It’s quite something – this month FSTL celebrates its 28 year anniversary! So we thought it fitting to look at how far the world of technology has come with a roundup of what’s happened in technological history on various dates in the month of January…
17 January 1882: Thomas Edison was granted a patent for the carbon microphone for the telephone, and created tech history. The carbon was attached to the mouthpiece and went between two cups. The diaphragm would change pressure, causing the carbon to be pushed upon. That would send electric current to the other end – which would transpose it back to audio.
25 January 1915: Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates U.S. transcontinental telephone service with a conversation that took place between Thomas Watson in San Francisco and himself in New York. President Woodrow Wilson and the mayors of both cities were also involved in the call.
1 January 1939: In a garage in Palo Alto, California, William Hewlett and David Packard began sharing the $45 a month rent for the garage, formalised their partnership and founded Hewlett-Packard – a little company that made audio oscillators– and later TouchPads. These audio oscillators helped design, produce and maintain telephones, stereos, radios and other audio equipment. The garage served as research lab, development workshop, and manufacturing facility for early products, including the Model 200A audio oscillator. The company was named by a toss of a coin and in 1989 was dedicated as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
4 January 1972: Hewlett-Packard introduces the first handheld scientific calculator, the HP- 35 – so named quite simply because it had 35 buttons! The precision of the calculator was greater than most mainframe computers of its time. It was the first pocket sized piece of technology that could conduct trigonometric and exponential functions.
30 January 1982: Fast on the heels of the development and introduction of home computers comes the first computer virus. Richard Skrenta wrote the first PC virus code, disguised as an Apple II boot program called “Elk Cloner“, which was 400 lines long.
1 January 1983: The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was an early packet switching network and the first network to implement the protocol suite TCP/IP. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. On this day on 1983, the ARPANET changed to using the Internet Protocol, thereby creating the very first component of the modern Internet.
6 January 1984: The excitement centred around the announcement by Hitachi that it had developed the first memory chip capable of holding 1 MB of data.
It really is astounding to think of how far we’ve come since then!
With technology being an integral part of our work in the transcription business, we’ve seen so much change since our inception in 1990. Back then, all our recordings were on tape and were hand delivered to our transcribers to guarantee they arrived both on time and securely. In 1990 e-mail was still in its infancy and the Cloud did not exist, so our transcripts were produced as hard copies and posted. Any corrections or editing were actioned using tippex and a typewriter, before being copied and posted back to the client. It was not a speedy process!
It’s really quite phenomenal when you look back at the impact technology has had on our business, both with the global spread of our clients and the speed at which technology has allowed us to produce transcripts. With recordings now taking place on sound-perfect digital recording equipment with sound files that can be uploaded instantly and 100% securely, you’d be forgiven for thinking it was longer than 28 years ago since our inception!
The world is indeed a much smaller place and one where we’re very much used receiving and sending information instantly.
Happy anniversary to FSTL – and here’s to what the future holds for both ourselves and the technology we use on a daily basis.