This Day in Geek History: April 22 Happy Bday Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ..a true radical and Happy Bday Robert Oppenheimer .. this guy up scaled his cracker night :) 1056 The Supernova Crab nebula is bright enough to be seen with the naked eye for the last time. 1946 CBS successfully transmits color television signals over a coaxial landline from New York City to Washington, D.C. and back for the first time. The first installment of the popular Japanese comic strip, Sazae-san, one of the first examples of manga, is published in the Fukunichi Shimbun, the local newspaper of Hasegawa, Japan. The four panel strip centers around a fictional wife, Sazae-san, as she struggle with the daily tribulations of managing an average three-generation Japanese household. 1952 A nuclear explosion is shown on live network television for the first time. 1969 The first successful human eye transplant is performed in Houston for a patient named John Madden. 1972 Apollo 16 astronauts John Young and Charles Duke ride on the Moon in the Lunar Rover. 1982 The Quaker Oats Company announces that it has acquired the home video game assets of U.S. Games Corporation. 1984 Gorizont 9, one of thirty-five geosynchronous Russian satellites, is launched. 1985 Fidonet logoTom Jennings announces in the weekly FidoNews newsletter that FidoNet, a worldwide network used for communication between bulletin board system (BBS), has become too large to be run from a centralized location and will subsequently be broken up into smaller networks to allow for better communication and administration. 1986 The first virus produced through genetic engineering is approved for use in a vaccine by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The virus is designed for use in veterinary medicine to fight a form of swine herpes. 1989 Intel introduces the Intel 486SX processor, operating at 33MHz, featuring a 32-bit bus, 1.185 million transistors, and the capability of addressing 4GB of memory. 1991 The Intel i486, otherwise known as the 80486 SX is released as a less expensive alternative to the 80486 DX. The fundamental difference between the two is that the SX does not include an on-chip floating-point unit (FPU). 1993 Version 1.0 of the web browser Mosaic is released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It’s the first software to provide a multimedia graphical user interface (GUI) for internet content, including the ability to display inline graphics. It’s also easy for the average computer user to install and highly reliable, which is why it will become known as the “killer app of the nineties.” The lead Mosaic developers are Marc Andreesen, one of the future founders of Netscape, and Jim Clark, one of the future founders of Silicon Graphics. In the coming year, Mosaic will take the Internet by storm, proliferating at an annual growth rate of 341,634% that of service traffic, becoming the first popular web browser. 1996 The American Museum of the Moving Image opens in Astoria Queens, News York on the former site of the Kaufman Astoria Studios. Juno Online Services launches the Juno free e-mail service. The service generates revenues through advertising that is visible to both the sender and the e-mail recipient. 1998 The hacker group Masters of Downloading (MoD), not to be confused with the eighties group Masters of Deception (MoD), publicly claim credit for having broken into a number of military networks, including the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN) and the DISN Equipment Manager (DEM), which controls the military’s global positioning satellites (GPS). The National Semiconductor Corporation says it intends to cut ten percent of its worldwide work force, or about 1,400 people. About 560 of the cuts will be taken from its Santa Clara, California facility. 1999 An auction for an 1860′s Sir John A. MacDonald bedroom suite (item #91465878) is closed on EBay. Days later, it’s discovered that the winning bid of US$400,000 was actually submitted by a New Jersey teenager who reportedly stole his parents password to the auction site and proceeded to place over three million dollars in total bids. The teenager also placed bids on a 1955 Ford convertible and a Vincent Van Gogh painting. Connectix ceases shipping its Virtual Game Station software for the Apple Macintosh computer, in compliance with a federal court order. Sony filed a trademark and patent infringement lawsuit against the company in January. The Virtual Game Station allows PlayStation games to be played on Apple computers. Dr. Carver Mead, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, is awarded the US$500,000 Lemelson-MIT Program award for his work on computer chips implementing parallel processing, similar to the workings of the human brain. 2000 Telephone dialing codes in the United Kingdom are updated due to the rapid growth of demands on telecommunications systems in what is dubbed the “Big Number Change.” The Royal-Canadian Mounted Police reveal that they have charged the father of the fifteen-year-old Montreal high school student known online by the webhandle “Mafiaboy” for conspiring to hack and disrupt service to CNN for four hours February 8, 2000. The boy, later revealed to be Michael Calce, was charged on Wednesday, April, 19, 2000. ZDNet News reports that Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has quietly shut down Interval Research, a Palo Alto research laboratory focused on broadband applications and services, citing that it had failed to meet “initial high expectations”. 2001 Chris Hadfield becomes the first Canadian to perform an Extra-vehicular activity (EVA). During his spacewalk, Hadfield installs the Canadarm2 onto the International Space Station (ISS). 2002 Compaq announces that two million iPaq computers have been sold in the two years since the line was released. Nintendo announces that the launch price for the GameCube in the United Kingdom will be £129. A team of hackers calling themselves the “Deceptive Duo” uses a common gateway interface (CGI) hack to deface the website of the U.S. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) with a message and screenshots of database files from the systems of Midwest Express Airlines and Union Bank. The screenshots include what seems to be a flight schedule and passenger manifest for a Midwest Express airline flight taken from a Microsoft Access database running on Windows XP Office, which had evidently been obtained during a previously undetected hacking exploit. In the message, the Deceptive Duo explains that it had hacked the site to “ensure that the public is aware of the United States of America’s lack of security.” “This situation proves that we are all still vulnerable even after 9/11.” They also issue a warning to the nation to “Tighten the security before a foreign attack forces you to. At a time like this, we cannot risk the possibility of compromise by a foreign enemy.” The Deceptive Duo will later be revealed to be Robert Lyttle, age 20, and Benjamin Stark, age 22. The pair will plead guilty in federal court to several charges involving their hacking exploits on May 19, 2004. Version 4.2.0 of the PHP programming language is released. Version 8.0 of the SUSE Linux operating system is released. 2003 AMD Opteron processorAdvanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the Athlon XP 2500+ processor. Price: US$124 in 1,000-unit quantities Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the Opteron processor. Apple Computer releases an updated version of the iBook, featuring a 800MHz or 900MHz G3 processor, a 12.1 or 14.1 inch LCD screen, and a 30GB or 40GB hard drive. 2004 Version 6.2 of MSN Messenger is released, featuring a larger range of features for mobile users. 2005 Make Magazine, a quarterly publication devoted to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) projects and culture, holds the first “Maker Faire” April 22 – 23, 2006 at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. The event features over one hundred exhibits in six pavilions and across a five acre midway. 2008 Seagate announces that it has shipped one billion hard drives since its founding in 1979, becoming the first hard drive manufacturer to reach the milestone. All told, the drives which it has already shipped would have a total capacity of roughly 79 million terabytes (TB). Further more, the company continues to ship 111,600TB worth of storage daily or an average of 1TB every second. Seagate projects that, if market demand holds, it will ship another billion drives within just five years. In 2007, Seagate was the world’s leading hard drive manufacturer, with a leading market share of 35%. 2010 CenturyTel announces that it will acquire Qwest Communications, the third-largest local phone company, in a stock swap valued at US$10.6 billion in an attempt to compete in a rapidly shrinking market. The merger will be completed on April 1, 2011, resulting in the third largest telecommunications company in the U.S. It will operate 17 million access lines, 5 million broadband customers, and 1.4 million video subscribers over thirty-seven states
Posted on: Tue, 22 Apr 2014 00:15:42 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015