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computing history

before 1960
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2000

10 Jan. - AOL (America OnLine) purchase media giant Time Warner, the largest merger in corporate history.

13 Jan. - Bill Gates resigned as Chief Executive of Microsoft Corporation in favour of president Steve Ballmer. Gates will remains as Chairman, and fill the newly created post of Chief Executive Architect.

Jan. - Microsoft plans a new strategy, called the Next generation Windows Services (NGWS) developed around a new Web development software called Windows DNA 2000.

IBM announces the new IntelliStation Z pro workstation based on Pentium III Xeon processor at speeds ranging from 667 to 800 MHz, 2 GB memory, a new Ultra SCSI subsystem at 160 MB/sec. IBM also announces RS/6000 the world's fastest workstation and the first UNIX workstation to have cooper-based microprocessor. Cooper increases performance compared with similar chips that have aluminium wire.

AMD ships Athlon at 800 and 850 MHz. It showed as well on 8 February the 1.1 GB Athlon chip one week after Intel announced plans for 1 GB chip called Willamette.

Windows 2000, the long-awaited successor to Windows NT, hits the shelves on Thursday, Feb. 17.
The new operating system promises greater reliability, mobile computing enhancements, and improved network management tools.

11 Apr. - MetaCreation has announced the sale of Painter, Bryce, Kai's Power Tools and KPT Vector effects to Corel Corporation on 11 April. This follows the announcement last week that MetaCreation had sold Carrara, its 3-D modeling, rendering and animation software to Adobe Systems which recently acquired Canoma, another MetaCreation product.

Corel claims to have an installed base of about 5.2 million Corel Draw users in US.

Xerox purchased Tektronic Color Printing and their family of Phaser color laser and solid ink printers. Soon after its acquisition, Xerox released the new Tektronic Phaser 850 color printer.

Apr. - Adobe InDesign 1.5 is the first major upgrade of Adobe flag publishing product

On end of April Microsoft has shipped 1.5 million copies of Windows 2000 since the mid-February launch.

SGI new workstations: 230, 330 and 550 for NT and Linux. They come with a new family of graphics subsystems called Vpro graphics.

May - AMD demonstrated a prototype Athlon processor that supports high- performance DDR (double data rate) memory, which promises to boost performance for math-intensive applications such as CAD.
Hailed as the successor to SDRAM, DDR memory features 266MHz bandwidth.

QuarkXpress 5. New features: layers and PDF support tables, Web with the addition of hyperlinks, image maps and rollover functionality.

Dreamweaver UltraDev is the first authoring software that allows developers, programmers, and designers to visually create and edit data-driven Web applications on multiple server platforms.
Dreamweaver UltraDev represents the next-generation of Macromedia Drumbeat 2000 with full integration of Dreamweaver 3.

Number Nine Visual Technology has ceased operation on the end of May.

The LoveLetter virus launched from the Philippines, infects millions of computers within 6 hours

Apple announced that over 50 million copies of Quick Time has been distribuited worlwide. The new version is Quick Time 4.

June - Top software companies by revenues: 1. IBM 2. Microsoft 3. Pricewaterhouse Coopers 4. Oracle 5. Anderson Consulting LLP

Adobe LiveMotion is the new Web animation program from Adobe.

August Intel outlined its AGP (Advanced Graphics Port) roadmap, which begins with a new AGP 8X designed to double the current top graphics processing speed. Like the current AGP 4X specification, it implements a 32-bit bus, but doubles its speed to 533MHz to achieve a data rate of 2GB per second.

August AMD began shipping its 1.1GHz Athlon processor

A designer-friendly application, Macromedia Flash 5 easily integrates with existing Web production workflow, supporting direct import from Macromedia FreeHand and Fireworks.

Corel Corporation announces the new version of their flag product: Corel Draw Suite. Includes Corel Draw 10, Corel Photo Paint 10 and Corel R.A.V.E.

Sep. - Microsoft Millennium (Me) Designed for home users, Microsoft Me offers a lot of enhanced multimedia features, such as: Edit, Catalog and e-mail your home movies, Store, manipulate and organize pictures on your computer.
250,000 units of Me sold in the first four days.

Adobe Systems has announced Photoshop 6, a major upgrade to its image editing software. Version 6 incorporates integrated vector functionality, improved web workflow, and a more streamlined interface.

Microsoft has purchased 24.6% of Corel for US$135 million in October. In exchange, Corel has committed to adapting its CorelDraw and WordPerfect products to Microsoft's .NET software rental system by the end of 2001.

In October Intel showed prototypes of the P4 in two versions: 1.4- and 1.5GHz. The P4 promises faster and better processing through new design features, while also offering faster core clock speeds and a 400MHz main bus. The new bus will allow 3.2 gigabytes per second transfer speeds to Rambus memory.
The new core technology is called NetBurst which will allow some tasks to be run at a speed faster than the main core clock speed. Level1 cache has been enhanced to include the Execution Trace Cache, which gives better task management.

At the 2000 Microprocessor Forum, AMD demonstrated a computer powered by dual AMD Athlon processors, the AMD-760 MP chipset, and next-gener- ation DDR (double data rate) memory.

Nov. - AMD announced its AMD-760 chipset, which supports DDR (double data rate) memory technology.
DDR RAM achieves a 2.1GB/second peak data rate that reportedly increases memory transfer rates up to 100% compared with SDRAM

Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 Fireworks 4 Studio is launched in December.

For the year 2000, unit sales of PCs were down 0.8%, the first annual decline.