Ironically, today is both Tom Cruise Day in Japan, according to the Japan Memorial Day Association, as well as World Mental Health Day.
1796
The metric system is born. The date (10/10) was chosen as an allusion to the base ten system of measurements.
1846
Neptune’s moon, Triton, is discovered by William Lassell while he is observing the newly discovered planet Neptune. He was attempting to confirm his own observation that Neptune had a ring, which he made the previous week. Instead, he discovers the satellite. Soon after, Lassell will discover that the ring he thought he had seen is only a product of his new telescope’s distortion.
1886
The first tuxedo is worn at a dinner club in New York.
1955
The Alexandra Palace transmitter begins transmitting NTSC colour television test signals of the BBC, adapted to the 405-line standard.
1957
The graphite core of the nuclear reactor in Cumbria, UK catches fire, becoming the world’s first major nuclear accident. The event, which will be dubbed the “Windscale fire” will remain the worst nuclear incident in history until the Three Mile Island incident in 1979 and then the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.
1963
International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) announces four new products: the IBM 7335 tape drive; IBM 1301 disk storage unit; IBM 1442 Model 4 card reader; and the IBM 1444 card punch.
1967
The Outer Space Treaty, signed on January 27 by more than sixty nations, goes into force.
1979
Midway releases the arcade game Pac-Man to arcades in Japan. The game will be released in North America exactly one year later. The game, in which players guide the title character through a single-screen maze, eating dots and avoiding contact with four ghosts, will become wildly popular and enormously influential in future game development. The game was developed by Namco over eighteen months primarily by Toru Iwatani. The original title was pronounced pakku-man, a reference to the Japanese onomatopoeic phrase paku-paku taberu which describes the sound of the mouth widely opened and then closed in succession.
1980
Midway releases the arcade game Pac-Man to arcades in North America. 96,000 arcade units will be produced in the US.
The Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope observatory in New Mexico is dedicated. Conceived in the sixties and built in the seventies, the VLA is versatile and sensitive, with angular resolution comparable to that of the best ground-based optical telescopes. The VLA is an aperture synthesis interferometric instrument, designed to gain the resolving power of a very large antenna by utilizing a number of smaller antennas. Information from all of its antennas is combined mathematically to produce resolving power equal to that of a single antenna 36km in diameter. The VLA is arranged in a “Y” pattern, with nine antennas on each of the three arms. Each of the twenty-seven antennae is a fully-steerable 82ft diameter parabolic dish, weighing approximately 230 tons. Visit the observatory’s official website.
1981
At the Citicorp Center in Manhattan, New York, Atari sponsors an open tournament of arcade games. Frank Cretella scores 118,740 on Asteroids, setting a new national record.
1982
Apple Computer introduces it new Lisa computer to its sales force at an annual sales meeting in Acapulco, Mexico. In his book, Apple Confidential 2.0, author Owen W. Linzmayer would later quote Apple employee Chris Espinosa as saying, “The story is that… there was instability in the Mexican government at that time. We had a plan that if a coup occurred and martial law was imposed, we would rent a boat and take all the pre-production Lisas out into the ocean and dump them, so they wouldn’t be seized by the military. Come to think of it, that wouldn’t have been a bad thing to do anyway.” (Page 77)
1986
20th Century Fox releases the comedy film Jumpin’ Jack Flash, directed by Penny Marshall and starring Whoopi Goldberg, Stephen Collins, John Wood, Carol Kane, and Peter Michael Goetz to 1,080 US theaters. In the film, Terry Doolittle works for First National Bank, where she uses Sperry brand computers to communicate with clients all over the world. One night she is contacted by a man calling himself “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, who turns out to be a British spy stuck in a hostile country in eastern Europe. In an encoded message, he appeals to Terri to help him return home safely. Terry soon finds herself embroiled in a deadly struggle with an espionage ring in a series of adventures throughout New York. The film will gross over US$6 million domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: R Running time: 1 hr 40 mins
Asteroid 3753 is discovered to be orbiting the Earth in addition to the Moon by J.D. Waldron of the Siding Spring Observatory. It is called Cruithne, after a Celtic tribe who came to Britain between about 880 and 500 BC. It is pulled alternately by the Sun and Earth. In the course of it’s orbit, it passes closer to the Earth than the Moon, within about fifteen million kilometers (about nine million miles). It is approximately 2.9 – 6.4km in diameter. Cruithne will remain in a suspended state around Earth for at least five thousand years.
1988
The New York Times photographers use a Macintosh and a 9600bps modem to send Dodgers-Mets photos from Los Angeles, California to New York.
1994
Intel releases the 75MHz version of the Pentium Processor.
Mosaic Communications Corporation, which will later be called Netscape Communications, announces the first version of it’s Netscape web browser, version 0.9 Beta.
1995
The Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) chronicles the World Wide Web in its “”A Day in the Life of Cyberspace”" project. To celebrate its tenth anniversary, the Media Lab invited submissions for the days leading up to October 10, 1995 on a variety of issues related to technology and the Internet, including: privacy, expression, age, wealth, faith, body, place, languages, and the environment. On October 10, a team collected, edited, and published the contributions to “create a mosaic of life at the dawn of the digital revolution that is transforming our planet.”
1996
Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Germany.
2000
Diamond Multimedia Systems announces its first handheld computer, the Diamond Mako, featuring a 36 MHz ARM processor, 16MB RAM, a monochrome display, the Epoc OS, and an optional 56kbps modem. The computer is based on Psion’s Revo Plus hardware and software. Price: US$399
International Business Machines (IBM) announces its intentions to build a US$5 billion chip-making plant and to expand the capacity of its existing plants. It is the most costly investment in the company’s history. The new plant will be located about sixty miles North of New York City and will employ approximately one thousand people when it begins operation in 2002.
Western Digital announces that it will supply hard drives for Microsoft’s Xbox video game system.
2001
Microsoft confirms reports that it will ship the Xbox with an 8GB hard drive, not the 10GB it had earlier announced.
Vasily Gorshkov, age 26, of Chelyabinsk, Russia is convicted of twenty counts of fraud and computer crimes.
2005
In San Francisco, California, Microsoft hosts an unveiling of the Xbox 360 game console for invited journalists, demonstrating twelve software titles.
2006
The comedy Click becomes the first film released on a 50GB dual-layer Blu-ray Disc, several months after the Blu-ray Disc format was released.
It was reported that Mike Everest, a home-schooled high school senior from Durango, Colorado had paid for his siblings’ college fees by trading virtual goods within Entropia Universe, and withdrawing his profits as real US Dollars. Everest, better-known as “Ogulak Da Basher” on the planet Calypso, claims to have made over US$35,000 USD. Of that profit, US$12,000 was used to help his two siblings attend college. When asked if he suggested this course to other high schoolers looking to make money, he said, “Not really, unless they can be devoted to it. It’s really hard in the beginning to play the game.” Everest spends an average of three hours a day on Entropia. “Some days I don’t get on at all. But other days I can spend half of the day playing in Entropia.” Since he is home schooled, he is allowed this freedom. Moreover, it can be argued that he learns life lessons from within the universe. Within Entropia, Everest is a captain in the Entropian hunting society, “ck Coat Killers.” There, he is a hunter/miner who constructs weapons and sells them to make a profit. Though this is not your traditional business model, it teaches a real lesson about costs and demands. Now that the two older Everest children are set up in college, Mike says he plans to save for his own college education–”and maybe a car”. When asked if he will remain active in online worlds in the coming 10 years, Everest says he is not going anywhere, but also knows what a commitment virtual worlds can be. “It depends on how busy I am. But I think I will, because I’ve made friends all over the world. I couldn’t see myself ever leaving it.”
Support for Windows XP Service Pack 1 and 1a ends. Microsoft recommends that users who have Windows XP SP1 or SP1a should upgrade to SP2 to enhance the security of the users’ computer and continue to receive updates for Windows XP.
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