1996
Williams Electronics ships the long awaited side-scrolling shooter Defender 2000 for the Atari Jaguar. The game will sell over fifty-five thousand units, to become Williams Electronics’ best-selling arcade game, as well as one of the highest grossing arcade games in history, earning over US$1 billion. It will gain a reputation for being one of the most challenging arcade games released to arcades.
Bandai Digital Entertainment unveils the Pippin Atmark computer. The system is licensed from Apple Computer, and it comes with a keyboard, mouse, and a modem. It doesn’t include a monitor, but it plugs into a television. Visit an archived version of the official Pippin Atmark website.
Only a year after creating element 111, a team of German scientists led by Peter Armbruster at the Gesellschaft für schwerionenforschung (GSI) facility at Darmstadt, Germany, announce the creation of an atom of element 112. Its nucleus has 112 protons and 166 neutrons, giving it the mass number 277. It is named Ununbium and given symbol UUB according to an internationally adopted system for naming new elements.
1997
The animated television sitcom “The Simpsons” airs its 167th episode, surpassing “The Flintstones” to become the longest-running animated series in history. Visit the official Simpson’s website.
1998
The website of SunSITE Hong Kong is hacked by “Magica de Bin”. View an archived version of the defaced website.
1999
The a market research firm Dataquest reports that there are personal computers in approximately fifty percent of United States homes as of 1998.
Version 6.5.3 of the IRIX operating system is released by Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI). Visit the official SGI IRIX website.
2000
The E-Trade Group and ZDNet experience outages for up to two hours due to “denial of service” attacks (DoS) waged by an unknown Internet hacker, who will later be revealed to be a fifteen year old Canadian high school student named Michael Calce, who goes by the web handle “MafiaBoy“. It’s the third straight day of the DoS attacks conducted by the hacker
Miriam Oxedine, age 48, lands at Ontario airport in California and is arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents. Allegedly, Oxedine had quit her music teaching job in North Carolina to fly to the Los Angeles area with the intention of having sex with a sixteen year old girl she had met in an Internet chat room. She will plead guilty to all charges on Thursday, April 20, 2000.
The website of Tennessee Crime Law is hacked by “Team Echo”. View an archived version of the defaced website.
2001
A ship’s anchor severs the China-US Cable Network cable in the waters off Chongming, China, causing a temporary break in Internet connectivity between America and Asia.
Version 6.01 of the Netscape web browser is released. Visit the official Netscape website.
2003
Benjamin Curtis, the actor best known for his role in the highly successful 2000 Dell Computer ad campaign that was credited with generating a business-saving revenue growth with the “Dude, you’re gettin’ a Dell” catch-phrase, is arrested attempting to buy a bag of marijuana on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The arrest of the actor, often referred to as the “Dell Dude” or just “Steve,” will end his career as the Dell spokesman and will precipitate a long-running link between Dell and drug culture on the internet.
2006
Late Night Software releases version 4 of Script Debugger, a code editing and debugging environment for the AppleScript programming language. Version has is a fully rewritten version of the software that includes support for both the Cocoa and Tiger API. Visit the official Late Night Software website.
2009
Amazon.com announces a second, slimmer version of its Kindle e-book reader, which will begin shipping February 23rd.. The new version of the device costs as much as the original, but it features a number of technological improvements. Read more about the Kindle at Amazon.com. Price: US$359
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