This month in IT history: April

The month of April has witnessed its share of historic technology moments, including the unveiling of the classic Apple II and Commodore PET personal computers, the founding of Netscape and the release of Microsoft’s first graphical user interface, Windows 3.1. Let’s take a look back at this month in IT history:

April 3, 1973 — The First Mobile Call is Made

Today, it might be hard to imagine a world without a smartphone, never mind a cell phone. But back when the first mobile call was made, it was on a device nearly as thick as a brick. On April 3, 1973, Motorola engineer Martin Cooper placed the first-ever mobile call with an early model of the Motorola DynaTAC phone. The device weighed in at a hefty 2.5 pounds and measured 9 inches by 5 inches. The DynaTAC didn’t become commercially available until the 1980s, but it was immortalized as Gordon Gekko’s phone in the 1987 movie Wall Street.

April 4, 1994 – Netscape Launches

Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Mosaic Communications Corporation on April 4, 1994. The company’s first product, the Mosaic Netscape 0.9 web browser, launched later that year and within four months had captured three quarters of the web browsing market. By 1998, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had surpassed Netscape’s Navigator browser in popularity, and in November 1998 the company was acquired by AOL for US$4.2 billion. AOL released two more versions of the Netscape browser before shutting down the Netscape department.

April 6, 1992 — Microsoft Releases Windows 3.1

It’s hard to imagine today, but the earliest Windows versions relied on a DOS command line interface rather than the now-familiar graphical user interface, making them much less intuitive to use. The release of Windows 3.1 on April 6, 1992 changed this, adding mouse support that allowed users to navigate the screen, multimedia support that enabled better sound and support for multitasking, which allowed users to run multiple programs at the same time.

April 16, 1977 — Introduction of Apple II and Commodore PET

The first annual West Coast Computer Faire in 1977 was the launchpad for two iconic computers — the Apple II and the Commodore PET 2001. The Apple II, the company’s first personal computer, boasted colour, graphics and sound, selling for US$1,298 (the equivalent of US$5,367 in 2018). The PET 2001 featured a monochrome display and sold for US$795 (about US$3,287 in 2018). Both machines proved popular and spawned a series of increasingly powerful devices over the following years.

April 30, 1993 — CERN Releases the World Wide Web’s Source Code into the Public Domain Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and a scientist at CERN, urged the organization’s directors to make the web’s source code part of the public domain, allowing anyone to use it without