1997
Apple Computer completes its acquisition of Next Software, which began February 4, for for US$427. Visit an archived version of the NeXT website.
Microsoft announces that it is ceasing the development of Windows NT for systems using PowerPC processors.
1998
The website of Dynatek InfoWorld is hacked by “TechVoodoo Crew”. View an archived version of the defaced website.
2000
At 10:15am Pacific Standard Time (PST), a 16 year-old Canadian hacker named Michael Calce using the web handle “Mafiaboy“, carries out a distributed denial of service attack (DoS) with a one gigabit per second flood of IP packet requests from a network of “zombie” servers. As a result, Yahoo goes offline for over three hours. Two days, later the same attacks continue, this time targeting Amazon, Buy.com, CNN, eBay, E*Trade, MSN, and ZDNet. After pleading guilty, Mafiaboy will later be sentenced to eight months in a youth detention center.
At the International Solid State Circuits Conference, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) demonstrates an Athlon processor operating at 1.1GHz. Intel demonstrates a prototype 1GHz Pentium III processor. Visit the official International Solid-State Circuits Conference website.
2003
The chess match between Garry Kasparov and Deep Junior 7 in New York ends in a draw, with Kasparov having won the first game, Deep Junior having won the third game, and the other four games ending in draws. The match is the first competition between a man and a machine sanctioned by FIDE (World Chess Federation). Deep Junior was programed over ten years by Amir Ban and Shay Bushinksy of Tel Aviv. It is capable of evaluating three million moves a second, fifteen moves deep.
Two hackers who broke into a California court’s computers in order to electronically dismiss a
variety of pending cases plead guilty to the crime. Both William Grace, age 22, and Brandon Wilson, age 28, will be sentenced to nine years in jail after pleading guilty to 72 counts of illegally entering a computer system and editing data, along with seven counts of conspiracy to commit extortion.
2005
The International Solid-State Circuits Conference is held in San Francisco, California. At the event, International Business Machines (IBM), Sony, and Toshiba reveal specifications for the Cell processor, intended for use in the next-generation PlayStation console. The Cell will feature a 64-bit IBM Power processor and eight processing units each capable of handling a separate set of tasks. The processor is expected to run at speeds faster than 4GHz, process 256 billion calculations per second, with the ability to transfer processor data at up to 100GB per second. Visit the official International Solid-State Circuits Conference website.
2006
Apple Computer introduces the 1GB iPod Nano (US$149), reduces the price of its iPod Shuffle to less than US$100 ($69 for a 512MB device and $99 for the 1GB model), and releases several accessories, including armbands and a combination lanyard-earphone. Visit the official iPod Nano website.
2007
ICANN reports that its root nameserver became the target of a massive denial-of-service attack conducted by anonymous hackers along with servers managed by US Defense Department and UltraDNS.
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