This Day in Computer History: December 27

This Day in Computer History

1988

Microsoft announced that CEO and President Jon Shirley would step down on June 30, 1990, though he would continue as a member of the company’s Board of Directors.

1995

France completes a round of nuclear weapon tests after President Jacques Chirac lifted France’s participation in an international moratorium on nuclear testing after publicly proclaiming that earlier tests had provided insufficient data to conduct meaningful computer simulations.

1998

PhpMyAdmin 1.3.1 was released. This version of PhpMyAdmin, the open source tool to administrate MySQL Internet, was the first to feature multi-lingual support.

Sun Microsystems discontinued support for both version 4.1.3 and 4.1.4 of its SunOS operating system.

Version 4.3 of the BSD-Quasijarus0 operating system was released.

1999

Microsoft’s market value reached a landmark value of six hundred million dollars.

Time magazine named e-commerce pioneer Jeff Bezos “Person of the Year” in an article entitled, “An eye on the future: Jeff Bezos merely wants Amazon.com to be Earth’s biggest seller of everything.”

2001

Job classified site HotJobs and search engine giant Yahoo! jointly announced an agreement under which Yahoo! would acquire virtually all (98.6%) of HotJobs stock for $436 million in cash and stock. (Specifically, .3045 shares of stock at $5.25 per share.) The resulting company would be known as Yahoo! HotJobs.

2002

Version 4.3.0 of the PHP programming language was released.

2004

America Online (AOL) reported that users of its network had experienced a noticeable reduction of spam over the course of the previous year, with the average number of daily spam e-mails dropping from 2.4 billion to 1.2 billion. In comparison, AOL reported receiving 11 million complaints in November 2003 and only 2.2 million in November 2004. The company attributed the reduction to new anti-spam legislation and improvements in its own spam filtering techniques.

The first IPv6 network backbone established in China (“CERNET 2”) goes live under the management of the China Education and Research Network (CERN). The network connected twenty-five universities in twenty separate cities at speeds of up to 10 Gbps.

2005

Pioneer Electronics introduced the BDR-101A, its first Blu-ray Disc Drive. The drive, which was capable of storing up to 25GB of data, would go on sale in the first quarter of 2006.

This post is part of the series: A Chronology of Computer History for the Month of December: 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: December 2
2. This Day in Computer History: December 3
3. This Day in Computer History: December 4
4. This Day in Computer History: December 5
5. This Day in Computer History: December 6
6. This Day in Computer History: December 7
7. This Day in Computer History: December 8
8. This Day in Computer History: December 9
9. This Day in Computer History: December 10
10. This Day in Computer History: December 11
11. This Day in Computer History: December 12
12. This Day in Computer History: December 14
13. This Day in Computer History: December 15
14. This Day in Computer History: December 16
15. This Day in Computer History: December 17
16. This Day in Computer History: December 20
17. This Day in Computer History: December 21
18. This Day in Computer History: December 23
19. This Day in Computer History: December 24
20. This Day in Computer History: December 25
21. This Day in Computer History: December 26
22. This Day in Computer History: December 27