This Day in Geek History: January 11 Happy BDay AlGOL !!! 1902 Popular Mechanics magazine is published for the first time. The magazine has five paying subscribers and will be purchased by a few hundred newsstand customers at a nickel a copy. In September 1903, the magazine will have become sufficiently popular to begin publishing monthly issues. 1935 Amelia Earhart takes off from Honolulu to become the first person to fly solo between Hawaii and California. She will land in Oakland the next day. Three years earlier, Earhart will become the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. 1960 The ACM/GAMM committee is convened with the mission of developing the first block-structured programming language, Algol 60 (ALGOrithmic Language), which will be the predecessor of the Pascal programming language. Algol and Algol 60 were designed as portable languages for scientific computation, and Algol will later be described by Alan Perlis as “the lingua franca of computer science.” 1973 The United Kingdom’s Open University grants its first degrees to students whose curriculum consisted (in part) of courses transmitted over radio and television. Founded in 1969, Open University was established to make education available to students globally. Visit Open University’s official website. 1976 The science fiction television series The Bionic Woman premieres on the ABC network with the episode “Welcome Home, Jaime: Part 1.” The series will run for three seasons and a total of fifty-eight episodes. The series is a spin-off of The Six Million Dollar Man. TV entry 1994 Eric Gordon Corley, better known by the handle “Emmanuel Goldstein” publishes “No Time For Goodbyes – Phiber Optik’s Journey to Prison” in Computer Underground Digest, after escorting Mark Abene (“Phiber Optik”) to prison on January 7th, to serve his one year jail sentence for a computer trespassing conviction. As a founding member of the Masters of Deception (MoD), Abene inspired thousands to explore the the infrastructure of the United States phone system. Soon after the article’s publication, New York Magazine dubs Abene one of the city’s 100 smartest people. The Superhighway Summit is held at Royce Hall on the campus of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The summit is touted as the “first public conference bringing together all of the major industry, government and academic leaders in the field [and] also began the national dialog about the Information Superhighway and its implications.” The event is attended by Disney CEO Michael Eisner, FCC Chair Reed Hundt, NewsCorp Chairman Rupert Murdoch, and Vice President Al Gore, among others. One of the principal topics addressed is the increasing “gap between those who will have access to it because they can afford to equip themselves with the latest electronic devices and those who can’t.” 1995 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel settle their outstanding processor-related legal issues. AMD pays Intel US$58 million in damages, Intel pays AMD US$18 million for breach of contract, and AMD retains full rights to microcode in Intel 386 and Intel 486 processors. United States Attorney Michael J. Yamaguchi of the Northern District of California announces that his office will not prosecute anyone in connection to the June 1991 posting of the “Pretty Good Privacy” encryption application to USENET. 1996 Umax Data Systems of Taiwan acquires a license to manufacture Macintoshes from the hardware firm Radius, along with the company’s license to sell Macintosh operating systems. Umax will later set up a U.S. company, Umax Computer, to market a line of Macintosh-compatible computers. United States Customs releases a seven line statement announcing that it has ceased its criminal investigation of Phil Zimmermann, the creator of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) email encryption software, for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act. The U.S. Government has long regarded cryptographic software as a munition subject to arms trafficking export controls. No explanation for the end of the investigation is provided, but export of Zimmermann’s software remains prohibited. 1999 Intel announces that their new series of Pentium chips will be called Pentium III. The company also announces that a new chip called the Xeon, which will be designed specifically for graphic and engineering applications, will be released at approximately the same time as the Pentium III. 2000 Construction of the first segment of the China-U.S. Cable Network, the first undersea fiber optic cable network between the China and the U.S. The cable will carry data, video, and voice traffic directly between two points in China (Chongming and Shantou) and two points in the U.S. (Bandon, Oregon and San Luis Obispo, California) at 80Gbps. 2001 Dave Winer first demonstrates the RSS enclosure with a Grateful Dead song in his Scripting News weblog news feed. The feature is a new functionality in RSS 0.92. Dell, Microsoft, and Unisys announce an agreement under which they will jointly create an electronic voting system for national elections. Researchers in Oregon announce having successfully produced the first monkey genetically altered to contain a jelly-fish gene for florescence. 2003 The domain registration for the “shock site” Ogrish, which primarily features photos and video of fatal accidents and brutal crimes, is deleted by German registrar Joker at the request of a German prosecutor who complained that the website’s content was extremely objectionable, despite the fact that it hasn’t violated any laws in the United States, where the site is actually hosted. 2005 International Business Machines (IBM) announces that it will donate five hundred technology patents to a number of open-source groups. The iPod ShuffleAt the Macworld Conference & Expo, Apple Computer releases iLife ’05, a suite for creating digital content. Price: US$79 At the Macworld Conference & Expo, Apple Computer releases the iPod shuffle with either a 512MB or 1GB capacity. It’s the first iPod to use flash memory rather than a hard drive. It is also the first iPod that has neither a screen nor the devices’ signature scroll wheel The Mac MiniAt the Macworld Conference & Expo, Apple releases the Mac mini, featuring an 1.25GHz or 1.42GHz PowerPC G4 processor, 256MB RAM, a 40GB or 80GB hard drive, the Mac OS X operating system, iLife, and an optional SuperDrive. The Mini is only two inches high and six and a half inches square, making it the smallest desktop tower ever. Price: US$499 and US$599, respectively 2007 China destroys its Feng Yun 1-C weather satellite, launched in 1999, with a ballistic missile 537 miles above the Earth. The impact creates about 28% of the junk currently in orbit around the Earth. The U.S. halted such tests in 1985 for fear of creating such debris.
Posted on: Sat, 11 Jan 2014 00:54:14 +0000
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