1877
Nicolaus Otto, Francis Crossley, and William Crossley are granted a patent for the first internal-combustion engine to burn gasoline in a piston chamber. (US No. 194,047) View the patent online.
1911
Captain Carlo Piazza of the Italian military flies a Blériot XI monoplane on an hour long reconnaissance mission of Turkish troop positions, becoming the first pilot to use an airplane for military purposes. Just more nine days later, Italian forces will carry out history’s first bombing raid based on the intelligence gathered by Piazza.
1956
The first video footage recorded on magnetic tape is televised coast-to-coast in the US.
1963
The first AED program is compiled in a compatible time-sharing system using a bootstrap language compiler.
1972
The BBC announces the development of world’s first teletext service, which will later be renamed Ceefax, and outlines a series of tests of the system. Ceefax is a news service for the deaf that is the forerunner of early Internet news services. The system uses spare lines in the vertical blanking interval of the television signal to carry information for display on television receivers via a decoder. The BBC will first launch the system on September 23, 1974.
1973
Elaine Thompson begins working for Atari, Inc. in their Los Gatos, California facility as a staffer on the PONG assembly line.
1981
According to Twin Galaxies, Dennis Hernandez scores a record-setting 30,100,000 points on Atari’s Asteroids after playing the game Friday, October 23, through Sunday, October 25 for fifty hours and twelve minutes at Space Odyssey in Geneva, New York. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.
A new service that caters to Texas Instruments, Inc.’s TI-99/4a home computer users is offered on The Source online network. TexNet offers graphics animations, music, sound effects, synthesized speech, and exclusive software downloads for members. Users are invited to sign up for just US$100 plus hourly fees of US$7.75 or US$5.75 on weekends. The service will be continued for less than four years due to the cost of maintaining it, the difficulty in keeping the service state-of-the-art without Xmodem protocols, and low access speeds.
The New York Times publishes an article entitled “When Computers Don’t Work,” in which Andrew Pollack writes that “The effects of a non-performing computer can go beyond frustrated expectations. A small business can become so critically dependent on a computer for its billing and accounting that, if the computer errs, the business can go bankrupt without even realizing it.”
1989
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Bonding” first airs. (No. 305) In it, a mysterious entity seeks to comfort a boy who has lost his mother in an accident on its planet. Memory Alpha entry
1995
The first court-ordered wiretap on a computer network is approved for use on the computer of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences during the last two months of 1995 to be used in the prosecution of an Argentine man accused of breaking into Harvard University computers in order to crack into numerous other computers at various US military sites across the country, including the Navy Research Laboratory, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ames Research Center, the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the Naval Command Control and Ocean Surveillance Center. Law enforcement agencies have frequently conducted electronic surveillance on computer systems in the past with the consent of the users, but this case marks the first time such a wiretap has been court-ordered. The authorization was deemed necessary because Harvard computer systems do not inform users logging onto the system that their communications may be monitored. On March 29, 1996, Julio Cesar Ardita, age 21, of Buenos Aires will be charged with unlawfully intercepting electronic communications over a military computer and damaging files on a military computer. In return for Ardita’s agreement to come voluntarily to the United States (without extradition proceedings), he will be sentenced to three years probation and a fine of US$5,000.
1996
At the Microprocessor Forum, the Digital Equipment Corporation demonstrates the Digital 21264 Alpha processor operating at 500MHz.
1997
Four game developers release the first arcade games based on Intel’s Pentium II platform and the Open Arcade Architecture. This system allows game changes by software only, without requiring a physical machine change.
In Japan, NEC Computer releases twenty-six models of the PC98-NX series, the first industry-standard (Windows/Intel) machines produced by the company. NEC also releases fifteen new models in its proprietary PC98 series.
Yahoo! completes the acquisition of Four11, the producer of RocketMail free webmail service, for US$92 Million.
1998
Microsoft is forced to shut down a website offering Money 98 upgrades to qualified users after discovering that customers are gaining access to other users’ registration forms when mistyping their own. Microsoft states that the site host, Softbank Services Group, normally requires a secondary input for verification, but the step had been overlooked in this case.
1999
Apple Computer releases Mac OS 9 for Macintosh computers, featuring AppleScript, automatic updating, encryption, and Sherlock 2, an Internet shopping application. Apple will market the system as “the Best Internet Operating System Ever.” Visit the system’s official website. Code-name: Gershwin and Sonata Price: US$99
2001
Apple Computer introduces the iPod portable music player. This first model features a 5GB capacity Toshiba hard drive (”enough for a thousand songs”), FireWire connectivity, and a mechanical scroll wheel. The device requires the Mac OS 9 or higher to sync with a computer. The device was introduced several months after iTunes. Over one hundred million units will be sold within six years. Visit the device’s official website. Code-name: Dulcimer Price: US$400
The pan-European Gigabit Research and Education Network (GÉANT) becomes operational, replacing the TEN-155 network.
Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) announces that it will release a Linux-enabled version of its PlayStation 2 video game console outside of Japan.
Tor Books releases the fantasy novel Swell Foop by Piers Anthony as a hardcover. (ISBN-10: 0312869061) It is the twenty-fifth book of the Xanth series. Length: 304 pages
Warner Bros. releases the horror film Thir13en Ghosts, directed by Steve Beck and starring Tony Shalhoub, Embeth Davidtz, Matthew Lillard, Shannon Elizabeth, and F. Murray Abraham, to 2,781 US theaters. In it, Arthur and his two children, Kathy and Bobby, inherit his Uncle Cyrus’s estate: a glass house that serves as a prison to 12 ghosts. When the family, accompanied by Bobby’s Nanny and an attorney, enter the house they find themselves trapped inside an evil machine “designed by the devil and powered by the dead” to open the Eye of Hell. Aided by Dennis, a ghost hunter, and his rival Kalina, a ghost rights activist out to set the ghosts free, the group must do what they can to get out of the house alive. Produced on a budget of US$42 million, it will gross US$15,165,355 domestically in its opening weekend. Visit the film’s official website. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: R Running Time: 1 hr 31 mins
Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Essentials.
2006
Dell announces new AMD-based servers, the PowerEdge 6950 and the PowerEdge SC1435, marking its entry into the AMD-based server-marketplace.
2007
Twenty-four year old Jason Michael Downey of Dry Ridge, Kentucky, known by the web handle “Nessun,” is sentenced to a year in prison, three years’ of supervised release, one hundred fifty hours of community service, and US$21,110 in restitution for operating a six thousand computer bot-net known as Yotta-byte.net to conduct a series of denial of service (DoS) attacks. Before his arrest, Downey was the owner and operator of the Rizon.net Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network
|
|
|
Comments are closed
