This Day in Computer History: September 6

2008-09-05

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This Day in Computer History

1968

Jerry Elkind and Larry Robert complete their proposal for building the first Interface Message Processors (IMP) that will form the backbone of the earliest incarnation of the internet. The document, which they’ll eventually submit to DARPA, is a little over two hundred pages long. It proposes creating the series of IMPs from the Honeywell DDP-516 systems.

1985

Franklin Computer introduces its second generation Apple computer clones, the ACE 2000 series, featuring compatibility with Apple’s popular IIe and IIc computers. Price: US$700 - US$1,000.

1989

Approximately fourty-one thousand Paris citizens are shocked to receive letters charging them with serious crimes including drug trafficking, extortion, murder, prostitution, and vice. The mailings were intended to contain minor traffic violation notices, but the notices were allegedly misprinted due to a “computer error” in possibly the most notorious computer snafus of all time.

1996

Using a single computer, an anonymous attacker launches a denial of service (DoS) attack against New York-based Panix.com, the third oldest internet service provider (ISP) in the world. The attack sends thousands of session requests that force Panix’s machines to allocate so much processor capacity to handle the dialogs that they crash.

1997

In San Francisco, California, the United States Navy commissions a ship named the U.S.S. Grace Murray Hopper to honor the Rear Admiral who developed the first programming language compiler.

Netscape Communicator 4.03 is released.

1998

PC Data Services of the the United Kingdom releases the latest video game industry statistics at the annual European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) in London, England. According to the firm, Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) sold 83.8% of all game consoles in the United Kingdom (UK) in July, while the Nintendo sold 15.2%. Electronics Arts, which is responsible for 10.3% of all game revenues for the year-to-date in the UK is ranked as the number one video game publisher.

2000

Jed McCaleb releases the first version of the eDonkey2000 peer-to-peer file sharing client. It connects to both the eDonkey2000 network and the Overnet network. The application introduces a major improvement to the filesharing community, the “swarming download,” which is the ability to download pieces of a file from multiple peers. The feature effectively uses the full bandwidth of all of the peers sharing each file, vastly improving the speed of the client over the model used by Napster.

RSA Security Inc. releases its RSA algorithm for public-key cryptography to the public domain two weeks before it’s set to expire on September 20th. (U.S. No. 4,405,829) Relaxation of government restrictions earlier in the year removed the last barriers to global distribution of such systems.

Twenty-year old Patrick W. Gregory, better known as ”MostHateD,” pleads guilty to charges of hacking as a founding member of a hacking group “GlobalHell,” and he is sentenced to twenty-six months in prison, three years of supervised release, and $154,529.86 in restitution. GlobalHell allegedly caused over $1.5 million of damage to various U.S. corporations and government organizations. Gregory admits in a plea agreement to using telephone conferencing services from AT&T, Latitude Communications, and MCI and to holding conference calls between 1997 and 1999.

A U.S. District court orders MP3.com, Inc. to pay Universal Music Group up to $250 million in damages in reparations for the willful infringement of copyright. MP3.com is an internet service that permits the public to register their privately owned music in order to listen to it streamed over the internet anytime, anywhere without any additional authentication.

2001

The United States Department of Justice announces that it will no longer seek to break up Microsoft under federal anti-trust laws or to pursue charges over the company’s integration of Internet Explorer into Windows.

2002

Version 4.2.3 of the PHP programming language is released.

2006

Apple releases a slightly revised model of the Mac mini, featuring either a new 1.66 GHz Core Duo T2300 or a 1.83 GHz Core Duo T2400 processor, a 512MB DDR2 SDRAM, four USB 2.0 ports, and a FireWire 400 port.

2007

After cutting the price of the 4GB iPhone by a third following its discontinuation, Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs writes an open letter to iPhone customers who purchased an iPhone at the higher initial release price, promising them each a one hundred dollar credit redeemable at any Apple’s website of chain of retail stores.

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.