1871
Samuel Clemens, better known as the author Mark Twain, receives a patent for “An Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Garment Straps,” later known as suspenders. (US No.121,992)
1914
The Cel overlay animation process is patented by Earl Hurd of Kansas City, Missouri as “Process of and Apparatus for Producing Moving Pictures.” (US No. 1,143,542)
1923
Dr. Vladimir K. Zworykin patents the first all-electronic picture tube.
1930
Amelia Earhart becomes the first autogyro pilot to carry a passenger at Pitcairn Field, in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Flying a PCA-2 Pitcairn Autogyro, she made trips with various passengers until dark. Just the previous day, December 18, 1930, Earhart made her first solo flight in the same autogyro, becoming the first female to make a solo flight. Two years earlier, on December 19, 1928, Harold F. Pitcairn made the first ever autogyro flight.
1958
The first known radio broadcast from outer space is transmitted from the SCORE (Signal Communications Orbit Relay Equipment) communication satellite, which was launched from Cape Canaveral the previous day. The voice of President Eisenhower issues a Christmas greeting from a pre-recorded tape on a recorder aboard the orbiting space satellite. The battery-operated 132 MHz vacuum tube transmitter had an 8W output. His full message is,
“This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you from a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one. Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind America’s wish for peace on earth and good will to men everywhere.”
1972
The last manned lunar flight, Apollo 17, crewed by Eugene Cernan, Ron Evans, and Harrison Schmitt, returns to Earth.
1974
The Altair 8800 microcomputer kit goes on sale in the US as a do-it-yourself computer kit. The kit is sold by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), which was founded by Ed Roberts. The Altair uses switches for input and indicator lights as a display. It’s powered by a 2 MHz Intel 8080A microprocessor. It’s first sold through Popular Electronics magazine, where the designers intended to sell only a few hundred kits to hobbyists; however, demand for the machine ultimately exceeded the manufacturer’s wildest expectations when ten times that many were sold in the first month. The Altair kit will later be widely recognized as the spark that led to the personal computer revolution. Price: US$397
Bloggers Note:The first programming language for the Altair will be Microsoft’s first product, Altair BASIC.
1985
Mary Lund becomes the first woman to receive a Jarvik VII artificial heart. She will receive a human heart transplant forty-five days later, and she will survive with the heart until October 1986.
1986
Cray released version 2.0 of its Unicos Unix operating system.
1988
Konami releases the platform game Castlevania for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in Europe. PEGI: 3+
NASANASA unveils plans for a lunar colony and a manned missions to Mars.
1996
Nintendo releases the platform game Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong’s Double Trouble! for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in Europe. Visit the game’s official website.
The Videogame Music Archive (VGMusic.com) is launched on the Internet by Michael Newman, a chemical engineer. The website archives MIDI sequences of video game theme music. The archive will grow to include tens of thousands of pieces from a wide variety of games spanning many systems, including the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), the Wii, and the Xbox 360. Visit the website.
1997
Generic Extension programming language is released.
Twentieth Century Fox releases the romance film Titantic, directed by James Cameron and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Frances Fisher, Kathy Bates, Gloria Stuart, and Bill Paxton, to 2,674 US theaters. The film will become both a critical and commercial success, winning eleven of the fourteen Academy Awards for which it will be nominated, including Best Picture, and it will become the highest grossing film of all time, with a total worldwide gross of US$1.8 billion. The epic film relies heavily on state-of-the-art computer graphics and animation to tell the story of a romance aboard the ill-fated 1912 maiden voyage of the Titanic. Produced on a budget of US$200 million, it will gross US$28,638,131 domestically in its opening weekend. Visit the film’s official website. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: PG-13 Running Time: 3 hrs 14 mins
A page of Tudelft.nl, the Delft University of Technology, is hacked and defaced by “pOOt & clOut”. View the an archived version of the defaced website.
1999
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com is named Person of the Year by Time magazine. Bezos started the e-commerce sensation with US$300,000, three Sun Workstations and a garage office. Critics, however, argue that Time magazine’s choice may have been ill placed since Amazon.com has never shown a profit and has not predicted a profit in the foreseeable future.
2001
In the journal Nature, a team of scientists at International Business Machines (IBM) and Stanford University graduate students report the first demonstration of “Shor’s Algorithm,” a quantum algorithm developed in 1994 by AT&T“>AT&T scientist Peter Shor for using quantum computers to calculate a number’s factors. Factoring large numbers is so difficult for conventional computers and yet so simple to verify, that it is commonly used in cryptographic methods to protect data. The IBM scientists controlled a vial of a billion-billion molecules custom designed by IBM chemists for the purpose, each with the nuclei of five fluorine and two carbon atoms. The molecules in the test tube became a seven-qubit quantum computer that solved a simple version of the mathematical problem at the heart of many of today’s data-security cryptographic systems. They executed Shor’s algorithm and correctly identified three and five as the factors of fifteen. “Although the answer may appear to be trivial, the unprecedented control required over the seven spins during the calculation made this the most complex quantum computation performed to date,” said Nabil Amer, manager and strategist of IBM Research’s physics of information group. “This result reinforces the growing realization that quantum computers may someday be able to solve problems that are so complex that even the most powerful supercomputers working for millions of years can’t calculate the answers.” Read more at IBM.
LucasArts releases Star Wars: Obi-Wan for the Xbox in the US. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: T (Teen)
New Line Cinema releases the fantasy film The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, directed by Peter Jackson and starring Elijah Wood, Sean Astin, Viggo Mortensen, Ian McKellen, Dominic Monaghan, Billy Boyd, Orlando Bloom, John Rhys-Davies, Liv Tyler, Cate Blanchett, John Rhys-Davies, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Sean Bean, Ian Holm, Andy Serkis, Lawrence Makoare, to 3,359 US theaters. It based on the epic 1954 fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. Produced on a budget of US$93 million, it will gross US$47,211,490 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: PG-13 Running Time: 2 hrs 58 mins
The warez group Echelon releases Final Fantasy X. It is the first of what will become hundreds of PlayStation 2“>PlayStation 2 games the group will release.
The Zacker (or Maldal) worm is first discovered.
2002
Microsoft releases DirectX 9. DirectX is a collection of programming interfaces for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming, and video, on Microsoft platforms. Visit the system’s official website.
2003
Version 2.3.3 of the Python programming language is released.
2004
A message is posted to the front page of the Suprnova.org torrent site stating that the site has officially been shut down. Visit an archive of the Supernova website.
US District Judge Charles R. Wolle awards Robert Kramer, the operator of a small Internet service provider in eastern Iowa, one billion dollars in a suit he had filed against 300 spammers who had allegedly been responsible for filling his inbound mail servers with as many as ten million spam messages a day at one point in 2000. Most of the messages were sent to non-existent email address at the small ISP, which served only about five thousand customers at the time in question. Under the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act and the Iowa Ongoing Criminal Conduct Act (IOCCA), AMP Dollar Savings Inc. of Mesa, Arizona was ordered to pay US$720 million, Cash Link Systems Inc. of Miami, Florida was ordered to pay US$360 million, and TEI Marketing Group of Florida was ordered to pay US$140,000. Under IOCCA, each company was fined US$10 in damaged per spam message. These penalties were then then tripled under RICO. The judgment is the largest ever handed down in an anti-spam lawsuit.
Version 1.0 of the RSSOwl news aggregator is released. Visit the application’s official website.
2005
American biologist J. Craig Venter announces that he is spearheading a project to create the first synthetic lifeform, an artificial microbe made from scratch by fusing existing DNA together with a microbe membrane.
Hewlett-Packard (HP) completes the acquisition of Peregrine, Inc, based in San Diego, California. The acquisition adds asset management and enhanced IT service management capabilities to the HP OpenView range of system management products.
Microsoft announces that it will no longer support Internet Explorer for the Macintosh and recommends using other Macintosh browsers such as Safari.
Red Hat is was added to the NASDAQ-100, an index of the one hundred largest non-financial companies on the NASDAQ stock exchange.
2006
Mozilla Corporation released version 2.0.0.1 of its open source browser Firefox. Visit the official Firefox website.
Scott McCausland, administrator of the EliteTorrents BitTorrent tracker site, is sentenced to five months of prison, five months of home arrest, and a US$3,000 fine at the conclusion of Operation D-Elite. Operation D-Elite was a joint operation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement against leading members of EliteTorrents precipitated by the tracker’s release of the Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith workprint approximately six hours prior to the movie’s theatrical release.
The Space Shuttle Discovery undocks from the International Space Station after completing a complex mission, that was extended by one day due to difficulties with a solar panel.
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