This Day in Computer History: September 15

Quick Take

Today marks the anniversary of the release of the film Hackers and the registration of the Google domain name. Read about these events and more in “This Day in Computer History”, a chronology of notable events in the computer, ecommerce, and software industries on this day in history.

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This Day in Computer History

1928

The first British-built robot was demonstrated by A.H. Renfell and Captain Rickards at the Model Engineering Exhibition in London, England.

1947

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) was founded to organize conferences and educational workshops on technology.

1975

Micro-Soft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen as high schoolers. Together, they wrote software for MITS Altair 8800 computer systems. It will officially be registered as Microsoft in November 1976.

1986

Apple Computer introduced the Apple IIGS (“GS” for Graphics and Sound) computer in 1 MHz and 2.8 MHz models, as a successor to the Apple II. Price: $1,000 - $1,900

1995

Apple Computer recalled its PowerBook 5300 portable computer after two machines burst into flames over the course of the past week because of malfunctioning lithium ion batteries. Apple replaced them with a cooler nickel metal hydride battery. The trade-off is that the new batteries didn’t hold a charge as long.

The Intel Corporation announced the construction of a new one hundred million dollar manufacturing complex in Du Pont, Washington. The ground breaking ceremony for the new facility is scheduled for October 31.

The film Hackers, directed by Iain Softley and starring Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie, is released to U.S. theaters. In it, a young hacking prodigy uncovers a plot to frame him. He must race to prevent a dangerous virus from being released while being pursued by the U.S. Secret Service. The film will be widely heckled, especially by actually programmers, for its campy portrayal of hacker culture and its wildly inaccurate representation of computing technology. MPAA Rating: PG-13 Running Time: 1 hr 47 mins

1997

Apple Computer introduced a number of Power Macintosh 6500 systems with processors ranging in speed from 275 - 300 MHz PowerPC processors.

Google registered the Internet domain Google.com eight days after its incorporation.

1998

Following the completion of the record merger of MCI Communications and WorldCom, MCI WorldCom opens for business. Five years later, the company declared bankruptcy.

1999

Microsoft announced the $1.3 billion acquisition of the Visio Corporation, a developer of engineering applications.

2003

VeriSign implemented a wildcard service for the .com and .net top level domains (TLDs), which redirect invalid domains to a Verisign error page. ICANN will eventually order VeriSign to discontinue the unauthorized service, and Verisign complied on October 4.

2004

Desktop Light Linux (DeLi Linux) 0.7 was released. The DeLi distribution was optimized for older systems. It requires only a 386 processor, 8 MB RAM, and 400MB of hard disk space.

2006

The Game Technology Group of Sun Microsystems released the Java OpenGL (JOGL) wrapper library 1.0. It makes C programming language functions to the Java programming language through OpenGL.

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.

This Day in Computer History: September 15

This Day in Computer History

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

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