This Day in Computer History: November 28

This Day in Computer History: November 28
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This Day in Computer History

1954

Herbert Bright, the developer of one of the earliest FORTRAN applications and creator of the first error message, died at the age of 67. Bright, who had been a research engineer at AT&T Laboratories, was an outspoken proponent of the use of data encryption for security.

1980

Texas Instruments, Inc. reduced the price of its TI-99/4 home computer to $650 from $950 in an attempt to remain competitive.

1983

At the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas, Nevada, Radio Shack introduced the Tandy TRS-80 Model 2000 computer. The system featured an 8 MHz Intel 80186 processor, an optional 10 MB hard drive, 128 KB RAM (expandable to 256 KB), an optional graphics card, either one or two 720 KB disk drives, and MS-DOS 2.0.

1984

The EXEC-PC bulletin board systems (BBS) is launched. At 2 A.M., the board took its first call on its only phone line. By the mid-nineties, the board would become one of the largest and most popular in North America with as many as two hundred and fifty phone lines and a then-staggering three hundred gigabytes of data storage.

2006

Opera released version 3.0 of its Opera Mini web browser for mobile phones with features to enable blogger and social networkers easy access to popular Web 2.0 web services, such as Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, and Wikipedia.

Wal-mart began testing a service through which its customers could download films directly to portable devices for $1.97, to a computer for $2.97, or for both for $3.97. The first film released through the service was “Superman Returns.”

Xandros Incorporated released version 4.1 of the Xandros operating system, a Linux distribution well known for its focus on business users.

2007

Senior security consultant Nick Breese of the Auckland, New Zealand-based site security-assessment.com, invents a method of cracking passwords by using a PlayStation 3 console to implement common ciphers and hash functions using vector computing. The project, which Breese dubbed the “CrackStation,” uses the console’s six Synergistic Processing Unit to perform twenty-four calculations simultaneously at a rate of 1.4 billion calculations a second, a dramatic increase over the 10 - 15 million calculations per second of then-current Intel-based architecture. Breese made the discovery while seeking a way to optimize MD5 (Message-Digest algorithm 5) processing. The announcement of the innovation raised serious concerns over the validity of some encryption algorithms.

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.

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