Throwback Thursday

Thirty-four years ago this week, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs asks McIntosh Labs for rights to use “Macintosh” as the brand name of a computer it was developing, a year after settling a trademark infringement suit brought by The Beatles’ holding company Apple Corps.

Long before the iPod and the Walkman there was a remarkable invention called the transistor radio.

Thirty-one years ago this week, 29-year-old entrepreneur David Cook opened the first Blockbuster video store in Dallas, Texas. An investment group later bought the company and parlayed it in to a national powerhouse that became synonymous with movie rentals—from VHS to DVD to Blu-ray.

Sixty-six years ago this week AT&T Bell Laboratories researchers John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley were granted a U.S. Patent for a device that would become a fundamental building block of modern electronics for decades to come—the transistor.

Twenty-five years ago this week a little-known band from Seattle called Nirvana released their second album, Nevermind.

Fifteen years ago Al Griffin and David Ranada teamed up to conduct a double-blind listening test with a half dozen $300-a-pair bookshelf speakers. (Gotta love those Sam Sisco caricatures!) Models from Acoustic Energy, Boston Acoustics, Jamo, KEF, Monitor Audio, and NHT were set up in two groups of three with each stereo pair situated so the “listener only had to turn his head slightly to bring the sonic image of each pair into focus.”

Say what you will about Abba but the ‘70s pop band is able to lay claim a small but significant piece of tech history. The Swedish group’s final studio album The Visitors was the world’s first commercially produced CD when it rolled off the production line 34 years ago this week at the Philips/Polygram-owned CD manufacturing plant in Langenhagen, Germany.