1994
Shipments of Windows to date surpasses forty million units.
1995
Apple Computer announces it has shipped the millionth Power Macintosh computer (or upgrade) to date.
1998
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) publicly asserts the authority to regulate human cloning, and announces that it would be a violation of federal law to attempt to clone a human without a permit. Dr. Michael Friedman, the FDA’s acting commissioner, warns that the agency will go to court to stop unauthorized cloning attempts. The announcement is controversial, as it preempts Congressional efforts to regulate cloning that began when Scottish scientists that they had cloned the udder cell of a six-year-old ewe to create a sheep named Dolly. It’s also unclear whether the FDA’s assertion of authority will withstand judicial scrutiny, as the agency’s mandate is to oversee the safety of food and medical products. The assertion of the FDA’s authority comes on the heels of an Illinois physicist, Dr. Richard Seed announcing that he had planned to raise money to open a cloning clinic. Read more at the New York Times.
2000
Transmeta Corporation concludes four and a half years of secret research by announcing a new processor family, code-named Crusoe. Crusoe is marketed as the world’s first family of “smart” microprocessors. Designed to create a new category of mobile Internet-enabled computers, the chips are designed for a performance comparable to the mid-range Pentium II chips, while consuming only a fraction of the power. The first processor is the 700MHz TM3120.
2001
In Bulgaria, hackers hit the nation’s presidential website. The hacker responsible deletes all official information and leaves a message signed “Kabaka”.
2006
NASA launches the New Horizons space probe aboard an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral on a mission to perform the first fly by of the dwarf planet Pluto and its moons, Charon, Nix, and Hydra. It leaves Earth at an Earth-relative velocity of about 36,373 mi/h (10.10 mi/s), making it the fastest speed ever recorded for a human-made object. It will arrive at Pluto on July 14, 2015 and later continue on to the Kuiper belt. Visit the official New Horizons mission website.
2007
The Storm Worm, first detected two days earlier, begins infecting thousands of computers across Europe and the United States. By Monday January 22, it will account for eight percent of all malware infections around the globe, after roughly six subsequent waves of the attack. The worm spreads through e-mails using the subject line reading “230 dead as storm batters Europe.” According to SecureWorks, the worm remains amazingly resilient, because the Trojan horse it employs changes its packing code every ten minutes, and, once installed, the bot uses fast flux to change the IP addresses for its command and control servers.
2008
Microsoft releases Milestone 1, Build 6519.1 of the Windows 7 operating system. It’s the first version to be released externally to Microsoft partners. Visit the Official Windows 7 Website.
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