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Through "the present in history", the future can be seen from the past, and the future can be changed from the present.
Today is February 21, 2022, and on this day in 1804, the Englishman Richard Treviswick, after years of exploration and research, finally built a single cylinder and a steam locomotive, pulling 5 cars at a speed of 8 kilometers per hour; this is the earliest locomotive on the track and began to operate in Galle, England. Looking back at February 21 in computer history, what other milestones and key events occurred on this day?
February 21, 1983: Daniel Ek, founder of music streaming service Spotify, is born
Source: Wikipedia
Born on February 21, 1983, Swedish entrepreneur Daniel Ek, a technologist and billionaire, CEO and co-founder of music streaming service Spotify. He was born and raised in Rothwaide, Stockholm; he graduated from it at the IT Liberal Arts Secondary School in Son derBybery and attended the Royal Institute of Technology in Engineering. Subsequently, Ike dropped out of school to focus on his IT career.
Ek's first foray into the business world began at the age of 13, when he started making websites for clients from home. He charges $100 to the first customer, then $200 to the second customer; eventually, he starts charging $5,000 for each custom site. To help expand the business, Ike bribed his classmates with video games to recruit students to work on the computer lab's website. Eck eventually earned $50,000 a month, and by the time he was 18, he could manage a team of 25 people. It was also from this year that Ike began to monetize the money he earned, so it was only after he brought home a big TV that his parents finally noticed his income.
The talented Ek later held a senior role at Nordic auction company Tradera, which was acquired by eBay in 2006; Ek also served as CTO of Stardoll, a browser-based gaming and fashion community. Later, Ek founded an online advertising agency called Advertigo, which was also sold to TradeDoubler in 2006; after the sale of Advertigo, Ek briefly became ceo of μTorrent, meeting ludvig Strigeus, the founder of μTorrent. In the days that followed, Ike poached the founder to his own music streaming service Spotify.
Image source: CSDN Downloaded from The Oriental IC
After selling the advertising agency Advertigo, Eck had made enough money to spend his life, so he immediately decided to retire. However, a few months after retiring, he realized he wanted to do something more, so he founded Spotify. In 2002, when the P2P music service Napster shut down, another pirate music site, Kazaa, took over the site, leaving Eck with mixed feelings; he later commented on the incident: "You can never legislate to avoid software piracy. The law will certainly help, but it won't solve the problem. The only way to solve the problem was to create a better service than pirated music, and Spotify came into being. ”
On April 23, 2006, Ecker merged with Martin Lorentzon in Stockholm, Sweden to form Spotify AB. Lorentzon previously worked at tradeDoubler, a digital marketing company that acquired Ek's advertising agency, Advertigo. In October 2008, the company founded by the two officially launched Spotify, a music streaming service that focuses on the main version. Initially, Spotify ran on a P2P distribution model, similar to uTorrent, and switched to a server-client model in 2014. In October 2015, Spotify co-founder Martin Lorentzon announced that he would be stepping down as chairman and Ek would take over as CEO. In 2017, Eck was named Billboard's most influential figure in the music industry. As of December 2021, Spotify has become one of the world's largest music streaming service providers, with more than 406 million monthly active users, including 180 million paying users. ( Source: Wikipedia, Baidu Encyclopedia )
February 21, 1986: The Legend of Zelda goes on sale
The Legend of Zelda is an action-adventure game series launched by Nintendo since February 21, 1986, by Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's most prestigious ace game designer, who has led the development of a series of classic games such as Super Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and Galactic Warrior. Set against the backdrop of a fictional fantasy world, each of Zelda's legends depicts the adventures of protagonist Link, and the series is also considered by players to be one of the most influential video game series of all time.
The first in the series, The Legend of Zelda, was released in Japan today in 1986 and then in the United States and Europe in 1987. By today's standards, it was a very simple game, but it was very advanced at the time. The Legend of Zelda's innovations include the availability of a variety of different items, a vast world full of secrets and waiting to be explored, and the ability to store game progress in battery-based memory. The game also includes a "second mission", after which the player can re-adventure in another world and include more challenging mazes.
From the first Zelda Legend, almost every time Nintendo released a new game, it revolutionized the history of the gaming world, creating many features that had become industry standards. For example, the first Zelda Legends pioneered the ability to save and read games, allowing players to pause their own gameplay, and Zelda Legends: Ocarina of Time introduced the industry's first aiming system that allowed players to lock their cameras on enemies or friendly NPCs, simplifying 3D combat. In addition to technical innovations, The Legend of Zelda's gameplay (e.g., finding items and using them to solve puzzles, real-time battles with monsters, exploring vast environments) was also very successful, and such content has been copied by many games since then.
The "Legend of Zelda" series has a high reputation in the game market with creative gameplay, interesting characters, unique world view settings, huge production costs and other characteristics; this series is also one of Nintendo's signature works, and the data outside Asia is the main market for the series, which has long been loved by European and American players. With nearly 126 million copies sold as of December 2021, the Zelda Legends series will continue to impact the entire gaming industry with cross-era designs – and never in royalties. ( Source: Wikipedia, Baidu Encyclopedia)
February 21, 2011: Chipmaker CSR acquires semiconductor company Zoran
On February 21, 2011, British chipmaker CSR announced that it would acquire U.S. multimedia and network communications chip solutions provider Zoran Corp (ZRAN) for $679 million in a cash-plus-share transaction, and then in June, as Zoran's business outlook declined, the Japanese earthquake lowered its second-quarter revenue forecasts and the impact of Cisco's video camera division shut down, reducing its agreed price by nearly 30%. Under the terms of the final transaction, Zoran shareholders will receive $6.26 in cash per share, as well as 0.589 CSR shares in the form of American Depositary Shares. Upon completion of the transaction, Zoran shareholders will own approximately 16.5% of the combined company.
CSR's chips are mainly used in Samsung Electronics' Galaxy S II smartphones, as well as mobile phones produced by Nokia, Sony, Research In Motion and Huawei; in 2011, its revenue ranked among the world's 13th largest non-plant semiconductor company. Just three years after the acquisition, on October 15, 2014, Qualcomm announced its acquisition of CSR for £9 ($14.5) per share, for a total price of about £1.6 billion ($2.58 billion), which was completed on August 13, 2015. In the unending era of the Internet of Things, such acquisitions and strategic layouts will be more and more. ( Source: Wikipedia)
February 21, 2013: U.S. gaming portal GameSpy closes
GameSpy, also known as GameSpy Industries, was once part of IGN Entertainment, a well-known game review media, and is now owned by Glu Mobile. The company operates a series of gaming websites and provides online services and software related to video games, making it a "portal" dedicated to gaming services. The service platform began to close on February 21, 2013, and finally ended on May 31, 2014.
GameSpy was founded in 1995 by Mark Surfas and is headquartered in Costa Mesa, California, USA. Then in 1996, the video game Quake, a well-known game company id Software, came out and became one of the first 3D multiplayer action games in the world to be allowed to play online; Quake further promoted the concept of creating and releasing "mods" (mods) or modifying game content among players. Mark Surfas saw the market demand and created the PlanetQuake website to host Quake's latest game news. The huge success of the Mod concept has allowed PlanetQuake to garner huge traffic as well and take center stage in the booming gaming site scene.
After planetQuake's success, many popular video game sites with the name "planet" began to join GameSpy's portal navigation, such as PlanetQuake, Planet Half-Life, PlanetUnreal, or ForumPlanet. In 1999, GameSpy received angel investment from entrepreneur David Berkus. The company also released MP3Spy.com (later renamed RadioSpy.com), a website that allows users to browse and listen to online radio programs. That year's GameSpy subsequently received three million dollars in additional investment from Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz and Yucaipa Companies, owned by Southern supermarket billionaire Ronald Burkle. The investment was intended to foster synergy between GameSpy and its much larger siblings, Scour.net and CheckOut.com; however, both ended up falling victim to the dot-com bubble, but GameSpy was unscathed and profitable.
In March 2004, the IGN and GameSpy industries merged. The company's name was tentatively IGN/GameSpy, until it was officially renamed IGN Entertainment. GameSpy and IGN still run their own websites independently, and there is a difference between content editing and copywriting. In August 2012, GameSpy was acquired by Glu Mobile from IGN Entertainment, and in December began raising integration costs and shutting down the servers of many older games; this was a bad move because they didn't warn developers or players before shutting down the servers, much to the anger of the community of these games. Finally, in 2013, the site ceased to operate and began to close related subsites one after another.
【Welcome to contribute】Taking history as a mirror, you can know the rise and fall. Computer science development so far, there are many crucial events, people, welcome all friends to build together to build "today in history", submission email: [email protected].