This Day in Geek History: April 7 Happy Bday Jackie Chan …A Fine chop socky Legend !!! 1795 The Academy of Sciences in France adopts the metre as the base unit of the metric system. There wasn’t any uniformity in French measurements prior to the Revolution. Delambre and Méchain measured an arc of the meridian from Dunkirk to Barcelona, in order to define the metre as one ten-millionth the distance between the poles and the equator. 1827 MatchEnglish pharmacist John Walker sell the first friction matches, which he invented the previous year while trying to produce a readily combustible material for fowling-pieces. The first match he created was the wooden stirring stick used in a mixture of potash and antimony. In an attempt to remove a dollop of the mixture on the end of the stick, he scraped it on the stone floor, and it ignited. However, he won’t ever patent the invention, and he’ll never produce more matches than he can sell in his pharmacy. 1917 The U.S. government cancels all amateur wireless transmission licenses, the day after declaring war on Germany and entering the first World War. 1924 The first flight (with stops) to successfully fly completely around the world takes off. 1956 Capitol Tower, the headquarters of Capitol Records in Hollywood, California, is dedicated. The building, designed to resemble a stack of records, is the first circular office tower in the U.S. It’s thirteen stories tall and ninety-two feet in diameter. At night, a light at the tip of the tower blinks the letters “H-O-L-L-Y-W-O-O-D” in Morse Code. 1959 The first atomic generated electricity is produced at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory in New Mexico. The experimental model uses a “plasma thermocouple” in the reactor rather than a full scale turbine, but it only produces enough electrical power for a light bulb. A radar signal is bounced off the Sun for the first time from Stanford, California. 1964 The IBM/360International Business Machines (IBM) launches the System 360 mainframe architecture in a line of six mutually compatible models, complete with forty peripherals. The line, dubbed the “360″ because it addresses all types and sizes of customer, cost IBM over five billion dollars to develop, and it will come to be widely considered one of the riskiest business gambles of all time. However, the gamble will pay off in a big way. The 360 family will become the most successful IBM system of all time, generating in over US$100 billion in revenue through the mid-eighties. Over 1,100 orders will be received inside a month. In just three months, IBM will receive US$1.2 billion in orders. Within five years, over thirty-three thousand units will be sold, popularizing the concept of a computer “upgrade” around the world. The 360 architecture introduces a number of industry standards to the marketplace, including the 8-bit byte, and it will become the basis for all sequent IBM mainframe architectures, which will gain a 65% marketshare by the nineties. The line’s popularity will largely stem from its components’ unprecedented interoperability. Over five models and 150 peripherals will be developed, allowing customers to add or remove computing capacity without losing their initial software investment. Never before had such interoperability been available. Prior to the System 360, incompatibilities had been a serious impediment to commercial computing. Every time a computer system had to be upgraded, expanded, or otherwise altered, a company would have to begin again with an entire new system. The popularity and affordability of the 360 line will be credited with leading financial industries, such as banking and insurance firms, to adopt the use of mainframes. Panama withdraws the registration of the infamous pirate radio station, the Radio Caroline ship, in accordance with international radio regulations. The subsequent closing of Radio Caroline marks the end of an era. 1969 Steve Crocker, a graduate student at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) publishes the first Request for Comments (RFC 0001) document, entitled “Host Software.” Crocker coined the term RFC to avoid sounding too self-righteous. He hoped to create an environment in which everyone felt comfortable participating. The first post outlines the interface between hosts and BNN’s Interface Message Processor, proposing that each site should be responsible for host software to connect their computers to the ARPANET’s IMPs. The post will become the first in a long series of technical postings which will be used to develop and define protocols for networking that the ARPANET will be built upon. Before long, thousands of RFC’s will be in circulation. This first RFC arguably marks the symbolic birth of the Internet. Read RFC 1. 1975 The first edition of Computer Notes, the Altair newsletter, premieres as a newsletter with the banner headline, “Altair BASIC – Up and Running” for Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) Altair 8800 users. Read the issue in the Computer Notes archive at the Startup Gallery. 1982 According to Twin Galaxies, Rijanto Joesoeff, age 22, scores a record-setting 4,421,232 points playing the Atari arcade game Centipede after playing the game for eight hours at the Captain Video arcade in Los Angeles, California 1983 According to Twin Galaxies, Robbie Saunders scores a record-setting 35,057,100 points playing the Williams Electronics arcade game Joust at the Outer Limits arcade in Durham, North Carolina. Space Shuttle Challenger astronauts Story Musgrave and Don Peterson perform the first spacewalk from a Space Shuttle. (STS-6) It lasts four hours, ten minutes. The first Internet /UUCP e-mail is sent from Jim McKie in Amsterdam to Björn Eriksen in Stockholm, Sweden. Björn’s employer, the UNIX consulting company Enea becomes the Swedish landing point for the European Unix network (Eunet). 1984 NASA launches the Space Shuttle Challenger on its eleventh mission. (STS-41-C) The mission marks the first time history eleven people have been in space at the same time. Seventy-four days after the introduction of the Macintosh, fifty-thousand units have been sold. 1997 Apple Computer begins shipping the Mac OS 7.6.1 operating system. Microsoft announces plans to acquire WebTV Networks for US$425 million. The United States Justice Department launches a review of the merger. NEC Electronics unveils the 66MHz 64-bit VR4102 processor for Windows CE devices. It features 4KB instruction cache, 1KB data cache, modem emulation, advanced power management, support for many peripherals. Shipments begin in July. Price: US$25 in 10,000-unit quantities Voodoo3 30001999 A forged webpage made to look like a Bloomberg financial news story raises shares of a small technology company by thirty-one percent in a fraud scheme that makes national headlines. Hayes Microcomputer sells its assets to Zoom Telephonics. Founded in 1978, Hayes was the first company to manufacture personal computer modems. Voodoo3 2000 and 3000 graphics boards for personal computers become available at retail. The boards are the first to carry the 3dfx brand name. Price: US$129.99 and US$179.99 2001 Lindsey Gall, a freshman at the University of Illinois and a resident of a suburb of Chicago, wins the grand prize at Sega’s Dreamcast Championships held in San Francisco, California. Her prize is a trip to Jamaica and fifteen thousand dollars. Gall’s performance concluded an eight-month long nationwide Mobile Assault Tour. The 2001 Mars OdysseyThe US$297 million Mars Odyssey is launched on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Odyssey will travel 286 million miles before entering orbit around the planet Mars on October 24, 2001. The probe’s primary mission is to search for traces of hydrogen in the form of ice under the Martian surface and to thermally map the planet from an altitude of 250 miles in the hope of finding evidence that the planet might once have supported life. It bears the name Odyssey in honor of the iconic science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Visit the official Mars Odyssey website. 2005 Japanese electronics manufacturer Sony announces that it has patented the idea of transmitting data directly into the brain. A report released The International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) announces that one in four-of the 625 primate species and subspecies are at risk of extinction. 2006 Lara Croft is entered into the Guinness Book of World Records as the “Most Successful Human Video Game Heroine.” The NASA space probe New Horizons crosses into the orbit of Mars at the end of its seventy-eight day journey, setting a new Earth-to-Mars distance flight record. 2007 Hungarian American software developer Charles Simonyi becomes the fifth space tourist in history when he is launched aboard the Soyuz TMA-10 on a mission to the International Space Station (ISS). 2009 Australia announces a plan to build a US$30 billion (AU43 billion) national broadband network, the single largest infrastructure project in the nation’s history. However, rather then contracting the network’s construction, the plan calls for the government to retain control of the project, paving the way for a national data infrastructure. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd explained during the announcement that, “Just as railway tracks laid out the future of the 19th century and electricity grids the future of the 20th century, so broadband represents the core infrastructure of the 21st century,” the prime minister said. “Slow broadband is holding our national economy back. … Slow broadband is holding our national economy back.” He estimates that the project will provide ninety percent of Australian homes with a connection of 12 megabits per second.
Posted on: Sun, 06 Apr 2014 20:56:39 +0000