Astronauts drive on the surface of the moon, Two companies combine to form a communications giant, and an American tech firm becomes the most valuable company in the world… It all happened This Week in Tech History.
This week in 1964 – Ranger 7 sent back the first close-up photographs of the moon, with images 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from earth-bound telescopes.
1971 – The first men to ride in a vehicle on the moon did so in the Lunar Rover Vehicle. This sort of lunar dune buggy carried Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin for five miles on the lunar surface. Their first stop at the rim of Elbow Crater was televised back to Earth to millions of viewers.
1998 – Bell Atlantic Corp. and GTE Corp. announced a $52.88 billion stock-swap deal to create the second-biggest telephone company — behind AT&T. The resulting mega-corporation — later to be named Verizon Communications — would begin with 63 million local telephone lines in 38 states and revenue of $53 billion.
And this week in 2018 – Apple became the first U.S. company to be valued at over $1 trillion. Three companies have now reached that status and are constantly battling to be named the world’s most valuable company. Apple, Microsoft and not surprisingly, Amazon. Also not surprisingly, Google isn’t far behind those top 3.