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1986

Beginning of Jack Link’s beef jerky. In the great white forest of north western Wisconsin sits the most prominent beef jerky maker in the country. Closer to Duluth, MN and the boundary waters than a major Wisconsin city, it’s quite the place to have a large scale beef jerky operation.

In the late 1800’s, Chris Link took the leap and brought his family to Minong, Wisconsin from Germany in search of a better life. His family’s secret sausage recipe traveled with him and is the basis for the company we know today. Chris’s son Earl started the family legacy by opening Minong Wisconsin’s first general store and butcher shop. They made beef snacks and sold their cattle locally, making a name for having a reputable operation. Minong is still where they’re headquartered today.

Wolf (yes, Wolf) Link took us into the 20th century when he was born in 1916. Wolf was renound in the northern Midwest for having the finest cattle herd around. Quite the feat back then. Wolf had one more claim to fame though: his son Jack… Jack Link.

Jack became obsessed with perfecting his family’s jerky recipes. As the story goes, Jack was out hunting with his two sons and having picked up some local beef snacks to sustain them throughout the day, he found himself distraught by the terribly bland taste of the beef they had chosen. Knowing he could do better, Jack took a dive into the family archives and came up with the original Kippered beef steak recipe. 1986 Jack formalized his love for the meat world when he bought a jerky machine and founded the company we know today as Jack Link’s beef jerky. After the cumbersome endeavor of starting a business and sharing his beef with the world, jack struck gold and it took off.

To keep up with product innovations and consumer demand, the company has expanded over the years.  To increase domestic production, Link Snacks doubled their processing capacity in the main Minong facility, and purchased Dakota Trails in South Dakota, New Glarus Foods in Wisconsin and King B in Idaho.  A new distribution and storage facility opened in Laurens, Iowa in 2005.  The company also has a processing plant in New Zealand that manufacture products for sale in
Australia, New Zealand and East Asia. The company currently employs around 1,500 people, of which, approximately 700 work in Wisconsin.

Today Jack’s oldest son Troy sits at the helm of the company. With 4 generations of meat history backing him, along side the world's friendliest yeti, the company still continues to thrive. Having more recently purchased Unilever’s meat snack division, the company went international and is one of the most recognizeable snack food manufacturers in the world.

Jack Link himself still resides in Minong. He’s rigorously involved in the community and quite frankly after watching a few interviews he’s about the most clean cut, down home, Wisconsin man you can imagine. An amazing family story and an amazing Wisconsin company.

Jack Link

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Jack Link’s father “Wolf Link” had a brother Francis Link, making him Uncle Francis. Growing up I am sure Jack spent time at Uncle Francis’s place in Minong. The home was across the street from the current Link Ford dealership that Francis stated in 1946. That’s the home we purchased in 2013.

1989

Berlin Wall came down in Germany, reuniting East and West Germany, and foreshadowing the fall of the Soviet Union. It stood for 28 years to separate the two sides of Berlin and the two sides of Germany.

In the years between 1949 and 1961, about 2.5 million East Germans had fled from East to West Germany, including steadily rising numbers of skilled workers, professionals, and intellectuals. Their loss threatened to destroy the economic viability of the East German state. In response, East Germany built a barrier to close off East Germans’ access to West Berlin and hence West Germany. That barrier, the Berlin Wall, was first erected on the night of August 12–13, 1961, as the result of a decree passed on August 12 by the East German Volkskammer (“Peoples’ Chamber”). The original wall, built of barbed wire and cinder blocks, was subsequently replaced by a series of concrete walls (up to 15 feet high) that were topped with barbed wire and guarded with watchtowers, gun emplacements, and mines. By the 1980s that system of walls, electrified fences, and fortifications extended 28 miles through Berlin, dividing the two parts of the city, and extended a further 75 miles around West Berlin, separating it from the rest of East Germany.

The Berlin Wall came to symbolize the Cold War’s division of East from West Germany and of eastern from western Europe. About 5,000 East Germans managed to cross the Berlin Wall (by various means) and reach West Berlin safely, while another 5,000 were captured by East German authorities in the attempt and 191 more were killed during the actual crossing of the wall.

East Germany’s hard-line communist leadership was forced from power in October 1989 during the wave of democratization that swept through eastern Europe. On November 9 the East German government opened the country’s borders with West Germany (including West Berlin), and openings were made in the Berlin Wall through which East Germans could travel freely to the West. The wall henceforth ceased to function as a political barrier between East and West Germany.

1990

Hubble Space Telescope, the first sophisticated optical observatory placed into orbit around Earth. Earth’s atmosphere obscures ground-based astronomers’ view of celestial objects by absorbing or distorting light rays from them. A telescope stationed in outer space is entirely above the atmosphere, however, and receives images of much greater brightness, clarity, and detail than do ground-based telescopes with comparable optics.

The telescope was placed into orbit about 370 miles above Earth. It is a large reflecting telescope whose mirror optics gather light from celestial objects and direct it into two cameras and two spectrographs (which separate radiation into a spectrum and record the spectrum). It has a 94-inch primary mirror, a smaller secondary mirror, and various recording instruments that can detect visible, ultraviolet, and infrared light. The most important of these instruments, the wide-field planetary camera, can take either wide-field or high-resolution images of the planets and of galactic and extragalactic objects. This camera is designed to achieve image resolutions 10 times greater than that of even the largest Earth-based telescope.

About one month after launch, it became apparent that the large primary mirror had been ground to the wrong shape owing to faulty testing procedures by the mirror’s manufacturer. The resulting optical defect, spherical aberration, caused the mirror to produce fuzzy rather than sharp images. It also developed problems with its gyroscopes and with its solar-power arrays. On December 2–13, 1993, a mission of the NASA space shuttle Endeavour sought to correct the telescope’s optical system and other problems. In five space walks, the shuttle astronauts replaced the wide-field planetary camera and installed a new device containing 10 tiny mirrors to correct the light paths from the primary mirror to the other three scientific instruments. The mission proved an unqualified success, and the HST soon began operating at its full potential, returning spectacular photographs of various cosmic phenomena.

Three subsequent space shuttle missions in 1997, 1999, and 2002 repaired the gyroscopes and added new instruments including a near-infrared spectrometer and a wide-field camera. The final space shuttle mission to install a new camera and an ultraviolet spectrograph, was launched in 2009.

1991

Operation Desert Storm, which began with the aerial bombing campaign against Iraq on 17 January 1991 and came to a close with the American-led liberation of Kuwait on 28 February 1991.

On 2 August 1990, Iraq, governed by Saddam Hussein, invaded neighboring Kuwait and fully occupied the country within two days. The invasion was primarily over disputes regarding Kuwait's alleged slant drilling in Iraq's Rumaila oil field, as well as to cancel Iraq's large debt to Kuwait from the recently ended Iran–Iraq War. After Iraq briefly occupied Kuwait under a rump puppet government known as the Republic of Kuwait, it split Kuwait's sovereign territory into the Saddamiyat al-Mitla' District in the north, which was absorbed into Iraq's existing Basra Governorate, and the Kuwait Governorate in the south, which became Iraq's 19th governorate.

The invasion of Kuwait was met with immediate international condemnation, including the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 660, which demanded Iraq's immediate withdrawal from Kuwait, and the imposition of comprehensive international sanctions against Iraq with the adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 661. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and US president George H. W. Bush deployed troops and equipment into Saudi Arabia and urged other countries to send their own forces. Many countries joined the American-led coalition, forming the largest military alliance since World War II.

The conflict's environmental impact included Iraqi forces causing over six hundred oil well fires and the largest oil spill in history. The Kuwait oil fires burned for more than eight months, consuming an estimated five to six million barrels of crude oil and 70 to 100 million cubic meters of natural gas per day.

1992

Hurricane Andrew was a compact, but very powerful and devastating tropical cyclone that struck the Bahamas, Florida, and Louisiana in August 1992. It was the most destructive hurricane to ever hit Florida in terms of structures damaged or destroyed, and remained the costliest in financial terms until Hurricane Irma surpassed it 25 years later. Andrew was also the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the United States in decades and the costliest hurricane to strike anywhere in the country, until it was surpassed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Even though Andrew was a small tropical cyclone for most of its lifespan, it caused extreme damage. The vast majority of the damage was as a result of extremely high winds, although a few tornadoes spawned by Andrew caused considerable damage in Louisiana. Throughout the areas affected, almost 177,000 people were left homeless. Outside of The Bahamas, Florida, and Louisiana, effects were widespread, although damage was minimal. Overall, $36 billion in losses and 65 fatalities were attributed to Andrew. Andrew was, at the time, the costliest hurricane in U.S. history.

Damage from Hurricane Andrew in a large mobile home community

1993

The invention of the World Wide Web (WWW), Tim Berners-Lee started building a layer on top of the internet to make it easier to access. Berners-Lee's idea was to make information available as pages, written in a shared language called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This eventually became the World Wide Web, which is the platform used by billions of internet users around the world.

By 1994 there were around 3,000 websites in existence. As of 2025 there almost 2 billion.

Charlie Kirk is born, October 14, was an American right-wing political activist, entrepreneur, and media personality. He co‑founded the conservative student organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012 and served as its executive director until his assassination in 2025. A key ally of Donald Trump, he became one of the most prominent voices of the MAGA movement within the Republican Party, publishing several books and hosting The Charlie Kirk Show.

Kirk espoused a range of conservative positions, including opposition to abortion, gun control, DEI programs, and LGBTQ rights. Over time, he aligned with the Christian right and advocated for Christian nationalism.

On September 10, 2025, Kirk was fatally shot by a rooftop sniper while speaking at a TPUSA debate event at Utah Valley University.

1994

Beginning of Amazon, evolved from a small online bookstore to one of the world's most influential technology companies, with numerous milestones marking its journey. It was originally called Amazon Bookstore, located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The feminist and queer-owned bookstore was the first of its kind in North America when it opened its doors in 1970.

Original Amazon book store 1970

1994: Founding - Jeff Bezos founded Amazon as "Cadabra, Inc." in his garage in Bellevue, Washington. The name was later changed to Amazon.com, inspired by the Amazon River and to appear early in alphabetical listings.

Jeff Bezos

1995: Launch - Amazon.com went live on July 16, 1995, initially selling books online. The first book sold was "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" by Douglas Hofstadter.

1997: Going Public - Amazon went public on May 15, 1997, at $18 per share, raising significant capital for expansion.

1998: Expansion - Amazon expanded its product offerings beyond books to include CDs and DVDs, and it acquired IMDb.

2000: Marketplace Launch - Amazon introduced its Marketplace platform, allowing third-party sellers to list their products, significantly increasing its inventory.

2002: Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Amazon launched AWS, providing cloud computing services that have since become a major revenue source for the company. The AWS Cloud spans 123 Availability Zones within 39 Geographic Regions, with announced plans for 7 more Availability Zones and 2 more AWS Regions in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Chile.

2005: Amazon Prime - The company launched Amazon Prime, offering members free two-day shipping, which has since evolved to include streaming services and other benefits. Anyone can join Prime for $14.99 per month or $139 per year if they pay annually. Fast, free delivery on a huge selection,

enjoy watch, read, listen, and play, digital entertainment such as Prime Video plus exclusive deals and savings on groceries, fuel, and healthcare.

2007: Kindle Launch - Amazon released the Kindle e-reader, revolutionizing the publishing industry and digital reading.

2015 Opened its first physical Amazon books store in Seattle, Washington. in the University Village shopping center in Seattle’s “U District” near the University of Washington. In total, Amazon opened two dozen stores across 12 states and Washington, D.C.

2017: Acquisition of Whole Foods - Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market for $13.7 billion, marking its entry into the grocery sector.

2021: Leadership Change - Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO, handing over the reins to Andy Jassy, the former head of AWS.

Andy Jassy

2022 Amazon announced that it was closing all of its Amazon Books retail locations., including all 24 permanent locations and a small array of pop-up shops.

Amazon has said that it has plans to continue operating other retail stores, focusing on Whole Foods Market, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Go, and Amazon Style stores. Amazon's journey from a garage startup to a global tech titan is marked by strategic expansions, innovative products, and significant acquisitions. The company continues to shape the future of e-commerce, cloud computing, and digital services, maintaining its position as a leader in multiple industries.