Search Results for "september 9"

1998 – Microsoft’s Internet Explorer passed Netscape Navigator as the Web browser with the greatest market share, according to a report from the International Data Corporation.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/09/0928ie-beats-netscape/

2008 – SpaceX launched the Falcon 1, the first ever private spacecraft to enter orbit.

http://www.spacex.com/press/2012/12/19/spacex-successfully-launches-falcon-1-orbit

2011 – Amazon shook up the tablet market, announcing the the Amazon Kindle Fire 7-inch tablet for $199.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/28/technology/amazon_tablet/index.htm

2015 – NASA announced definitive signs of liquid water on Mars had been found near the equator. Dr. Alfred S. McEwen and other scientists published a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, describing the direct identification of water in the the form of hydration salts.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-evidence-that-liquid-water-flows-on-today-s-mars

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

1922 – Scientists at the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory near Washington, DC, report on experiments with short wave radio that show if a ship passed through a radio wave broadcast between two stations, that ship could be detected. It was a development on the road to radar.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/classic/world-war-i-flight-timeline7.htm

1983 – Richard Stallman announced the GNU project which aimed at the time to develop a free Unix-like operating system.

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html

1996 – Kevin Mitnick was indicted on charges he broke into the systems of major software companies, then transferred stolen material to computers at USC via the Internet. Seems prosaic today, but was unheard of at the time.

http://articles.latimes.com/1996-09-27/local/me-47980_1_computer-hacker

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

1956 – The first submarine transatlantic telephone cable system, TAT-1 was inaugurated, replacing slow telegraph and unreliable radio systems.

http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Milestones:The_First_Submarine_Transatlantic_Telephone_Cable_System_(TAT-1),_1956

2001 – Apple announced the release of Mac OS X 10.1 Puma, the first major upgrade to OS X.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/09/25First-Major-Upgrade-to-Mac-OS-X-Hits-Stores-This-Weekend.html

2012 – Blizzard launched its 4th World of Warcraft expansion, called Mists of Pandaria.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/07/25/mists-of-pandaria-releases-september-25/

2013 – Amazon announced the Kindle HDX tablets with a service called “Mayday” that promised to let users speak with a real person by video over the Internet within 15 seconds of tapping a button.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/25/4767996/amazon-mayday-virtual-genius-bar-kindle-fire-hdx-remote-support

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

1979 – CompuServe began offering a consumer version of its dial-up online information service called MicroNET. The name would later be changed to CompuServe and offer public email among other online services.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/happy-30th-birthday-compuserve/24853

1993 – Broderbund Software released the game Myst, for the Macintosh computer. It became a record-setting bestseller and helped popularize CD-ROM drives.

https://www.giantbomb.com/myst/3030-3970/

1997 – Ultima Online launched, revolutionizing online gaming by supporting thousands of simultaneous players in a persistent shared world.

http://www.uo.com/article/Press-Around-Anniversary

2013 – Valve announced their new Steam OS, a free version of Linux built around the Steam video game service.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/23/4762370/steam-box-os

2014 – The shellshock vulnerability was made public. The way bash handled variables could allow malicious code to be run on computers running Linux and OS X. This meant routers, webcams and other connected devices were also vulnerable.

http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/09/bash-bug-as-big-as-heartbleed.html#.VCRaXildXA4

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

1889 – Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in Kyoto, Japan, to manufacture hanafuda, Japanese playing cards. Mario came much later.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/09/0923nintendo-founded/

1999 – NASA lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. It began orbit normally, but after it went behind the planet and out of range, it never made contact again. It was later determined that the approach attitude was wrong because software put out imperial units instead of metric units.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mco990923.html

1999 – Two years after its founding, Netflix launched its subscription DVD rental service which proved much more popular than renting DVDs individually by mail.

http://archive.fortune.com/2009/01/27/news/newsmakers/hastings_netflix.fortune/index.htm

2002 – Mozilla Phoenix 0.1 was released. It was the first public version of the web browser, that would become Mozilla Firefox.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/History:Timelines

2008 – The T-Mobile G1 launched, the first phone to use Google’s Android OS, as it began it’s competition against the barely year-old iPhone.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409863,00.asp

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

1791 – Michael Faraday was born in south London. He grew up to discover electromagnetic induction and coined the terms ‘electrode’, ‘cathode’ and ‘ion.’ He also lent his name to the Faraday cage.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/faraday_michael.shtml

1986 – In NEC Corp. Vs. Intel Corp., the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that microprograms are copyrightable literary works. And so all the trouble began.

http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v03/03HarvJLTech209.pdf

2011 – Facebook announced its new Timeline feature which would collect all your posts and materials in chronological order, replacing the old profile.

https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150289612087131

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

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.

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.

1890 – Louis Le Prince boarded a train to Paris at Dijon station. Neither he nor his bags ever arrived and his disappearance was never solved. In 1888 he had patented a system for taking 16 pictures a second and playing them back as a moving picture.

https://web.archive.org/web/19991128020048/http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/local_heroes/biogs/biogleprince.shtml

1959 – The first successful photocopier, the Xerox 914, was introduced at the Sherry-Netherland hotel in New York City. One of them caught fire. The demo that was carried live on television did not catch fire.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZYurhbUh_2gC&pg=PA61&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false

1985 – Steve Jobs spent his last day as an employee of Apple after submitting his resignation to the board.

http://gizmodo.com/5639822/25-years-ago-today-steve-jobs-left-apple

1997 – After purchasing NeXT the previous December, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company, the Apple Board named Jobs as interim CEO, replacing Gil Amelio.

http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/16/today-in-history-steve-jobs-returns-to-apple/

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