Let us take a look back at some significant dates in technology history for the month of October.
October 2 – On this day in 2007, Google opened it’s San Francisco office. Many of the employees in the were commuting daily from homes in the San Francisco area to the headquarters in Mountain View, CA. A Google spokeswoman said: “We’re always looking at where people want to live; where people want to work, and the footprint on the environment…This will alleviate the commutes for some people.”
October 3 – John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley were issued a patent for the transistor in 1950. This invention allowed for the creation of the semiconductors, microprocessors, and integrated circuits common in modern computers.
October 10 – Pac Man fever became a North American epidemic in 1980. It had released in Japan the previous year but became a piece of 80’s pop culture in the US. Thirty-five years after its release, it remains one of the most popular games of all time.
October 30 – In 1938, Orson Welles used his Mercury Theatre radio broadcast to reenact H.G. Wells’ The World of the Worlds. Listeners mistook the show for a real news broadcast and mass panic ensued when people believed that we were being invaded by alien beings. Welles feared that this incident would end his career but, instead, it acted at the springboard to his future in the film industry.
