December 18
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1926
In a letter published in the journal Nature, American chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis coins the term photon. In the letter, he writes that it would seem inappropriate to speak of one of these hypothetical entities as a particle of light, a corpuscle of light, a light quantum, or a light quant, if we are to assume that it spends only a minute fraction of its existence as a carrier of radiant energy, while the rest of the time it remains as an important structural element within the atom. It would also cause confusion to call it merely a quantum, for later it will be necessary to distinguish between the numb er of these entities present in an atom and the so-called quantum number. I therefore [propose for this] which is not light but plays an essential part in every process of radiation, the name photon.
1958
The world’s first communications satellite, SCORE (Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment), is launched aboard an Atlas B missile, and it will shortly thereafter record a Christmas message to the world from President Eisenhower to be transmitted the next day.
1991
IBM and Siemens AG announce that they have developed a prototype 64MB DRAM chip. The development is in line with Moore’s Law which predicts a doubling of the number of transistors etched into silicon every eighteen months.
1997
HTML 4.0 is published by the World Wide Web Consortium.
The Swedish website NetTime is hacked and defaced by hyperon.
2000
The Australian government endorses the transfer of authority for the .au domain to the au Domain Administration (auDA). ICANN will relinquish control over the domain to auDA on October 26, 2001.
2003
Daniel Jeremy Baas, age 25, of Milford, Ohio pleads guilty in United States District Court to hacking into a protected computer and stealing customer databases at Acxiom, a company in Little Rock, Arkansas that manages customer information for credit card issuers, banks, automotive manufacturers, retailers and others. The total cost to Acxiom incurred by Baas’s intrusion and theft of data is more than US$5.8 million.
Linux kernel 2.6 is released. 2006 Opera releases Version 9.1 of the Opera Web Browser
2007
Dan Hesse takes over as CEO of Sprint
Version 5.10.0 of the Perl programming language is released.
2008
OpenSocial 0.9 is released
Microsoft announces they will be opening up the program Active Sync for developers to build more on that platform
EZ4Media sues Apple because employees were hired away that had confidential knowledge of technology in the AppleTV.
2009
Paris court orders Google to pay $430,000 to pay copyright infringement. French publisher La Martiniere sued for Google publishing extracts of their books.
