1744
Gowan Knight presents his research on permanently magnetizing steels to the Royal Society. The use of steel instead of soft iron represents a significant improvement in the compass needles used by England’s Royal Navy, but Knight won’t apply for a patent on his compass until 1766.
1883
Thomas Edison receives a patent for his two-element vacuum tube, the forerunner of the vacuum tube rectifier.
1887
German scientist, Dr. Carl Gassner, is issued a patent for the first “dry” cell battery. (US No. 373,064)
1912
Gaumont Chronochrome, the first practical three-color film process, is demonstrated to the French Photographic Society in Paris. A three-lens camera with different color filters is used, compared with the two-color approach of Kinemacolor.
1926
National Broadcasting Company (NBC) becomes the first radio network in history when it is incorporated in the US as a subsidiary of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA) with twenty-four radio stations.
1960
The Polaris missile is test launched.
A patent is issued to P.A. Marsal, Karl Kordesch, and Lewis F. Urry for an alkaline dry-cell battery, and they assigned the patent to the Union Carbide Corporation, the manufacturer of Eveready batteries. (US No. 2,960,558)
1966
Gemini 12 splashes down safely in the Atlantic Ocean.
1970
The Soviet moon rover, “Lunokhod 1” lands on the moon. Lunokhod is the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another world.
1971
Intel releases the Model 4004 microprocessor, the world’s first commercial single-chip microprocessor. It contains the equivalent of 2,300 transistors, and it is capable of around 60,000 Interactions per second (0.06 MIPs), running at a clock rate of 108KHz with a 4-bit bus. The chief designers of the chip were Marcian “Ted” Hoff and Federico Faggin of Intel and Masatoshi Shima of Busicom. The chip is introduced to the public in Las Vegas by Wayne Pickette, and the first advertisement for it appears in the journal Electronic News. It was developed for Busicom, a Japanese calculator manufacturer, as an alternative to traditional circuitry. Along with Intel’s RAM chip, the microprocessor will allow a fourth generation of computers to developed even smaller and faster than previous generations. Documentation manuals were written by Adam Osborne. Price: US$200
1972
International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) rolls out the IBM Health Care Support Electrocardiogram Analysis program, a computer program for cardiologists.
1974
The first Spanish satellite, Intasat, is launched.
1985
A research assistant at the University of Michigan is injured when a package sent by the Unabomber explodes. The Unabomber, later revealed to be Theodore John Kaczynski, sent sixteen bombs in total to various airlines and universities to protest “the erosion of human freedom necessitated by modern technologies requiring large-scale organization.”
1987
The Lehigh virus is discovered at and named for Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. It’s the first virus that causes direct damage to data. It does so by attacking a file called COMMAND.COM, which is present on all MS-DOS formatted disks and drives. It doesn’t increase the size of the file, it simply overwrites the stack space at its end. When the file is activated, usually by booting from an infected floppy disk, the virus remains in the resident memory. It is loaded into the memory during each boot, and once the infection count reaches four, it begins overwriting the boot and FAT areas of the disk with data from the BIOS. Fortunately, however, there are several computer experts at Lehigh University who were skilled at analyzing viruses, and the virus never leaves the university or is detected in the wild. The fact that the virus never spread is also due, in part, to its own ineffectiveness. The virus destroys itself along with its host after only four reproductions, proving to be highly ineffectual. In addition, the virus changes the date of COMMAND.COM, providing a method for discovering whether or not a file had been infected. The virus can be defeated by either making COMMAND.COM read-only, or with a simple program that returns the file’s stack space to zeros, over-writing the virus.
|
|
|
