This Day in Geek History: May 17 Happy Bday M.C. Escher thankyou for your awesome mind bending art 1865 At the first International Telegraph Convention, in Paris, France, the International Telegraph Union (ITU), which will later be renamed the International Telecommunication Union, is established to standardize and regulate international telecommunications. 1877 Edwin T. Holmes of Boston, Massachusetts installs the first burglar alarm connected to a telephone switchboard. 1890 Comic Cuts, the first British weekly comic paper, is first published in London by Alfred Northcliffe. 1902 Greek archaeologist Valerios Stais discovers an ancient mechanical analog computer in a ship wreck of the coast of the Greek island of Antikythera, that will later be dubbed by the media the “Antikythera mechanism.” Archaeologists will theorize that the mechanism was designed to calculate astronomical positions and date the device’s construction to somewhere between 150BC and 100BC. It’s complexity is comparable to that of later eighteenth century clocks, though it is the oldest known geared device ever discovered. 1912 The London Times reports that a new automatic telephone system featuring phones with rotary dials has been installed in Epsom, Surrey and that the system will be activated the following day. The new system, which is the first of its kind in Great Britain, will provide three hundred twenty Epson households with the ability to dial other numbers in the town without operator assistance. The Epsom experiment marks the beginning of telephone automation in Great Britain, years behind other nations, such as Canada and the United States. 1954 An official ground-breaking ceremony is held for the new European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Laboratory in the Meyrin municipality or Geneva, Switzerland. 1955 Enrico Fermi and Leó Szilárd receives a patent on a neutronic reactor, which they applied for in December 1944. (US No. 2,708,656) The patent covers the design of the world’s first artificial nuclear reactor. 1965 Dolby Laboratories is founded by Ray Dolby in London, England. The company specializes in audio noise reduction technology, and it will later expand into audio compression and encoding. The first transatlantic color television transmission is made by the NBC network between the United Kingdom and the United States. 1968 ESRO 2B becomes the first successfully launched European satellite. It is launched by the European Space Research Organization (ESRO), the forerunner of the later European Space Agency (ESA), on a mission to study X-ray and particle emissions from the Sun. 1969 The Soviet space probe Venera 6 begins its descent into the atmosphere of Venus, sending back atmospheric data before being crushed by the planet’s atmospheric pressure. 1986 Steve Wozniak receives his bachelor’s degree in electrical and engineering sciences from University of California, Berkeley. He dropped out of college several credits shy receiving his degree in 1975. 1989 In Nw York, Tengen holds a reception for members of the press, retailers, and trade representatives to launch the Tetris game cartridge. Tengen also runs a full-page ad in USA Today. 1990 Lewis Galoob Toys seeks a court declaration that the Game Genie does not infringe on Nintendo’s copyrights. Satellite CD Radio, Inc. is founded. The company will later become Sirius Satellite Radio. 1991 The first server in history to run HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is set up by Tim Berners-Lee on a NeXTcube at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. The launch of this first server will be marked by some future historians as the birth of the World Wide Web. 1995 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) publishes MacPGP 2.6.2, a freeware version of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) program for the Apple Macintosh. 1999 Intel introduces the Pentium III processor with a clock speed of 550MHz. Remote Agent becomes the first artificial intelligence (AI) system to be given primary control of a spacecraft. For two days, the AI will operate on the on-board computer of the NASA space probe Deep Space 1, nearly sixty million miles distant from Earth. Remote Agent is written entirely in Common Lisp. The SETI@home project releases a free screen-saver program that harnesses a user’s spare processing power to analyze data from the Arecibo Observatory in search of signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. The application requires approximately five minutes to download over a 28.8Kbps modem. 2000 Number Nine Visual Technology, a manufacturer of graphics processors, ceases operations. Most of its assets will be acquired by S3 during the the company’s 1999 bankruptcy reorganization. . 2001 The Apache.org and SourceForge.net websites are hacked by the “Fluffy Bunny” hacking group. The DVD+RW Alliance announces the addition of DVD+R write-once capabilities to the standard. J2SE 1.3.1 (Ladybird) is released. The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) is held in Los Angeles, California, over three days. Sixty-two thousand people attend. At the event, Microsoft unveils the Xbox video game system, and Nintendo unveils the GameCube video game system. 2002 Nintendo releases the GameCube video game system in Australia. 2004 According to Twin Galaxies, J.C. Padilla scores a record-setting 2,181,619,994,299,256,480 points playing the Capcom arcade game Giga Wing 2 on the Dreamcast. The score establishes a record for the highest score ever achieved on any game on record. AppleseedThe anime film Appleseed, directed by Shinji Aramaki and featuring the voice talents of Ai Kobayashi, Jurota Kosugi, and Yuki Matsuoka is released to theaters in Japan. It is based on the characters created by Masamune Shirow in the original 1985 manga series Appleseed, and it will be released in the U.S. on January 14, 2005. IMDB listing Running Time: 1 hr 45 mins 2005 The market share of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dips below ninety percent as the market shares of Firefox, Opera, and Safari continue to grow. Nintendo holds a press conference at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) to announce that the company has sold two billion software titles since it entered the video game market. The company also announces that its online strategy for the Nintendo DS is to offer Wi-Fi Internet connectivity in partnership with GameSpy, and it introduces the Game Boy Micro, the smallest cartridge-based video game system in history. The Game Boy Micro is two inches by four inches in size and seven-tenths of an inch thick. It weighs 2.8 ounces. The company also offers some of the details of the upcoming Revolution video game system. It will read proprietary DVD-size disc and GameCube disc media, 512MB flash memory, and SecureDigital media. It will also feature a virtual console play of NES, SNES, and Nintendo 64 games via download. Sony Computer Entertainment confirms some specifications of the Cell processor that will be shipped in the forthcoming PlayStation 3 video game console. The Cell configuration will have one Power processing element (PPE) on the core, with eight physical SPEs in silicon. In the PlayStation 3, one SPE is locked-out during the test process, a practice which helps to improve manufacturing yields. The target clock-frequency at the time of the console’s initial introduction is 3.2GHz. The initial units will be produced at IBM’s facility in East Fishkill, New York. 2006 The Pioneer BDR-101A Blu-ray Disc Recorder DrivePioneer ships BDR-101A, the world’s first Blu-ray Disc recorder drive for personal computers. The drive supports a data transfer rate of 72 Mbit/s. A single disc holds just over two hours of high-definition video. Price: US$1,000 Scientists report having sequenced the last chromosome in the Human Genome Project, which was first launched in 1990. The final chromosome, Chromosome 1, is the largest human chromosome, containing 3,141 genes or 247 million nucleotide base pairs, about 8% of all human DNA. It is linked to an estimated 350 illnesses including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and several types of cancer. The URGE digital music store, an online music distribution service operated by Microsoft, is launched. Downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by Windows Media DRM 11, Microsoft’s digital rights management (drm). URGE is sponsored by MTV, CMT, and VH1. These sponsors provide content for the music store. URGE charges 99¢ a track, or US$9.95 a month for a subscription. It is not compatible with either Microsoft’s Zune or Apple’s iPod. It is fully integrated into Windows Media Player 11. Version 2.2.11 of the GIMPshop graphics application, based on version 2.2.11 of The Gimp, is released. GIMPshop is a modification of the free/open source graphics program GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) intended to replicate the layout and features of Adobe Photoshop. Its primary purpose is to make users of Photoshop feel comfortable using GIMP. 2007 The birth place of Hewlett-Packard, the garage at 367 Addison Ave in Palo Alto, California, is officially listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the “HP Garage.” The stand-alone garage was built in back of the house around 1924, and in 1987, it was listed as a California state historical landmark.
Posted on: Tue, 17 Jun 2014 00:04:16 +0000
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