1880 – First Electrically
Lighted City
Wabash,
Indiana becomes the first city in the world to be completely illuminated by
electric lighting. And the light was good.
1939 – Harvard and IBM Agree
to Build The Mark I “Giant Brain”
Harvard
and IBM sign an agreement to build the Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic
Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), Project leader Howard Aiken developed
the original concept of the machine: a series of switches, relays, rotating shafts
and clutches. The Mark I weighed about five tons and contained more than
750,000 components. It read instructions from paper tape and data from punch
cards.
1993 – Richard Depew accidentally posted 200
identical messages to news.admin.policy while testing some auto-moderation
software. It became the first UNSENET postings to be referred to as spam.
1995 – Microsoft Bob is
Spawned
Microsoft
releases their epically ill-fated-software package, “Bob”, whose name will
forever live in infamy. Given the tide of popularity and visibility Microsoft
was riding on the way to releasing Windows 95 later that year, Bob was the
first highly visible flop from Microsoft. Future flops from Microsoft included
Windows ME, the Zune, and Windows Vista to name a few. While Bob was “killed”
only a year later, many of the ideas that went into Bob were salvaged by
Microsoft, most notably the “Clippy” assistant, which was perhaps as equally as
derided by computer users.
1998 – Netscape posted about 8 megabytes of
source code for its browser Netscape Communicator 5.0. The code was posted to
Mozilla.org, a site Netscape set up for source code-related information.
1998 – After three years of development and
much wrangling with the Warcraft engine it was originally built on, Blizzard
released the iconic game Starcraft.
1999 – Free … Your … Mind
The
hugely successful motion picture, The Matrix, is released on this day. Many
call it a classic (ok, that’s me), many call it influential (ok, me again), but
no one can deny that the impact it had on many aspects of our society from the
emerging tech culture, to the movie industry, to science-fiction, to political
thinking. The Matrix won 4 Oscars, on a budget of $63 million grossed over $463
million, and was the first DVD to sell over 3 million copies. And who could
forget some of the great quotes from this movie, including “Free … your … mind”,
“Dodge this”, “There is no spoon”, “Don’t think you are – know you are”,
“Welcome … to the real world”, “I know kung fu”, and “You take the red pill –
you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
2008 – DNS Addressing Flaw
Dan
Kaminsky announced he has been in contact with Microsoft over a flaw in the DNS
naming system. At this time, there were no other details as to keep this issue
as secret as possible while they try to fix the problem.
On March 27, Kaminsky discovered that within the Conficker
virus, the hosts had a detectable signature when scanned remotely. This was
known as DNS Cache poisoning. Over 568,000 computers were infected because of
this. The patch was released on July 8th, 2008.
2013 – IBM shut down the Roadrunner
supercomputer, the first computer to run at more than one petaflop.
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