1404
The English Parliament passes the Act of Multipliers, forbidding alchemists from using transmutation to create or multiply precious metals, specifically gold and silver. The Act comes in response to widespread fear that alchemists would succeed in their projects and ruin the nation or install a despot. In 1689, Robert Boyle lobbied for repeal of the Act.
1610
Galileo Galilei discovers what will later be named Callisto, the fourth satellite of Jupiter. Galileo names the Moon along with the three he discovered earlier the “Medicean planets,” after the Medici family, and numerically as I, II, III and IV. Galileo’s naming system will be used until the mid-1800’s, when they will come to be referred to as Galilean moons, Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io.
1874
C.G. Spalding receives a patent for the Spalding Adding Machine. (US No. 29.3,809) The machine is the precursor of later calculators and computers.
1906
This date is sometimes noted for the first release of an advertisement for a radio receiver in the US. However, the very earliest one-inch advertisement for the Telimco appeared in the November 25, 1905 issue of the Scientific American. Both of these ads, and several similar weekly advertisements run between the two dates, were placed by Hugo Gernsback of The Electro Importing Company of New York. Gernsback will later forget the exact date on which the first Telimco advertisements first appeared and mis-cite it in a later interview for a special issue of Radio Craft published in March 1938.
1908
Henry Farman, an English-born Frenchman, flew the first one-kilometer circuit, winning the Grand Prix de Aviation and its 50,000 franc purse. He crossed the starting poles about 4-m (13-ft) in the air, then flew straight out for about 500-m. Slowly climbing to 12-m (40-ft), he then made a wide, flat turn, using rudder alone to slide around the marker. He came back and made another turn, crossed the point at which he started, and landed gently. The entire flight lasted 28-sec, and covered the prescribed kilometer. Although the Wrights may have accomplished this at an earlier date, this was the first such flight in front of official witnesses.
1928
American inventor Ernst F.W. Alexanderson demonstrates his television receiver publicly for the first time. It delivers a poor and unsteady picture only 1.5 inches square. The picture, with a forty-eight line resolution transmitted at sixteen frames per second, is broadcast over 2XAF at a 37.8 meters frequency while the sound is broadcast over radio station WGY. Three television sets are installed by General Electric (GE) and Radio Corporation of America (RCA), one in the Alexanderson home and two in the homes of board members, all in Schenectady, New York. On May 28, 1928, WGY, the first television station, will begin broadcasting a regular schedule of programs on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoons between 1:30 and 3:30pm, at twenty-four frames a second.
1958
Linus Pauling presents a petition of signed by prominent scientists to the United Nations, asking for a halt to the testing of nuclear weapons. Pauling, along with his wife, was instrumental in collecting the nine thousand signatures from scientists across the globe, which the present to Dag Hammarskjöld, secretary general of the United Nations. Within months, the Soviet Union will call for an immediate halt to nuclear testing, and by October, following a number of tests conducted by both the Soviet Union and the United States, talks began in Geneva to discuss details of a possible test ban.
1974
Hammer Studios releases the horror film The Satanic Rites of Dracula, directed by Alan Gibson and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, to US theaters. In it, two years after the events of Dracula, strange things begin to happen, and Scotland Yard calls upon Professor Van Helsing to assist them. He soon discovers that Dracula plots to unleash a plague on the world. IMDB listing
1976
Inventor Raymond Kurzwell demonstrates the first machine for reading printed material aloud. Using a camera, a computer can scan printed pages, analyze them, and speak them aloud with in synthesized English speech at one hundred fifty words a minute. The machine was manufactured by Kurzwell Computer Products, Inc., and was tested by the National Federation for the Blind.
Viewdata, later renamed Prestel, is first publicly demonstrated. Viewdata is a Videotex information retrieval service which subscriber can use to remotely access a database to request data on one channel and receive requested data over a separate channel. The system uses a modem running at CCITT V.23 speeds of 1200bps down and 75bps up. The service will be popular in the travel industry through the ninties.
1978
NASA selects its first female astronauts. The six women chosen as astronaut candidates by NASA are Anna Fisher, Shannon Lucid, Judith Resnik, Sally Ride, Rhea Seddon, and Kathryn Sullivan.
1984
At a meeting of the board of directors, Jack Tramiel publicly resigns as president, CEO, and director from Commodore International. Just two days prior, Tramiel announced the Commodore 264 and 364 home computers at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show (CES). His departure is precipitated by management disputes with Irving Gould, a Candian venture capitalist who had purchased seventeen percent of Commodore with a US$400,000 investment. Gould wanted Marshall Smith, a veteran of the steel industry, to be named president, while Tramiel wanted to bring in his sons. Another disputer arose when Tramiel wanted to based the company’s new computer line on Zilog Corporation processors and the board of directors want to use IBM-compatible computers instead. Tramiel will later found a second computer company, Tramel Technology (not Tramiel), where he will be joined by his three sons, Garry, Leonard, and Sam and several ex-Commodore employees, including John Faegans, Commodore software director, Don Richards, former Commodore president, Gary Sommers, head of Commodore Technology Group, and Joe Spitari, chief of Commodore manufacturing.
1988
Ashton-Tate and Microsoft announce the Microsoft SQL Server, relational database management system (RDBMS) for Local Area Networks (LANs). The software is based on a RDBMS licensed from Sybase. Visit the software’s official website.
1989
The “Friday the 13th” effects computers running MS-DOS across the United Kingdom. The virus erases data and fills screens with at one large staff training center near Brussels. All in all, it fails to cause the widespread damage that users have feared as rumors of the virus have circulated for the past six weeks in an unprecedented spate of publicity.
TriStar Pictures releases the science fiction horror film DeepStar Six, directed by Sean S. Cunningham and starring Greg Evigan, Nia Peeples, and Miguel Ferrer, to 1,117 US theaters. In it, the crew of an underwater nuclear base struggle to survive as an alien race strives to destroy their base. It will gross US domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing Running Time: 1 h 43 min MPAA Rating: R
1993
Sega releases the Streets of Rage 2 for the Sega Genesis in the US. ESRB: E (Everyone)
The Space Shuttle Endeavour is launched on its third flight.
1995
Hacker Mark Abene, better known as “Phiber Optik”, completes his twelve month sentence at Schuylkill federal prison in Pennsylvania.
Koei releases the turn-based strategy game Romance of the Three Kingdoms IV: Wall of Fire for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in the US.
1997
The Crack.com website is hacked and the source code for Doom, Golgotha, and Quake is stolen.
1998
Temporary PIN numbers for Boeing’s 401(k) accounts are stolen by hackers.
1999
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduces the low-power K6-2 processors for notebooks, featuring 3DNow technology and a 100MHz processor bus. Price: US$106 (266MHz), US$187 (300MHz), and US$299 (333MHz) each in quantities of 1,000
The Censure and Move On websites are hacked anonymously.
Konami releases the music game Dance Dance Revolution to arcades in Australia. Visit the game’s official website.
SyQuest announces that Iomega will acquire its intellectual property and its assets in the United States for US$9.5 million dollars.
The website of the Chinese National Library is hacked by “Bosnatek”. View an archived version of the defaced website.
2000
Microsoft announces that Steve Ballmer will replace Bill Gates as CEO of the company while remaining president. Gates will remain chairman and becomes new chief software architect.
2006
Apple Computer’s market capitalization surpasses that of Dell, whose CEO, Michael Dell, was quoted on October 6, 1997, in an interview as saying, “I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders”, when asked what he would do if he owned Apple. Jobs had started a war of words with Dell back then when he criticized Dell for making “un-innovative beige boxes.”
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