This Day in Geek History: October 7 Happy Bday Tim Minchin ..You ROCK !!! 1520 The first public burning of books is held in Louvain, Netherlands. 1806 Ralph Wedgewood patents carbon paper, which he describes as an “apparatus for producing duplicates of writings” in London, England. 1826 The first railway in the United States opens in Quincy, Massachusetts. 1849 Author Edgar Allan Poe dies at 5:00am, four days after being found delirious in a Baltimore, Maryland gutter. 1868 Cornell University opens in Ithaca, New York. Four hundred twelve students enroll for its first term, a record among American universities. 1913 Once again, Henry Ford overcomes the resistance of many of his own stockholders with a revolutionary method of building automobiles. Ford, who for ten years has advocated manufacturing the greatest number of cars to sell at the lowest price, can now assemble one of his Model Ts at its Highland Park plant within three hours. Ford himself can build an entire car with his hands, but in his factory, automobiles are manufactured on an assembly line. One worker attached doors, another fenders, another the engine. Ford projects that his assembly line will turn out more than 250,000 Model T’s in the first year alone. 1931 Short-exposure infrared photography is first demonstrated by researchers at the Eastman Kodak company in Rochester, New York. The first short-exposure infrared photo taken is of a group of fifty Kodak engineers in a totally dark room flooded with invisible infrared light for the purpose. 1952 Bernard Silver and Joseph Woodland are granted the first patent for the bar code system. (US No. 2,612,994) The bar codes consist of a series of concentric rings that form a bull’s eye. Read the patent online. Raphael Robinson discovers the 664-digit Mersenne prime M2203, which can be expressed as 22,203 – 1, using the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC). The number will be the largest prime number discovered for almost two whole days, until Robinson’s unprecedented discovery of a fifth Mersenne prime in a single year. 1954 International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) demonstrates its first calculator to rely completely on transistors. The device consumes only five percent of the power of a comparable electronic calculator. Three years later, IBM will introduce the resulting consumer model, the IBM 608, which will be the world’s first all-transistor commercial calculator. Equipped with more than 3,000 germanium transistors, the 608 is capable of storing forty nine-digit numbers and performing 4,500 additions per second. It will ultimately prove too expensive to be a commercial success. However, its release will set off a number of changes across the industry, beginning with a dramatic reduction in the price of transistor, which, at the time of this demonstration, are markedly more expensive than vacuum tubes. 1958 The United States’ first manned space-flight program is renamed Project Mercury. 1959 U.S.S.R. probe Luna III transmits the first photographs ever taken of the far side of the Moon. Twenty-nine photographs are taken from a distance of 63,500km over a period of forty minutes, then developed onboard and transmitted back to Earth on October 18, 1959. The photographs cover approximately seventy percent of the surface of the far side of the Moon. The photographs are very noisy and of a relatively low resolution, but astronomers will identify numerous features from them. 1968 The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) publicly adopts its own self-regulating film ratings systems, consisting of four possible classifications: G (general), M (mature), R (restricted, no unaccompanied children) and X (over 16 only). All films released after November 1st will carry one of these ratings. The system was designed by Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA. A NATO conference is held October 7 – 11 at which the term “software engineering” will be coining in response to a growing perception that software programmers are not keeping abreast of computer hardware developments. 1971 Three product announcements are made by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM): the IBM 3410 magnetic tape subsystem; the IBM 2596 card read-punch; and extension of the 96-column punched card to the IBM System/360 and IBM System/370. 1974 The merger of the Philips and MCA disc systems is officially ratified by the two companies’ boards of directors. 1983 The Macintosh Introduction Plan, a list of popular developers and celebrities that will be invited to beta-test the Mac computer as a marketing ploy, is first compiled. 1992 Hewlett-Packard releases version 9.0 (S800) of the HP-UX operating system, a proprietary implementation of Unix. 1997 Sun Microsystems takes legal action against Microsoft for shipping Internet Explorer 4.0 with a non-standard implementation of the Java programming language. Sun files a breach of contract lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in San Jose, California. 1998 478 domains are hacked by a hacker using the handle “Cha0s”. 2001 Jeff Herrings, the active developer of the Renegade bulletin board system (BBS), announces that the development of the Renegade BBS has ceased and the popular application has officially been discontinued. 2002 At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Astronomers report the discovery of a dwarf planet candidate an estimated 800 miles across in orbit around the Sun in the Kuiper belt (beyond Pluto). It’s dubbed Quaoar, after a creation force in Southern California Indian mythology. Palm announces its first Zire handheld computer, featuring a 16MHz Motorola Dragonball EZ processor, 2MB RAM, 2MB ROM, the Palm OS 4.1, a 160×160 pixel monochrome 1.9-inch LCD screen, and a rechargeable battery. Price: US$99 Weight: 3.6oz 2003 Nokia NGageNokia releases the N-Gage handheld video game system worldwide. It features a 104MHz ARM processor, 64MB RAM, a 176×208 pixel 4096-color display, cell phone functions, wireless Bluetooth connectivity, USB port, XHTML web browser, MP3 audio player, email support, stereo FM radio, and instant messaging. Games are available on MultiMedia Cards. Price: US$300 Yahoo! acquires Overture Services, Inc. to provide Yahoo! Search Marketing products. 2006 Sony Pictures Home Entertainment announces the first film titles to be released on 50GB Blu-Ray format, including Click, due to be released October 10th, Black Hawk Down, on November 14th, and Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby on December 12th. 2007 Intel releases the 2333MHz Dual-Core Xeon 3065, featuring a 4,096KB Level-2 Cache and a 1,333MHz front-side bus. Price: US$163 MSNBC acquires the Newsvine community-powered news websit The Trend Micro website is hacked by a Turkish hacker using the web handle “Janizary” or “Utku”. 2008 Google launches Adsense for games. 2009 At Noon EDT, GeoEye-1, the world’s highest-resolution commercial satellite, captures its first image, a photograph of Kutztown University in Pennsylvania. The 4,300-pound satellite is sponsored by Google. Google begins allowing PDF documents returned in search results to be viewed with its Quick View option.
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 01:23:25 +0000
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