This Day in Geek History: October 3
1982
The science fiction television series Voyagers! premieres on the NBC network with the episode “Pilot.” The series follows the adventures of a society of time travelers called Voyagers who take it upon themselves to ensure that history unfolds as it was meant to with the help of a 12-year old orphan from 1982. The series will run for one season of twenty episodes until July 31, 1983. TV.com entry
1985
The Space Shuttle Atlantis,the fourth operational shuttle, embarks on its maiden flight. (STS-51-J) It’s mission is undertaken on the behalf of the Department of Defense.
1986
The Tandem Accelerator Superconducting Cyclotron (TASCC) superconducting cyclotron at the Chalk River Laboratories opens. It is the world’s first Tandem Accelerator.
1988
The Space Shuttle Discovery completes a four-day mission, the first American shuttle flight since the Challenger disaster.
The Turner Network Television (TNT) cable network is launched in U.S. with a starting subscriber base of seventeen million homes, the largest base of any cable channel launch to date. The network’s first program is the 1939 file Gone with the Wind. Visit the official TNT website.
1990
Nintendo sends letter to its licensees, extending to them the opportunity to manufacture their own game cartridges for the Nintendo Entertainment System game console.
1995
Be introduces the BeBox, featuring two 66MHz PowerPC 603, up to 256MB RAM, a SCSI II bus, 16-bit CD-quality sound, three PCI slots, four MIDI ports, four serial ports, and five ISA slots. The hardware of the system will generally fail to achieve any popularity, however the company’s multithreaded, memory-protected, object-oriented, preemptively multitasking operating system will be a success. Price: US$1,600 – US$3,000
2002
Scott Dudley of Lanius Corporation releases the final version (3.02) of Maximus BBS Software under a GNU Public License.
2004
A new version of Beast, a backdoor trojan horse or RAT (Remote Administration Tool), released. Originally, written in Delphi by “Tataye” in 2002, the popular trojan is capable of infecting all Windows operating systems from 95 through XP.
