1990
In an early-morning raid, the Secret Service raids the offices of Steve Jackson Games, a maker of roleplaying games, in Chicago. Two of the workers, known online as “Erik Bloodaxe” and “Mentor”, are alleged to have ties to a hacker group that the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating. The agents keep the employees out of the offices through the morning and into the afternoon. They seize the server which hosts the company’s bulletin board system (BBS), “Illuminati,” along with an employee’s work computer, miscellaneous computer equipment, and hundreds upon hundreds of floppy disks. The agents find the soon to be published rulebook for a game called “G.U.R.P.S. Cyberpunk.” The raiders mistake the book for a computer hacking tutorial and subsequently seize all the recent versions of the book, including a large section of the draft which had been made publicly available on Illuminati. Steve Jackson Games will later mount a campaign to retrieve the seized equipment. In the ensuing legal battle, the company will ultimately prevail, but their equipment will never be returned in its entirety. The incident will later be the inspiration for a card game called Hacker. Read a brief history of the Illuminati BBS at the Steve Jackson Games website. Read more in The Hacker Crackdown.
1991
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation of Microsoft for alleged monopolistic practices becomes public knowledge. Visit the official FTC website.
1993
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Birthright (Part 2)” first airs. (No. 617) In it, Worf infiltrates a prison colony run by Romulans in order to find out if his father is alive. Memory Alpha entry
1994
The comedy television series Weird Science, starring John Mallory Asher, Michael Manasseri, Vanessa Angel, and Lee Tergesen, premieres on the USA Network cable network with the episode “She’s Alive”. The series is a spin-off of the 1985 film Weird Science. It will run for five seasons and eighty-eight episodes. TV.com entry
1997
French electronics manufacturer Thomson puts demonstration DVD players into branches of Fnac entertainment department store in France with a suggested retail price of 4,990 francs (€755 or US$878). Visit the official Thomson website.
Sony announces that it will cut the price of the PlayStation twenty-five to thirty-five percent in Australia, France, Germany, and Great Britain.
1998
The website of Persatuan Hackers Indonesia is hacked by “CHRiZTiaNZ WaReZ”. View an archived version of the defaced website.
The website of Sprint International Global One is hacked by “Simon”. View an archived version of the defaced website.
1999
Compaq Computer begins shipping the Aero 2100 handheld computer, featuring 8MB RAM, a 256-color display, an integrated microphone and speaker, and the Windows CE operating system. A lithium-ion battery powers the unit for about ten hours. Price: US$449
The General Electric Company (GEC) acquires the US telecommunication network products company RELTEC.
Oracle begins shipping Oracle 8i database software, for a variety of operating systems. Visit the official Oracle website. Price: Starts at US$1,475 for a five user license.
2000
3Com holds an initial public offering (IPO) for its subsidiary Palm, Inc. on the NASDAQ market, making it a publicly traded company. Visit the official Palm website.
The website of AntiOnline’s AntiCode is hacked by “ADM”. View an archived version of the defaced website.
2001
Forty ecommerce and banking websites in twenty states are hacked by Eastern European organized crime (Russian) groups. Over a million credit card numbers are stolen in the incident.
2002
NASA launches the Space Shuttle Columbia on its last successful mission, during which it will perform maintenance on the Hubble Space Telescope. (STS-109) It is the shuttle’s final successful mission. On its next mission, the shuttle will be destroyed.
Version 1.6.7 of the Ruby programming language is released. Visit the official Ruby website.
2003
The Alias Systems Corporation is honored with an Oscar award for scientific and technical achievement by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the development of its Maya 3D computer graphics software. Visit Autodesk’s official Maya website.
2004
The national registrars of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland adopt Punycode, a computer encoding syntax which translates Unicode strings into the character set which is permitted for network host names. Visit the Punycode translator at NameISP.com.
Version 8.4.6 of the Tcl/Tk programming language is released. Tcl/Tk is widely used in the programming of graphical user interfaces (GUI’s). Read more about the history of Tcl at the Tcl Developer Xchange.
2005
Yahoo! announces that it will begin including paid entries within its search engine results, though the company is quick to assure consumers that it will continue to rely on free web crawl results for most of its content. Visit the official Yahoo! website.
2006
Msnbc.com publicly launches the Newsvine collaborative journalism news website. Using the site, users can publish articles, post links to external news stories, and discuss all of the stories posted. Visit the Newsvine website.
Wikipedia reaches one million English language articles with the creation of an entry entitled “Jordanhill railway station.”
World of Warcraft reaches a milestone six million total subscribers worldwide. Visit the official World of Warcraft website.
2007
The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) changes its name to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in order to reflect the organization’s increasingly international membership. Read the official press release at the official AAAI website.
Leister Productions releases version 9 of the Reunion genealogy software for the Mac OS X. Visit the official Leister Productions website.
2008
America Online (AOL) discontinues the Netscape web browser. Visit the official Netscape website.
2009
China’s first lunar probe, Chang’e 1, impacts the surface of the Moon.
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