From Metroid, Microsoft’s Apple Purchase and the First HTTP Server (PCGH-Retro 06 Aug)

…1986: One of the most successful game series has its beginning here: On August 6th, Nintendo releases the NES game Metroid in Japan, which was created under the leadership of the later Game Boy “father” Gunpei Yokoi. The action title, which also contains jump’n’run and adventure elements, becomes a great success and, with numerous successors, one of the longest-lasting and most popular series for Nintendo consoles.

…1991: At this point we have often reported on the birth of the Internet – and it is indeed not at all easy to precisely locate such a complex structure as the global network. In any case, on August 6th, a certain Tim Berners-Lee invited the users of a Usenet group, the Project World Wide Web, based on a first prototype server to visit.

The WorldWideWeb (WWW) project aims to allow links to be made to any
information anywhere. The address format includes an access method
(=namespace), and for most name spaces a hostname and some sort of path.

The fact that one of the cornerstones of the modern Internet and, in contrast to the separate networks of the early days, also of the worldwide network was laid is history.

…1997: Apple fans all over the world scream: On August 6, 1997, Microsoft buys Apple shares worth 150 million US dollars. Although some fear a takeover, the shares are non-voting, meaning Microsoft has no direct control over the competitor. The cash injection is linked to a patent exchange and the obligation for Microsoft to continue to maintain the Office package for the Mac; the deal will help Apple, the then struggling PC maker, get back on its feet. Many suspect that the Redmond company is supporting Apple in order to be able to present a competitor in the ongoing antitrust proceedings with allegations of monopoly abuse. In any case, Microsoft later sold the shares again, ultimately the business largely had no consequences – and soon Apple was no longer dependent on outside help.
If we calculated correctly, the approximately 9.5 million Apple shares, which Microsoft acquired at a price of just under 16 US dollars each, would be worth around 2.2 billion euros as of June 27th, 2011, which corresponds to that over $3 billion. Another year later, the Apple share price is around $600 after an interim high of $644 – if only Microsoft had held the shares…

…2003: PDAs, smartphones and mobile multimedia players form a huge growth market, and the numbers will soon exceed those of classic notebooks and PCs. Manufacturers who rely on ARM-IP have been celebrating success for years with particularly compact and economical processors for this type of device. AMD also recognizes the importance of this market segment and on August 6, 2003, bought all rights to the Geode from National Semiconductor, an x86-compatible “system-on-a-chip” processor originally developed by Cyrix. From now on, the chip series will be further developed as “AMD Geode” – but it won’t stay that way for long: A few years later AMD will close the Geode department, there will be no successors for the outdated chips, although they will remain on the market for a long time. But who knows – maybe the Geode brought AMD to the concept of APUs…

…2012: On the occasion of Siggraph 2012, the Khronos Group, guardians of the OpenGL specifications, presented version 4.3 of the cross-platform graphics interface on that day. Biggest and most important innovation: OpenGL can now calculate. Because after vertex, pixel… excuse me, fragment and geometry shaders, a specification for compute shaders has now been agreed upon. the presented one all other changes and innovations of the OpenGL 4.3 specification to the public this August 6th.