The first presidential photograph is snapped, a popular video sharing site is launched and Blu-Ray comes out on top… It all happened This Week in Tech History.
This week back in 1849 – The first photograph of a U.S. President was taken by Matthew Brady in New York City. The subject of the famous picture was the 11th President of the US, James Polk.
1878 – Thomas Edison, famed inventor – and subject of more This Week in Tech Histories than any other human being – patented a music player at his laboratory in Menlo Park, NJ. This music device is the one we know as the phonograph. Originally, Edison had set out to invent a telegraph repeater, but instead came up with the phonograph or, as he called it, the speaking machine.
2000 – Windows 2000 Professional Edition was released. Windows 2000 was an “the next generation NT operating system” that Microsoft said took four years and cost over $1 billion to develop.
2005 – YouTube is launched by a group of college students, eventually becoming the largest video sharing website in the world. A little side note: Just a year after its founding, YouTube was sold to Google for more than $1.6 Billion.
And this week in 2008 – Toshiba Corporation said it was giving up on its HD DVD format for high-definition video, conceding defeat to the competing Blu-Ray technology backed by Sony Corp. Nowadays, you’re hard pressed to even find Blu-Ray discs or players still around. Most people are now streaming their content.