1791
African American astronomer and mathematician Benjamin Banneker sends a copy of his first almanac to Thomas Jefferson to disprove Jefferson’s belief that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites.
1839
Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre freely releases a manual for his daguerreotype photographic process, the first process to allow an image to be chemically fixed into a permanent picture. The publication produces an immediate and widespread demand among the French public for the equipment and chemicals needed for the process.
1887
Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev uses a balloon to ascend above the cloud cover to an altitude of 11,500 feet (3.5km) to observe an eclipse in Russia. He makes the solo ascent above Klin without any prior experience. While his family was rather concerned, he paid no attention to controlling the balloon until after he had completed his observations, at which time he worked out how to land it. Mendeleev will be best known for the ordering the periodic table of the elements.
1891
William Huggins first describes the astronomical application of spectrum.
1921
Gene Roddenberry, the American producer of the sci-fi series Star Trek, is born. Read a biography of Gene Roddenberry.
1929
John Logie Baird transmits a commercially made film, The Bride, a monologue by the comedian George Robey, from his studios in Long Acre, London.
1950
The tradition of Saturday morning television for children begins in the USA. The ABC television network’s programming includes Acrobat Ranch and Animal Clinic.
1960
The Soviet Union launches the Sputnik 5 satellite into Earth orbit, carrying two dogs named Belka (Squirrel) and Strelka (Little Arrow), along with a gray rabbit, forty mice, two rats, flies, and a variety of plants. After a safe round trip into space, these creatures will become the first living organisms to return from space after a day in orbit. The spaceship’s retrorocket will be fired and the landing capsule will return to Earth on August 20, 1960.
The Yankee Atomic Electric Company’s $57 million plant in Rowe, Massachusetts, on the Deerfield River becomes the first commercial atomic energy reactor, and the third in the US, to achieve a self-sustaining nuclear reaction. It will begin producing power for distribution on November 10, 1960. The pressurized light-water reactor will produce 125,000 kilowatts of electricity. The company was formed by twelve New England utility companies with the Westinghouse Corporation as the principal contractor. It will be permanently shut down on February 26 1992.
1964
Syncom 3, which becomes the first satellite placed into geostationary orbit, is launched on Delta D rocket. It will be used to telecast the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo to the United States. It will be the first television program to cross the Pacific ocean. Read more at the NASA website.
1972
Gen Con V is held from August 19 – 20 in Williams Bay, Wisconsin.
1976
The science fiction novel Doctor Who and the Web of Fear by Terrance Dicks is published by Target Books. (ISBN 0 426 11084 6) Visit the book’s official website.
1982
The science fiction novel Doctor Who and the Visitation by Eric Saward is published by Target Books. (ISBN 0 426 20135 3) Visit the book’s website.
The Redford Observer newspaper of Redford, Michigan publishes a story reporting that James Kelly, Township Supervisor, and Michael Manoog, the Reford Police Chief, have viewed a seventeen minute video produced by Atari, Inc. that has eased their minds about issues related to video game arcades opening in their community. The video aired on local cable channel twelve.
1996
IDT Corporation announces the acquisition of Genie Online Service, which caters to 20,000 subscribers, from the Yovelle Renaissance Corporation. The specific terms of the purchase the service are not revealed, however, IDT gains the rights to the Genie name as well as to the one hundred gigabytes of service content. Geoff Rochwarger, president of Genie and Howard Jonas, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of IDT publicly agree that the deal works well for both parties. Genie employs twenty people in Rockville, Maryland and manages around sixty system operators.
Netscape Communications releases version 3.0 of the Netscape Navigator web browser. This version introduces a number of new features, including new plug-ins, background colors for tables, the archive attribute is the first to face any serious competition from another web browser. The competition comes from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3.0. Previously, Netscape’s dominance in the web browser market had been unchallenged. Code-name: Atlas
1997
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announces that it has ceased manufacturing the K5 processor.
The fantasy novel Running with the Demon by Terry Brooks is published by Del Rey Books. (ISBN 0-345-37962-4) It is the first book in the Word/Void series, which serves as a far flung prequel to the Shannara series. The book follows the adventures of a fourteen-year-old girl named Nest Freemark who lives in Hopewell, Illinois and is gifted with magical powers that have been passed from mother to daughter down her family line. She and a traveler named John Ross, who reveals himself to be a “Knight of the Word,” must face demons in order to maintain a balance between the powers of the Word and the powers of the Void. Visit Terry Brooks’ official website. Length: 420 pp (hardcover edition), 448 pp (paperback edition)
1998
Air traffic control over a wide New England area blacks out due to a computer crash at the Federal Aviation Administration’s Boston Center. The region affected is from the Candian border to Long Island for about thirty-seven minutes beginning at 6:50pm Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) during which time about three hundred planes were being tracked by seventy-five traffic controllers.
Rapture Technologies and Creative Capers Entertainment co-operatively form Digital Doorway as a new video games producer. Sue Shakespeare is appointed Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the new operation.
1999
The ABC news website is defaced by the “United Loan Gunmen.”
Apple Computer Corporation announces that they have filed suit against eMachines, Inc. alleging that the eOne PC was illegally copied from the design of the Apple iMac computer. However, the similarity appears to be confined to the machine’s translucent blue case.
Dance Dance Revolution Solo BASS MIX is released to arcades.
Intel Corporation, confirms a report that they plan to exit the market for chips that process two and three-dimensional graphics for personal computers. The announcement less than a year after introducing their first graphics controller chip,the i740, in February of 1998.
Microsoft Corporation announces that their newly released Office 2000 and MSN Messenger software packages contain bugs in security implementation that may make them vulnerable to attacks. Visit the company’s official website.
2000
The Kalisto console warez group determines how to rip and redistribute Dreamcast GD-ROMs as CD-ROM ISOs without the need for a swappable “bootdisk” CD-ROM. The revelation marks the beginning of Dreamcast game piracy. In only a very short period, Swapping Dreamcast games online will become wildly popular. So much so that a few weeks later, Sega will offer Kalisto a financial incentive for them to stop releasing games for the Dreamcast platform. On September 2, the group posts a message to their site announcing that, “Sega has offered us stock options to stop releasing DC, so this will be it, our last release. Thanks to all who have supported us throughout our stay in the DC scene. Take note this is NOT a joke. We are really stopping all DC operations with this release. We will continue on with the PSX. Bye.” In 2004, Kalisto was named as one of six groups targeted as part of Operation Fastlink by the United States Department of Justice.
2001
The Nihon Keizai Shimbun (Japan Economic Times) daily newspaper publishes an article in which is states that Fujitsu Ltd., one of Japan’s largest technology firms, will reduce its worldwide workforce by fifteen thousand employees, or approximately ten percent. The article attributes the cuts to a “high-tech slump.” The article also states that the company will be closing several overseas plants. Visit Fujitsu’s official website.
2002
Sony releases the Clie PEG-SJ20 handheld computer, featuring 16MB RAM, a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, a backlit monochrome 320×320 pixel screen, the Palm OS 4.1, and a Memory Stick slot. Price: US$199
Strategy First releases the action role-playing game (rpg) The Prince of Qin for Windows. ESRB: Teen
2003
The Korean Network Information Center (KRNIC), the organization entrusted with internet resources management in Korea, launches the Hangeul.KR service. Hangeul are Korean characters, and the service allows websites to register web domains that include native Korean rather than western scripts.
The Sobig worm becomes known, spreading rapidly via email. It sets a record with the sheer volume of email it sends. The computer worm is most widespread in its “Sobig.F” variant. Sobig is a computer worm in the sense that it replicates by itself, but it is also a Trojan horse in that it masquerades as something other than malware. Many of the Emails carrying the worm will have one of the following subjects: “Re: Approved,” “Re: Details,” “Re: Re: My details,” “Re: Thank you!,” “Re: That movie,” “Re: Wicked screensaver,” “Re: Your application,” “Thank you!,” or “Your details.” Information on Sobig from Symantec
Version 1.0 of the SQLite Database Browser, a public domain, open source GUI database client for SQLite database files. It allows users to visualize a database without an actual working knowledge of the SQL language. It is written in Qt, and it is thus cross-platform compatible. Visit the application’s official website.
Version 1.1 of the QiLinux Free operating system is released. QiLinux is a Linux distribution suitable for desktop and server functions that was created from scratch. The QiLinux project is intended to integrate the work of the vast community of free software developers in order to create a modern, safe, and easy system for administrators and desktop users. Visit the system’s official website.
2004
Google holds its initial public offering (IPO), offering 19,605,052 shares at US$85 per share and raising US$1.67 billion. Of the 19,605,052 shares, 14,142,135 were floated by the company in a bit of mathematical levity (1.4142135 is the square root of two or “Pythagoras’ constant“). Stock will trade above $300 per share within first year
2005
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the Mobile Sempron 3300+ processor, which operates at 2000 MHz and features a 128 KiB level 2 cache.
The Battle Star Galactica episode “Home, Part 1” first airs. In it, Roslin begins her quest to find the Tomb of Athena, while Adama struggles to replace crewmen lost to Roslin’s mutiny. BattleStar Wiki entry
Deep Silver releases the cyberpunk-themed first person shooter (fps) Neuro Hunter for Windows. Visit the game’s official website. PEGI: 12+
Id Software releases the id Tech 3 first-person shooter game engine under a GNU General Public License as a free download. Id Software developed the engine for Quake III Arena.
The ESA/NASA SOHO spacecraft discovers discovers its milestone one thousandth comet. The thousandth comet was a Kreutz-group comet spotted in images from the C3 coronagraph on SOHO’s LASCO instrument by Toni Scarmato, an amateur astronomer from Calabria, Italy, for whom this was the fifteenth comet discovery using SOHO images.
In the journal Science, US biologists publish the full genome of the bacterium Pelagibacter ubique, which contains only 1,354 genes, compared to human’s 30,000. It is estimated that it represents one quarter of the ocean’s total number of organisms. Scientists project that there are approximately twenty billion billion billion Pelagibacter microbes scattered throughout the world’s oceans, and they believe that it is the organisms’ simplicity that allows it to proliferate so readily.
2006
The first gameplay footage of Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars premieres on the SpikeTV show Game Head at Midnight.
The Singapore Media Development Authority adds a new rating to it film rating system, R18. The R18 rating stands for “Restricted 18,” and is to be used for film which are restricted to persons 18 years and above.
2008
Del Rey publishes the science fiction novel Star Wars: The Force Unleashed by Sean Williams as a hardcover. (ISBN: 978-0345499028) The novel tells the story of the fate of Darth Vader’s apprentice. Length: 336 pages
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