The First Email in Germany, Doom 3 and the Iphone Precursor (PCGH-Retro, August 3)

…1977: On August 3, Tandy Radio Shack releases the TRS 80 Model 1, one of the first widely used home computers not sold in kit form. It is based on the Zilog Z80, the most popular 8-bit processor of all, which comes in model 1 at 1.77 MHz. Other features: 4 KiByte RAM, operating system in ROM and integrated BASIC programming language.

…1984: Michael Rotert, computer scientist at the University of Karlsruhe, received the on August 3, 1984 at 10:14 local time first email, sent to a German mail server. It comes from Laura Breeden, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin, USA. The e-mail welcomes the recipient to the network: “Michael, this is your official welcome to CSNET. We are glad to have you aboard.” The CSNET is an early research network, together with the larger, but purely military used Arpanet, it is a forerunner of the later Internet. Electronic mail is still mainly used for exchange between scientists – nobody (probably) suspects that this new medium would soon revolutionize worldwide communication.

…1993: Apple releases the Newton Message Pad, Apple’s first PDA. In 1992 the Zoomer was the first PDA ever, developed by Palm at the time. The device offers a touchscreen with adaptive handwriting recognition and a resolution of 336 x 320 pixels. The Newton runs on an ARM processor with 20 MHz and 640 KiByte RAM. Unfortunately, this PDA is ahead of its time, the Newton never became a great success and was finally discontinued in 1998 – after Steve Jobs took over the reins and restructured the company. However, a few years later, Apple returned to this market, this time with much more success: with the Iphone mobile phone/PDA.

…2001: After the 8 to 16-bit ISA, the VESA Local Bus for graphics and cache controllers and the Peripheral Component Interconnect or PCI Local Bus came onto the market, later supplemented by the Accelerated Graphics Port, AGP for short, based on the PCI protocol. However, modern computers greed for more and more transmission speed from and to all forms of memory and so large industrial consortia are working behind the scenes on faster and faster interface standards. One of these standards is now codenamed Arapahoe and will be publicly announced this August 3rd by the PCI-SIG, the Special Interest Group along with Compaq, Dell, IBM, Intel and Microsoft as Next General-Purpose I/O. Almost another three years should pass before the serial technology, meanwhile traded as 3GIO (3rd generation I/O), finds its way into ordinary desktop PCs under the name PCI Express.

…2004: Activision and Id Software launch the PC shooter “Doom 3” after four years of development. The game impresses with its impressive engine based on OpenGL, which makes very realistic lighting effects possible through a standardized lighting calculation with volume shadows.