This Day in Geek History: October 9 Happy Bday Scott Bakula ...Thanx for the Quantum Leap 1701 The Collegiate School of Connecticut, later renamed Yale University is chartered. It will become the first U.S. school to award a doctorate degree. 1779 In Manchester, England, the Luddite riots erupt in reaction to mechanized looms that were installed in local factories for spinning cotton. 1855 Isaac Singer patents the sewing machine motor, which will go on to revolutionize the textile industry. (US No. 13,661) 1876 The first two-way telephone conversation over outdoor wires takes place between Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson over the telegraph line linking Boston and East Cambridge. Three days earlier, in Boston, Bell’s two-way telephone test of conversation with Watson had been the world’s first two-way telephone conversation in doors. 1890 Though there will never be any conclusive evidence of the event, this is reportedly the date on which French electrical engineer Clément Ader becomes the first person to successfully fly an airplane, though it bears little resemblance to later airplanes. His steam-powered plane, “Eole,” will only fly for a fifty meter length, and unlike the Wright Brothers’ future flight, it rises only a few inches off the ground. The flight ends when the bat-like contraption collides with trees at the end of the testing field. It is certain that Ader coined the French word “avion” for aircraft. Some believe it to be an acronym for “Appareil Volant Imitant les Oisaux Naturels” (Flying Machine Imitating Natural Birds). 1894 The first “magic lantern” feature is shown at the Carbon Studio in New York City. Magic lanterns are early precursors to latter-day cinemas. 1928 John Logie Baird first demonstrates his television system to BBC officials, who aren’t impressed. 1933 An unpredicted meteor shower is seen from Europe. A hundred “shooting stars” a minute are reported by the Soviet Pulkovo Observatory, near Leningrad. Dr. W.J. Fisher, a Harvard astronomer, identifies the Giacobini-Zinner comet as the source of the shower. This minor periodic comet only caused sparse meteor showers in the past and was otherwise of little note to astronomers. 1936 The BBC officially announces that it will begin television service on November 2. 1938 The radio altimeter is first demonstrated in New York by Bell Labs. The device gives pilots an accurate altitude reading of an aircraft above the local terrain by bouncing radio signals off the ground, thus changing aviation forever. 1947 The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation enters into a contract to develop the first electronic digital computer with the ability to store programs, BINary Automatic Computer (BINAC), for the Northrop Aircraft Company. It will be the first computer built commercially, though it will be the only computer that will ever built by the company before it becomes a division of the Remington Rand Corp. The BINAC will be both faster and more powerful than the more famous ENIAC despite being powered by only seven hundred vacuum tubes, rather than ENIAC’s eighteen thousand. The system will feature capacity of 512 words and will cost US$278,000. The first telephone conversation made between a telephone on an aeroplane and a telephone in a car is place in Wilmington, Delaware. 1952 Raphael Robinson discovers the 687-digit Mersenne prime M2,281, which can be expressed as 22,281 – 1, using the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC). The number is the fifth discovered by Robinson in 1952 (one of which he discovered two days earlier), and it will remain the largest prime number to be discovered for more than four years. 1973 In the case of Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, Judge E. R. Larson issues a decision invalidating the patents granted on February 4, 1964 to John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert for their work on ENIAC, thus placing electronic computers into the public domain. In his decision, Larson cites the prior work of John Atanasoff and a paper written by John von Neumann, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. The decision is one of the fundamental legal decisions in the history of the computer industry. 1974 The Data Processing Division of International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) introduces the IBM 3850 mass storage system. 1980 The First Tennessee Bank, the largest bank of Knoxville, becomes the first home banking computer system used by consumers. By September 1983, there will be four banks accessible through the CompuServe Information Service. 1989 An official news agency in the Soviet Union reports the landing of a UFO in Voronezh. 1991 Apple Computer settles a lawsuit originally filed in February 1989 by Apple Corps, the corporate face of The Beatles, for US$26.5 million. The case alleges that Apple Computer continued to infringed on the label’s trademark by marketing a line of hardware with the ability to synthesize music in violation of an agreement reached between the two companies in 1981. 1992 The PeekSkill MeteoriteA falling meteor, seen from Kentucky to New York, is observed at 7:50pm EDT. The 12.37kg stone meteorite crashes into a parked Chevrolet Malibou belonging to Michelle Knapp of Wells Street in Peekskill, New York at a velocity of about 80m/s. It is only the fourth meteorite recovered for which detailed trajectory data exists. After being hit by the meteorite, the car will tour France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and the U.S. 1994 Minor Threat and Mucho Maas release version 1.10 of the popular wardialing program ToneLoc (an amalgam of the words “Tone Locator”) for MS-DOS. The program scans dial tones in order to search out private branch exchanges (PBX) or modems. 1995 In the Monday, October 9 issue of Newsweek, an article written by Katie Hafner and Adam Rogers entitled, “How Now Voyager?” appears on page 67. It features a profile of a start-up CD-ROM company that claims to prioritize quality over profits. The article highlights the founding of Voyager Co. in 1984 by Bob Stein and states that Stein once worked “briefly at Atari, the now defunct video game manufacturer.” Atari Corporation’s PR firm is notified and begins to take corrective measures at once. Time Warner Interactive releases the racing game Power Drive Rally for the Atari Jaguar. Power Drive Rally will be the only Jaguar title with a users manual featuring a color cover. 1996 The website of Mark Kommun is hacked by “ivil h4x0r”. 1998 478 domains are hacked by the Chaos hacking group and redirected to the same defaced website. The Hayes Corporation, a manufacturer of computer communications hardware, files for Chapter 11 protection in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware. This is the second time the firm has filed since 1994. 1999 The New York Times reports in an interview with Paul Packan, a scientist working for Intel Corporation, that semiconductor engineers have reached an impasse in regard to downsizing silicon transistors. Meanwhile Intel executives are quick to caution that they fail to see the problem as insurmountable. Philips Electronics announces that it is discontinuing its line of Nino 200 and 500 Palmtop computers. 2000 Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster, testifies at a Senate Judiciary Committee convened by Senator Orin Hatch. At the hearing, Fanning offers testimony on the creation and growing popularity of Napster, emphasizing its legal uses. “People tell us that they use Napster to sample new music before deciding what to buy, find new artists, and house music in their computers that they already own on CD, cassette, vinyl and sometimes 8-track. We hear regularly from mothers who say they use Napster to screen the music their children are listening to and parents who say that Napster is a share activity that helps them communicate with their teenagers.” Just weeks later, Napster will announce plans to partner with BMG records to develop a subscription-based service. 2001 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) introduces the 1.33GHz Athlon XP 1500+ processor, featuring a 64KB Leve-1 data cache, 64KB Level 1 instruction cache, 256KB Level 2 cache, three pipelined FPUs, a 4GB address space, and a 266MHz system bus. It supports MMX, 3DNow!, Enhanced 3DNow!, and 3DNow! professional instructions. “XP” stands for “extreme performance.” It incorporates 37.5 million transistors in a 0.18-micron process. It is the first of the Athalon XP processors to be released. Code-name: Palomino Price: US$160 in 1,000-unit quantities Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the 1.4GHz Athlon XP 1600+ processor. Price: US$160 in 1,000 unit quantities Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the 1.467GHz Athlon XP 1700+ processor. Price: US$190 in 1,000 unit quantities Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the 1.53 GHz Athlon XP 1800+ processor. Price: US$252 in 1,000 unit quantities The U.S. Supreme Court rejects Microsoft’s request to hear an appeal of its antitrust case. 2003 Van T. Dinh, age 19, of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania is arrested on the campus of Drexel University on charges of hacking and identity theft committed last July in an elaborate scheme to dump worthless options for Cisco Systems stock. It is the first time computer hacking and identity theft have both played a part in a fraud prosecution brought by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The teenager allegedly lured victims in an online stock-discussion group to download a key-logging program that he claimed was a stock-charting tool. After using the program to monitor his victims’ machines, Dinh allegedly obtained the log-in and password information for a TD Waterhouse Investor Services online brokerage account owned by a Westborough, Massachusetts, man. With the victim’s account information in hand, Dinh used his own online brokerage account to create orders to sell worthless option, then hacked into the victim’s online account and created corresponding buy orders for the options, to the tune of approximately US$46,986. SEC official don’t comment on the teen obtained the money to buy the put options he erroneously sold, but they do note that the SEC investigation is ongoing. 2004 Symantec Corporation, the largest single developer of security software for computers, completes its acquisition of @stake (ATstake, Inc.), a computer security professional service. The @stake start-up includes L0pht Heavy Industries, the corporate face of the formerly notorious hacker collective L0pht, which testified before Congress in 1998 that they could shut down the entire internet within thirty minutes. @stake merged with L0pht Heavy Industries in January 2000, lending the group legitimacy. The Symantec acquisition was initially announced on September 16. In March 2006, Symantec will discontinue the sale of the L0phtCrack password auditing and recovery application. Visit the official Symantec website. 2006 Google officially announces that it will acquire the video host YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock. The agreement comes just hours after YouTube announces three separate agreements with major media outlets in response to threats of copyright-infringement lawsuits. YouTube was launched by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley and Steve Chen in February 2005 and quickly grew to become one of the most visited sites on the internet. Version 4.4 of the Scientific Linux operating system, “Beryllium,” is released. 2007 Google acquires Jaiku, a micro-blogging similar to Twitter. Sony announces that it will reduce the price of its PlayStation 3 video game console in Japan to ¥44,980 for the 20GB model and ¥54,980 for the 60GB. 2008 Version 2.6.27 of the Linux operating system is released. 2009 Gary McKinnon, age 43, is denied an appeal to the Supreme Court, Britain’s highest judicial body, in his legal battle to avoid being extradited to the United States. McKinnon is accused of crashing the U.S. Army’s network for twenty-four hours in what is being characterized as “the biggest military hack of all time” using only a 56K dial-up connection. McKinnon argues that his actions were not malicious, while his lawyers have argued that extradition would be a cruel and excessive punishment, given his Asperger Syndrome. Read more at Reuters. Google announces that the number of books scanned into its Google Book Search service has exceeded ten million. Less than a year prior, on October 28, 2008, Google had scanned seven million books. LCROSS CentaurIn an attempt to determine the extent of the water-ice discovered on the Moon, the NASA Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) robotic spacecraft impacts the Cabeus crater on the south pole of the Moon in two stages. The Centaur rocket stage of the probe crashes into the lunar surface at 7:31am, creating a hole into which the second stage of the probe, equipped with camera to photograph the results of the first crash, impacts at 7:37am, taking photographs in an effort to capture photographs of water-ice. The mission is dedicated to the late American broadcaster Walter Cronkite. YouTubeThree years to the day after Google’s acquisition of YouTube, the company’s chief executive and co-founder Chad Hurley announces on the video sharing site’s blog that YouTube has been serving well over a billion views a day. “Today, I’m proud to say that we have been serving well over a billion views a day on YouTube. This is great moment in our short history and we owe it all to you.” He goes on to explain that “As bandwidth has increased, so has our video quality. As we’ve started to see demand for longer, full-length content, we’ve brought more shows and movies to the site. There are now more ways than ever to make and consume content, and more of you are looking to turn your hobby into a real business.”
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 00:26:34 +0000