1879
Electric arc lamps are used for the first time in the United States, as street lights in Cleveland, Ohio.
1953
An episode of the science fiction series Space Patrol becomes the first experimental three-dimensional television broadcast in the US when it is transmitted by ABC affiliate KECA-TV in Los Angeles, California.
1957
The first military nuclear power plant is dedicated at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.
1959
The UNIVAC picks four out of six winners at the Churchill Downs races in Louisville, Kentucky, setting a record for the correct choices in a horse race.
1964
The monster movie Mothra vs. Godzilla is released.
1979
The last episode of the classic sci-fi television series Battlestar Galactica, “The Hand of God,” first airs on the ABC network. (No. 24) In the eight months following the release of the Battlestar Galactica movie, seventeen new episodes of the series were aired, five of which were two-parters, for a grand total of twenty-four hours of programming, but ABC canceled the series in early April, citing declining ratings and repeated cost overruns. In the final episode, the Galactica receives a mysterious radio signal that may have originated at Earth. Adama is hopeful but afraid that the signal may be yet another Cylon trap, so the crew turns the tables on the Cylons by preemptively attacking them aboard a stolen Cylon Raider. In the series’ final scene, Apollo and Starbuck narrowly miss receiving the historic transmission of the Apollo 11 lunar landing.
1980
At the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, New York, Data General, one of the earliest microcomputer manufacturers, announces the Eagle computer. The system, which will be critically acclaimed, features a 4MHz Zilog Z80 A processor, 64KB RAM, and the CP/M 2.2 operating system.
1983
Walt Disney Pictures releases the fantasy film Something Wicked This Way Comes, directed by Jack Clayton and starring Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce, to 817 US theaters. It is based on the Ray Bradbury novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Produced on a budget of US$19 million, it will gross US$2,423,555 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG) Running Time: 1 hr 36 mins
1985
Apple Computer discontinues the Macintosh XL line of computers. The Macintosh XL is a modified version of the Apple Lisa personal computer that features a 5MHz Motorola 68000, a 400K 3.5″ floppy drive, and an optional external 10 MB hard drive. Visit the official Apple website for the Macintosh XL.
1986
A fire at the Central library of the City of Los Angeles Public Library, destroys nearly four hundred thousand books.
1991
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Drumhead” first airs. (No. 421) In it, a zealous Starfleet admiral comes aboard following a major mechanical breakdown in order to find the saboteur responsible. When it turns out that the incident was an accident, the admiral refuses to stop her inquiries. Memory Alpha entry
1992
The Legion of Net. Heroes, the first Usenet superhero shared universe, is formed at rec.arts.comics. The newsgroup becomes a popular center of fan fiction based on existing comic book universe and parodies of popular comic tropes. By 2006, over 450 stories will have been posted to the thread.
The Legion of Net. Heroes began after a member of rec.arts.comics, declaring himself “Spelling Boy” of the Legion of Super Heroes (LSH), commented on the correct spelling of the name Winsor McCay on April 27. In response, Dan’l Danehy Oakes subsequently suggests that long-time posters form a Legion of Net. Heroes. He declared himself California Kid, “whose power is to read comix weeks after everyone else has discussed ‘em…” These posts expand, spawning 115 replies from a diverse group of new “net.heroes”. On May 5, Steven Librande, undoubtedly growing tired of the thread, will declare himself “the ingenious Doctor Killfile” and threaten to “release the awesome force of my patented Kill-O-Ray, destroying all posts about you blithering Net. Heroes!!”
Benjamin Pierce, in the net.persona of Marvel_Zombie Lad, will rally his fellow “net.heroes” to fight back. It is at this that point that forty-four different authors will begin working on the first actual LNH story, later known as “The Cosmic Plot Device Caper”. At that time, USENET users are primarily college students, and when summer vacation came, interest in the LNH waned.
Come the fall, interest will be reawakened by Todd “Scavenger” Kogutt. New LNH stories and new authors will debuted on rec.arts.comics.misc (rec.arts.comics had become defunct in late 1992), creating a continuing “series”, with issue numbers and serializations. The first of these stories will be Kyle Lucke’s “Quest for Cheeze“, followed by Ray “wReam” Bingham’s Ultimate Ninja.
1994
Commodore International announces that it will declare bankruptcy due to its inability to renegotiate its outstanding loan terms. The process will take months due to the company’s sheer size and complications that will arise from the fact that the company is incorporated in the Bahamas while many of the company’s creditors are based in the United States. Commodore’s assets will be sold to German PC manufacturer ESCOM in 1995 when it is finally unable to renegotiate its loans. The former site of Commodore’s operational headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, will eventually house the headquarters and broadcast studios of cable retailer QVC, Inc. Read more about the history of Commodore.
1996
The Star Trek: Voyager episode “The Thaw” first airs. (No. 139) In it, the crew find aliens mentally connected to a computer that has created a being that feeds on their fear. Memory Alpha entry
The media reports that, in the first quarter of the year, personal computers have outsold televisions for the first time in history. The Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association (CEMA) will issue a correction to the figures the next day. Due to an error made by a CEMA representative while referring to a table of sales figures, the number of television sales for the first quarter is cited as 660,000. The correct number, however, is 4.6 million, far more than the number of personal computers sold during the same period.
Power Computing releases the PowerCenter and PowerTower line of Macintosh-compatible computers. All systems feature the PowerPC 604 processor. Price: US$1,895 to US$4,195
1997
US astronaut Jerry M. Linenger and Russian cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev complete the first-ever Russo-American space walk, a five-hour excursion from the Russian space station Mir.
1998
It’s revealed that experiments conducted for decades up to 1994, Norwegian and American researchers used mentally ill and retarded Norwegians in tests of the biological and genetic effects of X-ray radiation on the human body.
1999
Chen Ing-hau, a computer engineering student at the Tatung Institute of Technology, is identified as the creator of the Chernobyl virus that disabled hundreds of thousands of computers around the globe on April 26. The institute will punish Ing-hau with a demerit in April of 1998 when the university experienced damage to their own data system.
Mpath Interactive Inc., the Silicon Valley company that runs Mplayer.com, a free online gaming service, issues their Initial Public Offering (IPO) of common stock with an opening price of US$18 per share. The stock closes at US$50 per share at day’s end. The huge growth of MPlayer in the future will be closely associated with the growth in the internet that culminates in the dot com boom in the late nineties. The company will be forced to sell out to GameSpy in June 2001 because of financial difficulties. By the time of the buyout, MPlayer will have over ten million registered members and over twenty million unique visitors per month.
2000
The website of Electronic Frontier Foundation is hacked by “soulstice”. View an archived version of the defaced website.
2002
Apple Computer announces the Apple eMac computer, which was developed exclusively for the educational market. The system features a 700MHz G4 processor, a 128MB CDROM, a 40GB hard drive, a CD-RW drive, a 17-inch monitor, an nVidia GeForce2 MX video card, five USB ports, two FireWire ports, built-in speakers, a built-in microphone, a keyboard, a mouse, and OS X 10.1.5. Price: US$1,099
The hacker group calling themselves The Deceptive Duo hacks and defaces five sites, including: the Durango, Colorado Airport, the South Bend Regional Airport, the Southeast Iowa Regional Airport, the US Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, and the Uniformed Services of the University of the Health Sciences. The Deceptive Duo has posted excerpts of databases taken from websites the group previously compromised in order to demonstrate the vulnerability of important American institutions. The Deceptive Duo declared in previous statements that their only concern is national security and that they are in contact with the administrators of several of the previously attacked websites, helping them patch and secure their systems. Mirrors of the attacked sites can be found at:
http://www.zone-h.org/defaced/2002/04/29/c4iweb.spawar.navy.mil/
http://www.zone-h.org/defaced/2002/04/29/www.sbnair.com/
http://www.zone-h.org/defaced/2002/04/29/www.durangoairport.com(1)/
2003
Metropolitan Police in the United Kingdom arrest Lynn Htun, age 24, at London’s InfoSecurity Europe 2003 computer fair for failing to appear in Guildford Crown Court in England, on forgery charges. Although he is arrested on unrelated charges, authorities immediately launched an investigation upon his arrest. Htun is believed to be the infamous website defacer known as “Fluffi Bunni”, who allegedly gained unauthorized access to the computer systems of several major security companies, including SecurityFocus and Symantec.
Version 2 (v1.4.2) of the Java programming language is released. Visit the official Java website.
2004
Assistant Attorney General Christopher A. Wray and US Attorney Jeff Collins of the Eastern District of Michigan announce the arrest of two Detroit-area men allegedly responsible for sending hundreds of thousands of commercial electronic mail messages advertising diet patches and other such devices, while using false and fraudulent headers to hide their identities. The messages resulted in over ten thousand complaints to the Federal Trade Commission’s unsolicited electronic mail database since January 1, 2004 The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which worked in conjunction with the US Attorney’s Office during the investigation, has filed a civil action against the defendants. The criminal charges in this case are the first filed under the “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Marketing and Pornography Act” (”CAN-SPAM”), which was enacted in December 2003 and took effect on January 1, 2004. The Act criminalizes, among other things, sending multiple commercial electronic mail messages with materially false or fraudulent return addresses.
Google files an S-1 form with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) to raise as much as US$2,718,281,828. This number, an allusion to the mathematical constant e, is a is a bit of mathematical humor reflecting Google’s lighthearted corporate culture. April 29th is the 120th day of 2004, and, according to section 12(g) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, “a company must file financial and other information with the SEC 120 days after the close of the year in which the company reaches $10 million in assets and/or five hundred shareholders, including people with stock options”. Google has stated in its Annual filing for 2004 that every one of its 3,021 employees, “except temporary employees and contractors, are also equity holders, with significant collective employee ownership”, so Google is required to make its financial information public by filing with the SEC regardless of whether or the company intended to make a public offering. As Google states in the filing, the company’s, “growth has reduced some of the advantages of private ownership. By law, certain private companies must report as if they were public companies. The deadline imposed by this requirement accelerated our decision.” The SEC filing also reveals that Google has turned a significant profit in the preceding year. The IPO will use an auction process employing a complex averaging formula designed specifically to prevent brokers from winning more shares than average investors.
The Sasser worm is released. Sasser will first be thought to have been authored in Russia by the same person or group who created the worm referred to as Blaster, Lovsan, or MSBlast, due to similarities in the code of the two worms. However, on May 7, 2004, computer science student Sven Jaschan, age 18, from Rotenburg, Lower Saxony, Germany will be arrested for writing the worm. He will immediately confess to having written it when he was seventeen, along with Netsky.AC, a variant of the Netsky worm. On Friday, July 8, 2005, Jaschan will receive a twenty-one month suspended sentence after being tried as a minor.
2005
Apple Computer releases Mac OS X v10.4, “Tiger,” for the Apple Macintosh. Apple claims that Tiger contains more than 200 new features. Among its new features, Tiger introduces Automator, Core Image and Core Video, Dashboard, QuickTime 7, Safari 2, Smart Folders, Spotlight, updated Mail program with Smart Mailboxes, and VoiceOver. Read the press release that announcing Tiger.
Apple Computer releases QuickTime 6.2 exclusively for Mac OS X to provide support for iTunes 4, which allows AAC encoding for songs in the iTunes library. Visit the official Quicktime website.
The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part II” first airs. (No. 418) In it, the Captain Archer of the Mirror Universe commandeers a 23rd century Defiant from the Tholians and uses it in a nefarious power grab. Memory Alpha entry
Version 8.0 of Darwin, an open source, Unix-like operating system is released. First released by Apple Inc. in 2000, it is a standalone operating system as well as the core set of components upon which Mac OS X was developed. It is primarily developed by Apple to support Mac OS X.
2006
PC-BSD 1.0 is released. PC-BSD is a Unix-like, desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD. Visit the official PC-BSD homepage.
2008
Rockstar North releases the third-person shooter Grand Theft Auto IV for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in Europe, North America, and Oceania. The game will be both a critical and commercial success, and it breaks industry records by selling some 3.6 million units in the first day of its release and grossing more than half a billion in the first week from an estimated 6 million units sold globally. By Mark 2009, over thirteen million units will be sold. (ESRB: M) Visit the official Grand Theft Auto IV website.
|
|
|
Comments are closed
