Charles Babbage Biography

Charles Babbage was born in London Dec. 26, 1791, St. Stephan day, in London. He was son of Benjamin Babbage, a banking partner of the Praeds who owned the Bitton Estate in Teignmouth and Betsy Plumleigh Babbage. It was about 1808 when the Babbage family decided to move into the old Rowdens house, located in East Teignmouth, and Benjamin Babbage became a warden of the nearby church of St. Michael.


The father of Charles was a rich man, so it was possible for Charles to receive instruction from several elite schools and teachers during the course of his elementary education. He was about eight when he had to move to a country school to recover from a dangerous fever. His parents sentenced that his "brain was not to be taxed too much"; Babbage wrote: "this great idleness may have led to some of my childish reasonings."
Then, he joined King Edward VI Grammar School in Totnes, South Devon, a thriving comprehensive school that's still operative today, but his fragile health status forced him back to private teaching for a period. Then, he finally joined a 30-student closed number academy managed by Reverend Stephen Freeman. The academy had a big library, where Babbage used to study mathematics by himself, and learned to love it. He had two more personal tutors after leaving the academy. One was a clergyman of Cambridge, and about him Babbage said: "I fear I did not derive from it all the advantages that I might have done.". The other one was an Oxford tutor who teached Babbage the Classics, so that he could be accepted to Cambridge.

Babbage arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge in October 1810. He had a big culture - he knew Lagrange, Leibniz, Lacroix, Simpson... and he was seriously disappointed about the math programs available at Cambridge. So he, with J.Herschel, G.Peacock, and other friends, decided to form the Analytical Society.

When, in 1812, Babbage transferred to Peterhouse, Cambridge, he was the best mathematician; but he failed to graduate with honours.
He received an honorary degree later, without even being examinated, in 1814.

In 1814, Charles Babbage married Georgiana Whitmore at St. Michael's Church in Teignmouth, Devon. His father, for some reason, never gave his approvation. They lived in tranquility at 5 Devonshire Street, Portland Place, London.
Only Three of their 8 children became adult.
Tragically, Charles' father, his wife and one of his sons all died in 1827.

A Brief History Of Computer Virus

There is a great deal of debate about this history and evolution of computer viruses. Although many experts may disagree on the origins of viruses, their history is an interesting one. Computer viruses have evolved over the years as the measures taken to detect and disable viruses have become more effective. There is a constant struggle between programmers who write viruses and the programmers who create anti-Virus Software, with one group trying to stay a step ahead of the other. Computer users can more effectively defend themselves against viruses when they have an understanding of how viruses work and their origins.

In 1949, a mathematician named John Von Neumann introduced the concept of programs that could be taught to replicate themselves. Although this thinking was way ahead of its time, the roots of computer viruses can be traced to the principles Von Neumann was describing. Nearly 20 years later, in the late 1960s, computer users created a game called “Core Wars,” where they would attempt to occupy all of the existing memory on other player’s computers. Programmers at the time had no idea that they were writing computer viruses.

The first known personal computer virus was called the brain virus, and it began infecting PCs in 1986. The Brain Virus was created in Pakistan and was a boot sector virus that affected disk space as opposed to hard drives. The virus would render floppy disks unusable by eliminating their available space. The Brain Virus was a “Stealth” virus, or in other words a virus that tried to affect machines without being noticed by the user. The first anti-virus program was created in 1988. The program was designed specifically to deal with the Brain Virus, detecting, removing, and protecting disks from future problems with the virus. The first Trojan horse virus was also created in the mid 1980′s.

In late 1987, the first “memory resident file infector” was createdóa virus that was embedded in a file and attacked only once the program was ordered to execute by the user. The first of these viruses was called the Lehigh Virus, as the first computers it attacked were at Lehigh University. A month later, a similar virus, called the Jerusalem Virus, attacked in Israel, becoming the first virus that replicated itself within infected files.

In 1990, several companies started selling anti-virus software, including IBM and McAfee, with Symantec introducing Norton Anti-Virus software in 1991. Viruses were become more stealth and more effective than ever before and the need for anti-virus software was growing for PC owners. Ironically, only a few years later, most computer experts felt that anti-virus software would no longer be necessary once Microsoft released its 1995 version of Windows, a fact that is hard to believe in retrospect.

Nearly every year since the mid 90′s, another new virus has been created, detected, and rendered ineffective by anti-virus software. The tug of war between programmers who write viruses and anti-virus software programmers will likely continue for years to come.

Bill Gates Biography

Bill Gates Biography (William Henry Gates III): Microsoft Founder
Famous for : Being the richest man in the world, a cofounder of the software company Microsoft, and for being one of the world's most generous philanthropists.
Gates details : Born - USA October 28, 1955 Lives - United States of America
More Gates : Buffett Gives to Gates Foundation - Person of the Year 2005 - Melinda Gates - Richest Man in the World

Bill Gates is one of the most influential people in the world. He is cofounder of one of the most recognized brands in the computer industry with nearly every desk top computer using at least one software program from Microsoft. According to the Forbes magazine, Bill Gates is the richest man in the world and has held the number one position for many years.

Gates was born and grew up in Seattle, Washington USA. His father, William H. Gates II was a Seattle attorney and his mother, Mary Maxwell Gates was a school teacher and chairperson of the United Way charity. Gates and his two sisters had a comfortable upbringing, with Gates being able to attend the exclusive secondary "Lakeside School".

Bill Gates started studying at Harvard University in 1973 where he spent time with Paul Allen. Gates and Allen worked on a version of the programming language BASIC, that was the basis for the MITS Altair (the first microcomputer available). He did not go on to graduate from Harvard University as he left in his junior year to start what was to become the largest computer software company in the world; Microsoft Corporation.

Bill Gates and the Microsoft Corporation
"To enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential." Microsoft Mission Statement
After dropping out of Harvard Bill Gates and his partner Paul Allen set about revolutionizing the computer industry. Gates believed there should be a computer on every office desk and in every home.

In 1975 the company Micro-soft was formed, which was an abbreviation of microcomputer software. It soon became simply "Microsoft"® and went on to completely change the way people use computers.

Microsoft helped to make the computer easier to use with its developed and purchased software, and made it a commercial success. The success of Microsoft began with the MS-DOS computer operating system that Gates licensed to IBM. Gates also set about protecting the royalties that he could acquire from computer software by aggressively fighting against all forms of software piracy, effectively creating the retail software market that now exists today. This move was quite controversial at the time as it was the freedom of sharing that produced much innovation and advances in the newly forming software industry. But it was this stand against software piracy, that was to be central in the great commercial success that Microsoft went on to achieve.

Bill Gates retired as Microsoft CEO in 2008.

Bill Gates Criticism
With his great success in the computer software industry also came many criticisms. With his ambitious and aggressive business philosophy, Gates or his Microsoft lawyers have been in and out of courtrooms fighting legal battles almost since Microsoft began.

The Microsoft monopoly sets about completely dominating every market it enters through either acquisition, aggressive business tactics or a combination of them. Many of the largest technology companies have fought legally against the actions of Microsoft, including Apple Computer, Netscape, Opera, WordPerfect, and sun Microsystems.

Bill Gates Net Worth
With an estimated wealth of $53 billion in 2006, Bill Gates is the richest man in the world and he should be starting to get used to the number spot as he has been there from the mid-ninties up until now. The famous investor Warren Buffett is gaining on Gates though with an estimated $46 billion in 2006.

Microsoft hasn't just made Bill Gates very wealthy though. According to the Forbes business magazine in 2004 Paul Allen, Microsoft cofounder was the 5th richest man in the world with an estimated $21 billion. While Bill Gates' long time friend and Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer was the 19th richest man in the world at $12.4 billion.


Bill Gates Philanthropy
Being the richest man in the world has also enabled Gates to create one of the world's largest charitable foundations. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has an endowment of more than $28 billion, with donations totaling more than $1 billion every year. The foundation was formed in 2000 after merging the "Gates Learning Foundation" and "William H. Gates Foundation". Their aim is to "bring innovations in health and learning to the global community".

Bill Gates continues to play a very active role in the workings of the Microsoft Company, but has handed the position of CEO over to Steve Ballmer. Gates now holds the positions of "Chairman" and "Chief Software Architect". He has started that he plans to take on fewer responsibilities at Microsoft and will eventually devote all his time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In 2006, the second richest man in the world, Warren Buffett pledged to give much of his vast fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Bill Gates Receives a KBE
In March 2005 William H. Gates received an "honorary" knighthood from the queen of England. Gates was bestowed with the KBE Order (Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for his services in reducing poverty and improving health in the developing countries of the world.
After the privately held ceremony in Buckingham Palace with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, Gates commented on the recognition..
"I am humbled and delighted. I am particularly pleased that this honor helps recognize the real heroes our foundation (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) supports to improve health in poor countries. Their incredible work is helping ensure that one day all people, no matter where they are born, will have the same opportunity for a healthy life, and I'm grateful to share this honor with them."

The KBE Order of the British Empire is the second highest Order given out, but it is only an honorary knighthood as only citizens that are British or a part of the Commonwealth receive the full Order. This means that Gates does not become Sir Bill Gates.

Bill Gates lives near Lake Washington with his wife Melinda French Gates and their three children. Interests of Gates include reading, golf and playing bridge.

Reference:- Official Link Copyright © Woopidoo.com

Multiplication Station

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Bubble Trouble

Windows 8 - A Step Ahead...!!!

At the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced that it would be including support for system-on-a-chip (SoC) and mobile ARM processors in its next version of the Windows operating system, which is expected to be called Windows 8. It is anticipated that Windows 8 will be released in 2012 or later.

Windows 7

Windows 7 is the current major release after Windows Vista and was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and reached general retail availability on October 22, 2009.[10][11] It was previously known by the codenames Blackcomb and Vienna.
Some features of Windows 7 are faster booting, Device Stage, Windows PowerShell, Media Center in all main versions, less obtrusive User Account Control, multi-touch, and improved window management. Features included with Windows Vista and not in Windows 7 include the sidebar (although gadgets remain) and several programs that were removed in favor of downloading their Windows Live counterparts.
Windows 7 ships in six editions:[12]
Starter (available worldwide with new PCs only)
Home Basic
Home Premium
Professional
Enterprise (available to volume-license business customers only)
Ultimate (available to retail market with limited availability to OEMs)
In some countries (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland)[citation needed], there are other editions that lack some features such as Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center and Internet Explorer called names such as "Windows 7 N." Microsoft focuses on selling Windows 7 Home Premium and Professional. All editions, except the Starter edition, are available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

Windows Server 2008

Windows Server 2008, released on February 27, 2008, was originally known as Windows Server Codename "Longhorn". Windows Server 2008 builds on the technological and security advances first introduced with Windows Vista, and is significantly more modular than its predecessor, Windows Server 2003. At the Professional Developers Conference (PDC) 2008, Microsoft announced Windows Server 2008 R2, as the server variant of Windows 7. Windows Server 2008 R2 ships in 64-bit (x64 and Itanium) only.
Windows Server 2008 ships in ten editions:
Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows HPC Server 2008
Windows Web Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows Storage Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows Small Business Server 2008 (64-bit only)
Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit)
Windows Server 2008 for Itanium-based Systems
Windows Server 2008 Foundation Server

Windows Vista

Windows Vista was released on November 30, 2006 to business customers, consumer versions following on January 30, 2007. Windows Vista intended to have enhanced security by introducing a new restricted user mode called User Account Control, replacing the "administrator-by-default" philosophy of Windows XP. One major difference between Vista and earlier versions of Windows, Windows 95 and later, is that the original start button was replaced with just the Windows icon. Vista also features new graphics features, the Windows Aero GUI, new applications (such as Windows Calendar, Windows DVD Maker and some new games including Chess, Mahjong, and Purble Place),[8] Internet Explorer 7, Windows Media Player 11, and a large number of underlying architectural changes.
Windows Vista ships in six editions:[9]
Starter (only available in developing countries)
Home Basic
Home Premium
Business
Enterprise (only available to large businesses and enterprises)
Ultimate (combines both Home Premium and Enterprise)
All editions (except Starter edition) are currently available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions. The biggest advantage of the 64-bit version is breaking the 4 gigabyte memory barrier, which 32-bit computers cannot fully access.

Windows Home Server

Windows Home Server (codenamed Q, Quattro) is a server product based on Windows Server 2003, designed for consumer use. The system was announced on January 7, 2007 by Bill Gates. Windows Home Server can be configured and monitored using a console program that can be installed on a client PC. Such features as Media Sharing, local and remote drive backup and file duplication are all listed as features.

Thin client: Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs

In July 2006, Microsoft released a thin-client version of Windows XP Service Pack 2, called Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs (WinFLP). It is only available to Software Assurance customers. The aim of WinFLP is to give companies a viable upgrade option for older PCs that are running Windows 95, 98, and Me that will be supported with patches and updates for the next several years. Most user applications will typically be ran on a remote machine using Terminal Services or Citrix.

Windows Server 2003

On April 25, 2003 Microsoft launched Windows Server 2003, a notable update to Windows 2000 Server encompassing many new security features, a new "Manage Your Server" wizard that simplifies configuring a machine for specific roles, and improved performance. It has the version number NT 5.2. A few services not essential for server environments are disabled by default for stability reasons, most noticeable are the "Windows Audio" and "Themes" services; Users have to enable them manually to get sound or the "Luna" look as per Windows XP. The hardware acceleration for display is also turned off by default, users have to turn the acceleration level up themselves if they trust the display card driver.
December 2005, Microsoft released Windows Server 2003 R2, which is actually Windows Server 2003 with SP1 (Service Pack 1) plus an add-on package. Among the new features are a number of management features for branch offices, file serving, printing and company-wide identity integration.
Windows Server 2003 is available in six editions:
Web Edition (32-bit)
Standard Edition (32 and 64-bit)
Enterprise Edition (32 and 64-bit)
Datacenter Edition (32 and 64-bit)
Small Business Server (32-bit)
Storage Server (OEM channel only)

Windows XP

In 2001, Microsoft released Windows XP (code named "Whistler"). The merging of the Windows NT/2000 and Windows 95/98/Me lines was finally achieved with Windows XP. Windows XP uses the Windows NT 5.1 kernel, marking the entrance of the Windows NT core to the consumer market, to replace the aging 16/32-bit branch. The initial release met with considerable criticism, particularly in the area of security, leading to the release of three major Service Packs. Windows XP SP1 was released in September 2002, SP2 came out in August 2004 and SP3 came out in April 2008. Service Pack 2 provided significant improvements and encouraged widespread adoption of XP among both home and business users. Windows XP lasted longer as Microsoft's flagship operation system than any other version of Windows, from 2001 to January 30, 2007, when it was succeeded by Windows Vista.
Windows XP is available in a number of versions:
Windows XP Home Edition, for home desktops and laptops - lacked features such as joining Active Directory Domain, Remote Desktop Server and Internet Information Services Server.
Windows XP Home Edition N, as above, but without a default installation of Windows Media Player, as mandated by a European Union ruling
Windows XP Professional, for business and power users contained all features in Home Edition.
Windows XP Professional N, as above, but without a default installation of Windows Media Player, as mandated by a European Union ruling
Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE), released in October 2002 for desktops and notebooks with an emphasis on home entertainment. Contained all features offered in Windows XP Professional and the Windows Media Center. Subsequent versions are the same but have an updated Windows Media Center.
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2003
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004
Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, released on October 12, 2004. Included Windows XP Service Pack 2, the Royalle Windows Theme and joining a Windows Active Directory Domain is disabled.
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, for tablet PCs
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005
Windows XP Embedded, for embedded systems
Windows XP Starter Edition, for new computer users in developing countries
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, released on 25 April 2005 for home and workstation systems utilizing 64-bit processors based on the x86-64 instruction set developed by AMD as AMD64; Intel calls their version Intel 64
Windows XP 64-bit Edition, is a version for Intel's Itanium line of processors; maintains 32-bit compatibility solely through a software emulator. It is roughly analogous to Windows XP Professional in features. It was discontinued in September 2005 when the last vendor of Itanium workstations stopped shipping Itanium systems marketed as "Workstations".
Windows XP 64-bit Edition 2003, based on the Windows NT 5.2 codebase.

Windows Millennium Edition (Me)

In September 2000, Microsoft introduced Windows Me (Millennium Edition), which upgraded Windows 98 with enhanced multimedia and Internet features from Windows 2000. It also introduced the first version of System Restore, which allowed users to revert their system state to a previous "known-good" point in the case of system failure. System Restore was a notable feature that made its way into Windows XP. The first version of Windows Movie Maker was introduced as well.
Windows Me was conceived as a quick one-year project that served as a stopgap release between Windows 98 and Windows XP. Many of the new features were available from the Windows Update site as updates for older Windows versions, (System Restore and Windows Movie Maker were exceptions). Windows Me was criticised for stability issues, and for lacking real mode DOS support, to the point of being referred to as the "Mistake Edition" or "Many Errors." Windows Me was the last operating system to be based on the Windows 9x (monolithic) kernel and MS-DOS.

Windows 2000

Microsoft released Windows 2000, known during its development cycle as Windows NT 5.0, in February 2000. It was successfully deployed both on the server and the workstation markets. Amongst Windows 2000's most significant new features was Active Directory, a near-complete replacement of the NT 4.0 Windows Server domain model, which built on industry-standard technologies like DNS, LDAP, and Kerberos to connect machines to one another. Terminal Services, previously only available as a separate edition of NT 4, was expanded to all server versions. A number of features from Windows 98 were incorporated as well, such as an improved Device Manager, Windows Media Player, and a revised DirectX that made it possible for the first time for many modern games to work on the NT kernel. Windows 2000 is also the last NT-kernel Windows operating system to lack Product Activation.
While Windows 2000 upgrades were available for Windows 95 and Windows 98, it was not intended for home users.[7]
Windows 2000 was available in six editions:
Windows 2000 Professional
Windows 2000 Server
Windows 2000 Advanced Server
Windows 2000 Datacenter Server
Windows 2000 Advanced Server Limited Edition
Windows 2000 Datacenter Server Limited Edition

Windows 98

On 25 June 1998, Microsoft released Windows 98 (codenamed Memphis). It included new hardware drivers and better support for the FAT32 file system which allows support for disk partitions larger than the 2 GB maximum accepted by Windows 95. The USB support in Windows 98 is far superior to the token, unreliable support provided by the OEM editions of Windows 95. It also controversially integrated the Internet Explorer browser into the Windows GUI and Windows Explorer file manager, prompting the opening of the United States v. Microsoft case, dealing with the question of whether Microsoft was abusing its hold on the PC operating system market to unfairly compete with companies such as Netscape.
In 1999, Microsoft released Windows 98 Second Edition, an interim release. One of the more notable new features was the addition of Internet Connection Sharing, which was a form of network address translation, allowing several machines on a LAN (Local Area Network) to share a single Internet connection. Second Edition was also much easier to use and much smoother than the first edition of Windows 98. Hardware support through device drivers was increased. Many minor problems present in the original Windows 98 were found and fixed which make it, according to many, the most stable release of Windows 9x family—to the extent that commentators used to say that Windows 98's beta version was more stable than Windows 95's final (gamma) version.

Windows NT 4.0

Main article: Windows NT 4.0
Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0, which features the new Windows 95 interface on top of the Windows NT kernel (a patch was available for developers to make NT 3.51 use the new UI, but it was quite buggy[citation needed]).
Just before Windows NT 4.0, real MS-DOS disappeared, and have been replaced by a window "Command Prompt" in Windows®
Windows NT 4.0 came in four versions:
Windows NT 4.0 Workstation
Windows NT 4.0 Server
Windows NT 4.0 Server, Enterprise Edition (includes support for 8-way SMP and clustering)
Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server

Windows 95

After Windows 3.11, Microsoft began to develop a new consumer oriented version of the operating system codenamed Chicago. Chicago was designed to have support for 32-bit preemptive multitasking like OS/2 and Windows NT, although a 16-bit kernel would remain for the sake of backward compatibility. The Win32 API first introduced with Windows NT was adopted as the standard 32-bit programming interface, with Win16 compatibility being preserved through a technique known as "thunking". A new GUI was not originally planned as part of the release, although elements of the Cairo user interface were borrowed and added as other aspects of the release (notably Plug and Play) slipped.
Microsoft did not change all of the Windows code to 32-bit; parts of it remained 16-bit (albeit not directly using real mode) for reasons of compatibility, performance, and development time. Additionally it was necessary to carry over design decisions from earlier versions of Windows for reasons of backwards compatibility, even if these design decisions no longer matched a more modern computing environment. These factors eventually began to impact the operating system's efficiency and stability.
Microsoft marketing adopted Windows 95 as the product name for Chicago when it was released on August 24, 1995. Microsoft had a double gain from its release: first, it made it impossible for consumers to run Windows 95 on a cheaper, non-Microsoft DOS; secondly, although traces of DOS were never completely removed from the system and a version of DOS would be loaded briefly as a part of the booting process, Windows 95 applications ran solely in 386 Enhanced Mode, with a flat 32-bit address space and virtual memory. These features make it possible for Win32 applications to address up to 2 gigabytes of virtual RAM (with another 2GB reserved for the operating system), and in theory prevented them from inadvertently corrupting the memory space of other Win32 applications. In this respect the functionality of Windows 95 moved closer to Windows NT, although Windows 95/98/ME did not support more than 512 megabytes of physical RAM without obscure system tweaks.
IBM continued to market OS/2, producing later versions in OS/2 3.0 and 4.0 (also called Warp). Responding to complaints about OS/2 2.0's high demands on computer hardware, version 3.0 was significantly optimized both for speed and size. Before Windows 95 was released, OS/2 Warp 3.0 was even shipped preinstalled with several large German hardware vendor chains. However, with the release of Windows 95, OS/2 began to lose market share.
It is probably impossible to choose one specific reason why OS/2 failed to gain much market share. While OS/2 continued to run Windows 3.1 applications, it lacked support for anything but the Win32s subset of Win32 API (see above). Unlike with Windows 3.1, IBM did not have access to the source code for Windows 95 and was unwilling to commit the time and resources to emulate the moving target of the Win32 API. IBM later introduced OS/2 into the United States v. Microsoft case, blaming unfair marketing tactics on Microsoft's part.
Microsoft went on to release five different versions of Windows 95:
Windows 95 - original release
Windows 95 A - included Windows 95 OSR1 slipstreamed into the installation.
Windows 95 B - (OSR2) included several major enhancements, Internet Explorer (IE) 3.0 and full FAT32 file system support.
Windows 95 B USB - (OSR2.1) included basic USB support.
Windows 95 C - (OSR2.5) included all the above features, plus IE 4.0. This was the last 95 version produced.
OSR2, OSR2.1, and OSR2.5 were not released to the general public; rather, they were available only to OEMs that would preload the OS onto computers. Some companies sold new hard drives with OSR2 preinstalled (officially justifying this as needed due to the hard drive's capacity).
The first Microsoft Plus! add-on pack was sold for Windows 95.

Windows 3.1 and NT

In response to the impending release of OS/2 2.0, Microsoft developed Windows 3.1, which included several minor improvements to Windows 3.0 (such as display of TrueType scalable fonts, developed jointly with Apple), but primarily consisted of bugfixes and multimedia support. It also excluded support for Real mode, and only ran on an 80286 or better processor. Later Microsoft also released Windows 3.11, a touch-up to Windows 3.1 which included all of the patches and updates that followed the release of Windows 3.1 in 1992. Around the same time, Microsoft released Windows for Workgroups (WfW), which was available both as an add-on for existing Windows 3.1 installations and in a version that included the base Windows environment and the networking extensions all in one package. Windows for Workgroups included improved network drivers and protocol stacks, and support for peer-to-peer networking. One optional download for WfW was the "Wolverine" TCP/IP protocol stack, which allowed for easy access to the Internet through corporate networks. There were two versions of Windows for Workgroups, WfW 3.1 and WfW 3.11. Unlike the previous versions, Windows for Workgroups 3.11 only ran in 386 Enhanced mode, and requires at least an 80386SX processor.
All these versions continued version 3.0's impressive sales pace. Even though the 3.1x series still lacked most of the important features of OS/2, such as long file names, a desktop, or protection of the system against misbehaving applications, Microsoft quickly took over the OS and GUI markets for the IBM PC. The Windows API became the de-facto standard for consumer software.
Meanwhile Microsoft continued to develop Windows NT. The main architect of the system was Dave Cutler, one of the chief architects of VMS at Digital Equipment Corporation (later purchased by Compaq, now part of Hewlett-Packard).[2] Microsoft hired him in August 1988 to create a successor to OS/2, but Cutler created a completely new system instead. Cutler had been developing a follow-on to VMS at DEC called Mica, and when DEC dropped the project he brought the expertise and around 20 engineers with him to Microsoft. DEC also believed he brought Mica's code to Microsoft and sued.[3] Microsoft eventually paid US$150 million and agreed to support DEC's Alpha CPU chip in NT.
Windows NT 3.1 (Microsoft marketing wanted Windows NT to appear to be a continuation of Windows 3.1) arrived in Beta form to developers at the July 1992 Professional Developers Conference in San Francisco.[4] Microsoft announced at the conference its intentions to develop a successor to both Windows NT and Windows 3.1's replacement (Windows 95, codenamed Chicago), which would unify the two into one operating system. This successor was codenamed Cairo. In hindsight, Cairo was a much more difficult project than Microsoft had anticipated and, as a result, NT and Chicago would not be unified until Windows XP—albeit Windows 2000, oriented to business, had already unified most of the system’s bolts and gears, it was XP that was sold to home consumers like Windows 95 and came to be viewed as the final unified OS. Parts of Cairo have still not made it into Windows as of 2009 - specifically, the WinFS file system, which was the much touted Object File System of Cairo. Microsoft announced that they have discontinued the separate release of WinFS for Windows XP and Windows Vista[5] and will gradually incorporate the technologies developed for WinFS in other products and technologies, notably Microsoft SQL Server.
Driver support was lacking due to the increased programming difficulty in dealing with NT's superior hardware abstraction model. This problem plagued the NT line all the way through Windows 2000. Programmers complained that it was too hard to write drivers for NT, and hardware developers were not going to go through the trouble of developing drivers for a small segment of the market. Additionally, although allowing for good performance and fuller exploitation of system resources, it was also resource-intensive on limited hardware, and thus was only suitable for larger, more expensive machines.
However, these same features made Windows NT perfect for the LAN server market (which in 1993 was experiencing a rapid boom, as office networking was becoming common). NT also had advanced network connectivity options and the efficient NTFS file system. Windows NT version 3.51 was Microsoft's entry into this field, and took away market share from Novell (the dominant player) in the following years.
One of Microsoft's biggest advances initially developed for Windows NT was a new 32-bit API, to replace the legacy 16-bit Windows API. This API was called Win32, and from then on Microsoft referred to the older 16-bit API as Win16. The Win32 API had three main implementations: one for Windows NT, one for Win32s (which was a subset of Win32 which could be used on Windows 3.1 systems), and one for Chicago. Thus Microsoft sought to ensure some degree of compatibility between the Chicago design and Windows NT, even though the two systems had radically different internal architectures. Windows NT was the first Windows operating system based on a hybrid kernel.

A step sideways: OS/2

During the mid to late 1980s, Microsoft and IBM had cooperatively been developing OS/2 as a successor to DOS. OS/2 would take full advantage of the aforementioned Protected Mode of the Intel 80286 processor and up to 16MB of memory. OS/2 1.0, released in 1987, supported swapping and multitasking and allowed running of DOS executables.
A GUI, called the Presentation Manager (PM), was not available with OS/2 until version 1.1, released in 1988. Its API was incompatible with Windows. (Among other things, Presentation Manager placed X,Y coordinate 0,0 at the bottom left of the screen like Cartesian coordinates, while Windows put 0,0 at the top left of the screen like most other computer window systems.) Version 1.2, released in 1989, introduced a new file system, HPFS, to replace the FAT file system.

By the early 1990s, conflicts developed in the Microsoft/IBM relationship. They cooperated with each other in developing their PC operating systems, and had access to each others' code. Microsoft wanted to further develop Windows, while IBM desired for future work to be based on OS/2. In an attempt to resolve this tension, IBM and Microsoft agreed that IBM would develop OS/2 2.0, to replace OS/2 1.3 and Windows 3.0, while Microsoft would develop a new operating system, OS/2 3.0, to later succeed OS/2 2.0.
This agreement soon however fell apart, and the Microsoft/IBM relationship was terminated. IBM continued to develop OS/2, while Microsoft changed the name of its (as yet unreleased) OS/2 3.0 to Windows NT. Both retained the rights to use OS/2 and Windows technology developed up to the termination of the agreement; Windows NT, however, was to be written anew, mostly independently (see below).
After an interim 1.3 version to fix up many remaining problems with the 1.x series, IBM released OS/2 version 2.0 in 1992. This was a major improvement: it featured a new, object-oriented GUI, the Workplace Shell (WPS), that included a desktop and was considered by many to be OS/2's best feature. Microsoft would later imitate much of it in Windows 95. Version 2.0 also provided a full 32-bit API, offered smooth multitasking and could take advantage of the 4 gigabytes of address space provided by the Intel 80386. Still, much of the system had 16-bit code internally which required, among other things, device drivers to be 16-bit code as well. This was one of the reasons for the chronic shortage of OS/2 drivers for the latest devices. Version 2.0 could also run DOS and Windows 3.0 programs, since IBM had retained the right to use the DOS and Windows code as a result of the breakup.

Success with Windows 3.0

Microsoft Windows scored a significant success with Windows 3.0, released in 1990. In addition to improved capabilities given to native applications, Windows also allowed users to better multitask older MS-DOS based software compared to Windows/386, thanks to the introduction of virtual memory.

Windows 3.0's user interface was finally a serious competitor to the user interface of the Macintosh computer. PCs had improved graphics by this time, due to VGA video cards, and the Protected/Enhanced mode allowed Windows applications to use more memory in a more painless manner than their DOS counterparts could. Windows 3.0 could run in Real, Standard, or 386 Enhanced modes, and was compatible with any Intel processor from the 8086/8088 up to the 80286 and 80386. This was the first version to run Windows programs in protected mode, although the 386 enhanced mode kernel was an enhanced version of the protected mode kernel in Windows/386.
A "multimedia" version, Windows 3.0 with Multimedia Extensions 1.0, was released several months later. This was bundled with "multimedia upgrade kits", comprising a CD-ROM drive and a sound card, such as the Creative Labs Sound Blaster Pro. This version was the precursor to the multimedia features available in Windows 3.1 and later, and was part of Microsoft's specification for the Multimedia PC.
The features listed above and growing market support from application software developers made Windows 3.0 wildly successful, selling around 10 million copies in the two years before the release of version 3.1. Windows 3.0 became a major source of income for Microsoft, and led the company to revise some of its earlier plans. It was discontinued on 31 December 2001.

Windows 1.0 and Windows 2.0

The first independent version of Microsoft Windows, version 1.0, released on 20 November 1985, achieved little popularity. It was originally going to be called "Interface Manager" but Rowland Hanson, the head of marketing at Microsoft, convinced the company that the name Windows would be more appealing to consumers. Windows 1.0 was not a complete operating system, but rather an "operating environment" that extended MS-DOS, and shared the latter's inherent flaws and problems.
The first version of Microsoft Windows included a simple graphics painting program called Windows Paint; Windows Write, a simple word processor; an appointment "calendar"; a "cardfiler"; a "notepad"; a "clock"; a "control panel"; a "computer terminal"; "Clipboard"; and RAM driver. It also included the MS-DOS Executive and a game called Reversi.
Microsoft had worked with Apple Computer to develop several Desk Accessories and other minor pieces of software that were included with early Macintosh system software[citation needed]. As part of the related business negotiations, Microsoft had licensed certain aspects of the Macintosh user interface from Apple; in later litigation, a district court summarized these aspects as "screen displays". In the development of Windows 1.0, Microsoft intentionally limited its borrowing of certain GUI elements from the Macintosh user interface, in order to comply with its license.

For example, windows were only displayed "tiled" on the screen; that is, they could not overlap or overlie one another. There was no trash can icon with which to delete files, since Apple claimed ownership of the rights to that paradigm.
Microsoft Windows version 2 came out on 9 December 1987, and proved slightly more popular than its predecessor. Much of the popularity for Windows 2.0 came by way of its inclusion as a "run-time version" with Microsoft's new graphical applications, Excel and Word for Windows. They could be run from MS-DOS, executing Windows for the duration of their activity, and closing down Windows upon exit.
Microsoft Windows received a major boost around this time when Aldus PageMaker appeared in a Windows version, having previously run only on Macintosh. Some computer historians[who?] date this, the first appearance of a significant and non-Microsoft application for Windows, as the beginning of the success of Windows.
Versions 2.0x used the real-mode memory model, which confined it to a maximum of 1 megabyte of memory. In such a configuration, it could run under another multitasker like DESQview, which used the 286 Protected Mode.
Later, two new versions were released: Windows/286 2.1 and Windows/386 2.1. Like previous versions of Windows, Windows/286 2.1 used the real-mode memory model, but was the first version to support the High Memory Area. Windows/386 2.1 had a protected mode kernel with LIM-standard EMS emulation, the predecessor to XMS which would finally change the topology of IBM PC computing. All Windows and DOS-based applications at the time were real mode, running over the protected mode kernel by using the virtual 8086 mode, which was new with the 80386 processor.
Version 2.03, and later 3.0, faced challenges from Apple over its overlapping windows and other features Apple charged mimicked the ostensibly copyrighted "look and feel" of its operating system and "embodie[d] and generated a copy of the Macintosh" in its OS. Judge William Schwarzer dropped all but 10 of Apple's 189 claims of copyright infringement, and ruled that most of the remaining 10 were over uncopyrightable ideas.

Microsoft Windows

In 1983, Microsoft announced the development of Windows, a graphical user interface (GUI) for its own operating system (MS-DOS), which had shipped for IBM PC and compatible computers since 1981. The product line has changed from a GUI product to a modern operating system over two families of design, each with its own codebase and default file system.
The 3.x and 4.x family includes Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows Me. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 achieved the breakthrough from 16- to 32-bit networking and 32-bit disk access. Windows 95 completed the migration to 32-bit code and started an entirely new user interface, most of which is still used today.
Windows NT family started with NT 3.1 in 1993. Modern Windows operating system versions are based on the newer Windows NT kernel that was originally intended for OS/2. Windows runs on IA-32, x86-64, and Itanium processors. Earlier versions also ran on the i860, Alpha, MIPS, Fairchild Clipper, and PowerPC architectures. Some work was done to port it to the SPARC architecture. The NT kernel borrows many techniques from VMS. With NT4.0 in 1996 the shell changed from Program Manager to Explorer. CPU support included PowerPC, MIPS, and DEC Alpha for earlier versions of NT, but focuses on Itanium, 386, 486, and x64 today.

International Scores

International Scores: "Get the latest scores of all the international cricket matches from Cricinfo. Add the Cricinfo International Scores widget now!"

History Of Google By Google

Our company has packed a lot in to a relatively young life.
We‘ve captured some of the key milestones in Google‘s development.

1995-1997 · 1998 · 1999 · 2000 · 2001 · 2002 · 2003 · 2004 · 2005 · 2006 · 2007 · 2008 · 2009 · 2010


1995

* Larry Page and Sergey Brin meet at Stanford. (Larry, 22, a U Michigan grad, is considering the school; Sergey, 21, is assigned to show him around.) According to some accounts, they disagree about most everything during this first meeting.

1996

* Larry and Sergey, now Stanford computer science grad students, begin collaborating on a search engine called BackRub.
* BackRub operates on Stanford servers for more than a year—eventually taking up too much bandwidth to suit the university.

1997

* Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google—a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.

1998

August

* Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim writes a check for $100,000 to an entity that doesn‘t exist yet: a company called Google Inc.

September

* Google sets up workspace in Susan Wojcicki‘s garage at 232 Santa Margarita, Menlo Park.
* Google files for incorporation in California on September 4. Shortly thereafter, Larry and Sergey open a bank account in the newly-established company‘s name and deposit Andy Bechtolsheim‘s check.
* Larry and Sergey hire Craig Silverstein as their first employee; he‘s a fellow computer science grad student at Stanford.

December

* “PC Magazine” reports that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results” and recognizes us as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.

1999

February

* We outgrow our garage office and move to new digs at 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto with just eight employees.

April

* Yoshka, our first “company” dog, comes to work with our senior vice president of operations, Urs Hoelzle.

May

* Omid Kordestani joins to run sales—the first non-engineering hire.

June

* Our first press release announces a $25 million round from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins; John Doerr and Michael Moritz join the board. The release quotes Moritz describing “Googlers” as ”people who use Google”.

August

* We move to our first Mountain View location: 2400 E. Bayshore. Mountain View is a few miles south of Stanford University, and north of the older towns of Silicon Valley: Sunnyvale, Santa Clara, San Jose.

November

* Charlie Ayers joins as Google’s first chef. He wins the job in a cook-off judged by the company‘s 40 employees. Previous claim to fame: catering for the Grateful Dead.

2000

April

* On April Fool‘s Day, we announce the MentalPlex: Google‘s ability to read your mind as you visualize the search results you want. Thus begins our annual foray in the Silicon Valley tradition of April 1 hoaxes.

May

* The first 10 language versions of Google.com are released: French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish.
* We win our first Webby Awards: Technical Achievement (voted by judges) and Peoples’ Voice (voted by users).

June

* We forge a partnership with Yahoo! to become their default search provider.
* We announce the first billion-URL index and therefore Google becomes the world’s largest search engine.

September

* We start offering search in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, bringing our total number of supported languages to 15.

October

* Google AdWords launches with 350 customers. The self-service ad program promises online activation with a credit card, keyword targeting and performance feedback.

December

* Google Toolbar is released. It’s a browser plug-in that makes it possible to search without visiting the Google homepage.

2001

January

* We announce the hire of Silicon Valley veteran Wayne Rosing as our first VP of engineering operations.

February

* Our first public acquisition: Deja.com’s Usenet Discussion Service, an archive of 500 million Usenet discussions dating back to 1995. We add search and browse features and launch it as Google Groups.

March

* Eric Schmidt is named chairman of the board of directors.
* Google.com is available in 26 languages.

April

* Swedish Chef becomes a language preference.

July

* Image Search launches, offering access to 250 million images.

August

* We open our first international office, in Tokyo.
* Eric Schmidt becomes our CEO. Larry and Sergey are named presidents of products and technology, respectively.

October

* A new partnership with Universo Online (UOL) makes Google the major search service for millions of Latin Americans.

December

* Keeping track: Our index size grows to 3 billion web documents.

2002

February

* Klingon becomes one of 72 language interfaces.
* The first Google hardware is released: it’s a yellow box called the Google Search Appliance that businesses can plug into their computer network to enable search capabilities for their own documents.
* We release a major overhaul for AdWords, including new cost-per-click pricing.

April

* For April Fool‘s Day, we announce that pigeons power our search results.
* We release a set of APIs, enabling developers to query more than 2 billion web documents and program in their favorite environment, including Java, Perl and Visual Studio.

May

* We announce a major partnership with AOL to offer Google search and sponsored links to 34 million customers using CompuServe, Netscape and AOL.com.
* We release Google Labs, a place to try out beta technologies fresh from our R&D team.

September

* Google News launches with 4000 news sources.

October

* We open our first Australian office in Sydney.

December

* You can now search for stuff to buy with Froogle (later called Google Product Search).

2003

January

* American Dialect Society members vote “google” the “most useful” Word of the Year for 2002.

February

* We acquire Pyra Labs, the creators of Blogger.

March

* We announce a new content-targeted advertising service, enabling publishers large and small to access Google‘s vast network of advertisers. (Weeks later, on April 23, we acquire Applied Semantics, whose technology bolsters the service named AdSense.)

April

* We launch Google Grants, our in-kind advertising program for nonprofit organizations to run in-kind ad campaigns for their cause.

October

* Registration opens for programmers to compete for cash prizes and recognition at our first-ever Code Jam. Coders can work in Java, C++, C# or VB.NET.

December

* We launch Google Print (which later becomes Google Book Search), indexing small excerpts from books to appear in search results.

2004

January

* orkut launches as a way for us to tap into the sphere of social networking.

February

* Larry Page is inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.
* Our search index hits a new milestone: 6 billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages and 880 million images.

March

* We move to our new “Googleplex” at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway in Mountain View, giving 800+ employees a campus environment.
* We formalize our enterprise unit with the hire of Dave Girouard as general manager; reporters begin reporting in April about our vision for the enterprise search business.
* We introduce Google Local, offering relevant neighborhood business listings, maps and directions. (Later, Local is combined with Google Maps.)

April

* For April Fools we announce plans to open the Googlunaplex, a new research facility on the Moon.

May

* We announce the first winners of the Google Anita Borg Scholarship, awarded to outstanding women studying computer science. Today these scholarships are open to students in the U.S., Canada, Australia and Europe.

August

* Our Initial Public Offering of 19,605,052 shares of Class A common stock takes place on Wall Street on August 18. Opening price: $85 per share.

September

* There are more than 100 Google domains (Norway and Kenya are #102 and #103). The list has since grown to more than 150.

October

* We formally open our office in Dublin, Ireland, with 150 multilingual Googlers, a visit from Sergey and Larry, and recognition from the Deputy Prime Minister of Ireland, Mary Harney.
* Google SMS (short message service) launches; send your text search queries to GOOGL or 466453 on your mobile device.
* Larry and Sergey are named Fellows by the Marconi Society, which recognizes “lasting scientific contributions to human progress in the field of communications science and the Internet.”
* We spotlight our new engineering offices in Bangalore and Hyderabad, India with a visit from Sergey and Larry.
* Google Desktop Search is introduced: You can now search for files and documents stored on your hard drive using Google technology.
* We launch the beta version of Google Scholar, a free service for searching scholarly literature such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports.
* We acquire Keyhole, a digital mapping company whose technology will later become Google Earth.

November

* Our index of web pages reaches 8 billion.

December

* We open our Tokyo R&D (research & development) center to attract the best and brightest among Japanese and other Asian engineers.
* The Google Print Program (since renamed Google Book Search) expands through digital scanning partnerships with the libraries of Harvard, Stanford, University of Michigan and Oxford as well as the New York Public Library.

2005

February

* We hit a milestone in Image Search: 1.1 billion images indexed.
* Google Maps goes live.

March

* We launch code.google.com, a new place for developer-oriented resources, including all of our APIs.
* Some 14,000 programmers from six countries compete for cash prizes and recognition at our first coding competition in India, with top scores going to Ardian Kristanto Poernomo of Singapore.
* We acquire Urchin, a web analytics company whose technology is used to create Google Analytics.

April

* Our first Google Maps release in Europe is for the U.K.
* For April Fool‘s, we announce a magical beverage that makes its imbibers more intelligent, and therefore better capable of properly using search results.
* Google Maps now features satellite views and directions.
* Google Local goes mobile, and includes SMS driving directions.
* My Search History launches in Labs, allowing you to view all the web pages you‘ve visited and Google searches you‘ve made over time.
* We release Site Targeting, an AdWords feature giving advertisers the ability to better target their ads to specific content sites.

May

* We release Blogger Mobile, enabling bloggers to use their mobile phones to post and send photos to their blogs.
* Google Scholar adds support for institutional access: Searchers can now locate journal articles within their own libraries.
* Personalized Homepage (now iGoogle) is designed for people to customize their own Google homepage with content modules they choose.

June

* We hold our first Summer of Code, a 3-month $2 million program that aims to help computer science students contribute to open source software development.
* Google Mobile Web Search is released, specially formulated for viewing search results on mobile phones.
* We unveil Google Earth: a satellite imagery-based mapping service combining 3D buildings and terrain with mapping capabilities and Google search.
* We release Personalized Search in Labs: over time, your (opt-in) search history will closely reflect your interests.
* API for Maps released; developers can embed Google Maps on many kinds of mapping services and sites.

August

* Google scores well in the U.S. government‘s 2005 machine translation evaluation. (We‘ve done so in subsequent years as well.)
* We launch Google Talk, a downloadable Windows application that enables you to talk or IM with friends quickly and easily, as well as talk using a computer microphone and speaker (no phone required) for free.

September

* Overlays in Google Earth illuminate the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina around New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Some rescue teams use these tools to locate stranded victims.
* DARPA veteran Vint Cerf joins Google to carry on his quest for a global open Internet.
* Dr. Kai-Fu Lee begins work at our new Research and Development Center in China.
* Google Blog Search goes live; it‘s the way to find current and relevant blog postings on particular topics throughout the enormous blogosphere.

October

* Feed aficionados rejoice as Google Reader, a feed reader, is introduced at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.
* Googlers volunteer to produce the first Mountain View book event with Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Blink” and “The Tipping Point.” Since then, the Authors@Google program has hosted more than 480 authors in 12 offices across the U.S., Europe and India.

November

* We release Google Analytics, formerly known as Urchin, for measuring the impact of websites and marketing campaigns.
* We announce the opening of our first offices in São Paulo and Mexico City.

December

* Google Transit launches in Labs. People in the Portland, Oregon metro area can now plan their trips on public transportation at one site.
* Gmail for mobile launches in the United States.

2006

January

* Our first Code Jam in China concludes in Beijing. The winner, graduate student Chuan Xu, is one of more than 13,000 registrants.
* We announce the acquisition of dMarc, a digital radio advertising company.
* Google.cn, a local domain version of Google, goes live in China.
* We introduce Picasa in 25 more languages, including Polish, Thai and Vietnamese.

February

* We release Chat in Gmail, using the instant messaging tools from Google Talk.
* Eric Schmidt is inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.
* Dr. Larry Brilliant becomes the executive director of Google.org, our philanthropic arm.
* Google News for mobile launches.

March

* We announce the acquisition of Writely, a web-based word processing application that subsequently becomes the basis for Google Docs.
* A team working from Mountain View, Bangalore and New York collaborates to create Google Finance, our approach to an improved search experience for financial information.

April

* For April Fool‘s we unveil a new product, Google Romance: “Dating is a search problem.”
* We launch Google Calendar, complete with sharing and group features.
* We release Maps for France, Germany, Italy and Spain.

May

* We release Google Trends, a way to visualize the popularity of searches over time.

June

* We announce Picasa Web Albums, allowing your to upload and share your photos online.
* The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) adds “Google” as a verb.
* We announce Google Checkout, a fast and easy way to pay for online purchases.
* Gmail, Google News and iGoogle become available on mobile phones in eight more languages besides English: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Russian, Chinese and Turkish.
* Gmail launches in Arabic and Hebrew, bringing the number of interfaces up to 40.

July

* At Google Code Jam Europe, nearly 10,000 programmers from 31 countries compete at Google Dublin for the top prizes; Tomasz Czajka from Poland wins the final round.

August

* We launch free citywide WiFi in Mountain View.
* More than 100 libraries on 10 campuses of the University of California join the Google Books Library Project.
* Star Trek‘s 40th Anniversary Convention in Las Vegas features a Google booth showcasing tools appropriate for intergalactic use.
* Apps for Your Domain, a suite of applications designed for organizations of all sizes, and including including Gmail and Calendar, is released.
* Google Book Search begins offering free PDF downloads of books in the public domain.

September

* We add an archive search to Google News, with more than 200 years of historical articles.
* Featured Content for Google Earth includes overlays from the UN Environmental Program, Discovery Networks, the Jane Goodall Institute and the National Park Service.
* The University Complutense of Madrid becomes the first Spanish-language library to join the Google Books Library Project.

October

* Together with LitCam and UNESCO‘s Institute for Lifelong Learning, we launch the Literacy Project, offering resources for teachers, literacy groups and anyone interested in reading promotion.
* We announce our acquisition of YouTube.
* We release web-based applications Docs & Spreadsheets: Word processor Docs is a reworking of Writely (acquired in March).
* Google Custom Search Engine launches, giving bloggers and website owners the ability to create a search engine tailored to their own interests.
* We acquire JotSpot, a collaborative wiki platform, which later becomes Google Sites.

November

* The first nationwide Doodle 4 Google contest in the U.K. takes place with the theme My Britain. More than 15,000 kids in Britain enter, and 13-year old Katherine Chisnall is chosen to have her doodle displayed on www.google.co.uk. There have been Doodle 4 Google contests in several other years and countries since.

December

* We release Patent Search in the U.S., indexing more than 7 million patents dating back to 1790.

2007

January

* We announce a partnership with China Mobile, the world‘s largest mobile telecom carrier, to provide mobile and Internet search services in China.

February

* We release Google Maps in Australia, complete with local business results and mobile capability.
* Google Docs & Spreadsheets is available in eleven more languages: French, Italian, German, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Polish, Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil) and Russian.
* For Valentine‘s Day, we open up Gmail to everyone. (Previously, it was available by invitation only.)
* Google Apps Premier Edition launches, bringing cloud computing to businesses.
* The Candidates@Google series kicks off with Senator Hillary Clinton, the first of several 2008 Presidential candidates, including Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, to visit the Googleplex.
* We introduce traffic information to Google Maps for more than 30 cities around the U.S.

March

* Our first Latin American software coding contest ends with Fábio Dias Moreira of Brazil taking the grand prize. He scored more points than 5,000 other programmers from all over the continent.
* We sign partnerships to give free access to Google Apps for Education to 70,000 university students in Kenya and Rwanda.

April

* This April Fool‘s Day is extra busy: not only do we introduce the Gmail Paper Archive and TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider)—we lose (and find) a real snake in our New York office!
* We add eight more languages to Blogger, bringing the total to 19.

May

* In partnership with the Growing Connection, we plant a vegetable garden in the middle of the Googleplex, the output of which is incorporated into our café offerings.
* We move into permanent space in Ann Arbor, Michigan and Governor Jennifer Granholm helps us celebrate. The office is an AdWords support site.
* At our Searchology event, we announce new strides taken towards universal search. Now video, news, books, image and local results are all integrated together in one search result.
* Google Hot Trends launches, listing the current 100 most active queries, showing what people are searching for at the moment.
* Street View debuts in Google Maps in five U.S. cities: New York, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver.
* On Developer Day, we announce Google Gears (now known just as Gears), an open source technology for creating offline web applications.

June

* Google Maps gets prime placement on the original Apple iPhone.
* YouTube becomes available in nine more domains: Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ireland and the U.K.
* We announce a partnership with Salesforce.com, combining that company‘s on-demand CRM applications with AdWords.
* We unveil several “green” initiatives: RechargeIT, aimed at accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, the completion of our installation of solar panels at the Googleplex, in Mountain View, and our intention to be completely carbon-neutral by the end of 2007. We also announce the Climate Savers Computing Initiative, in collaboration with Intel, Dell and more than 30 other companies.
* Google Earth Outreach is introduced, designed to help nonprofit organizations use Google Earth to advocate their causes.

July

* We announce the acquisition of Postini.
* The first CNN/YouTube debate takes place between the eight U.S. Democratic Presidential candidates. (The Republicans get their turn in November 2007.)
* Google Finance becomes available for non-U.S. markets for the first time, in Canada.
* Google Apps is now available in 28 languages.

August

* We ask your for you interpretation of how Gmail travels around the world, and receive more than 1,100 video responses from more than 65 different countries.
* To infinity and beyond! Sky launches inside Google Earth, including layers for constellation information and virtual tours of galaxies.

September

* AdSense for Mobile is introduced, giving sites optimized for mobile browsers the ability to host the same ads as standard websites.
* Together with the X PRIZE Foundation we announce the Google Lunar X PRIZE, a robotic race to the Moon for a $30 million prize purse.
* We add Presently, a new application for making slide presentations, to Google Docs.
* Google Reader becomes available in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, English (U.K.), Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese and Korean.

October

* We partner with IBM on a supercomputing initiative so that students can learn to work at Internet scale on computing challenges.

November

* We announce OpenSocial, a set of common APIs for developers to build applications for social networks.
* Android, the first open platform for mobile devices, and a collaboration with other companies in the Open Handset Alliance, is announced. Soon after, we introduce the $10 million Android Developer Challenge.
* Google.org announces RE
December

* The Queen of England launches The Royal Channel on YouTube. She is the first monarch to establish a video presence this way.

2008

January

* Google.org announces five key initiatives: in addition to the previously-announced RE * We bid in the 700 MHz spectrum auction to ensure that a more open wireless world becomes available to consumers.

February

* For people searching in Hebrew, Arabic, or other right-to-left languages, we introduce a feature aimed at making searches easier by detecting the direction of a query.
* Google Sites, a revamp of the acquisition JotSpot, debuts. Sites enables you to create collaborative websites with embedded videos, documents and calendars.

March

* We finally complete the acquisition deal for DoubleClick.
* Together with Yahoo and MySpace, we announce the OpenSocial Foundation, an independent non-profit group designed to provide transparency and operational guidelines around the open software tools for social computing.

April

* We feature 16 April Fool‘s jokes from our offices around the world, including the new airline announced with Sir Richard Branson (Virgle), AdSense for Conversations, a Manpower Search (China) and the Google Wake-Up Kit. Bonus foolishness: all viewers linking to YouTube-featured videos are “Rickrolled.”
* A new version of Google Earth launches, incorporating Street View and 12 more languages. At the same time, KML 2.2, which began as the Google Earth file format, is accepted as an official Open Geospacial Consortium standard.
* Google Website Optimizer comes out of beta, expanding from an AdWords-only product. It‘s a free website-testing tool with which site owners can continually test different combinations of their website content (such as images and text), to see which ones yield the most sales, sign-ups, leads or other goals.
* We launch Google Finance China allowing Chinese investors to get stock and mutual fund data as a result of this collaboration between our New York and Shanghai teams.
* We introduce a collection of 70+ new themes (“skins”) for iGoogle, contributed by such artists and designers as Dale Chihuly, Oscar de la Renta, Kwon Ki-Soo and Philippe Starck.

May

* Following both the Sichuan earthquake in China and Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar (Burma), Google Earth adds new satellite information for the region(s) to help recovery efforts.
* Reflecting our commitment to searchers worldwide, Google search now supports Unicode 5.1.
* At a developer event, we preview Google FriendConnect, a set of functions and applications enabling website owners to easily make their sites social by adding registration, invitations, members gallery, message posting and reviews, plus applications built by the OpenSocial developer community.
* With IPv4 addresses (the numbers that computers use to connect to the Internet) running low, Google search becomes available over IPv6, a new IP address space large enough to assign almost three billion networks to every person on the planet. Vint Cerf is a key proponent of broad and immediate adoption of IPv6.
* Google Translate adds 10 more languages (Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian and Swedish), bringing the total to 23.
* We release Google Health to the public, allowing people to safely and securely collect, store and manage their medical records and health information online.
* We introduce a series of blog posts detailing the many aspects of good search results on the Official Google Blog.
* California 6th grader Grace Moon wins the U.S. 2008 Doodle 4 Google competition for her doodle “Up In The Clouds.”

June

* Real-time stock quotes go live on Google Finance for the first time.
* With the launch of Google Site Search, site owners can enable Google-powered searches on their own websites.
* We launch Gmail Labs, a set of experimental Gmail features, including saved searches and different kinds of stars, which let you customize your Gmail experience.
* A new version of Maps for Mobile debuts, putting Google Transit directions on phones in more than 50 cities worldwide.
* For the first time, Google engineers create the problems for contestants to solve at the 7th Annual Code Jam competition.

July

* We provide Street View for the entire 2008 Tour de France route—the first launch of Street View imagery in Europe.
* Our first downloadable iPhone app, featuring My Location and word suggestions for quicker mobile searching, debuts with the launch of the Apple 3G iPhone.
* We work with the band Radiohead to make a music video of their song “House of Cards,” using only data, and not cameras.
* Our indexing system for processing links indicates that we now count 1 trillion unique URLs (and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day).

August

* Street View is available in several cities in Japan and Australia—the first time it‘s appeared outside of North America or Europe.
* Google Suggest feature arrives on Google.com, helping formulate queries, reduce spelling errors and reduce keystrokes.
* Just in time for the U.S. political conventions, we launch a site dedicated to the 2008 U.S. elections, with news, video and photos as well as tools for teachers and campaigners.

September

* Word gets out about Chrome a bit ahead of schedule when the comic book that introduces our new open source browser is released earlier than planned on September 1. The browser officially becomes available for worldwide download a day later.
* We get involved with the U.S. political process at the presidential nominating conventions for the Democratic and Republican parties.
* We release an upgrade for Picasa, including new editing tools, a movie maker and easier syncing with the web. At the same time, Picasa Web Albums is updated with a new feature allowing you to ”name tag” people in photos.
* Google News Archive helps to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.
* T-Mobile announces the G1, the first phone built on the Android operating system. At the same time, we release a new Android Software Developer Kit, and the Open Handset Alliance announces its intention to open source the entire Android platform by the end of 2008. The G1 becomes available for purchase in October.
* We launch Transit for the New York metro region, making public transit information easily available for users of the largest transportation agency in the U.S.
* Thanks to all of you, Google celebrates 10 fast-paced years.

October

* We release the first draft of Clean Energy 2030, a proposal to wean the U.S. off of coal and oil for electricity use and to reduce oil use by cars 40 percent by 2030. The plan could generate billions in savings as well as millions of “green jobs.”
* We introduce Google Earth for the iPhone and iPod touch, complete with photos, geo-located Wikipedia articles and the ability to tilt your phone to view 3D terrain.
* Googlers in Mountain View build a zip line to travel across the small Permanente Creek separating a few of our buildings.

November

* In a vote by 5-0, the FCC formally agrees to open up “white spaces,” or unused television spectrum, for wireless broadband service. We see this decision as a clear victory for Internet users and anyone who wants good wireless communications.
* After we discover a correlation between certain search queries and CDC data on flu symptoms, we release Google Flu Trends, an indicator of flu activity around the U.S. as much as two weeks earlier than traditional flu surveillance systems.
* We announce the availability of the LIFE photo archive in Google Image Search. Only a fraction of the approximately 10 million photos have ever been seen before.
* SearchWiki launches, a way for you to customize your own search experience by re-ranking, deleting, adding and commenting on search results. Comments can also be read by other users.

December

* We invite musicians around the globe to audition to participate in the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, the world‘s first collaborative online orchestra.
* Google Friend Connect is available to any webmaster looking to easily integrate social features into their site.
* Street View coverage more than doubles in the United States, including several states never before seen on Street View (Maine, West Virginia, North Dakota and South Dakota).
* We partner with publishers to digitize millions of magazine articles and make them readily available on Google Book Search.

2009

January

* We kick off January with the launch of Picasa for Mac at Macworld.
* The Vatican launches a YouTube Channel, providing updates from the Pope and Catholic Church.
* Together with the New America Foundation‘s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium and academic researchers, we announce Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open platform that provides tools to test broadband connections.

February

* The latest version of Google Earth makes a splash with Ocean, a new feature that provides a 3D look at the ocean floor and information about one of the world‘s greatest natural resources.
* We introduce Google Latitude, a Google Maps for mobile feature and an iGoogle gadget that lets you share your location with friends and see the approximate location of people who have decided to share their location with you.
* After adding Turkish, Thai, Hungarian, Estonian, Albanian, Maltese and Galician, Google Translate is capable of automatic translation between 41 languages, covering 98 percent of the languages read by Internet users.
* Our first message on Twitter gets back to binary: I‘m 01100110 01100101 01100101 01101100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01101100 01110101 01100011 01101011 01111001 00001010. (Hint: it‘s a button on our homepage.)

March

* We launch a beta test of interest-based advertising on partner sites and on YouTube. This kind of tailored advertising lets us show ads more closely related to what people are searching for, and it gives advertisers an efficient way to reach those who are most interested in their products or services.
* We release Google Voice to existing Grand Central users. The new application improves the way you use your phone, with features like voicemail transcription and archive and search of all of your SMS text messages.
* We celebrate our San Francisco office‘s Gold rating from the U.S. Green Building Council‘s LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Green Building Rating System. We see it as a sign that we‘re on track with our approach to building environmentally friendly offices.
* The White House holds an online town hall to answer citizens‘ questions submitted on Google Moderator.
* We launch new iGoogle backdrops inspired by video games, including classics like “Mario,” “Zelda” and “Donkey Kong.”
* We announce Google Ventures: a venture capital fund aimed at using our resources to support innovation and encourage promising new technology companies.
* Using our transliteration technology, we build and release a feature in Gmail that makes it easy to type messages in Indian languages like Hindi or Malayalam.
* Google Suggest goes local with keyword suggestions for 51 languages in 155 domains.

April

* Our April Fool‘s Day prank this year is CADIE, our “Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity” who spends the day taking over various Google products before self-destructing.
* We announce an update to search which enables people to get localized results even if they don‘t include a location in their search query.
* For India‘s 15th general election, we launch the Google India Elections Centre, where people can check to see if they‘re registered to vote, find their polling place, as well as read news and other information.
* Over 90 musicians from around the world—including a Spanish guitarist, a Dutch harpist and a Lithuanian birbyne player—perform in the first-ever YouTube Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
* We rebuild and redesign Google Labs as well as release two new Labs: Similar Image search and Google News Timeline. Later in the month, we introduce Toolbar Labs.
* We begin to show Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. search pages when people search for names, giving people more control over what others find about them when they search on Google.
* We release 11 short films about Google Chrome made by Christoph Niemann, Motion Theory, Steve Mottershead, Go Robot, Open, Default Office, Hunter Gatherer, Lifelong Friendship Society, SuperFad, Jeff&Paul and Pantograph.

May

* To clear brush and reduce fire hazard in the fields near our Mountain View headquarters, we rent some goats from a local company. They help us trim the grass the low-carbon way!
* At our second Searchology event, we introduce a few new search features, including the Search Options panel and rich snippets in search results.
* We launch Sky Map for Android, which uses your Android phone to help you identify stars, constellations and planets.
* Christin Engelberth, a sixth grader at Bernard Harris Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, wins the second U.S. Doodle 4 Google competition with her doodle “A new beginning.”
* At our second annual Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, we preview Google Wave, a new communication and collaboration tool.

June

* We add a new dashboard to Google Places which gives business owners information, such as what people searched for to see their listing or how many times their listing appeared in search results, about how customers find their businesses in Google Maps.
* We introduce two new ways to customize your iGoogle page: the iGoogle Showcase, which lets you see your favorite celebrities‘ homepages look like and add gadgets and more from those pages to your own, and nature themes.
* Google Squared, a new experiment in Labs intended for certain kinds of complex search queries, collects facts from the web and presents them in an organized collection, similar to a spreadsheet.
* The Google Translator Toolkit is a new set of editing tools that helps people translate and publish work in other languages faster and at a higher quality. Our automatic translation system also learns from any corrections.
* We announce All for Good. It‘s a single search interface for volunteer activities across many major volunteering sites and organizations that‘s developed using App Engine and Google Base. Many Googlers contributed to the open source project in their 20 percent time.
* We release a beta version of AdSense for Mobile Applications, which allows developers to earn revenue by displaying text and image ads in iPhone and Android applications.
* Google SMS is a suite of mobile applications that allows people in Africa to access information—like health and agriculture tips, news and local weather—using SMS on their mobile phones, and includes a marketplace application for finding buyers and sellers of goods.

July

* Both the enterprise and consumer versions of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk are now out of beta.
* We announce that we‘re developing the Google Chrome OS, an open source, lightweight operating system initially targeted at netbooks.
* We launch Moon in Google Earth on the 40th anniversary of the moon landing. The tool features lunar imagery, information about the Apollo landing sites, panoramic images shot by the Apollo astronauts and narrated tours.
* The new comics themes for iGoogle range from classic strips like Peanuts to heroes like Batman to alternative comics from all over the world.
* We add a search options panel to Google Images, making it easier to find the types of images you need.

August

* Any active U.S. service member is invited to sign up for a Google Voice account, to help them keep in better touch with family and friends, especially when deployed abroad.
* We announce a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a high-quality video compression technology company.
* New social features come to iGoogle, including social gaming, media-sharing and to-do list gadgets as well as an update feed for friends‘ activities.
* Google Insights for Search is now available in 39 languages around the world. While we‘re at it, we introduce a forecasting feature and an animated map.
* We expand the YouTube Partnership Program to include individual popular videos, so you can monetize your viral video and earn revenue even if you aren‘t a member of the Partnership Program.
* We add Afrikaans, Belarusian, Icelandic, Irish, Macedonian, Malay, Swahili, Welsh and Yiddish to Google Translate, bringing the total number of supported languages to 51—that‘s 2,550 language pairs!

September

* We celebrate the birthday of a product nearly as old as Google itself: Blogger. More than 300 million people visit the blogging site every month, and we‘re proud that it continues to be a medium for people around the world to freely express themselves.
* The search box on our classic homepage gets bigger.
* FastFlip, an experiment in Google Labs, lets you quickly browse through recent news, headlines and popular topics like a print magazine, while at the same time offering some of the benefits of online news, like aggregation and search over many top publications, personalization and the ability to share content with your friends.
* We acquire reCAPTCHA, a technology company focused on Optical Character Recognition (OCR)—the process that converts scanned images into plain text.
* In an effort to create a more open display advertising ecosystem for everyone, we introduce the DoubleClick Ad Exchange, a real-time marketplace that helps large online publishers on one side; and ad networks and agency networks on the other, buy and sell display advertising space.
* On the birthday of the “father of science fiction,” we unveil the truth behind a mysterious series of doodles in tribute to H.G. Wells.
* We introduce Place Pages to Google Maps: one page that organizes all the relevant information about a business, point of interest, transit station, neighborhood, landmark or city—in any part of the world—in one place. Place Pages include rich details, like photos, videos, a Street View preview, nearby transit, reviews and related websites.

October

* We begin a series of posts on the Official Google Blog dedicated to the latest and greatest in the world of Google search.
* Flu Trends, our flu surveillance tool, is now available in 16 additional countries and in 37 languages.
* We introduce BuildingMaker, a tool for creating buildings for Google Earth that lets you construct a model of a building using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes.
* We announce an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results.
* Social Search, a new experiment on Google Labs, helps you find relevant public content from your friends and contacts right in your Google search results.
* Google Maps Navigation, our turn-by-turn GPS navigation system, includes 3D views and voice guidance—and because it‘s connected to the Google cloud, it always includes the newest map data, lets you search by voice or along a route, and provides live traffic data.
* A new search feature helps you find music information on the web. When you enter the name of a song, artist or album, or even a snippet of lyrics, your search results will include links to an audio preview of those songs provided by our music search partners.

November

* The Google Dashboard provides you with greater transparency and control over the data associated with your Google Account.
* A new series on the Official Google Blog covers what’s new in Google Apps.
* We add full-text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts to Google Scholar. We think this addition will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all.
* An experimental feature in Labs called Image Swirl builds on new computer vision research to cluster similar images into representative groups in a fun, exploratory interface.
* By combining automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system, we offer automatic captions in YouTube. Captions can help the deaf and hearing impaired, enable people around the world to access video content through machine translation, improve search and enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they‘re looking for.
* A few months after announcing our open source operating system project, we open-source the project as Chromium OS in order to engage with partners, the open source community and developers.

December

* A new homepage design shows only our logo, the search box and the buttons upon first loading, and reveals other links on the homepage, such as Gmail or Image Search, when the user moves the mouse.
* Google Public DNS is part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster. A DNS resolver converts easy-to-remember domain names into unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers so that computers can communicate with one another.
* With our new real-time search feature, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter, as well as news headlines and blog posts published just seconds before your search—right on the search results page.
* Just in time for the holidays, we roll out Mac and Linux versions of Google Chrome, as well as extensions for Chrome in Windows and Linux (all in beta).
* Living Stories, developed in partnership with The New York Times and The Washington Post, is an experimental format prototype for presenting online news. (We ended this experiment in February 2010, and open-sourced the code for anyone to use.)
* We introduce a few new features to Google Toolbar, including an easy way to share any page on the web, shortened by a new URL shortener (goo.gl).
* For the first time, YouTube reveals official Most-Watched lists and some of its fastest-rising search terms for the past year.

2010

January

* We introduce Nexus One, an exemplar of what‘s possible on mobile devices through Android, as well as a Google-hosted web store aimed at providing people with an easier way to buy a mobile phone.
* Now, you can upload all file types, including large graphics files, RAW photos, ZIP archives and more to the cloud through Google Docs, giving you one place where you can upload and access your key files online.
* We state our new approach to business in China: Google will no longer censor search results on Google.cn, and we will work to determine how we might operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if possible.
* On International Data Privacy Day, we publish our privacy principles. We‘ve always operated under these principles, but now codify them to share our thinking as we create new technologies.

February

* The first-ever Google Super Bowl ad tells a love story through search terms. This is one of many videos made to celebrate the human quests behind search.
* In time for the Winter Games in Vancouver, we introduce Street View imagery of Whistler Blackcomb Mountains, gathered with a special camera-equipped snowmobile.
* Google Buzz is a new way to start conversations about things you find interesting—like photos, videos, webpages or whatever might be on your mind—built into Gmail and for mobile.
* We introduce Safety Mode in YouTube, an opt-in setting to help screen out potentially objectionable content that you may prefer not to see or don‘t want others in your family to stumble across while enjoying YouTube.
* We announce a plan to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks, delivering Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, in a small number of trial locations across the United States.
* We acquire Aardvark, a company that lets you quickly and easily tap into the knowledge and experience of your friends and extended network of contacts.
* The next generation of ad-serving technology for online publishers, DoubleClick for Publishers and DFP Small Business, combines Google‘s technology and infrastructure with DoubleClick‘s display advertising and ad serving experience.

March

* We acquire Picnik, a site enabling you to edit your photos in the cloud, without leaving your browser.
* Stars in search is a new feature that makes it easier for you to mark and rediscover your favorite web content.
* The Google Apps Marketplace is a new online store for integrated business applications that allows Google Apps customers to easily discover, deploy and manage cloud applications that integrate with Google Apps.
* Bike directions and bike trail data come to Google Maps.
* Following the January announcement about search in China, we stop censoring our search services—Google Search, Google News and Google Images—on Google.cn, instead redirecting users from Google.cn to Google.com.hk.

April

* For April Fool‘s Day, we change our name to Topeka. The change is a tribute to Topeka, Kansas, which changed its name to Google as part of an effort to bring our experimental fiber network to that city.
* Scientists announce a significant new hominid fossil discovery, made with help from Google Earth, in the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site in South Africa.
* New features for real-time search include the ability to search the archive of public tweets and “replay” the conversation from a particular moment in time, as well as a tool called Google Follow Finder that helps you find new people to follow.
* Google Places (formerly the Local Business Center) gets a new name along with some new features, like showing service areas and, in some cities, the ability to use an easy advertising program called Tags.
* We launch a Government Requests tool to give people information about the requests for user data or content removal we receive from government agencies around the world.
* With Earth view in Google Maps, you can explore Google Earth’s detailed 3D imagery and terrain directly in Google Maps, on your browser.
* Oregon becomes the first state to open up Google Apps for Education to public schools throughout the state.

May

* As part of our efforts to accelerate the deployment of renewable energy, we make our first direct investment in a utility-scale renewable energy project.
* In response to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, we provide Google Earth imagery of the spill’s spread.
* We roll out a refreshed look for our search results, with a new, contextual left-hand panel that highlights the most relevant search tools and refinements for your query.
* A team of Googlers in London create a photomosaic of the Google logo. (Later, this project becomes the inspiration for a company contest.)
* At Google I/O, we announce Google TV, which is built on Android and Chrome and gives you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. We’re busy at I/O this year, with a handful of other announcements and updates.
* In celebration of PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, we release our first-ever playable doodle, complete with all 256 levels and Ms. PAC-MAN. It’s so popular we soon give it a permanent home.
* You have the option to search more securely with SSL-encrypted Google web search.
* We release a report on our economic impact in the United States: in 2009, we generated a total of $54 billion of economic activity for American businesses, website publishers and non-profits.
* The 2010 Doodle 4 Google winner in the U.S. is third grader Mackenzie Melton, for her doodle “Rainforest Habitat.”
* We officially acquire AdMob, a mobile display advertising company.

June

* You can now personalize your Google.com with a background image.
* With help from the Marin Bee Company, we install the Hiveplex—four bee hives painted in Google’s colors, situated in a flowered area on our campus. We have our first honey harvest later in the year.
* We collaborate with the Guggenheim Museum on a global online initiative, called YouTube Play: A Biennal of Creative Video, to discover the most creative video in the world.
* We catch football fever, offering ways for fans to stay on top of the 2010 World Cup as well as a lot of thorough analysis of soccer search trends.
* Caffeine, our new indexing system, provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and is the largest collection of web content we‘ve offered.
* Google Voice is now available to anyone in the U.S.
* We stop redirecting Chinese users from Google.cn to Google.com.hk. Instead, we provide a landing page where users can use Google.cn services that we can provide without filtering, and/or click through to Google.com.hk for search.
* The Google News homepage is redesigned to make your view of news more relevant and easier for you to share interesting stories.

July

* We sign an agreement to acquire ITA, a software company specializing in organizing airline data, including flight times, availability and prices.
* “Life in a Day” is a cinematic experiment to document one day, as seen through the eyes of people around the world.
* We acquire Metaweb, a company that maintains an open database of things in the world.
* We announce an agreement to purchase the clean energy from 114 megawatts of wind generation at the NextEra Energy Resources Story County II facility in Iowa.
* Google Images gets a new look, designed to make it easier for you to take advantage of some of the powerful technology behind Images.
* Google Apps for Government, our newest edition of Google Apps, includes the same Google applications offered to businesses and everyday users, with specific measures to address the policy and security needs of the public sector.

August

* We will not continue to develop Google Wave as a standalone product.
* We acquire Slide, a social technology company with an extensive history of building new ways for people to connect with others across numerous platforms online.
* With Verizon, we announce a joint policy proposal for an open Internet.
* Voice Actions for Android are a series of voice commands that let you control your phone just by speaking.
* If you’re in the U.S., you can now call any phone directly from Gmail.
* Realtime Search gets a new standalone homepage, along with more tools for exploring and refining real-time results.
* “The Wilderness Downtown” is a musical experience created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google, built with Google Chrome in mind using HTML5 and other technologies.
* Priority Inbox, an experimental way of handling information overload in Gmail, automatically sorts your email by importance, using a variety of signals.

September

* We celebrate Google Chrome’s second birthday with a new release of the browser that’s three times faster than the original beta.
* Google Instant predicts what you’re interested in and shows you search results as you type so you can quickly get to the information you’re looking for.
* Our new Family Safety Center is a one-stop shop with info for parents and teachers on how to keep kids safe online.
* A new online Transparency Report gives people tools to see where governments are demanding that we remove content and where Google services are being blocked.
* Google News turns eight.
* We announce the five winners of Project 10^100.
* We celebrate the 50th anniversary of “The Flintstones” with a Google doodle.
* Brazil, Ireland and Antarctica imagery comes to Street View. Now, three years after we first launched Street View in five U.S. cities, you can explore all seven continents at eye level!

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