This Day in Computer History: November 26

Pipedreamergrey
Categories : Hardware ,Computing
Tags : Computing hardware topics hardware news

Page content

This Day in Computer History

1887

Thomas Edison applied for a patent for an improved motor-driven phonograph that played wax-coated cylinders (US No. 386,974). The device was among the earliest, if not the first, electrical media player.

1894

Norbert Wiener, who would one day become the father of cybernetics, was born.

1976

Just weeks before dropping out of Harvard University, Bill Gates registers the trade name Microsoft with the Secretary of the State of New Mexico, where Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), manufacturer of the Altair 8800 and Microsoft’s first major client, was located. The name Microsoft was coined by Bill Gates in a letter he wrote to Paul Allen a year prior, on November 29, 1975.

1995

Version 1.1 of the NetBSD operating system was released.

1997

PGP, Inc. published version 5.5.3 of the Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption application for personal computers in the U.S. It was the first version not to be backward-compatible with PGP 2.6x or below, but it offered significant technological advances. Following its release, the software would be illegally exported in a high-profile incident that would raise questions about the impact of privately-developed encyption on nation security.

2000

The website of Associacao Educacional Sao Jose in Brazil became the latest victim of the hacking group “crime boys”, which had made itself notorious with a long line of high-profile hacks in late 1999 and early 2000.

2001

Intel announced the development of a new transistor with a structure constructed of revolutionary materials that promised significant leaps forward in future transistor speeds. The technology represents an important link in the chain of advancements that have kept the industry in step in that it address issues regarding heat and efficiency that had only recently been recognized as barriers to Moore’s Law. The new TeraHertz transistor would not only make whole new fields of computing possible, such as facial recognition, it would also greatly extend battery life. Intel forecasted that it would begin incorporating the new structure into production lines as soon as 2005.

Two ex-Cisco System employees, Geoffrey Osowski and Wilson Tang, are sentenced to thirty-four months in prison for gaining unauthorized access to company computers for the purpose of issuing themselves nearly eight million dollars worth of stock after pleading guilty to one count of computer fraud.

2003

Henry Jensen released the fourth version of the Desktop Light Linux (DeLi Linux) operating system, version 0.4. DeLi is a Linux distribution that was especially designed for older systems.

This post is part of the series: A Chronology of Computer History for the Month of November: 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.