Today in Geek History -November 12th ten million Zip drives Eh where are they now ??? sorry about the delay was on a train for a few hours Enjoy ! 1901 The first Nobel Prize for Physics is awarded to Wilhelm Röentgen for the discovery of X-rays. 1933 Hugh Gray captures what he claims to be the first known photo of the Loch Ness Monster. 1937 Alan Turing publishes a paper entitled “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem.” In it, Turing provides an abstraction that will form the basic theory of computability for several decades. Later renamed the Turing Machine, this abstract engine described in this paper will provide the fundamental concepts of computers that other inventors will later conceive independently. 1946 In Japan, the United States Army holds a contest pitting a champion Japanese abacus (soroban) user against a US soldier operating the using the most cutting-edge calculating machine of the day. In four out of five rounds, the abacus user wins. 1980 The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) announces the IBM 3081 processor complex and the IBM 3033 model group 2, two processors that will extend the power and range of IBM’s largest computer systems. Both processors are developed and manufactured in Poughkeepsie, New York. The NASA space probe Voyager I makes its closest approach to Saturn, passing within 77,000 miles of the planet’s south pole, and it transmits images of Saturn’s rings across nearly a billion miles of space, back to NASA. 1981 The Space Shuttle Columbia becomes the first spacecraft to be reused on a second mission when it is launched at 3:10pm GMT from Cape Canaveral. 1982 According to Twin Galaxies, Doug Nelson scores a record-setting 9,980,420 points playing the Midway arcade game Pac-Man at the Fun Factory arcade in Bakersfield, California. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website. 1983 Microsoft Windows is first mentioned on Usenet. 1984 Astronaut Joseph Allen executes the first salvage operation in space when a US$35 million Palapa B-2 communication satellite is retrieved by the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery. Lotus Development officially announces the Jazz office suite for the Macintosh 512K, which will include communications functions, database, graphics, spreadsheet, and word processing. The software will go on to be a complete failure, despite the incredible success of the company’s Lotus 1-2-3 for IBM-compatible computers. Later critics will credit the software’s to overpricing and a lack of brand recognition caused by not giving it the Lotus name. Read an archived review of the software at Atari Magazine. Price: US$595 Richard Sandza’s article on the world of the Hacker BBS, “The Night of the Hackers“, appears in Newsweek magazine. The article introduces many would-be hackers to BBS technology and significantly contributed to the popularity of BBS communities in the mid-eighties. 1990 With help from Robert Cailliau, Tim Berners-Lee publishes a “formal proposal for the World Wide Web. The proposal is based on an earlier proposal, “Information Management: A Proposal,” written in March 1989. 1994 Version 1.0 of the 386BSD operating system is released. 1996 The website of Kriegsmans Fur is hacked by “The Ghost Shirt Society.” 1997 Iomega announces that it has sold ten million Zip drives. 1998 Be announces Release 4 of its BeOS operating system, for Intel and PowerPC computers. The new release better integrates with Windows, with the ability to better interface with files and a full set of keyboard shortcuts. The system is expected to be released in December. The company also announces that Hitachi will include the operating system on its computers. Price: US$69.95 (online) or US$99.95 (retail) 2001 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announces the 950MHz mobile Duron processor. Price: US$160 Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announces the 1.2GHz mobile Athlon 4 processor. Price: US$525 The first uncompressed real-time gigabit HDTV transmission over a wide-area IP network takes place on “Internet2.” 2002 A thirty-six year old unemployed London sysadmin named Gary McKinnon, also known by the handled “Solo,” is indicted for what US authorities describe as the “biggest hack of military computers ever detected.” McKinnon allegedly exploited poorly-secured Windows systems to attack ninety-two networks run by NASA, the Pentagon, and twelve other military installation scattered over fourteen states from February 2001 through March 2002. Several private businesses are also affected by the attacks, causing an estimated US$900,000 in damages. Prosecutors said that McKinnon “stole passwords, deleted files, monitored traffic and shut down computer networks on military bases from Pearl Harbor to Connecticut.” 2003 Nokia confirms that hackers have cracked the copy protection system of games designed for the N-Gage video game system. 2006 Ang Chuang Yang, age 16, of Singapore breaks the Guinness World Record for the shortest time needed to type a 160-character SMS message at a competition organized by Singapore Telecommunications. The previous record of 42.22 was set by American Ben Cook in July. Yang’s new record is 41.52 seconds. 2007 The first system with 65536 processors, the JUGENE (Jülich Blue Gene) supercomputer, goes into service at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany. With a processing speed of 167 TFLOPS, it is the fastest supercomputer in Europe and the sixth fastest computer in the world. JUGENE operates on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11. 2008 India’s first unmanned lunar probe, Chandrayaan-1, enters into orbit around the Moon, at an altitude of roughly 100km above the surface
Posted on: Tue, 12 Nov 2013 07:08:34 +0000
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