer.
1987 – Legend of Zelda released
The Legend of Zelda is released for the NES in North America. The game is a action-adventure and role-playing game. The game had been released in Japan previously for the “Family Computer Disk System”, a fore-runner to the NES. The game centred on Link, the playable character. Link must rescue Princess Zelda from Ganondorf, a Gerudo thief. The game featured interaction with many characters including townspeople he meets along the way. The game sold more that 6 million copies in the U.S. and spawned a series of releases that contuines up to today. This includes 17 official games on all of Nintendo’s major consoles, as well as several spin-offs, and an american animated series. As of 2011, the series had sold over 67 million copies.
2001 – Webcam goes offline
The first webcam in the world, a webcam aimed at the Trojan Room Coffee machine goes offline. The coffee pot was located in the corridor just outside the so-called Trojan Room within the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. The webcam was created to help people working in other parts of the building avoid pointless trips to the coffee room by providing, on the user’s desktop computer, a live 128×128 greyscale picture of the state of the coffee pot. The camera was setup in 1991 by Quentin Stafford-Fraser (who wrote the client software) and Paul Jardetzky (who wrote the server). It was setup on a video capture card on an Acorn Archimedes computer. The camera was connected to the Internet in November 1993 by Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson. It therefore became visible to any Internet user and grew into a popular landmark of the early web. At 09:54 on 22 August 2001, the camera was switched off when the computer department moved to their new premises. The pot was auctioned on eBay for £3,350 to Spiegel Online, the Internet version of the German Der Spiegel magazine. The coffee pot was refurbished and has been switched on again in the editorial office of Spiegel Online.
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
