This Day in Computer History: October 16

Computer Hardware, Computing
This Day in Computer History: October 16
Page content

This Day in Computer History

1956

The first high-level programming language, FORTRAN, was released by an IBM team lead by John W. Backus.

1989

The WANK computer worm attacked SPAN VAX/VMS computers through DECnet protocols, not traditional TCP/IP, leaving a political message in its wake that consisted of its full name and one of sixty randomized messages, such as “vote anarchist.” The worm also appeared to delete files, although it never actually altered any. Therefore, it was largely unharmful. In design, it was very similar to the previous year’s HI.COM worm. Some now believe that WANK was the first global virus to have been created by Australian hackers, though no one person or group was ever definitively blamed for the incident. WANK is an acronym for “Worms Against Nuclear Killers.”

1996

Microsoft released Service Pack 1 for its Windows NT 4.0 operating system.

1997

The Web Copyright Act was signed into law by U.S. President Bill Clinton. The act, which was designed to address piracy, made the infringement of intellectual property with a total value of over one thousand dollars punishable of penalties between one hundred thousand and a quarter of a million dollars, and infringement of intellectual property with a total value of over twenty-five hundred dollars punishable by penalties of up to three years in prison, even if the distributor didn’t profit from the violations. A second violation of the act could result in six years in prison.

1998

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. files a lawsuit against Amazon.com alleging that the popular ecommerce bookseller had integrated the chain store’s proprietary inventory tracking technology.

2000

Python programming language

Guido van Rossum released version 2.0 of the Python programming language.

2001

Apple Computer released a minor update on the iBook G3 Dual USB, the Late 2001 model, featuring a 600 MHz PowerPC G3 processor, a 256KB Level-2 cache, 64 or 128 MB RAM, a 15 GB Hard Disk, and version 10.1 of the Mac OS.

Yahoo! launched Yahoo! Warehouse.

2002

Microsoft grudgingly admits to having been hacked. An anonymous group of hackers breached the servers that hosted Microsoft’s Windows beta community, opening access to software under active development to an estimated twenty-thousand Windows users.

2003

Apple Computer released a much-awaited version of its iTunes music service for Windows.

2006

The KSpread Team released version 1.6 of the free spreadsheet application KSpread.

2007

Live Free or Die Hard

20th Century Fox announced that the release of its film “Live Free or Die Hard” will include a complete electronic copy of the film with each DVD. The electronic copy would be playable on computers and a variety of video players. The release would be an industry first.

This post is part of the series: A Chronology of Computer History for the Month of October: This Day in Computer History

This series provides a daily account of what happened on this day in the history of computing and technology. It discusses developments, breaking news, new releases and global implications that occurred as a result of these ground breaking events.

  1. This Day in Computer History: October 4
  2. This Day in Computer History: October 5
  3. This Day in Computer History: October 6
  4. This Day in Computer History: October 7
  5. This Day in Computer History: October 8
  6. This Day in Computer History: October 9
  7. This Day in Computer History: October 10
  8. This Day in Computer History: October 11
  9. This Day in Computer History: October 12
  10. This Day in Computer History: October 13
  11. This Day in Computer History: October 14
  12. This Day in Computer History: October 15
  13. This Day in Computer History: October 16
  14. This Day in Computer History: October 17
  15. This Day in Computer History: October 18
  16. This Day in Computer History: October 19
  17. This Day in Computer History: October 20
  18. This Day in Computer History: October 21
  19. This Day in Computer History: October 22
  20. This Day in Computer History: October 23
  21. This Day in Computer History: October 24
  22. This Day in Computer History: October 25
  23. This Day in Computer History: October 26
  24. This Day in Computer History: October 27
  25. This Day in Computer History: October 28
  26. This Day in Computer History: October 29
  27. This Day in Computer History: October 30
  28. This Day in Computer History: October 31