This Day in Computer History: September 5

2008-09-05

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This Day in Computer History

1977

NASA launches the Voyager 1 space probe on a mission to explore outside our solar system. It will soon become the most distant computer from Earth.

1980

The last IBM 7030 STRETCH mainframe still being actively used is decommissioned at Brigham Young University in Utah. The system was the fastest computer in the world between 1961 to 1964.

1983

Neal Patrick of the hacking group The 414s is featured on the cover of Newsweek as part of a story entitled “Beware: Hackers at Play.” The issue marks the popularization of the term “hacker” and the first use of the word by the mainstream media in the pejorative sense. Patrick is responsible (and will continue to be responsible) for a number of hacks in the early eighties, including one break-in at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, that made national headlines.

1985

Computer manufacturer Gateway 2000 is founded by Ted Waitt and Mike Hammond in Siox City, Iowa. It will become the first successful direct sales computer companies by imitating Dell’s business model.

1996

Gordon Lyon, better known as “Fyodor,” releases a modified version of the Nmap security scanner (version 1.25) that was released as printed code in the September first Phrack magazine. It is released as a 28KB tarball to satisfy reader demand.

2000

Compaq Computer discontinues its ProSignia line of personal computers, expanding the DeskPro and Armada lines of economy-priced systems in its stead.

Raymond Torricelli, better known by the handle ”Rolex,” of New Rochelle, New York is sentenced to four months’ prison for hacking into NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory back in 1998 to host Internet chat rooms devoted to hacking. In addition to charges of unauthorized use of a government computer, authorities discover over seventy-six thousand stolen passwords on Torricelli’s computer. The twenty-one year old is one of the principal members of the hacking group “#conflict”, which made headlines for electronically altering the results of the annual MTV Movie Awards.

Version 1.6 of the Python programming language is released.

2003

Dan Diobanu, age 24, of Romania is arrested for creating and releasing the Blaster-F worm. According to Romanian antivirus vendor BitDefender, Diobanu imitated Jeffrey Lee Parson, the creator of the Blaster.B worm, by inserting his nickname and other personal information in the worm’s code prior to its being released, making it easy to track back to its creator.

THINKFilm releases the documentary Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine, directed by Vikram Jayanti. It takes an in-depth look at the 1997 chess match between World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, the highest rated chess player in world history, and Deep Blue, the chess-playing computer IBM designed specifically to beat him, which defeated him. Specifically, the film places a heavy emphasis on suspicions that IBM used a human player to bolster the computer’s strategic strength during the course of several games. Running Time: 1 hr 27 mins.

2004

Bill Zeller releases myTunes Redux, an iTune client that allows users to download music rather than just streaming it. It overcomes restrictions released as part of iTunes 4.5 that rendered the original myTunes release inoperative and adds several new features, such as the ability to search for cover art, the ability to search all music on the network simultaneously, and new keyboard shortcuts.

2006

Iron Python 1.0, an implementation of the Python programming language written entirely in C# and intended for Mono and .NET development is released as a part of Microsoft’s Shared Source initiative.

Microsoft releases the beta version of the Microsoft Expression WYSIWYG HTML editor as part of the Expression Studio suite, which was designed to replace FrontPage. Expression Web is designed to meet the needs of web design professionals. It supports ASP.NET 2.0, CSS 2.1, JavaScript, XHTML, XML, XSLT and requires the .NET Framework 2.0 to operate. Code-name: Quartz

Roxio releases version 9.0 of the Easy Media Creator disc authoring application for Windows.

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

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