This Day in Geek History: October 5 Happy Bday Brian Johnson ...Highway to Hells YEAH !!! 1905 Wilbur Wright pilots the Wright Flyer III in a flight the lasts thirty-nine minutes and covers twenty-four miles, setting a world record that will stand until 1908. 1923 Edwin Hubble identified the first Cepheid variable star. 1962 United Artists releases the first installment in the James Bond film franchise, the spy film Dr. No, directed by Terence Young and starring Sean Connery, Joseph Wiseman, Ursula Andress, Jack Lord, and John Kitzmiller to UK theaters. In it, an agent of the British Secret Service, James Bond (007), is sent out to the West Indies in order to find out why another of his number was killed. His arrival is not welcomed by everyone, but it is not long before he is on the trail of the killer. The trail leads to a secretive scientist, Dr. No, but the discovery has wider implications… Produced on a budget of US$1 million, the film will gross US$109.6 million worldwide.(MPAA Rating: PG) Running Time: 1 hr 50 mins 1969 The comedy series Monty Python’s Flying Circus premieres on the BBC with the episode “Whither Canada?” The series will run for forty-five episodes over five series. 1970 The PBS television network is launched. 1982 According to Twin Galaxies, David Plummer, age 14, scores a record-setting 2,175,743 points playing the Atari arcade game Tempest for two hours and twenty-three minutes at Midtown Amusements in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. Sony begins marketing pocket televisions with 2-inch diagonal flat screens. 1984 Marc Garneau becomes the first Canadian in space, aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. (STS-41G) The mission is the first NASA mission to carry a crew of seven. It also marks the first time in history two women (Sally K. Ride and Kathryn D. Sullivan)have been in space at the same time. 1991 Linus Torvalds announces the release of the first official version of the Linux kernel, version 0.02. The announcement is made on Usenet. In the announcement, Torvalds writes, “Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?” and goes on to invite fellow hackers to join in the project’s development. 1992 International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) introduces the IBM ThinkPad line of laptop computers. The ThinkPad 300, manufactured by Zenith Data Systems, features a 25 MHz 386SL processor. The ThinkPad 700 features a monochrome 9.5-inch display, a 25 MHz 486SLC, a 80/120 hard drive, and 4MB RAM. The ThinkPad 700C features the 25MHz 486SLC, a 10.3-in TFT active-matrix VGA color. 1997 Hackers anonymously crack the pentagon-ai.army.mil home page. 1998 Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) reveals plans to cut 2,500 of their 127,000 worldwide employees by offering a voluntary severance package. HP’s last employee buyout took place in 1991. Veritas Software Corporation, a data protection software developer, reveals plans to acquire the Network and Storage Management Group of Seagate Software for about US$1.6 billion in stock. Version 4.07 of the Netscape Communicator internet suite is released. 1999 According to a report published by MmWire, the results of a recently concluded Fairfield Research study shows that Sega’s Dreamcast sales figures appear to be significantly cutting into Nintendo’s N64 sales. However, PlayStation sales appear to be unaffected. Apple Computer unveils a new line of iMac computers with prices starting as low as US$999. The new computers include a new iMac, iMac DV, and iMac DV Special Edition that is housed in a graphite-colored case. Apple also begins offering version 9 of its Macintosh operating system for US$99. At the Microprocessor Forum is held in San Jose, California, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announces the first details of its own x86 64-bit architecture, as well as its future system bus, Lightning Data Transport. Both will be implemented in AMD’s eighth-generation microprocessor, which will be backward-compatible with Intel 32-bit x86 architecture processors. Code-name: Sledgehammer 2000 Microsoft accuses the Federal government of attempting to “short-circuit the appellate process” while Microsoft seeks more time to appeal a ruling by a federal judge to break up the company. 2002 IBM announces that, in the ten years since introducing the first ThinkPad computer, it has sold fifteen million units. 2003 Microsoft releases a wireless network adapter for the Xbox. Price: US$140 2004 Bill Gross, the founder of Overture and a pioneer in the field of paid search services, relaunches the Snap search engine with a new, completely transparent business model that allows the public to view advertiser interactions, company revenues, and traffic volume. Snap features advanced sorting features that differentiate from other engines, which tend to make searching as simple as possible. 2005 ATI introduces the Radeon X1000 series of graphics cards, the first to use the Radeon R520 core referred to by ATI as an “Ultra Threaded Dispatch Processor”. This new core employs a strategy of attempting to streamline the Radeon line, rather than simply increasing its number of processing unit, as previous models had. 2006 Google launches Google Code Search, a free beta product that allows users to search for open-source code on the Internet. 2011 Following a prolonged battled with battle with pancreatic cancer, Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, dies of pancreatic cancer at age 56. Over the course of the following week, the internet will be flooded by the emotional outpouring of Apple fans mourning Jobs’ death. Popular technology journalist Robert X. Cringely speculates that Jobs’ impending death was the reason Apple introduced the iPhone 4S rather then a next-gen iPhone 5 the previous day.
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 00:51:01 +0000
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