This Day in Computer History: November 30

This Day in Computer History

1924

In a highly publicized public demonstration, photographs are transmitted via radio facsimile across the Atlantic Ocean for the first time. Once they are successfully received in New York, the photographs, which depict British officials and the Oxford track team winning a race at Cambridge, are published in the Herald Tribune. The demonstration is the first instance of long distance photo transmission without cables.

1959

The first two IBM 7090 mainframe computers, the model later used during the Mercury and Gemini space missions, are delivered to their customers. The transistorized mainframe system would become very popular in large-scale scientific research applications.

1964

IBM released the IBM 1800 data acquisition and control system, a computer capable of monitoring a manufacturing assembly line or analyzing an inbound missile in flight for military applications.

1965

The IBM Data Processing Division launches the world’s largest computer software library, the IBM Watson Research Center, in Hawthorne, New York.

1999

At the behest of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner began meeting with representatives of the Justice Department and Microsoft to mediate settlement negotiations in the pending antitrust trial following Jackson’s finding that Microsoft was, in fact, a monopoly.

Microsoft released Service Pack 6a for its Windows NT 4.0 operating system.

2004

The Fortran 2003 programming language was released.

A new record is set for the speed of data transmission over an optical network by the High Energy Physics team, which achieved a sustained speed of 101 GB/s over a line between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Los Angeles, California. The speed is enough to transmit one hundred eighty DVD discs each minute.

Version 2.4 of the Python programming language was released.

Version 5.8.6 of the Perl programming language was released.

2005

d0c released Rufus 0.7.0, the only bittorrent client for Windows to be written entirely in Python.

2006

Advanced Micro Devices released three new versions of its Athlon 64 processor in 2600, 2800, and 3000 MHz clock speeds. Each featured two 1,024 KB Level-2 caches.

Microsoft launched Windows Vista to volume license customers. The release came two years after initially promised and, for all of its delay, users still reported that it was riddled with bugs. The operating system would be released to consumers two months later.

2007

Computer manufacturer Dell reported that it had shipped 40,000 computers with Ubuntu pre-installed since it had first begun offering them May 24, 2007.

E-commerce giant Amazon.com launched the Askville.com service, where users can pose questions to other users. The service, which was similar to AnswerBank or the popular Yahoo Answers sites, had been launched for beta-testing in December 2006.

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