Antiques Collectables and Fine Art

[HistoryMan]

December 19, 1974 The first personal computer, Altair 8800, went on sale

1961 - The Indian Army invaded the Portugese colony of Goa.


1974 - The first personal computer, Altair 8800, went on sale.
The MITS Altair 8800 is a microcomputer design from 1975, based on the Intel 8080A CPU. Sold as a kit through Popular Electronics magazine, the designers intended to sell only a few hundred to hobbyists, and were surprised when they sold over ten times that many in the first month. Today the Altair is widely recognized as the spark that led to the personal computer revolution of the next few years: The computer bus designed for the Altair was to become a de facto standard in form of the S-100 bus, and the first programming language for the machine was Microsoft's founding product, Altair BASIC.

Software
Around this time Roberts received a letter from a Seattle company asking if he would be interested in selling their BASIC programming language for the machine. He called the company and reached a private home, where no one had heard of anything like BASIC. In fact the letter had been sent by Bill Gates and Paul Allen from the Boston area, and they had no BASIC to offer. When they called Roberts to follow up on the letter he expressed his interest, and the two started work on their BASIC interpreter using a self-made simulator for the 8080 on a PDP-10 minicomputer. They figured they had 30 days before someone else beat them to the punch, and once they had a version working on the simulator, Allen flew to Albuquerque to deliver the program, Altair BASIC (aka MITS 4K BASIC), on a paper tape. Miraculously it worked the first time, and Gates soon joined him and formed Microsoft, then spelled "Micro-Soft".





1984 - The Peoples Republic of China and the United Kingdom signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration, agreeing to transfer sovereignty of Hong Kong to the PRC in 1997.

The Sino-British Joint Declaration on the Question of Hong Kong (The Joint Declaration), was signed by the Prime Ministers of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the United Kingdom (UK) governments on December 19, 1984 in Beijing.

The Declaration entered into force with the exchange of instruments of ratification on May 27, 1985 and was registered by the PRC and UK governments at the United Nations on June 12, 1985.


1998 - The U.S. House of Representatives passed articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky scandal.

On December 19, the House of Representatives forwarded articles I and III of impeachment (perjury and obstruction of justice) to the Senate. Article I was passed by a vote of 228-206. Article III was approved by a vote of 221-212. Article II failed by a vote of 205-229. Article IV was rejected by a vote of 148-285. The two articles that were passed made Clinton the first elected president in U.S. history to be impeached. The only previous impeachment was the unelected President Andrew Johnson (who had succeeded the assassinated Abraham Lincoln) in 1868. President Richard Nixon had resigned under the threat of impeachment in 1974.