The Victor Talking Machine Company is incorporated, the space race is on and a popular social media site is launched… It all happened This Week in Tech History.
1901 – The Victor Talking Machine Company was incorporated. After a merger with Radio Corporation of America, RCA-Victor became the leader in phonographs and many of the records played on them. The famous Victrola phonograph logo, with Nipper the dog, and the words “His Master’s Voice”, appeared on all RCA-Victor phonographs and record labels.
1954 – IBM displayed the first all-transistor calculator. These days, we think of calculators as pocket-sized devices, but this calculator was the size of a desk. Upgrading these machines to transistors from vacuum tubes, didn’t make them any smaller, but did allow them to operate using only 5 percent of the power that ran their predecessors.
1957 – The first Earth satellite was launched into space by the Soviet Union, effectively starting the space race. The craft circled the earth every 95 minutes at almost 2,000 miles per hour. “Sputnik I” fell from the sky on January 4th of the following year.
And this week in 2010 – Instagram, a mainstream photo-sharing application, was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Just a year and a half later, it would be acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars, which incidentally, is about a dollar for every active user the platform currently has.