1996
At the Handheld PDA Expo in San Mateo, California, Microsoft announces that the Windows CE operating system will support Motorola MPC 821 and 823 PowerPC processors, as well as ARM processors from Cirrus Logic and Digital Equipment.
General Motors (GM) releases the first electric car to be mass-produced, the EV1. While GM had developed previous electric cars, they were mostly prototypes, where the EV1 is the first model intended for the general market. However, it will never be offered to the public. It will only ever be available to consumers under a lease program that won’t allow consumers to purchase the vehicle. Visit an archive of the vehicle’s official website.
Shares of GT Interactive drop 37.6% on the Nasdaq, after the company reported that the release of its Nintendo 64 games will be delayed.
NASA launches the Mars Pathfinder space probe on a mission to soft land on Mars Pathfinder to study the planet’s geology. Visit the official Mars Pathfinder website.
1997
A bomb threat is e-mailed to a Goodyear Tire store in Wisconsin by Chad Newman.
1998
The Space Shuttle Endeavour is launched on the first mission to begin assembling the International Space Station (ISS) after delivering the station’s second module, the Unity Module.
2001
The Pentagone or “Goner” e-mail worm is identified by anti-virus experts at McAfee. Goner spreads primarily through Microsoft Outlook, by sending itself to all the entries contained in the Outlook address book, via an e-mail message, with the subject, “Hi.” In the body of the e-mail is the message, “How are you? When I saw this screen saver, I immediately thought about you I am in a harry, I promise you will love it!” and the attachment “GONE.SCR.” Once the attachment is opened, the hybrid virus attempts seeks out and terminates processes involved in the operation of popular anti-virus and firewall software, then the worm proceeds to deletes all the files in the directory and all subdirectories where the file from which the task was killed is located. If deletions fail, the worm creates a Windows registry key that reactivates the virus upon the startup of the infected computer. The virus also spreads via ICQ file transfers. Despite it’s relatively unsophisticated approach, the Goner virus will prove to be incredibly effective, causing an estimated US$80 million dollars of damage in western nations. In August of 2002, five young Israeli boys will be accused of writing and disseminating the virus. Four of the boys are in the tenth and eleventh grade, while the fifth is an eighth grader. Officials finally track down the four of the five youths by comparing the web handles with which the virus code had been tagged with IP addresses that had registered the same handles on the DALnet (the IRC network.) The fifth teen will be arrested after questioning the first four.
2003
Version 2.7.0 of PhpMyAdmin, an open source tool written in PHP to handle the administration of MySQL over the Internet. This version features improved importing capabilities and a simplified configuration. Visit the application’s official website.
2006
iVillage Live, the first interactive daytime talk show, premieres. The show is based on the NBC Universal-owned iVillage website.
NASA announces plans to build a permanent base at either the north or south pole of the Moon as a testbed for the development of future technologies for travel to Mars. Read more at ABC News.
2008
Sun Microsystems releases version 1.0 of the JavaFX Script, a compiled, statically typed, declarative, scripting language for the Java Platform. Visit the official JavaFX website.
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