1813
A special Commission is convened in York, England to try sixty-six people for Luddite offenses. Seventeen of them will later be sentence to execution. The Luddites, who vowed to destroy the factory automation mechanisms which they blamed for their unemployment, rioted in 1812, destroying a thousand looms in Nottingham, where half of the population had been left no alternative but to rely on parish relief.
1839
French pioneering photographer Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the Moon.
1936
The first electron tube to enable night vision was described, in St. Louis, Missouri.
1959
The first artificial satellite to orbit the sun, Luna 1, is launched by the U.S.S.R. Luna 1 will have the distinction of being the first spacecraft to leave Earth’s gravity and to fly past the Moon. It will lead to the discovery of solar winds.
1971
In the United States, an advertising ban on Cigarettes and tobacco product television commercials begins after being deferred for a day so that broadcasters could keep their commitments to advertisers during the Super Bowl the previous day. Both the ABC and CBS networks will later report that the ban results in a fifty per cent drop in advertising revenue, for an estimated loss of US$220 million. Under the Fairness Doctrine, the FCC also bans anti-smoking advertisements from broadcast.
The number of Bell System telephones in service reaches one hundred million, while independent telephone companies serve only twenty-five million.
1975
Bill Gates and Paul Allen write to Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), the manufacturer of the Altair computer, saying they have a BASIC language for the Intel 8080 processor. Gates and Allen propose licensing the language for use on the Altair in exchange for royalty payments. This letter and the contract which results from it, are the first time Gates and Allen refer to themselves by the company name Microsoft, spelled “Micro-Soft”.
1979
Software Arts is incorporated by founders Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston for the purpose of developing VisiCalc, the world’s first spreadsheet program, which will be published by a separate company, Personal Software Inc. (later named VisiCorp). VisiCalc will come to be widely regarded as the first “killer app” that turned the microcomputer into a serious business tool. Read more about VisiCalc.
1985
Coleco Industries announces it will sell off its Adam computer inventory and abandon the home computer business.
1988
The development of Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), an extraordinarily influential early time-sharing operating system, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is discontinued with MSS version 38.3.
1992
Nintendo releases Metroid II: Return of Samus for the Game Boy in Japan.
1998
The official BMW website is hacked anonymously. View an archived version of the defaced website.
The official website of Janet Jackson and the Rolling Stones are both hacked by ” Team CodeZero”. View an archived version of Jackson’s defaced website and the Rolling Stones’ defaced website.
View an archived version of the defaced website.
2001
Intel announces that it will recall its 1.13 GHz Pentium III processors due to a “glitch”.
2002
Jim Harrer, co-founder of Mustang Software, which developed Wildcat! BBS system, becomes President and Chief Operating Officer of Starbase Corporation in Santa Ana, California. Read the original press release.
2006
Version 1.2 Beta of the NeoOffice office suite is released. Visit the software’s official website.
2007
The University of Washington first releases the BitTyrant java-based bittorrent client. Visit the application’s official website.
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