1837
Professor Daubeny, Professor Torrey, and Alfred Vail attend a demonstration of Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph at New York University. Vail becomes interested. Vail and Morse will be the first two telegraph operators on Morse’s experimental line between Washington, DC, and Baltimore
1890
Guglielmo Marconi demonstrates radio transmission at Three Mile Hill in Salisbury Plain, England for officials from the General Post Office, the Navy, and the Army present.
1930
The first non-stop airplane flight from Europe to the US is completed by Captain Dieudonne Coste and Maurice Bellonte of France when they arrive in Valley Stream, New York, aboard the Question Mark after a thirty-seven hour flight.
1963
The CBS Evening News becomes US network television’s first half-hour weeknight news broadcast, when the show is lengthened from fifteen to thirty minutes.
1969
The first Interface Message Processor (IMP), built by BBN, is first connected to the ARPANET as a node or backbone at UCLA, where a group lead by Leonard Kleinrock have connected the IMP to their Sigma 7 computer, the first host. The group then sends the first Internet message from the UCLA computer lab.
The first automatic teller machine (ATM) in the United States is installed in Rockville Center, New York.
1970
NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine announces the cancellation of two Apollo missions to the Moon, Apollo 15 (a designation which will be re-used by a later mission), and Apollo 19 due to congressional cuts in FY 1971 NASA appropriations. The Apollo budget will be reduced by US$42.1 million, to US$914.4 million, within the total NASA US$3.27 billion budget.
1980
California Pacific Computer Co. releases the roleplaying game Ultima I only for the Apple II computer, though many ports will follow. Ultima revolves around a quest to find and destroy the Gem of Immortality, which is being used by the evil wizard Mondain to enslave the lands of Sosaria. Players step into the role of “The Stranger,” an individual summoned from another world to end the rule of Mondain. The game is one of the first commercial computer roleplaying games and the first commercial games to feature tile graphics to represent the environment. The tile graphics system was programmed in machine language by Ken W. Arnold, a friend of Richard Garriott, the game’s developer. The rest of the game is coded in interpreted BASIC. Due to its use of illegal opcodes, the game can’t be won on an enhanced Apple IIe, IIc, or IIGS system;, an Apple II, II+, or an un-enhanced IIe is required. It will come to be considered an important and influential turning point in the evolution of the genre in the years to come.
1983
A prototype camera cassette recorder (CCR), based on the VHS-C compact videocassette format, is shown at the Berlin Funkausstellung by JVC.
1985
It is announced that a US and French expedition have located the wreckage of the Titanic about 560 miles off Newfoundland, seventy-three years after the British luxury liner sank.
1987
Former English Major Paddy Roy Bates formerly claims the World War II installation Roughs Tower, situated in international waters seven nautical miles off the British coast, as his own, settles his family there, proclaims the artificial island to be a micronation, and declares himself Prince, claiming jus gentium. The island will subsequently be named the Principality of Sealand
Philips introduces the CD video format.
1992
Version 2.0 of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption program is released outside of the US for the first time. It’s the first really widely distributed version of the program.
1993
The United States and Russia formally end decades of competition in space by agreeing to a joint venture to build a space station.
1995
Sega of America launches the Saturn game system nationwide, along with the Virtua Fighter game. In May, the system received a limited release in the U.S., but this is the official global release usually referenced. Price: US$399
1997
Apple Computer buys back their Macintosh operating system license from Power Computing, the largest Mac clone manufacturer, for US$100 million in common stock. Power Computing will stop selling Macintosh systems as of December 31st.
International Business Machines (IBM) announces that the performance of its RS/6000 SP model parallel supercomputer is now fifty-eight percent faster thanks to a new microprocessor and a number of software refinements. The announcement is of particular note because Deep Blue, the computer that defeated chess champion Gary Kasparov in May, was an early RS/6000 SP.
1999
Anti-virus experts predict that the threat posed by the Thursday macros virus (WM97) that infects Microsoft Word documents and can erase computer hard drives on Monday, December 13. On September 6, Network Associates will issue a “High Risk” warning, placing the virus in the same category as Chernobyl, Explore.zip, and Melissa viruses.
eBay stops an auction for a human kidney as bids reached US$5.7 million. EBay’s decision is based on their policy against allowing the auction of human body parts in accordance of United States federal law that considers such actions a felony punishable by up to five years in prison or a US$50,000 fine. An eBay spokesperson explains that the company believes the auction was only a prank.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) launches a new programmable processor designed specifically for communication applications such as hubs, routers, and switches that can be enhanced by way of software upgrades.
Orbit books publishes The Path of Daggers by Robert Jordan as a paperback in the UK. (ISBN 1-85723-569-X) It is the eighth book in The Wheel of Time series. Length: 661 pages
The science fiction film The Thirteenth Floor, directed by Josef Rusnak and starring Craig Bierko, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Gretchen Mol, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Dennis Haysbert, to theaters in Australia. In it, computer scientist Hannon Fuller is murdered on the verge of revealing an important discovery to his colleague. To discover just what Fuller discovered and to exonerate himself from murder charges, Douglas Hall must venture into a virtual world which emulates the thirties, only to find himself baffled at every turn. IMDB listing Running Time: 1 hr 40 mins
2000
Version 5.7.0 of the Perl programming language is released. Visit the official Perl website.
2001
The European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) is held September 2 – September 4, at a new venue, the ExCel, in London, England.
2002
Internet2 now includes two hundred academic, sixty corporate, and forty affiliate members. There are an estimated 605 million people online.
Sony releases the Clié PEG-SJ30 handheld computer, featuring a 16-bit color 320×320 resolution screen, 16MB RAM, rechargeable lithium-ion battery, a Memory Stick slot, and version 4.1 of the Palm OS. Price: US$300
2003
Activision releases Disney’s Extreme Skate Adventure for the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo GameCube, PlayStation 2, and Xbox in the US. It utilizes the same game engine as Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 by Neversoft. ESRB: E (Everyone)
Algenta Technologies releases DNSMax is a proprietary-licensed Domain Name System (DNS) server for Unix-like systems. Visit the DNSMax’s official website.
Version 1.1 of the OpenOffice.org cross-platform open source office suite. Visit the application’s official website.
2005
Jeremy Arendt releases the G3 Torrent open source bittorrent client under an MIT License for Windows. It was written in Python and bears a close resemblance to the Azureus bittorrent client. Visit the application’s Sourceforge page.
The Register publishes the news that “DVD Jon” has defeated the encryption in Microsoft’s Windows Media Player by reverse engineering a proprietary algorithm that was ostensibly used to protect Media Player NSC files from engineers sniffing for the files’ source IP address, port or stream format. Johansen has also made a decoder available. Visit DVD Jon’s official blog.
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