1902
Popular Mechanics magazine is published for the first time. The magazine has five paying subscribers and will be purchased by a few hundred newsstand customers at a nickel a copy. In September 1903, the magazine will have become sufficiently popular to begin publishing monthly issues.
1935
Amelia Earhart becomes the first person to fly solo between Hawaii and California. Three years earlier, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
1960
The ACM/GAMM committee is convened with the mission of developing the first block-structured programming language, Algol 60 (ALGOrithmic Language), which will be the predecessor of the Pascal programming language. Algol and Algol 60 were designed as portable languages for scientific computation, and Algol will later be described by Alan Perlis as “the lingua franca of computer science.”
1973
The United Kingdom’s Open University grants its first degrees to students who curriculum consisted, in part, of courses transmitted over radio and television. Founded in 1969, Open University was established to make education available to students globally. Visit Open University’s official website.
1976
The science fiction television series The Bionic Woman premieres on the ABC network with the episode “Welcome Home, Jaime: Part 1.” The series will run for three seasons and a total of fifty-eight episodes. The series is a spin-off of The Six Million Dollar Man. TV.com entry
1988
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Big Goodbye” first airs. (No. 112) In it, Crusher, Data, and Picard are trapped in the holodeck by a computer malfumction, and they must survive the program that they’ve begun. Memory Alpha entry
1994
Eric Gordon Corley, better known by the handle “Emmanuel Goldstein” publishes “No Time For Goodbyes – Phiber Optik’s Journey to Prison” in Computer Underground Digest, after escorting Mark Abene (”Phiber Optik”) to prison on January 7th, to serve his one year jail sentence for a computer trespassing conviction. As a founding member of the Masters of Deception (MoD), Abene inspired thousands to explore the the infrastructure of the United States phone system. Soon after the article’s publication, New York Magazine dubs Abene one of the city’s 100 smartest people. Read the entire article.
The Superhighway Summit is held at Royce Hall at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The summit the “first public conference bringing together all of the major industry, government and academic leaders in the field [and] also began the national dialog about the Information Superhighway and its implications.” The event is attended by Disney CEO Michael Eisner, FCC Chair Reed Hundt, NewsCorp Chairman Rupert Murdoch, and Vice President Al Gore, among others. One of the principal topics addressed is the increasing “gap between those who will have access to it because they can afford to equip themselves with the latest electronic devices and those who can’t.”
1995
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel settle their outstanding processor-related legal issues. AMD pays Intel US$58 million in damages, Intel pays AMD US$18 million for breach of contract, and AMD retains full rights to microcode in Intel 386 and Intel 486 processors.
United States Attorney Michael J. Yamaguchi of the Northern District of California announces that his office will not prosecute anyone in connection to the June 1991 posting of the “Pretty Good Privacy” encryption application to USENET.
1996
Umax Data Systems of Taiwan acquires the license to manufacture Macintoshes from the hardware firm Radius, along with the company’s license to sell Macintosh operating systems. Umax will later set up a US company, Umax Computer, to market a line of Macintosh-compatible computers. Visit the official UMax website.
1999
Intel announces that their new series of Pentium chips will be called Pentium III. The company also announces that a new chip called the Xeon, which will be designed specifically for graphic and engineering applications, will be released at approximately the same time as the Pentium III. Visit Intel’s official website.
2000
Construction of the first segment of the China-US Cable Network, the first undersea fiber optic cable network between the China and the US. The cable will carry data, video, and voice traffic directly between two points in China (Chongming and Shantou) and two points in the US (Bandon, Oregon and San Luis Obispo, California) at 80Gbps.
2001
America Online (AOL) and Time Warner complete their merger to form AOL Time Warner after receiving the final approval from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Visit the official AOL Time Warner website.
2002
Nintendo releases the turn-based game Advance Wars for the Game Boy Advance in Europe. ELSPA: 11+
The US ISP Association (USISPA) is formed from the Compulink Information eXchange (CIX), the organization which initially converted the Internet into a commercial enterprise. Visit the organization’s official website.
2003
The domain registration for the “shock site” Ogrish.com, which primarily features photos and video of fatal accidents and brutal crimes, is deleted by German registrar Joker.com at the request of a German prosecutor who complained that the website’s content was extremely objectionable, despite the fact that it hasn’t violated any laws in the United States, where the site is actually hosted.
2005
International Business Machines (IBM) announces that it will donate five hundred technology patents to a number of open-source groups.
Capcom releases the third-person shooter Resident Evil 4 for the GameCube in the US. It is the sixth installment in the Resident Evil franchise. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: M(Mature) Price: US$49.99
At the Macworld Conference & Expo, Apple releases iLife ‘05, a suite for creating digital content. Price: US$79
At the Macworld Conference & Expo, Apple releases the iPod shuffle with either a 512MB or 1GB capacity. It is the first iPod to use flash memory rather than a hard drive. It is also the first iPod that has neither a screen nor the devices’ signature scroll wheel.
At the Macworld Conference & Expo, Apple releases the Mac mini, featuring an 1.25GHz or 1.42GHz PowerPC G4 processor, 256MB RAM, a 40GB or 80GB hard drive, the Mac OS X operating system, iLife, and an optional SuperDrive. The Mini is only two inches high and six and a half inches square, making it the smallest desktop tower ever. Price: US$499 and US$599 repectively.
2006
Konami releases the game compilation Castlevania: Double Pack for the Game Boy Advance in North America. The compilation includes Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance. ESRB: T (Teen)
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