I’ve seen a LOT of fan videos, and this is far and way the best I’ve ever come across. It’s hilarious.

I would love to know how long this took to piece together. I could name the episodes the Star Trek footage was pieced together from right off the top of my head, but remembering the bits of dialogue and fitting them together so tightly must have taken weeks.

Dare to be gorgeous and unique.
But don’t ever be cryptic or otherwise unfathomable. Make it unforgettably great.

- Amiga Intuition Reference Manual by Robert J. Mical, 1986.

The only way of finding the limits of the possible
is by going beyond them into the impossible.

- The Lost Worlds of 2001 by Arthur Clarke, 1972.

1886
George Westinghouse opens the first commercially successful alternating current power plant in the US in Buffalo, New York to compete against Edison’s direct current ventures. Alternating current power can be transmitted much further than direct current power by using transformers at the source for a higher voltage, which decreases the loss of energy.

1899
Aluminium is first used commercially in the US as an electrical transmission conductor for the Hartford Electric Light Company of Hartford, Connecticut.

1924
The first photograph facsimile is transmitted by radio across the Atlantic Ocean as a public demonstration were received in New York, where they will published next day in the New York Herald Tribune. The photos include pictures of British government officials, the Oxford team winning in a relay race in Cambridge, a steamship aground on the banks of the Thames, and the proverb, “one picture is worth a thousand words” written out.

1936
The first coaxial cable is installed between New York and Philadelphia for multi-channel telephone tests. The coaxial cable is demonstrated by Frank B. Jewett, the president of Bell Telephone Laboratories, with an inaugural call to the FCC in Washington, D.C.

1954
In Sylacauga, Alabama, Ann Hodges, age 32, is bruised on the arm and hip by a meteorite that fell through the roof of her house into her living room and bounced off her wooden radio to strike her as she lay on her couch. The meteorite fragment weighs nine pounds (4kg) and is about six inches (15 cm) in diameter. Scientists believe that the fragment is a piece of a larger chondrite which witnesses report exploded over central Alabama at about 2pm with a bright flash. In 1956, Hodges will donate the fragment to the Alabama Museum of Natural History, where it will be dubbed the Hodges Meteorite.

1956
The CBS program Douglas Edwards and the News becomes the first live broadcast to ever be video recorded. It is recorded in New York on an Ampex machine and played back three hours later on the west coast. The program is recorded by two Ampex machines, as well as by 35mm and 16mm film machines to assure success.

1959
The first two IBM 7090 mainframe computers are delivered. The popular transistorized mainframe was designed for scientific research and large-scale technological applications. One of the units will be used in the Mercury and Gemini space missions.

1964
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) introduces the IBM 1800 data acquisition and control system, which can monitor an assembly line, control a steel-making process, or analyze the status of a missile in flight.

1965
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) opens the largest computer program library in the world in Hawthorne, New York.

1983
At the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada, Radio Shack unveils the Tandy TRS-80 Model 2000 computer, featuring an 8 MHz Intel 80186 processor, 128KB RAM, two 720KB disk drives, and the MS-DOS 2.0 operating system. Base Price: US$2,750 Optional 12-inch monochrome monitor: US$250 Optional 10MB hard drive Optional color graphics card: US$750 Optional color monitor: US$800 Optional Extra 128KB RAM: US$300 Optional monochrome graphics card: US$450 Visit the event’s official website.

1987
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Haven” first airs. (No. 111) In it, Counselor Troi is visited by her mother, who has come to prepare her for an arranged marriage. Memory Alpha entry

1989
In Toronto, Ontario, Canada, the World of Commodore trade show is held, over five days.

1995
Virgin Interactive releases the horror game The 11th Hour for Windows in the US. ESRB: M (Mature)

1997
Activision releases the first-person shooter (FPS) Quake II for personal computers in the US. It is not a sequel to the storyline of the blockbuster game Quake, but, rather, it is an entirely new game using the name Quake for marketing purposes. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: M (Mature)

1998
Blizzard Entertainment releases the expansion pack for the real-time strategy (RTS) game StarCraft: Brood War for personal computers. ESRB: T (Teen)

Sega announces that it has sold 150,000 units of its new Dreamcast video game console in its first day of sales in Japan. Price: ¥29,800

1999
Business.com, a search engine, is sold for US$7.5 million after it was purchased in 1997 for US$150,000. Visit the website.

Judge Richard Posner, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, begins meeting with Microsoft representatives and the US Justice Department in an attempt to mediate a settlement in the pending antitrust trial. Posner was asked by US District Court Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson to mediate negotiations between the two parties after Jackson ruled that Microsoft is a monopoly.

Microsoft releases Service Pack 6a for the Windows NT 4.0 operating system.

2000
The hacking group “prime suspectz” defaces the Brazilian websites Dell Computadores, Governo do Estado de Sao Paulo, and Senado Federal. The websites are hosted on a server running Windows NT. View an archived version of the defaced Dell, Governo, and Senado websites.

2004
Fortran 2003 is released.

Longtime Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings finally loses, leaving the show with US$2,520,700, the largest prize in US television history.

The optical network speed record is broken by the so-called High Energy Physics team with a sustained speed of 101GB per second between Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, the equivalent of 180 DVD movies a minute.

Version 2.4 of the Python programming language is released. Visit the language’s official website.

Version 5.8.6 of the Perl programming language is released. Visit the language’s official website.

2005
d0c releases version 0.7.0 of the Rufus bittorrent client for Windows. The client is notable for being written in Python. Visit the application’s official website.

Version 1.5 of the Firefox web browser is released. Visit the application’s official website.

2006
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the 2600 MHz Athlon 64 FX-70, 2800 MHz Athlon 64 FX-72, and 3000 MHz Athlon 64 FX-74 processors, featuring two 1,024KB Level-2 Caches, 1,000MHz hypertransport.

Microsoft releases the Microsoft Windows Vista operating system to volume license customers, which are mostly corporations. The release, which comes roughly five years after the company’s last major release, Windows XP, is two years behind schedule. Not only does the release come later than expected, it is riddled with bugs and Microsoft will require another two months to release a consumer version. Visit the system’s official website.

2007
Amazon.com Inc, launches Askville.com, a website where users can ask questions to be answered by other users similar to AnswerBank and Yahoo Answers. The site has been in beta testing since December 2006 and has already been open to a few users, Amazon said.

Dell reports having shipped over forty thousand computers with the Ubuntu operating system pre-installed since Dell began offering them on May 24, 2007.

1951
The first US underground atom bomb test, designated “Uncle,” is detonated. The low-yield 1.2 kiloton bomb is detonated seventeen feet beneath the surface of Frenchman Flat, in Nevada as part of Operation Buster-Jangle. It leaves an eighteen hundred foot diameter crater one hundred feet deep.

1961
The first US satellite carrying an animal is launched by Mercury-Atlas 5 from Cape Canaveral. The passenger, a five-year-old chimpanzee named Enos, orbits the Earth twice over the course of three hours and twenty minutes. During the mission, Enos carries out the lever-pulling performance and psychological tests that he had been conditioned for over the past sixteen months. Enos performs the tasks with a high degree of accuracy, receiving shocks for the minimal number of incorrect answers. Even when the controls malfunction and Enos begins receiving consecutive shocks for correct answers, the frustrated chimpanzee continues to the proper sequence through the end of the flight.

1965
Canadian Space Agency launches the satellite Alouette 2.

1972
Without fanfare, Atari co-founders Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn wheeled the first stand-alone Pong coin-operated arcade unit into Andy Cappa’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. Instead of pursuing established manufacturers, Bushnell had decided to manufacture the Pong units himself. Bushnell distributed Pong along the pre-existing arcade routes he and Ted Dabney had worked to keep Atari afloat while their first game was being created. It was his boldest move yet and would ultimately prove successful. He leased an old roller rink in Santa Clara and converted it into a production line. Each machine took in around US$200 a week, which was nearly four times what other pinball games and jukeboxes earned on the same routes. Pong will go on to be the first commercially successful video game, this day is widely marked as the first nail in the coffin of pinball era. Carl Sagan will write that, “As a result of Pong, a player can gain a deep intuitive understanding of the simplest Newtonian physics.”

1975
The name “Micro-soft” (an amalgam of the words microcomputer and software) is first used in a letter from Bill Gates to Paul Allen.

1982
Atari files a copyright infringement suit against Imagic, claiming Demon Attack is a copy of Amstar’s Phoenix arcade game, which Atari has the exclusive right to produce for the home game market.

1990
Tor Books published the fantasy novel The Great Hunt by Robert Jordan as a hardcover. (ISBN-13: 978-0312851408) It was the second novel in the Wheel of Time series. Length: 600 pages

1996
A woman in Aurora, Illinois is charged for punching another shopper in the head while fighting over the last Nintendo 64 video game system in a Best Buy store.

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) announces that the company has shipped ten million units of the PlayStation game console worldwide. The total sales include 4.2 million units in Japan, 3.45 million units in North America, and 2.35 million units in Europe.

1999
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the 533MHz K6-2 processor. Price: US$167 in 1000-unit quantities

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the 750MHz Athlon processor, fabricated with 0.18-micron technology. Price: US$799 in 1000-unit quantities

The General Electric Company (GEC)/Marconi sells its Electronics Systems division to British Aerospace.

2000
The Brazilian website of SMS Tecnologia Eletronica Ltda is hacked by the hacking group “prime suspectz”. The website is hosted on a server running Linux. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The Brazilian website of Tecnolatina is hacked by the hacking group “prime suspectz”. The website is hosted on a server running Linux. View an archived version of the defaced website.

2002
Massachusetts Attorney General Tom Reilly files an appeal of the ruling US District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly made on the settlement of the antitrust case against Microsoft.

2005
The National Institute on Media and the Family release a report characterizing the video game industry-operated rating system “beyond repair.”

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) releases an update for the PlayStation Portable (PSP) in the US via Internet connection, Memory Stick, or Universal Media Disc (UMD) disc. The update adds Really Simple Syndication (RSS) version 2.0 for audio streams and Windows Media Audio file playback.

Version 1.5 of the open source Firefox web browser is released.

2007
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reports that, in the second phase of Operation “Bot Roast,” thirteen warrants were served in the US and abroad, resulting in eight indictments for acting as botherders, operating a global botnet that infected over one million computers and caused an estimated US$20 million in financial damages and losses. Among those indicted were Ryan Brett Goldstein, 21, of Ambler, Pennsylvania, who conducted a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Nasdaq Stock Market, which traditionally lists technology firms, announces that it would launch an index to specifically track the performance of companies that offer Internet-related services, such as ecommerce sites, internet access, search engines, web hosting, and website design. Senior Vice President Steven Bloom stated, “It is logical for Nasdaq to extend investment opportunities through a new benchmark for this dynamic, evolving sector.”

Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker’s game because they almost always turn out to be - or to be indistinguishable from - self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.

- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, 1999.

• Mario and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles meet, with tragic results.

Film

• Could Twilight Bring About a New Buffy The Vampire Slayer Movie? Only if there’s a god.
• Lenard Nemoy makes a cameo appearance in the New Trek Trailer.
• Sony Pictures has released an awesome animated poster for Terminator Salvation.

Internet

• Fantasy Magazine warns those of you who aren’t teenage girls about Ten Things You Should Know About Twilight.
• io9 points out the monster in the new Star Trek trailer looks very similar to the Cloverfield monster. Is this a sign Abrams, the director of both, is running low on material or that he’s developing the playful habit of inter-linking his works.
• ListVerse runs down the Top Ten Star Wars Spoofs.
• Star Wars: A New Heap Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Death Star is a tour of visual elements of the original Star Wars trilogy.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Listen to “Bury the Dead” by Ann Leckie at PodCastle.
• Free Fiction: Listen to “Portrait in Ivory” by Michael Moorcock and more at StarShipSofa.
• Free Fiction: Read the romantic fantasy novella “Glad Yule” by Pati Nagle at QuasarDragon.
• Interview: BookSpotCentral interviews Hal Duncan, author of Escape from Hell!
• Interview: The Omnivoracious blog to read Jeff VanderMeer’s interview with Charlaine Harris, best known as author of the “Southern Vampire” book series
• The Crotchety Old Fan counts down the The Top Ten Collectible SF Magazines.
• io9 rounds up a list of the Ten of the Kinkiest Science Fiction Books You’ll Ever Read.
• To mark the Thanksgiving holiday, Cinematical compiled a list of Terrific Turkeys, some of the worst films release in the new millenium.

Television

• Slice of Sci-Fi shares a few theories regarding Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Personally, I don’t think that there is going to be so much depth to this story that fans need to start theorizing on underlying motivations.

Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.

- The Lost Worlds of 2001 by Arthur Clarke, 1972.

1923
Radio amateur Léon Deloy (call sign 8 AB) in Nice, France, connects on a 109 meter wavelength with F.H. Schnell (call sign 1 MO) in Hartford, Connecticut, USA in the trans-Atlantic radio transmission.

1948
The Polaroid Land Camera, the first instant camera, first goes on sale, at a Boston department store. The camera, invented by Dr. Edwin Land, would produce a sepia-colored photograph in approximately one minute. Price: US$89.75

1964
NASA launches the Mariner 4 probe toward Mars from Cape Kennedy. On July 14, 1965, it will become the first satellite to transmit close-up photographs of the planet.

1967
The first pulsating radio source (pulsar) is detected by graduate student Jocelyn Bell, working under Professor Antony Hewish at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory in Cambridge, England.

1980
Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI) reduces the price of the TI-99/4 home computer to US$650, US$300 off the previous price of US$950.

1983
The COMDEX trade show is held in Las Vegas, Nevada. At the event, Radio Shack unveils the Tandy TRS-80 Model 2000 computer, featuring an 8 MHz Intel 80186 processor, 128KB RAM, two 720KB disk drives, and the MS-DOS 2.0 operating system. Base Price: US$2,750 Optional 12-inch monochrome monitor: US$250 Optional 10MB hard drive Optional color graphics card: US$750 Optional color monitor: US$800 Optional Extra 128KB RAM: US$300 Optional monochrome graphics card: US$450 Visit the event’s official website.

1984
EXEC-PC, which will eventually grow into one of the largest bulletin board systems (BBS) in North America, takes its first call at 2am on its only phone line. At its height, in the mid-nineties, the system will include over two hundred fifty lines and over 300GB of file storage.

1988
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Where Silence Has Lease” first airs. (No. 202) In it, the Enterprise is ensnared in a mysterious “hole” in space, controlled by a malevolently curious space-faring life form. When the alien becomes intrigued by the concept of death, he informs Captain Picard that he intends to kill half of the crew to test the different ways to die. Memory Alpha entry

1996
Aboard the NASA Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-80), astronauts Tammy Jernigan and Thomas Jones are preventing from taking a spacewalk when a hatch fails to open. “I’m pushing as hard as I can,” Jones said. “It just doesn’t seem to want to move,” Jernigan agreed. The malfunction will later be blamed on a loose screw.

1997
The website of the Local 2609, The United Steelworkers of America is hacked by “Magica de Bin”.

2000
Bidding on eBay for item number 507007174 for “The Ultimate Video Game Library!” closes at US$70,000. The winning bidder is listed as “skahcpunk” and the auction was created by baybuy1@aol.com.

Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) introduces the PlayStation 2 in the US. The system features a 294.912MHz processor, a single analog DualShock2 controller, two memory card slots, two USB ports, one i-Link (IEEE 1394) port, and a 128-bit Emotion Engine graphics processor. The system is backwards compatible with PlayStation games and supports CD-ROM, Dolby Digital, DTS, DVD-ROM, and DVD-Video media. Price: ₤300 Weight: 5 pounds

2001
The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Cold Front” first airs. (No. 111) In it, Archer finds out a crewman on Enterprise is helping to fight the Temporal Cold War against Silik and some of the Suliban. Memory Alpha entry

2006
Nintendo announces that it had sold over six hundred thousand Wii video game consoles in the eight days since its launch in the Americas. Along with accessories and games, Wii-related revenue has reached US$190 million.

Ubisoft releases the stealth-based game Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Double Agent for the Wii in the US. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: M (Mature)

Xandros Incorporated releases version 4.1 of the Xandros operating system. Visit the system’s official website.

1789
Thanksgiving is first celebrated in the United States after Congress requested that President George Washington proclaim a “…day of public thanksgiving and prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many and signal favors of Almighty God, especially by affording them an opportunity to peaceably establish a form of government for their safety and happiness…” After several subsequent US Presidents declared a national Thanksgiving, Abraham Lincoln finally made it an annual event with his 1863 Thanksgiving Proclamation. The official date of the holiday was changed from the fifth Thursday in November to the fourth Thursday in November by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939.

1834
Thomas Davenport invents the first commercially successful electric motor, which he used with great ingenuity to power a number of established inventions. He would receive a US patent February 25, 1837.

1895
Alfred Nobel signed his last will, which established the Nobel Prize.

1963
The Centaur II becomes the first flight of space vehicle fueled by a combination of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen when it is launched at 19:03 from Cape Canaveral.

1971
The Soviet Union’s Mars 2 lander becomes the first spacecraft to land on the surface of Mars. It was launched on May 19.

1987
Nintendo releases The Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in Europe.

1995
Microsoft releases Internet Explorer 2.0 web browser to compete with the popular Netscape Navigator web browser, which had a virtual monopoly on the web browser market. Microsoft markets the browser as having superior privacy protection.

The Star Trek: Voyager episode “Resistance” first airs. (No. 128) In it, Janeway accepts the help of an insane resistance fighter in order to free her imprisoned crew members. Memory Alpha entry

1996
The website of Nethosting is hacked by “01001000 00110111″. View an archived version of the defaced website.

1998
Sega launches the Dreamcast video game console in Japan. The system features a 200Mhz Hitachi SH-4 RISC processor, 16MB RAM, a 56kbps modem, a 32-bit Yamaha Super Intelligent Sound Processor, a proprietary 1.2 Gigabyte CD-ROM, and the Windows CE operating system. The system is accompanied by the release of five software titles including: Godzilla Generations, July, Pen Pen TriIcelon, Sega Rally 2, and Virtua Fighter 3. Price: ¥29,800 (about US$220)

2000
The Brazilian website of Banco Central do Brasil is hacked by the hacking group “prime suspectz”. The website is hosted on a server running Windows NT. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The E-Stamp Corporation stops selling postage over the Internet and lays off one third of its employees, blaming the cuts on high operating costs.

Martin Schweiger releases Orbiter, a freeware space shuttle simulator for Windows. Unlike other simulators, Orbiter is focused on controlling the shuttle, rather than on the views or destination of the flight. Visit the application’s official website.

Microsoft again denies it is a monopoly or has violated any antitrust laws when it files an appeal to throw out a lower court ruling that would force it to split into two smaller companies.

2001
Acclaim Entertainment releases the puzzle game Super Puzzle Bobble, which is also released under the title Super Bust-A-Move, for the Game Boy Advance.

A hydrogen atmosphere is discovered on the extrasolar planet Osiris (HD 209458b) by the Hubble Space Telescope. It is the first atmosphere ever detected on an extrasolar planet.

2002
The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Vanishing Point” first airs. (No. 210) In it, Hoshi finds herself invisible after her first trip through the transporter, while the rest of the crew believing she’s dead. Memory Alpha entry

2004
Nintendo announces that over eight hundred thousand Game Boy Advance video game systems were sold over the Thanksgiving week in the US.

Thanksgiving is America’s national chow-down feast,
the one occasion each year when gluttony becomes a patriotic duty.

- Michael Dresser

The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations - in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

- The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, 1995.

1789
In the United States, Thanksgiving Day is first observed on the recommendation of President George Washington and with the approval of Congress.

1864
Charles Dodgson, who will later publish under the pen name Lewis Carroll, sends the handwritten manuscript of his fantasy novel Alice’s Adventures Underground to ten year-old Alice Liddell as an early Christmas gift. Dodgson had promised the girl that he would record the story after first told her and her two sisters the tale to pass the time while traveling via row boat from Folly Bridge, Oxford to Godstow on The Isis for a picnic outing. One year later, the manuscript would be published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

1865
Macmillan and Co. publishes the juvenile fantasy novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pen name Lewis Carroll in England. The novel included forty-two illustrations drawn by John Tenniel, who will be long remembered for the contribution. The novel, which tells the story a young girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a magical world populated with bizarre characters. It would become enormously influential in the fantasy genre. Queen Victoria enjoyed the book so much that she would send Dodgson a letter saying that she would be “pleased to accept any other works by the same pen.”

1881
The Western Electric Manufacturing Company abbreviates its name to “Western Electric” and acquires the only existing licenses to make Bell System telephone equipment through purchases and the expirations of existing contracts.

1885
The first photo of a meteor trail ever taken is taken in Prague, Czechoslovakia during the Andromedid meteor shower.

1887
Thomas Alva Edison applies for a US patent for an improved phonograph system that uses wax-coated cylinders and an electric motor-driven machine. (US No 386,974)

1922
Archaeologist Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon become the first people to enter the tomb of Egyptian King Tutankhamun in over 3000 years. The find will be dubbed, “The greatest archaeological discovery of all time” by the media.

The film Toll of the Sea becomes the first widely released film to feature two-tone Technicolor. The film The Gulf Between, which used the same technology, was released over five years earlier, but it was never widely released and it wasn’t produced in Hollywood, as Toll of the Sea was. IMDB listing

1965
France launches its first satellite, Astrix-1, aboard a Diamant-A rocket from Hammaguir, Algeria, becoming the world’s third nation to enter space after the Soviet Union and the United States.

1966
President Charles de Gaulle inaugurates the world’s first tidal power station at Rance estuary, in Brittany. At high and low tide, the water builds up rapidly on one side of the dam. When the difference in the two sides’ levels is sufficient, the gates open and the water rushes into the dam, operating the turbines in either direction to generate up to five hundred million kilowatt-hours (kWh) of power a year.

1976
The trade name Microsoft is registered with the Office of the Secretary of the State of New Mexico. The name was first used by Bill Gates in a letter written to Paul Allen on November 29, 1975. Just weeks later, Gates will drop out of Harvard.

1981
According to Twin Galaxies, Dan Whitman, age 16, scores a record-setting 556,886 points on Atari’s Centipede after playing the game for one hour and five minutes at 2-Bit Bandit in Evansville, Indiana. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

1984
In the Business Monday section of the San Jose Mercury News, technology editor Evelyn Richards, reports that Jack Tramiel was “making peace with retailers as soon as he arrived at Atari … That means Atari’s computers and video-game systems will be on retailers’ shelves in time for the Christmas shopping season.” The article also points out the difficult balance that Atari has had to find to optimize cash flow. “Tramiel’s challenge was to convince retailers to pay him what they owed, plus buy more goods.”

1986
Paramount Pictures releases the science fiction film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, directed by Leonard Nimoy and starring William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, Majel Barrett, Grace Lee Whitney, Mark Lenard, and Jane Wyatt, to 1,349 US theaters. In it, Kirk and his crew go back in time to retrieve a set of humpback whales to save Earth from an alien probe seeking the species in a future in which they are extinct. In the film, Scotty, attempting to secure a supply of acrylic glass, enters the molecular formula for “transparent aluminum” into a Apple Computer Macintosh Plus using its keyboard after a failed attempt to speak to the system through its mouse. Produced on a budget of US$25 million, it will gross US$16,881,888 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG) Running Time: 1 hr 49 mins

1990
The first Delta II rocket is launched. Visit the rocket’s official website.

Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. acquires Music Corporation of America (MCA) for US$6.6 billion.

1995
The NetBSD Foundation releases version 1.1 of the NetBSD operating system. Visit the official NetBSD website.

1997
PGP Inc. publishes PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) 5.5.3 freeware for Windows 95, Windows NT, and Macintoshes. This version is no long backward-compatible with the keys PGP versions 2.6x. Shortly after it’s release, it will be illegally exported from the US.

Twentieth Century Fox releases the science fiction film Alien: Resurrection, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and starring Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Dominique Pinon, and Ron Perlman, to 2,415 US theaters. Two hundred years after her death, Ellen Ripley is revived, and she must continue her battle against the Aliens. Produced on a budget of US$75 million, it will gross US$16,474,092 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: R) Running Time: 1 hr 49 mins

The website of China Agricultural University is hacked by “LSD”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

1999
GT Interactive released the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament for Windows in the US. ESRB: M (Mature)

Sega announces its plans to make the Dreamcast video game console the center of its Web strategy, focusing on multiplayer online gaming.

2000
The Brazilian website of Associacao Educacional Sao Jose is hacked by the hacking group “crime boys”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The Brazilian website of Znica Telecomunicates e Informatica Ltd is hacked by the hacking group “prime suspectz”. The website is hosted on a server running Linux. View an archived version of the defaced website.

2001
Intel announces that its researchers have developed an innovative transistor structure with new materials that represent a dramatic improvement in transistor speed, power efficiency and heat reduction. The technology development is an important milestone in the effort to maintain the pace of Moore’s Law and remove the technical barriers that Intel and the semiconductor industry have only recently begun to identify. The Intel TeraHertz transistor solves a key barrier to bringing future chips into volume production that enable a whole new range of applications like face recognition and computing without keyboards as well as significantly improved battery life. Intel is expected to begin incorporating elements of this new structure into its product line as early as 2005.

Two former Cisco accountants are sentenced to thirty-four months for breaking into company computers to steal stock.

2002
Square and Enix announce they are merging to form Square Enix by April 1, 2003. Visit the company’s official website.

2003
The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Carpenter Street” first airs. (No 311) In it, Archer, Daniels, and T’Pol travel back in time to 2004 Detroit after discovering that a group of reptilian Xindi have traveled there to create a biological weapon. Memory Alpha entry

Version 0.4 of the Desktop Light Linux (DeLi Linux) operating system is released. Visit the official DeLi website.