Emoticons are born, the latest version of the Gnome operating system is released and Netflix makes a bit of a mistake. All on today’s On This Day from TEST Huddle.
1982 – Emoticons are Born
Research Professor Scott E. Fahlman proposes the use of emoticons to express humor for the first time anywhere in a message posted to the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science department’s general bulletin board. While the use of emoticons will spread like wildfire, the origin of the emoticon will be lost for nearly two decades, until September 10, 2002, when the original post made by Scott Fahlman will be retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x) server.
2007 – Gnome language
The GNOME Project releases version 2.20 of the GNOME operating system. Among other improvements, this new version includes significant improvements to the system’s image collection interface and file manager.
2011 – Netflix abandons its product
On this day in 2011, CEO of Netflix Reed Hastings announced that the company was spinning off their DVD division to Qwikster thus their core product of home-delivered DVD’s was planned to be spun off and put up for sale. The result of this action saw the company’s shares drop 2/3rds over a 2 month period. The company lost 800,000 customers in the process. Reed Hastings later put out a public apology and rescinded the spin-off.
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: Wikipedia
