Throwback Thursday

Twelve years ago this month, Jawed Karim uploaded the first video to the new YouTube video-sharing website he and his partners Chad Hurley and Steve Chen had just created.

Twenty years ago this month, the first DVD players were introduced in the U.S. after numerous false starts and delays over copyright concerns raised by Hollywood movie studios. DVD offered better picture quality than VHS tape plus the convenience of a CD-like disc that wasn’t prone to wear.

Thirty-one years ago this month, the NFL voted to adopt limited use of instant replay as an officiating aid. That first season saw an average of 1.6 reviews per game for a total of 374 plays, only 10 percent of which ended with a reversal of the ruling on the field.

Radio may be considered passé by some but it has been a staple in the lives of Americans for nearly 100 years and will be around for many years to come. Ninety-three years ago this month, on the night of February 8, 1924, AT&T made history when it conducted the first coast-to-coast radio broadcast from a banquet hall in Chicago’s Congress Hotel.

Thirty-three years ago, Apple’s now-famous “1984” TV commercial was broadcast during the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII (the then Los Angeles Raiders pummeled the Washington Redskins 38-9), introducing in dramatic fashion a machine that would redefine home computing: The Macintosh.

CES, the mother of all consumer technology shows, ended on Sunday, marking its 50th anniversary with a record breaking turnout of 3,800 exhibitors, spanning 2.6 million square feet of space, and somewhere in the neighborhood of 175,000 attendees. By comparison, the first show, held in New York in 1967, had 200 exhibitors and attracted around 17,000 attendees.

The Altec Lansing “Voice of the Theatre” speaker series has a storied past. Famous for its super high efficiency and lifelike sound—produced by a huge compression driver and 15-inch woofer mounted in a big, boxy enclosure—the speaker was adopted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as the industry standard for playback in movie theaters in the mid-1950s. The A7 model shown here went on to define an era of sound reproduction for movie theaters and beyond.