A 500 GHz chip and a patent claim on hyperlinks – that happened on June 20th. Every day, PC Games Hardware takes a look back at the young but eventful history of the computer.
… 1989: IBM announces an incredibly affordable upgrade kit: The 486/25 Power Platform Processor Upgrade Kit for the IBM PS/2 Model 70-A21 delivers a – you guessed it from the name – a 486 processor with 25 mhz
… 2000: Matching yesterday’s “launch”, if you can call the hidden idea of the new P3 that, there is now also a new chipset with the i815, which supports AGP x4 and PC133-SDR-SDRAM – but not the new CPUs. Intel only compensates for this flaw with a new stepping of the chipset, which is supposed to be on the market as i815EP. Be that as it may: The Solano does not come close to Intel’s chipset legend of the time, the BX, in terms of compatibility or speed. In addition, it is annoyingly officially limited to 512 MiByte main memory, which only undermined an experimental board from a Chinese manufacturer.
… 2000: As unbelievable as it sounds: After eleven years, British Telecom has claimed intellectual property rights to the “Hyperlink” invention (and thus actually how the Internet works) via a patent. The US patent in question, number 4873662, you can view online and decide whether you recognize a hyperlink in it. 
As with many such reports, it was more of a storm in a teacup that caused little damage but made big waves. BT’s claim was finally dismissed in court on August 23, 2002.
… 2003: Activision Publishes Ritual Entertainment’s Sci-Fi Shooter Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force II in Germany; Atari and Infogrames the D&D role-playing game Neverwinter Nights for Linux.
… 2006: Together with the Technical University of Georgia, the IBM research department shows a microchip that runs at 500 GHz – but only at temperatures close to absolute zero. In addition, unlike conventional semiconductors, the chip is based on a silicon-germanium compound; however, this can be produced more cheaply than the gallium arsenide compounds customary in high-frequency prototypes; Incidentally, the IBM test chip only reaches 350 GHz at room temperature.
… 2012: The gmail posse is over. The search engine operator Google has come to an agreement with the owner of the “Gmail” word mark so that Google Mail will become Gmail in Germany as of June 20th – just like in the rest of the world.
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