Search Results for "september 10"

1866 – Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, England. He would grow up to write under the name H. G. Wells and help form the genre of science fiction.

http://www.britannica.com/biography/H-G-Wells

1999 – Google came out of beta. The young company announced its new Google Scout feature and the launch of its new website, removing the beta designation from the Google search engine.

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/1999/09/googles-new-googlescout-feature-expands.html

2000 – Kevin Mitnick was released from a Lompoc, California prison after almost five years of incarceration.

http://news.cnet.com/Mitnick-released-from-prison/2100-1023_3-235933.html

2015 – Christopher Poole aka ‘moot’ sold 4Chan to its inspiration 2Channel. Hiroyuki Nishimura became 4Chan’s president.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/21/4chan-has-been-sold-to-2channel-after-12-years-of-independence/

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1848 – At noon in the library of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, members of the former Association of American Geologists and Naturalists met to create the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

https://www.aaas.org/news/aaas-celebrates-its-168th-anniversary

1954 – John Backus and his team at IBM ran the first FORTRAN program. FORTRAN stands for FORmula TRANslation and was the first high-level language and compiler developed.

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4396778/1st-FORTRAN-program-runs–September-20–1954

1983 – A patent for the RSA Algorithm for public-key cryptography was awarded. RSA stands for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who first publicly described it in 1977.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=daEsAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

2012 – Makerbot Industries released the Replicator 2 3D printer, meant for non-expert users, and providing 100 micron resolution printing. They also announced the opening of a store in Manhattan.

http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/09/19/a-whole-new-makerbot-introducing-replicator-2-desktop-3d-printer/

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1982 – In a posting made at 11:44 AM, Professor Scott Fahlman first proposed using the characters 🙂 to indicate jokes on a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University. In the same post he suggested :-(.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm

1989 – About 100 hospitals that used software from Shared Medical Systems saw their computers go into a loop when the date was entered. The day was 32,768 days from January 1, 1900, which caused a system overflow.

http://books.google.com/books?id=k29i2RUzg0EC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=september+19+1989+hospital+bug&source=bl&ots=LGg9GLyZD9&sig=fCpVkfK7qoMCUGiKvhpgeFpC48A&hl=en&sa=X&ei=aIUlUMSFIsLtiwL914GICg&ved=0CFkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=september%2019%201989%20hospital%20bug&f=false

1995 – International Talk Like a Pirate Day was first celebrated by John Baur (Ol’ Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (Cap’n Slappy), of Albany, Oregon. They had come up with the idea on June 6th while playing racquetball, but that was D-Day. The 19th was Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday, and the only day he could reliably remember.

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1822 – Jean-François Champollion, permanent secretary of the French Académie des Inscriptions, presented his Lettre a M. Dacier, describing his solution to the mystery of the Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. A nifty bit of decryption.

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/philology/gallery/champollion.html

1991 – The first version of the Linux kernel (0.01) was posted to a Finnish FTP server in Helsinki. Originator Linus Torvalds wanted to call the OS FreaX, but the FTP admin didn’t like the name and renamed it Linux.

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/The-history-of-Linux-1331088.html

2007 – AOL announced plans to refocus the company on advertising and relocate its corporate headquarters from Dulles, Virginia to New York City.

http://observer.com/2007/09/aol-to-move-corporate-headquarters-to-770-broadway/

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1956 – IBM introduced the IBM 350 disk storage unit for the RAMAC 305, the first commercial computer to use magnetic disk storage.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_350.html

1959 – After 33.5 hours of flight, Luna 2 became the first human-made object to strike the moon.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/solarsystem/space_missions/luna_2

2000 – Microsoft released Windows ME. The ME stood for Millenium Edition but deserving or not, would eventually become code for a bad or unnecessary OS update.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-245728.html

2001 – The Nintendo GameCube went on sale in Japan. It was the first Nintendo game console that did not use cartridges.

http://cube.gamespy.com/articles/500/500516p1.html

2015 – The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, LIGO, detected gravitational waves of two merging black holes. It was the first direct observation of gravitational waves.

http://www.wired.com/2016/02/scientists-spot-the-gravity-waves-that-flex-the-universe/

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1983 – Osborne Computer declared bankruptcy in Oakland, California federal bankruptcy court, listing assets of $40 million, liabilities of $45 million, and 600 creditors. Two years earlier, Osborne had produced the first portable computer, the 24-pound Osborne I.

http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n3/24_Osborne_Comptuer_Corporat.php

1985 – Nintendo released Super Mario Brothers in Japan. It became the best selling video game for 20 years until it was surpassed by Wii Sports.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20016209-17.html

2000 – The public beta of Apple’s Mac OS X, code named Kodiak, was released. Users had to pay $29.95 for the beta.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/09/13Apple-Releases-Mac-OS-X-Public-Beta.html

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1940 – In McNutt Hall at Dartmouth College, George Stibitz demonstrated the first remote operation of a computer. He connected to his Complex Number Generator at Bell labs by telephone using 28-wire teletype cable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stibitz_plaque_0708_edited-1.jpg

1947 – While troubleshooting the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator, operators found a moth trapped between the points of relay #70 in Panel F. They affixed the bug to the log and wrote “First actual case of bug being found.” While this was not the first use of the term ’bug’ for a computer problem, ‘debugging’ became popular for fixing bugs after this case.

http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/09/18/the-very-first-computer-bug/

1995 – The Sony PlayStation went on sale in North America.

http://thenextweb.com/media/2015/09/09/playstation-turns-20-in-the-u-s-heres-a-look-back-at-the-consoles-evolution/

1999 – The Sega Dreamcast debuted in North America. However many were distracted by the supposed 9/9/99 bug that ended up being just as much of a non-problem as the Y2K bug.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2009/09/the-swirl-that-shook-gaming-the-sega-dreamcast-turns-10/

2014 – Apple announced the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and 5.5-inch iPhone 6+ along with Apple Pay, a system that used NFC for payments. The company also unveiled the Apple Watch.

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2014/09/09/apple-unveils-apple-watch/

2015 – Apple announced a new 12.9-inch iPad Pro, a new Apple TV with a hard drive and remote with a touchpad and the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus with force touch capability.

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/09/09/everything-apple-announced-at-its-september-2015-event/

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1888 – George Eastman was issued US. patent No. 388,850 for his roll-film box camera.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=rAlvAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1998 – Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed for incorporation of Google, allowing them to cash a $100,000 check Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun, had written to Google Inc.

http://time.com/3250807/google-anniversary/

2013 – Samsung announced a smartwatch called Galaxy Gear that could only be used with its own phones and tablets that ran Android 4.3.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/4/4693692/samsung-galaxy-gear-smartwatch-announcement

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1859 – A unique combination of solar events including a magnetic explosion severely affected the young telegraph network in North America and Europe. Wires shorted out, fires started and some machines reportedly worked even when disconnected from batteries.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2003/23oct_superstorm/

1997 – IBM announced that its RS/6000 SP model parallel supercomputer, was now 58 percent faster than Deep Blue, the computer that beat Kasparov at chess.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/IBM+Makes+RS%2F6000+SP+Even+Faster%3B+Performance+Gains+Announced+for…-a019735249

2001 – At ECTS in London, Blizzard announced an online RPG version of its popular Warcraft franchise, called “World of Warcraft”.

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ects-2001-world-of-warcraft-announced/1100-2810134/

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1902 -Georges Méliès’ film Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) debuted in France. It is often considered the first real science fiction film.

http://www.euronews.com/2011/08/31/back-in-the-day-the-dawn-of-science-fiction/

1994 – The United States Library of Congress held the first of several meetings to plan the conversion of its materials to digital form and make them accessible by computer networks.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/September/1/

1996 – Apple released its Pippin game console in the US. The idea was to provide an inexpensive game-focused computer. Apple licensed third parties like Bandai to make Pippin consoles.

http://web.archive.org/web/20100527212315/http://web.mac.com/sebangulo/Pippin/About_the_Pippin.html

2008 – Google launched its Web browser called Google Chrome.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.