American Circular ⭕️

Today American Circular comes out of stealth. Companies are retiring millions of computers. Data centers are swapping hardware for AI. All of it has to go somewhere. We recover the value, destroy the data, and keep the materials in the US. Built in Tampa Bay. 🇺🇸

The original @XBOX hit North American shelves 25 years ago this Sunday, priced at $299.99, with @Halo: Combat Evolved in the launch lineup. Midnight lines and all. Who still has theirs? #retrogaming

36 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau sent @CERN management "WorldWideWeb: Proposal for a HyperText Project." The ask was four software engineers, a programmer and about six months. The web ended up taking a bit longer to finish. What was the first website you remember visiting? #internethistory

Einstein invented a fridge. On this day in 1930, Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard were granted US Patent 1,781,541 for a refrigerator with no moving parts, meant to stop toxic gas leaks from 1920s compressors. Non-toxic Freon arrived the same year, and their fridge never reached stores. h/t @APSphysics Had you heard this one? #techhistory

43 years ago today, @Microsoft announced @Windows at New York's Plaza Hotel. Its working name was Interface Manager, and it didn't ship until Nov 20, 1985, long enough that skeptics called it vaporware. Windows 1.0 came with Paint, Notepad, Calculator and Reversi.

@firefox 1.0 launched 22 years ago today. Tabbed browsing and a built-in pop-up blocker pulled millions away from Internet Explorer, and fans crowdfunded a two-page New York Times ad listing thousands of their names. What was your first browser?

131 years ago this weekend, Wilhelm Röntgen saw a fluorescent screen glowing across his lab while running current through a Crookes tube. He called the unknown rays "X." Weeks later he X-rayed his wife's hand, rings and all. In 1901 he won the first @NobelPrize in Physics.

On Nov 5, 2007, @Google and a group of phone makers, carriers and chip companies announced @Android as an open platform for phones. The first Android phone, the @HTC Dream (sold as the @TMobile G1), shipped in 2008 with a slide-out keyboard and a trackball.

On election night, Nov 4, 1952, @CBSNews had a UNIVAC I predict the presidential race live on TV. It called an Eisenhower landslide. The crew didn't believe it, tweaked the inputs and aired a closer race. The computer was right.

55 years ago today, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie published the first UNIX Programmer's Manual at @BellLabs. Its terse "man page" format, with usage, known bugs and who to ask, is still how Linux and macOS document commands. Early Unix ran on a DEC PDP-11.

88 years ago today, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast "The War of the Worlds" live on CBS radio, with fake news bulletins of a Martian invasion. Some listeners panicked. @librarycongress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2002.

57 years ago today at @UCLA, Charley Kline tried to log in to a computer at SRI over the new ARPANET. He typed "L," then "O." On "G," the system crashed. The first message was "LO." It went out through IMP No. 1, which still stands in 3420 Boelter Hall.

158 years ago today, the U.S. Patent Office (now @USPTO) received Thomas Edison's application for an "Electrographic Vote-Recorder." Each legislator moved a switch to yes or no, his name printed under that heading, and dials tallied the count. It became Edison's first patent.

25 years ago this week, @Microsoft launched Windows XP in Times Square, with Bill Gates on stage and more than 50 launch events worldwide. Retail copies came on a CD with an edge-to-edge hologram across the entire disc, a guard against counterfeiters.

26 years ago today, @PlayStation brought the PlayStation 2 to North America for $299. At its heart: the 128-bit "Emotion Engine" CPU, co-developed with Toshiba. It also played DVD movies and more than 800 original PlayStation games.

25 years ago today, @Apple introduced the iPod: up to 1,000 CD-quality songs on a 5 GB hard drive, in a 6.5-ounce player that fit in your pocket. A scroll wheel under your thumb, FireWire that loaded a whole CD in under 10 seconds, and a $399 price tag.

88 years ago today in Astoria, Chester Carlson and Otto Kornei made the first xerographic copy: "10-22-38 ASTORIA," inked on a glass slide, copied onto a charged sulfur-coated zinc plate with powder. Ten years later to the day, Haloid (later @Xerox) announced it publicly.

70 years ago this month, @IBM dated its FORTRAN Programmer's Reference Manual for the IBM 704: Oct 15, 1956. 51 pages on a language "closely resembling the ordinary language of mathematics." IBM says a problem needing up to 1,000 hand-keyed instructions could take 47 in FORTRAN.

ENIAC, unveiled at @Penn in February 1946, filled a 30-by-50-foot room, weighed 30 tons and used about 18,000 vacuum tubes. Programming it meant setting switches and plugging in cables. For its 50th anniversary, Penn students recreated ENIAC on a single 7.44 x 5.29 mm chip.

@SEGA released the Mega Drive in Japan in October 1988 and brought it to North America as the Genesis in August 1989.