17 may 1965 was founded the Dolby Laboratories, Inc. In the beginning it was a British academic laboratory based in London. Her “father” was ray Dolby — the American engineer, with 16 years working in the field of production sound equipment.
In 1968 the firm moved to the United States. Thanks to the creation of a system of noise reduction Dolby A” at the turn of 60-70-ies, which radically changes the way of recording to tape, Dolby Labs comes the first success.
In 1975, the company creates a system of Dolby Stereo, allowing you to use the movies channel sound. Center channel used for dialogue, left and right for special effects and musical accompaniment, and the latter creates a General atmosphere and is called “surrounding” (surround).
But just to create something new would not be enough. Need to know people. The best advertisement for Dolby Stereo is to use this format in the films “Star Wars: a New hope” and “Close encounters of the third kind”, released in 1977. Shortly thereafter, all American theaters were equipped for sound reproduction in this format.
May 17, 2001 the company represents Microsoft at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in Los Angeles Xbox game console. Rumors about it have started to go since 1999, to the American market the console was released only in November 2000 year, and at the European and even in March 2002.
The development was carried out in 1998, and the engineers originally called the DirectXbox console. Soon, the name itself was reduced to the Xbox, but the marketing Department was against such a name. However, it is still present in the questionnaires for the focus groups and, moreover, was in the lead in popularity among many other options.
Xbox, or “Xbox original” as they would call it over time, became the first console with a built-in hard drive. It was used for storing games and downloadable content. Actually, the Xbox was entirely based on PC hardware, which at that time it was possible to find in stores, and the creation console all began with the fact that Microsoft engineers took apart several laptops from Dell. As the CPU in the Xbox was made by Pentium III (Coppermine) with a clock frequency of 733 MHz. The amount of memory was 64 MB, DDR. The graphics chip was a joint development of Microsoft and NVIDIA, was called the NV2A and had 64 MB of video memory.
Popular games at launch the Xbox was released simultaneously with the console Halo: Combat Evolved and Project Gotham Racing and Dead or Alive 3. But the first year the console was still hard to recruit a pool of exciting games. First, in the beginning of the game simply did not use the full potential of the Xbox, secondly, defended his Sony PlayStation 2 highly anticipated exclusives like the series of games Grand Theft Auto and Metal Gear Solid. But in 2002 and 2003 several high-profile games quickly attracted the attention of Microsoft to the console. Among them are Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, MechAssault and Grand Theft Auto III, about which Microsoft were still able to negotiate with Take-Two Interactive and Sony.
Just by may 2006 it sold 26 million Xbox, and in the first three months after launch sales in the United States from the shelves swept away half a million of these consoles.
