This Day in Computer History: September 21

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This Day in Computer History

1784

America’s first daily newspaper, The Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser was first published. The paper will be the continent’s first daily news source.

1972

Semiconductor developer Texas Instruments released its first three calculators, the TI-2500, the TI-3000, and the TI-3500. The TI-2500 (the “Datamath”), which is a four-function, full-floating decimal point system with an eight-digit LED display, would become a break-out success. They were the first patented calculators to be released. Price: $119.95 (TI-2500), $85 (TI-3000), $100 (TI-3500)

1994

Microsoft released version 3.5 of its Windows NT operating system in two editions: Server and Workstation. Version 3.5 was specifically optimized for speed, which is why it was codenamed “Daytona,” in reference to the Daytona International Speedway.

1996

The New York Times reveals that the December 1995 crash of American Airlines Flight 965 in Colombia may have been the result of a programming error. Pilots of the plane evidently selected the first beacon option on the plane’s autopilot system to guide the plane to its landing site without manually checking that the option given was the correct destination. As a result, the plane ended up one hundred miles off of its intended course, and it subsequently crashed in a disaster that resulted in 159 deaths.

1998

Apple Computer released version 5 of the AppleWorks office suite. Price: $99 / $79 (upgrade)

1999

A 7.6 magnitude earthquake rocks Taiwan, bringing manufacturing facilities in the region to a grinding halt. Due to the high number of computer components manufactured there, electronics manufacturers around the globe are faced with shortages and chip prices rise sharply as a result.

HydraBBS 1.12 was released.

2000

Federal prosecutors announced that Jason Diekman, age 20, was charged with hacking into the NASA systems at Stanford University and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Diekman was also charged with the theft of over 500 credit card numbers and using them to make more than six thousand dollars of purchases.

The Phage virus was first discovered by security researchers at F-Secure and McAfee.com. Phage is one of the first major viruses to target the Palm OS.

2006

Opera Software released version 9.02 of its Opera Internet Suite.

2007

The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announced that the day prior, it had filed the first copyright infringement lawsuit in U.S. history to be based on a violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The suit, filed on behalf of two principal developers of the BusyBox, Erik Andersen and Rob Landley, alleges that Monsoon Multimedia failed to provide recipients of its firmware with access to its underlying source code as stipulated in the GPL governing BusyBox, which the company implements in its firmware. BusyBox is an application that provides a set of Unix tools popular among Linux distributions.

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.