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July 9Th Leader Navigator browser [Sept 18] America", after the owner of the soon became the industry Seattle business park housing July 9th leader. Nintendo’s US operation, Mario Segale, demanded payment of a Andreessen authored a popular late rental bill. op-ed piece for The Wall Street ICL Formed Journal in August 2011, “Why There is, of course, no donkey in July 9, 1968 Software Is Eating the World”. “Donkey Kong”, so why “donkey”? Miyamoto apparently International Computers wanted to include “donkey” to Limited (ICL) was a large British convey stubbornness. When he computer company created first suggested it, he was through the merger of several laughed at, but the name stuck. companies, including International Computers and Tabulators (ICT [Feb 27]), English Electric Leo Marconi Tron Released (EELM), and Elliott Automation July 9, 1982 [Oct 00]. EELM was itself a merger of the computer Tron (or TRON) is a 1982 sci-fi divisions of English Electric film directed by Steven [May 10], LEO [Sept 5], and Lisberger, and partly inspired by Marconi [Dec 11]. his love of Pong [Nov 29]. Jeff Bridges, a loveably roguish The hope of the UK’s Labour programmer, is transported into Government was that ICL could the nightmarish software world compete with major world of a mainframe. manufacturers like IBM, and for Marc Andreessen (2008). Photo a while it did quite well. by Joi. CC BY 2.0. Tron was one of the first movies to make ‘extensive’ use of Its most successful product line computer animation – about 20 was the ICL 2900 series A 2015 New Yorker piece, minutes worth, CGI was used for announced on October 9, 1974. “Tomorrow’s Advance Man,” the mainframe's “terrain,” and It combined features from a pointed out that he is “six feet vehicles such as light-cycles and variety of sources, including five inches tall, with a cranium tanks, replacing the traditional Burroughs [Jan 28] mainframes, so large, bald, and oblong that utilization of miniatures and Multics [Nov 30], and the MU5 you can’t help but think of words matte paintings. [June 16] developed at the like “Jumbo” and “Grade A.”" University of Manchester. Prior to the film’s release, Disney stock dropped by 4% However, ICL’s mainframe base after several Wall Street analysts came to be dominated by large Donkey Kong attended a screening and were contracts from the UK public unimpressed. The day after its sector, which contracted Released release, Disney stock fell another significantly with the rise of the 2.5 points. PC. The company was acquired July 9, 1981 by Fujitsu [Oct 00] at the end of "Donkey Kong" was created by Although the film was a failure, the 1990s. Shigeru Miyamoto at Nintendo, a the video game based on it Japanese playing card and toy proved to be a tremendous hit, company turned video game and actually out-grossed the enterprise. The original idea was film. The poor box office caused Marc Lowell to write a game involving the Disney to re-release the movie in Andreessen Popeye characters, but they February 1983, with even worse couldn't obtain a license. results. Born: July 9, 1971; "Donkey Kong" was named after The Motion Picture Academy Cedar Falls, Iowa the game’s villain, a gorilla gone refused to nominate TRON for a In 1993, Andreessen and Eric rogue (a bit like Popeye's special-effects award because, as Bina [Oct 25] developed the Blutto). The game’s hero was Lisberger put it, “The Academy Mosaic web browser [Sept 28] at originally a carpenter called thought we cheated by using NCSA [Jan 15]. The next year, Jumpman, but was renamed computers.” But in 1997, Ken Andreessen joined James Clark Mario when Nintendo wanted to Perlin of MAGI (one of the four [March 23] to co-found Mosaic use the character in other companies involved in the CGI) Communications [March 25], games. won an Academy Award for which later changed its name to Technical Achievement for his The story goes that the name Netscape Communications invention of Perlin noise, which "Mario" was chosen by Minoru Corporation. Its Netscape was first used in TRON. Arakawa, head of "Nintendo 1 There's been some debate over the origin of the TRON name. Some historians point to the TRON debugging command in old dialects of BASIC (short for TRace ON). However, Lisberger has stated that he took the name from the word “electronic”. Co-writer Bonnie MacBird suggested to Lisberger that they hire Alan Kay [May 17] as a consultant on the film. MacBird sent versions of the script to Xerox PARC [July 1] electronically over phone lines via acoustic coupler where Kay and MacBird subsequently edited them on an Alto [March 1]. This may make MacBird the first screenwriter to edit a screenplay on a computer. Kay and MacBird married in 1983. The movie's character Alan Bradley, who wrote the TRON program, was based in part on Kay, and the lab in the film was modelled after Kay’s lab at Xerox PARC. Video gaming Easter eggs in the movie include a glimpse of Pac- Man [April 3] and a surveillance machine that looks a bit like Donkey Kong [July 9]. 2 .
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