1842
The first US design patent is issued for typefaces and borders is issued to George Bruce of New York City. (US No. D1) This new form of patent was authorized by Act of Congress on August 29, 1842.
1921
Albert Einstein is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the photoelectric effect.
1946
Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) is shut down for refurbishment and a memory upgrade. It will be transferred to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in 1947.
1957
Gordon Gould records conjecture on the principles of what he calls a laser in a notebook on a sleepless Saturday night. The following Wednesday, he will have a notary witness and date his notebook in which he describes what he calls “light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation,” or, the “laser.” However, it will take more than thirty years of litigation before Gould ever receives recognition for his concepts.
1961
US Air Force Major Robert M. White achieves a record speed of 4,093 mph (Mach 6.04) and reaches an altitude of 101,600 feet (19 miles) in the X-15 rocket plane. To save fuel, the X-15 was air launched from a B-52 Stratofortress bomber aircraft at an altitude 45,000ft.
1967
NASA launches the unmanned Apollo 4 test spacecraft aboard the first Saturn V from Cape Kennedy.
1972
United Nations passes resolution 2916. The resolution agrees on the necessity of reaching an agreement regarding the specifications of international direct broadcasting satellite (DBS) service. When the United States delegate calls for a vote to suppress the issue for fear of restricting DBS, the U.S. loses 101 – 1.
1979
The NORAD (North American Aerospace Defense Command) computer alerts the United States Defense Command of inbound Soviet missiles. Jet fighters are scrambled, but when they reach the point at which they should have detected the missiles on their airborne radars, they discovered that the incident was a false alarm. It will later be concluded that the incident was precipitated by a “war game” tape that had accidentally been loaded onto the computer system.
1981
Apple Computer announces a revised model of the Apple III computer to address the reliability issues of the initial model that was released in May 1980. The company maintains that the issues with the original were due to quality-control procedures during manufacturing and not with the model’s underlying design, however, largely due to market advances, the new Apple III features an entirely different set of hardware sockets along and an optional 5MB Seagate ProFile hard drive with its updated software. The US$3,495 hard drive is an important leg-up on the market-dominating IBM PC that was released in August, as IBM is not yet offering a hard drive for its systems. Price: US$3,495
1982
Mattel Electronics announces that it will offer a converter device that allows its Intellivision game console to play Atari 2600 cartridges.
1983
The Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation announces that it is phasing out its video game division.
1987
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Justice” first airs. (No. 108) In it, Wesley breaks an idyllic world’s trivial law by accidentally stepping on flowers and faces the death sentence. Memory Alpha entry
1989
It’s revealed that a computer error caused eight precincts’ votes to be counted twice, resulting in a false results in a city council race in Durham, North Carolina. Interestingly, the precinct-by-precinct breakdown given to the media was correct, even though they did not match the totals. The mistake was discovered in a later hand check of the results by the City’s Board of Elections. The unspecified “glitch” was never described in-depth by officials, though Jo Overman, chairman of the County Board of elections, as stated that the “errant terminal was an extra unit put on election duty as part of a last-minute effort to process returns faster.”
1991
Nuclear fusion is harnessed to produce a significant amount of electricity (1.7 megawatts) for the first time in history at the Joint European Torus (JET) in Culham, England.
1992
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “A Fistful of Datas” first airs. (No. 608) In it, Data’s mind is plugged into the ship’s computer, which creates unforeseen effects for Worf, Troi, and Alexander on the holodeck. Memory Alpha entry
1994
The first atom of element 110, later named Darmstadtium (DS), is created and detected at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany, by an international group of scientists lead by Peter Armbruster and Sigurd Hofmann. When a thin lead foil sheet is bombarded with accelerated nickel atoms, a lead nucleus fuses with a nickel nucleus to form the nucleus of the new element. It lasts for only a fraction of a second before decaying. The element will be known as ununnilium, symbol Uun until it is named in 2003.
1995
Netscape Communications Corporation acquire the collaborative software developer Collabra Software, Inc.
1998
Version 4.08 of Netscape Communicator is released. It is the last version released for 16-bit computers.
2000
BattleBots appear on the Tonight Show again. The robot “Mauler 2000″ faces off against “Chin-Killa,” host Jay Leno’s robot in a 1/4 scale BattleBox arena.
Microsoft release DirectX 8. Visit the software’s official website.
A testbed allowing the registration of domain names in Chinese, Korean, and Japanese is launched. The testbed, created by VeriSign allows the second-level domain to be non-English, but still requires the use of a .com, .net, .org., or other top-level domain (TLD). The Chinese government moves to blocks internal registrations, announcing that Chinese registration is its own sovereign right.
2004
Microsoft Game Studios releases the first-person shooter Halo 2 for the Xbox in Australia and North America. In its first day, the game sells 2.4 million units in North America alone, grossing US$125 million in revenue and making it the biggest opening day in the history of entertainment. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: M (Mature) Price: US$50 or US$55 (deluxe edition)
The Mozilla Foundation releases version 1.0 of the open source web browser Firefox. It’s the browser’s first public release and Mozilla’s first major release since the Mozilla Suite 1.0 in June 2002. This version, the tenth, adds a plug-in finder, support for Atom and RSS feeds, and the browser’s highly praised find toolbar. The release also features over a dozen localized builds released along with the main English build, a first for the Foundation. The browser was created by Dave Hyatt, Blake Ross, and development leader Ben Goodger. Within just four months of the release, an estimated twenty-three million people will have downloaded Firefox. Codename: Phoenix Visit the application’s official website.
2005
The BBC reports that a twenty-three year old gamer known as “Deathifier” who purchased a virtual island for ££13,700 in the massively multiplayer online game (MMO) Entropia has recouped his investment in under a year. He earned a return on his investment by selling land to build virtual homes and by taxing other gamers to hunt or mine on the island. “The money made to date is only a taste of what can be achieved with my virtual island purchase,” Deathifier told the BBC.
The Venus Express mission is launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan by the European Space Agency.
2006
NASA looses contact with the Mars orbiter Mars Global Surveyor, shortly after the tenth anniversary of its launch. The space probe had originally only been intended for a two year mission, but continued to provide useful data well past its intended lifespan. Visit the probe’s official NASA website.
2007
Electronic Arts (EA) announced plans to donate the original version of its SimCity computer game to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project so that it can be distributed to schoolchildren in developing countries on OLPC’s XO laptop.
International Business Machines (IBM) releases version 6.1 of the AIX (Advanced Interactive eXecutive) proprietary operating system. AIX operates on as many as sixty-four IBM POWER or PowerPC architecture processors and 2TB of RAM. It’s JFS2 file system allows it to manage files and drive partitions of over 16TB. Visit the official AIX website.
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