352
The first confirmed celebration of Christmas takes place.
1818
The first performance of “Silent Night” takes place in the Church of St. Nikolaus in Oberndorf, Austria. It was written the day prior.
1939
The character and story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is created by Robert L. May for Montgomery Ward stores.
CBS radio broadcasts A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. It’s the first time it has ever been read on the radio.
1959
Sony launches their first transistor-based television set, model TV-301, in Japan.
1973
ARPANET crashes when a programming bug causes all ARPANET traffic to be routed through the server at Harvard University and the server freezes.
1987
The Christmas virus (Christmas Tree EXEC), the world’s first WAN virus as well as the first widely disruptive computer worm, begins to effect IBM computers around the globe. The virus draws a crude Christmas tree text graphic on the victim’s monitor and searches out other network users. The worm was written by a Clausthal University of Technology student in the REXX scripting language. The actual file name of the virus is CHRISTMA.EXEC because IBM systems only support eight-character filenames.
1990
Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau use the earlier rudimentary browser Berners-Lee developed over the course of a month earlier in the year to access the world’s first web server at info.cern.ch from their respective computers. Thus, the World Wide Web undergoes its first trial run.
1994
A hacker, initially believed to be Kevin Mitnick, allegedly hacks into the computer of security expert Tsutomu Shimomura and steals the Oki cell phone disassembler written by Shimomura. Later, a different, Israeli hacker will be believed to have been responsible. Shimomura responds by tracking Mitnick with New York Times reporter John Markoff to Raleigh, North Carolina. The events following the intrusion, including the eventual arrest of Kevin Mitnick will be recorded in the book Takedown.
1997
The homepage of Rand J Trading is hacked by “StarCracker”. View an archived version of the defaced webpage.
Lancasterhome.com is hacked by “Claire Danes”. View an archived version of the defaced webpage.
Warner Bros. released the science fiction film The Postman, directed by Kevin Costner and starring Kevin Costner, Will Patton, Larenz Tate, Olivia Williams, James Russo, Daniel Von Bargen, and Tom Petty, to 2,207 US theaters. The film, based on the 1985 novel of the same name by David Brin, follows the story of a drifter who brings hope to a series of small Pacific Northwest cities in a post-apocalyptic world when he takes the uniform of a dead postman begins delivering letters. Produced on a budget of US$80 million, it will gross US$5,260,324 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: R) Running Time: 2 hrs 57 mins
The website of the Centerfold Alumni Association is hacked by “StarCracker”. View an archived version of the defaced webpage.
The website of MPM Software is hacked by “StarCracker”. View an archived version of the defaced webpage.
The website of Net 4 Christ Enterprises is hacked by “Newport”. View an archived version of the defaced webpage.
1998
Between August 15, 1998, to December 25, 1998 eight hundred thousand iMac computers were sold, averaging one every fifteen seconds. The number makes the iMac the best-selling computer in history.
In the United States, one hundred thousand DVD Video players have been sold in the past two weeks, bringing the total sold to date to over a million units.
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