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 in 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 renamed 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 as well 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. Code-name: 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 was originally intended for a two year mission, but it 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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