1773
The Whirlpool Galaxy is discovered by Charles Messier
1884
Greenwich is established as the universal time meridian of longitude. At the behest of the US President, forty-one delegates from twenty-five nations meet in Washington, DC, for the International Meridian Conference. At the Conference, several important principles are established, including: a single meridian passing through the principal Transit Instrument at the Observatory in Greenwich from which all longitudes will be calculated and a universal day. The resolution fixing the Meridian at Greenwich is passed by a majority of twenty-two to one, with San Domingo opposed and both Brazil and France abstaining from the vote.
1892
Edward Emerson Barnard discovers D/1892 T1, the first comet discovered by photographic means.
1953
The first US patent for a burglar alarm operated by ultrasonic sound is issued to Samuel Bagno of New York City. (US No. 2,655,645) The system detects movement in a confined space using a sound source emitted at 19,000 hertz, a frequency too high for humans to hear. The system can detect intruders by the difference in frequency of the reflected waves from a moving body created by the Doppler effect. It will be marked under the Alertronic brand name, and it will be first sold in June 1950.
1964
The Voskhod 1, the first spacecraft to carry a multi-person crew, returns safely to Earth.
1966
The Star Trek episode “Mudd’s Women” first airs. (No. 6) In it, The Enterprise picks up a traveling con man, Harry Mudd, and his “beautiful” female cargo; the females seem to have a strange effect on the male crew. Memory Alpha entry
1976
The first electron micrograph of an Ebola viral particle was obtained by Dr. F.A. Murphy, now at U.C. Davis, who was then working at the C.D.C..
1982
According to Twin Galaxies, Kenneth Vance, age 18, scores a record-setting 482,620 points playing the Atari arcade game Space Duel after playing the game for one hour and fourty-six minutes at Tilt Arcade in Las Vegas, Nevada. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.
The first Hi-Tech Rec Videofair is held Wednesday, October 13 through Sunday, October 17 in downtown Vancouver, Canada. The event, arranged by the Vancouver Neurological Centre, features home computers, home game systems, satellite receivers, and video recorders.
Release 29 of the Infocom interactive fiction game Zork I is published for personal computers. It is Infocom’s first game.
1983
Ameritech Mobile Communications, which will later be named Cingular launches the first cellular network in the United States from Chicago, Illinois. The network offered advanced mobile phone service (AMPS), a 1G telephony standard, operates in the 800 – 900 MHz frequency band. The call carried on the network is made by Ameritech executive Bob Barnett from a parked car near Solider Field to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell. Within twenty years, there will be over 159 million cell phone service subscribers in the United States.
1985
At the the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, the first observation of proton-antiproton collisions are made by the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF). In all, twenty-three collisions are detected in October.
1991
Mustang Software (MSI), makers of the Wildcat! BBS Software, acquire John Friel’s QMODEM telecommunications software.
1992
Nintendo and Sony reach an agreement on a standard for CD-ROM drives for a new video game system that could play both Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) cartridges as well as discs. Nintendo will license all game software, and Sony will license, through Nintendo, all other types of software.
1994
Microsoft announces plans to acquire Intuit, the developer of Quicken, with a stock buyout of US$1.5 billion. Partly due to objections from the US Justice Department, the deal will be aborted. Later, evidence of illegal insider trading at Intuit in anticipating of Microsoft’s pending bid will later be uncovered. Visit the official Intuit website.
Netscape Communications Corporation releases Mosaic Netscape 0.9 web browser free online to “individual, academic and research users.” The company will take on the “Netscape” name on November 14, 1994, and on December 15, 1994, it will release Netscape Navigator 1.0. Visit the official Netscape website.
1995
CompuServe announces immediate plans to launch the “most aggressive advertising blitz in its history.” Visit the official CompuServe website.
Ted Hoff introduces a business plan which includes an aggressive move to develop and market IBM-compatible software to Atari’s Board of Directors. Shortly after, Atari Interactive is born.
1996
ICG Communications announces in a press release that it has “entered into a definitive agreement and plan of merger with NETCOM On-Line Communication Services, Inc.
1998
At the Microprocessor Forum, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announces the details of its K7 processor, which will initially be released at speed of 500MHz with a 200MHz system bus, multiprocessing capability, and secondary caches ranging from 512KB to 8MB.
In Finland, high-tech thieves are caught installing a “small black card reader” on top of the card slot of ATM units. With the codes from their card reader and some common “shoulder-surfing” to learn their victims’ PIN numbers, the thieves were able to create sixty counterfeit cards, which they then used to steal approximately US$36,600.
Hackers calling themselves the “Electronic Disruption Theater” complain that the US Department of Defense had used offensive information warfare techniques in response to the group’s September 9th attack on DefenseLink.
In Los Angeles, four men are charged with fraud for allegedly installing computer chips in gasoline pumps that cheat consumers by overstating the amount of gasoline pumped. The problem came to light when an increasing number of consumers complained that they had been sold more gasoline than their tank could hold. However, the fraud was initially difficult to prove because the perpetrators programmed the chips to deliver exactly the right amount of gasoline when five and ten gallons were pumped precisely. Five and ten gallons are the increments typically used by inspectors.
Thousands of Ugandan university students are unable to determine their academic placements at the National Examination Board due to defective computer cables that were chewed up by rats.
1999
Priceline.com files a lawsuit in the United States District Court of Connecticut against Microsoft alleging violations to the state’s Unfair Practices Act. In the suit, Priceline.com asks that a patent be upheld and that Microsoft be prohibited from future patent violations.
2000
Sun Microsystemslaunches the OpenOffice.org with the intention of making the the source code of StarOffice available for download under both the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) and the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) with the intention of building an open source development community centered around the software. Visit the software’s official website
2001
Novell releases version 7.3 of the SUSE Linux operating system. Visit the system’s official website.
2003
The Public Library of Science (PLoS) commences publication of an open access scientific journal, PLoS Biology, covering the full spectrum of the biological sciences. It is the first journal released by the PLoS, a nonprofit open access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content license. Visit the journal’s website.
2004
The French government passes a law to allow cinemas, concert halls, and theaters to block all incoming calls to mobile phones and all outgoing calls except to emergency services. Israel and Japan already have such laws.
2005
The Samy XSS worm becomes the fastest spreading virus in history according to definitions later released in 2006.
2008
McCain-Palin presidential campaign asks YouTube to stop removing campaign videos that incorporated news broadcast footage because of DMCA complaints. The campaign contends that the videos fall under fair use. YouTube will reply that checking to see whether content meets fair use requirements before a take down is unfeasible given the quantity of DMCA complaints and will suggest that the experience might advance Senator McCain’s thinking on the highly-criticized DMCA legislation that he himself had voted for ten years ago. The issue re-awakens the national debate over the regulation of DMCA take down notices of questionable legitimacy.
Sun Microsystems releases OpenOffice 3.0, featuring a number of major advancements, including the ability to open Microsoft Office documents and convert them to other formats. The suite will be downloaded three million time within the first week of its availability. About eighty percent of those downloads will be Windows users. Visit the official OpenOffice.org website.
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