This Day in Geek History: October 6 1889 William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, the inventor of the motion picture camera and an employee of Thomas Edison, makes the first motion picture, in which he films himself saying “Good morning, Mr Edison. How do you like this?” The motion picture is the first “sound film.” The image of the film is only about one inch wide and three-quarters of an inch high. 1908 The Ohio Art company, later manufacturer of the Etch-A-Sketch, is founded by Henry Simon Winzeler. 1914 Edwin H. Armstrong is granted a patent for a “Wireless Receiving System,” in which he describes his regenerative circuit, otherwise known as a feed-back circuit. (US No. 1,113,149) 1927 Warner Brothers premieres The Jazz Singer, the first motion picture with sound, at the Warner Cinema on Broadway in New York. The film features both silent scenes and sound-synchronized scenes featuring Warner’s Vitaphone sound-on-disc system. Originally, Warner Brothers Studio planned to record only songs while telling the story in silent sequences. However, star Al Jolson ad-libbed dialogue in two scenes, including the iconic line, “Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!” Its release marks the end of the silent film era. 1941 Electric photography, which will later be called xerography, is patented by Chester Carlson. 1966 Star Trek The Enemy WithinThe Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within” is first airs. (No. 5) In it, a transporter mishap divides Captain Kirk into two versions of himself, one good and one evil, but neither is able to function separately for long. The episode marks the first use of the line, “He’s dead, Jim.” The phrase is coined by the episode’s author, Richard Matheson. 1967 The Star Trek episode “Mirror, Mirror” first airs. (No. 33) In it, a transporter malfunction sends Kirk, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura into a parallel universe where, in lieu of the Federation, a despotic Earth-centered galactic empire exists. 1983 Lotus Development, founded by Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs in 1982, goes public after recording revenues of US$12.8 million over the course of the previous twelve months. The company will become a break-out success when it releases the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet application. Lotus 1-2-3 takes the innovative step of bypassing the IBM PC operating system for improved responsiveness that will give it an edge over its competitors. 1987 Microsoft announces Windows 2.0 and Windows/386. Price: US$195 Microsoft announces its first application, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for Microsoft Windows 2.0. 1994 Version 1.1.52 of the Linux operating system is released. 1995 Didier Queloz and Michael Mayor announce the first discovery of a planet orbiting a star similar to the Sun, 51 Pegasi. The planet is about one hundred sixty times the mass of the Earth. 1996 Intel releases the 200Mhz version of the Pentium Processor. 1997 American biology professor Stanley B. Prusiner wins the Nobel Prize for medicine for discovering “Prions,” which he describes as “an entirely new genre of disease-causing agents.” Michael Dell suggests that Apple be shut down. Gil Amelio had been ousted and Apple is searching for its next CEO. Steve Jobs was asked to to fill the position, but many felt that Jobs wasn’t an appropriate choice, Dell among them. When he was asked at an industry conference what he thought Apple should do at the Gartner Group symposium, Dell replied, “What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.” Whether the response is a sincere educated opinion or competitive bravado isn’t clear. By Friday, January 13, 2006, Dell’s US$71.97 billion market cap is exceeded by Apple’s US$72.13 billion market cap, and Apple’s performance will continue to significantly surpass Dell’s. Earth: Final ConflictThe science fiction series Earth: Final Conflict premieres with the episode “Decision” in Canada and the U.S. The series was created by Gene Roddenberry, but it wasn’t put into production until after his death. In the episode, William Boone is offered a job working for the Taelons; he refuses at first, but after his wife dies in an automobile crash, he agrees. Boone is contacted by the Resistance. The series will run for one hundred ten episodes over five seasons. 1998 At the Sega New Challenge Conference in Tokyo, Sega debuts the Dreamcast video game system. Creative Labs lowers the price of the 12MB 3D Blaster Voodoo2, a graphics accelerator card, to US$199.99 minus a US$50 mail-in rebate. The 8MB version is repriced to US$109.99 minus a US$30 rebate. Intel announced the 450MHz version of its Pentium II Xeon processor, designed for use in dual-processor workstations and servers. Jeff Goldblum appears in two new thirty-second television commercials to promote Apple’s new iMac computers. The first of the spots airs during Home Improvement on ABC. Microsoft introduces its first telephone, the Microsoft Cordless Phone System, which uses computers to deliver customizable call management and message services. The 900MHz phone system is scheduled to be released in November 1998. Price: US$199.95 Microsoft releases Visual J++ 6.0 Java development software. Price: US$109 (Standard Edition) or US$549 (Professional Edition) The science fiction television series Seven Days premieres in the U.S. with the episode “Pilot, Part I” on the United Paramount Network (UPN) network. It will run for three seasons and a total of sixty-six episodes. The series follows a secret branch of the United States’ National Security Agency who have developed a time traveling device based upon alien technology found after the legendary crash at Roswell. The Chronosphere, or Backstep Sphere, sends one human being back in time seven days to avert disasters. The series will run for sixty-six episodes over three seasons. 1999 Barnes & Noble, Inc. reveals plans to acquire Texas-based Babbage’s Etc. for US$215 million. Babbage’s operates 495 stores under the names of Babbage’s, GameStop, and Software, Etc. Michael Vatis of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) tells the United States Congress that a series of raids launched against Defense Department computers have allegedly originated from Russia. Vatis is the director of the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) and leading an ongoing investigation code-named Moonlight Maze that involves pertinent U.S. agencies and international counterparts. Jon Lech Johansen, age 15, of Norway releases DeCSS, a program that decodes the content-scrambling system used to protect the copyright of DVD content in order to allow users to copy DVDs onto their computer hard drives. Read a technical overview of the CSS decryption algorithm. Visit Jon Johansen’s blog. The United States Justice Department reveals that it has spent a total of US$12.6 million in litigation expenses in its antitrust case against the Microsoft Corporation since 1989. Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Mexico. 2000 Sony releases the Vaio PictureBook laptop computer in Japan, the first with a Transmeta Crusoe processor. 2003 Andrew Garcia, age 38, a former employee of Viewsonic, guilty to one count of accessing a protected computer and recklessly causing damage. Garcia accessed Viewsonic’s computer system on April 14, 2002 and deleted critical files on one of the servers that he had maintained while he was employed by the company. The loss of these files rendered the server inoperative, and Viewsonic’s Taiwan office was unable to access important data for several days. He is sentenced to one year in prison. Charter Communications becomes the first cable internet provider to challenge the RIAA use of provision 512(h) of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act (OCILLA), which deals with identify infringers, when it files for a motion to quash the subpoenas filed by the RIAA to identify one hundred fifty of its customers. Although Charter Communications will initially lose this motion and turn over the identities of the requested customers, a later appeal will rule that the motion to quash should have been upheld. The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet has today decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine jointly to Paul C Lauterbur and Peter Mansfield for their discoveries concerning “magnetic resonance imaging.” 2004 At the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, California, the World Cyber Games 2004 Grand Final championship games are held, over five days. Thirty thousand spectators watch about seven hundred gamers in teams from fifty-nine countries compete. The Netherlands team wins the most points. The Korean team wins the most medals. Google launches Google Book Search, a service that searches the full text of books that Google scans, converts to text using optical character recognition, and stores in its digital database. Microsoft releases version 7 of the Virtual PC suite for Macintosh computers. The virtualization application emulates a Pentium processor environment to allow Windows applications and operating systems to run on Macs. Visit the official Virtual PC website. Price: US$249 bundled with Windows XP Professional 2005 The High Court of Australia rules that it is legal to install modification chips in a PlayStation 2 that allows the console to play imported and copied games. Sony Computer Entertainment originally filed a lawsuit against Sydney retailer Eddy Stevens in 2001 for selling unauthorized copies of games, and selling and installing modification chips for the PlayStation 2. In Japan, a small Internet firm is ordered to pay 237,700 yen (2,000 dollars) in fines to the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper for using its news headlines without permission, in the first ruling of its kind in the country. Symantec releases a security notice on the first virus known to target Sony’s PlayStation Portable, the “Trojan.PSPBrick”. The virus is disguised as a PSP-hacking tool, but in actuality, it delete key system files on the device, rendering it in operable. 2006 Google officially launched Google Print, which eventually split into the Google Publisher program, which will scan books with the consent of publishers, and the Google Library program, which scans books with the consent of libraries but not necessarily the consent of publishers. The beta was publicly introduced in December 2003. NASA releases close-up photos taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter of the planet Mars revealing clues to its oceanic past. 2007 Jason Lewis completes the first human-powered circumnavigation of the globe, having traveled 46,505 miles (74,842km). 2008 Complete Genomics announces that it will offer complete human gene sequencing for five thousand dollars in the coming spring, about one twentieth the current price. The company predicts that the sharp reduction in the price of its services will revolutionize genetic research. The MESSENGER spacecraft makes its second pass of the planet Mercury. View the photos taken by MESSENGER at The New York Times. The Supreme Court of the United States declines a patent appeal from Dish Network, forcing the company to pay TiVo US$104 million. 2009 The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announces that the Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered the largest undiscovered ring around the planet Saturn. The diffuse ring doesn’t reflect much light, but it is so large that it would take an estimated one billion Earths to fill it. Kraken, a supercomputer at The University of Tennessee, becomes the world’s first academic supercomputer to break the petascale barrier, performing more than one thousand trillion operations per second. The Cray XT5 is composed of nearly one hundred thousand computing cores. It feautres 129 terabytes of memory and can store the equivalent of over ten million phonebooks. 2011 Google announces that Google Earth has been downloaded one billion times. To celebrate, Google launches OneWorldManyStories, a website devoted to collecting stories from people worldwide about how they have used Google Earth “to follow their dreams, discover new and distant places, or make the world a better place.” Read the official announcement at Google’s LatLog.
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 22:17:36 +0000
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