Today is White Day in Japan and Korea, a holiday similar to Valentine’s Day, in which men give gifts to women. It is also Pi Day, an International celebration of the mathematical constant, Pi.
1794
Eli Whitney patents the Cotton Gin, a mechanism to separate cotton seeds from the plant’s usable fiber. Before the Cotton Gin, removing seeds from cotton was a task largely accomplished by slave labor. The invention, which makes it possible for a single person to clean fifty pounds of cotton in a day, will revolutionize the textile industry and significantly decrease the demand for slave labor in the US.
1839
Sir John Herschel uses the word “photography” for the first time in history during a lecture given to the Royal Society in London.
1891
The construction of the first submarine telephone cable across the English Channel is completed.
1915
The first issue of the Sunday Pictorial, the first newspaper to make extensive use of photography, is launched in the UK.
1930
John Logie Baird begins experimental transmissions of his thirty-line television system from a transmitter in Brookmans Park, England.
1931
The first motion picture theater built especially for rear projection films in the US opens in New York City.
1936
Warner Bros. Pictures releases the black-and-white horror film The Walking Dead, directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Boris Karloff, Edmund Gwenn, and Marguerite Churchill, to US theaters. In it, a man framed for murder is sentenced to death, but he is later revived by a scientist. It was produced on a budget of US$217,000. IMDB listing
1954
Radio Corporation of America (RCA) begins producing an initial run of five thousand color television receivers at its plant in Bloomington, Indiana. The fifteen inch set, The Merrill (CT-100), will retail for US$1,000.
1955
AT&T Bell Laboratories publicly announces the completion of the first fully transistorized computer, the TRADIC (TRAnisitor DIgital Computer). The computer contains nearly eight hundred transistors, which operate on fewer than 100 watts, about one-twentieth the power required to operate a computer using vacuum tubes.
1956
At the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters convention in Chicago, Illinois, Ampex demonstrates a VRX1000 quadruplex videotape recorder to two hundred CBS network affiliates. Within four days of the demonstration, the network will spend nearly four million dollars to purchase over seventy of the machines, which will later be renamed the Mark IV, for US$50,000 each.
1968
The final episode of Batman starring Adam West and Burt Ward airs on the ABC television network after one hundred twenty episodes but before the completion of its third season. Because the series aired two weekly installments, the series concluded with nearly as many episodes as others running for five years.
1969
The Star Trek episode “All Our Yesterdays” first airs. (No. 78) In it, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are trapped on a planet which will soon be destroyed in a supernova. Memory Alpha entry
1978
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) introduces the IBM 3624, a second-generation automated teller terminal.
1979
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) introduces the IBM 3604 Model 7 administrative terminal.
1986
The Giotto space probe, which was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA), passes within 605 kilometers of Halley’s Comet in order to examine the comet’s nucleus. Visit the official website of the Giotto mission.
1988
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Coming of Age” first airs. (No. 119) In it, Wesley takes the Starfleet Academy admission exam while the Enterprise’s crew undergoes an investigation. Memory Alpha entry
1991
The New England Journal of Medicine reports that pregnant women who use workstations with a Video Display Terminal (VDT) are at no greater risk of miscarriage than women who use monitors that don’t emit electromagnetic fields. Read an abstract of the article at The New England Journal of Medicine website.
1994
Apple Computer introduces an upgrade card for Macintosh computers currently using a Motorola 68040 processor. The card features a PowerPC 601 processor running at either 66 or 80MHz, a Level-2 cache, and 4MB ROM. Price: US$699
Apple Computer introduces releases the Power Macintosh line of computers. The initial models include the 6100/60, 7100/66, and 8100/80, all of which feature the new PowerPC 601 processor.
Apple Computer introduces the Power Macintosh 6100 computer, featuring a 60MHz PowerPC 601 processor, 68LC040 emulation ROM, 8MB RAM, 160MB hard drive, a 14-inch monitor, Ethernet, SCSI, one NuBus slot, and the System 7 operating system. Price: US$2,209
Apple Computer introduces the Power Macintosh 7100 computer, featuring a 66MHz PowerPC 601 processor, 8MB RAM, a 250MB hard drive, 1MB video RAM, 68LC040 emulation ROM, a 14-inch monitor, Ethernet, SCSI, three NuBus slots, and the System 7 operating system. Price: US$3,379
Apple Computer introduces the Power Macintosh 8100 computer, featuring a 80MHz PowerPC 601 processor, 8MB RAM, a 250MB hard drive, 2MB video RAM, a secondary external cache, 68LC040 emulation ROM, a 14-inch monitor, Ethernet, SCSI, three NuBus slots, and the System 7 operating system. The system would be well-received critically, and it would set new Apple sales records. Price: US$4,869
Linus Torvalds releases version 1.0.0 of the Linux Kernel. Visit the official website of the Linux Kernel.
A magnetic grappling system is used in outer space for the first time by the astronauts of the Space Shuttle Columbia.
Sega of America announces the Sega Genesis Super 32X cartridge for the Genesis game system, featuring two Hitachi 32-bit processors, 32,000 on-screen colors, 60 frame-per-second video, and 40-MIPS processing power.
1995
Astronaut Norman Thagard travels aboard the Soyuz TM-21 spacecraft as a part of the Russian Mir-18 mission, becoming the first American astronaut to ride to space on-board a Russian launch vehicle. The launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan marks the first time in history thirteen people have been in space simultaneously.
1997
Apple Computer discontinues its Performa brand and both its OpenDoc and Open Transport project. The company also terminates 2,700 of its 11,000 full-time employees, along with 1,400 contract and temporary employees.
Intel begins shipping samples of its 300MHz Pentium II processors to computer manufacturers.
Intel files a lawsuit against Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Cyrix, accusing the companies of infringing Intel’s “MMX” trademark.
NEC announces that it will begin selling personal computers based on industry-standard Intel-architecture in Japan. Previously, all NEC computers have been based on the company’s proprietary 9800 architecture. These new systems will be manufactured by Packard Bell-NEC in the US.
Twentieth Century Fox re-releases Return of the Jedi with enhancements to theaters nationwide.
2000
The first Gnutella client, developed by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper, is made available for download on the servers of Nullsoft. The program, announced by Slashdot as “an open source Napster clone,” is downloaded thousands of times in the first twenty-four hours. The Gnutella network is a fully distributed alternative to such semi-centralized systems as FastTrack and the original Napster. Gnutella’s popularity will explode as Napster came under increasing legal pressure to shut down.
Philip Loranger, chief of the United States Army Command and Control Protect Division at the Army’s Information Assurance Office, announces that the Brazilian hacking group calling themselves Crime Boys, who two days earlier, had defaced the website of US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) National Training Center, have threatened to take down the Army’s main homepage. However, the page is difficult to crack because it is running on an Apple Computer WebStar server. “The main [Army] site was switched to a server that was practically un- hackable,” said Alex McCombie, co-founder of New World Media Inc. and one of more than 30 witnesses to the March twelfth attack on the Army’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) website.
Version 4.0 of the FreeBSD operating system is released. FreeBSD 4 was a particular popular operating system for internet service providers during the first dot-com bubble, and it will come to be widely regarded as one of the most stable of Unix operating systems.
2001
Sony announces a new version of the Clié handheld computer, featuring a 33MHz Motorola Dragonball VZ processor, 8MB RAM, a 320×320 resolution monochrome screen, the Palm OS, a Memory Stick slot, and a rechargeable lithium-ion battery. The device will be released in Japan in April and later in the US.
2002
Apple Computer introduces the Apple Remote Desktop (ARD). ARD is an application to allow administrators to remotely control computers over a network. Visit the official Apple Remote Desktop website.
Microsoft releases the Xbox video game console in Europe. The system features a 733MHz Intel processor, an 8GB hard drive, a 250 MHz NVidia XGP graphics processor, 64MB RAM, four controller ports, one controller, 3D audio support, and an Ethernet port. Games for the system come on dual-layer DVD-ROM discs that can store 9GB of data. The system can also play DVD movies, but requires an optional remote control device to do so. In England, the system costs £299, games cost £44.99, controllers cost £24.99, the DVD remote control cost £29.99, and a memory unit cost £29.99. The price of the Xbox in the rest of Europe is €479 (about US$430). Visit the system’s official website.
2003
Christopher Andrew Phillips, a twenty year old student at the University of Texas at Austin, is charged with the unauthorized access of a protected computer and with using the identification of another person with the intent of committing a federal offense. Phillips wrote and executed a computer program that permitted him to gain unauthorized access to a database at the University of Texas at Austin, from which he obtained the names and Social Security numbers of about 37,000 students, faculty members, and other employees in 2002 and 2003. On March 5, 2003, Secret Service agents carried out search warrants at Phillips’ residences in Austin and Houston and seized several computers. On one of the computers, agents recovered the downloaded names and social security numbers, along with the computer program used to access the UT database. Phillips will be convicted by a federal jury in June, and will subsequently be sentenced to US$170,000 in restitution and five years of probation in September.
2005
The SD Card Association (SDA) announces the world’s smallest memory card, the microSD format, at CTIA Wireless 2005. MicroSD is a format for removable flash memory cards only 15mm x 11mm in size with capacities that will eventually reach 128GB. Upon launch of the format in July, cards will be available in 32, 64, or 128MB capacities.
2006
Version 2.0 of the Skolelinux operating system is released. Skolelinux is a Debian-based Linux distribution designed for educational use. Visit the official Skolelinux website.
2007
NASA announces that the Cassini spacecraft has photographed several sea-sized bodies of liquid, most likely hydrocarbons, on Titan, the largest moon of Saturn.
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