This Day in Geek History: April 29 Happy Bday Jerry Seinfeld 1879 Electric arc lamps are used for the first time in the United States, as street lights in Cleveland, Ohio. 1953 An episode of the science fiction series Space Patrol becomes the first experimental three-dimensional television broadcast in the U.S. when it is broadcast by ABC affiliate KECA-TV in Los Angeles, California. 1957 The first military nuclear power plant is dedicated at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. 1959 The UNIVAC picks four out of six winners at the Churchill Downs races in Louisville, Kentucky, setting a record for the correct choices in a horse race. 1964 The monster movie Mothra vs. Godzilla is released. 1979 Battlestar GalacticaThe last episode of the classic sci-fi television series Battlestar Galactica, “The Hand of God,” first airs on the ABC network. (No. 24) In the eight months following the release of the Battlestar Galactica movie, seventeen new episodes of the series were aired, five of which were two-parters, for a grand total of twenty-four hours of programming, but ABC canceled the series in early April, citing declining ratings and repeated cost overruns. In the final episode, the Galactica receives a mysterious radio signal that may have originated at Earth. Adama is hopeful but afraid that the signal may be yet another Cylon trap, so the crew turns the tables on the Cylons by preemptively attacking them aboard a stolen Cylon Raider. In the series’ final scene, Apollo and Starbuck narrowly miss receiving the historic transmission of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. 1980 At the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, New York, Data General, one of the earliest microcomputer manufacturers, announces the Eagle computer. The system, which will be critically acclaimed, features a 4MHz Zilog Z80 A processor, 64KB RAM, and the CP/M 2.2 operating system. 1983 Walt Disney Pictures releases the fantasy film Something Wicked This Way Comes, directed by Jack Clayton and starring Jason Robards and Jonathan Pryce, to 817 U.S. theaters. It is based on the Ray Bradbury novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. Produced on a budget of US$19 million, it will gross US$2,423,555 domestically in its opening weekend. (MPAA Rating: PG) Running Time: 1 hr 36 mins 1985 Apple Computer discontinues the Macintosh XL line of computers. The Macintosh XL is a modified version of the Apple Lisa personal computer that features a 5MHz Motorola 68000, a 400K 3.5″ floppy drive, and an optional external 10MB hard drive. Visit the official Apple website for the Macintosh XL. 1986 A fire at the Central library of the City of Los Angeles Public Library destroys nearly four hundred thousand books. 1992 The Legion of Net. Heroes, the first Usenet superhero shared universe, is formed on rec.artsics. The newsgroup becomes a popular center of fan fiction based on existing comic book universe and parodies of popular comic tropes. By 2006, over 450 stories will have been posted to the thread. 1994 Commodore International announces that it will declare bankruptcy due to its inability to renegotiate its outstanding loan terms. The process will take months due to the company’s sheer size and complications that will arise from the fact that the company is incorporated in the Bahamas while many of the company’s creditors are based in the United States. Commodore’s assets will be sold to German PC manufacturer ESCOM in 1995 when it is finally unable to renegotiate its loans. The former site of Commodore’s operational headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, will eventually house the headquarters and broadcast studios of cable retailer QVC, Inc. The media reports that, in the first quarter of the year, personal computers have outsold televisions for the first time in history. The Consumer Electronics Manufacturers Association (CEMA) will issue a correction to the figures the next day. Due to an error made by a CEMA representative while referring to a table of sales figures, the number of television sales for the first quarter is cited as 660,000. The correct number, however, is 4.6 million, far more than the number of personal computers sold during the same period. Power Computing releases the PowerCenter and PowerTower line of Macintosh-compatible computers. All systems feature the PowerPC 604 processor. Price: US$1,895 to US$4,195 1997 U.S. astronaut Jerry M. Linenger and Russian cosmonaut Vasily Tsibliyev complete the first-ever Russo-American space walk, a five-hour excursion from the Russian space station Mir. 1998 It’s revealed that experiments conducted for decades up to 1994, Norwegian and American researchers used mentally ill and retarded Norwegians in tests of the biological and genetic effects of X-ray radiation on the human body. 1999 Chen Ing-hau, a computer engineering student at the Tatung Institute of Technology, is identified as the creator of the Chernobyl virus that disabled hundreds of thousands of computers around the globe on April 26th. The institute will punish Ing-hau with a demerit in April of 1998 when the university experienced damage to its own data system. 2000 The website of Electronic Frontier Foundation is hacked by “soulstice”. 2002 Apple Computer announces the Apple eMac computer, which was developed exclusively for the educational market. The system features a 700MHz G4 processor, a 128MB CDROM, a 40GB hard drive, a CD-RW drive, a 17-inch monitor, an nVidia GeForce2 MX video card, five USB ports, two FireWire ports, built-in speakers, a built-in microphone, a keyboard, a mouse, and OS X 10.1.5. Price: US$1,099 The hacker group calling themselves The Deceptive Duo hacks and defaces five sites, including: the Durango, Colorado Airport, the South Bend Regional Airport, the Southeast Iowa Regional Airport, the U.S. Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, and the Uniformed Services of the University of the Health Sciences. The Deceptive Duo has posted excerpts of databases taken from websites the group previously compromised in order to demonstrate the vulnerability of important American institutions. The Deceptive Duo declared in previous statements that their only concern is national security and that they are in contact with the administrators of several of the previously attacked websites, helping them patch and secure their systems. 2003 Metropolitan Police in the United Kingdom arrest Lynn Htun, age 24, at London’s InfoSecurity Europe 2003 computer fair for failing to appear in Guildford Crown Court in England on forgery charges. Although he is arrested on unrelated charges, authorities immediately launched an investigation upon his arrest. Htun is believed to be the infamous website defacer known as “Fluffi Bunni”, who allegedly gained unauthorized access to the computer systems of several major security companies, including SecurityFocus and Symantec. Version 2 (v1.4.2) of the Java programming language is released. 2004 The Sasser worm is released. Sasser will first be thought to have been authored in Russia by the same person or group who created the worm referred to as Blaster, Lovsan, or MSBlast, due to similarities in the code of the two worms. However, on May 7, 2004, computer science student Sven Jaschan, age 18, from Rotenburg, Lower Saxony, Germany will be arrested for writing the worm. He will immediately confess to having written it when he was seventeen, along with Netsky.AC, a variant of the Netsky worm. On Friday, July 8, 2005, Jaschan will receive a twenty-one month suspended sentence after being tried as a minor. 2005 Apple Computer releases Mac OS X v10.4, “Tiger,” for the Apple Macintosh. Apple claims that Tiger contains more than 200 new features. Among its new features, Tiger introduces Automator, Core Image and Core Video, Dashboard, QuickTime 7, Safari 2, Smart Folders, Spotlight, updated Mail program with Smart Mailboxes, and VoiceOver. Apple Computer releases QuickTime 6.2 exclusively for Mac OS X to provide support for iTunes 4, which allows AAC encoding for songs in the iTunes library. Version 8.0 of Darwin, an open source, Unix-like operating system is released. First released by Apple Inc. in 2000, it is a standalone operating system as well as the core set of components upon which Mac OS X was developed. It is primarily developed by Apple to support Mac OS X. 2006 PC-BSD 1.0 is released. PC-BSD is a Unix-like, desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD 2008 Google adds Google Street View to its Google Maps driving directions. Rockstar North releases the third-person shooter Grand Theft Auto IV for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in Europe, North America, and Oceania. The game will be both a critical and commercial success. It will break industry records by selling some 3.6 million units in the first day of its release and grossing more than half a billion dollars in its first week from an estimated six million units sold globally. By March 2009, over thirteen million units will be sold. By March 2011, over twenty million units will be sold. These figures will break the previous opening-week record of “Halo 3,” which grossed US$300 million in sales in its first week. 2009 The NetBSD Foundation releases version 5.0 of the NetBSD operating system.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Apr 2014 22:04:15 +0000
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