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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