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This Week in Tech History: YouTube is Launched

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.

Written by Chris Graveline

Chris has covered consumer technology for over 20 years. He is the host of This Week in Tech History as well as a regular co-host on "Into Tomorrow with Dave Graveline" and our Technical Director.

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