December 4
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1974
Jack St. Clair Kilby of Texas Instruments presents the world’s first miniature electronic calculator to the Smithsonian Institution for their collection.
1978
The IBM Data Processing Division (DPD) division reports the doubling of the information storage capacity of the IBM 3033 processor to sixteen million characters of storage.
1985
"The Cray X-MP/48 supercomputer goes into operation at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, a research unit of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). The X-MP is the first parallel vector processor produced by Cray Research, and it was popular for generating computer graphics, particularly for creating special effects for films. The processors deliver a maximum of 200 megaflops per processor for a a total of 400 megaflops. Price: US$15 million"
1987
IBM ships the first copies of the OS/2 Standard Edition 1.0 operating system.
1989
Because of the reforendum a couple days ago about FidoNet to the International FidoNet Association (IFNA) has closed. He calls for everyone involved on both sides of the issue to bury the hatchet. The referendum resulted from network-wide rumblings that the IFNA, which was founded at the urging of Ken Kaplan to deal with the day to day drudgery of running the network, was “stealing FidoNet.” Jennings himself refuted the notion, but many Sysops were left with hard feelings over the new policies cropping up. On January 1, 1990 the results of the referendum will be announces. The motion fails, 480 (Yes) to 1417 (No)."
1995
"Netscape, Silicon Graphics, and Sun Microsystems announce plans to develop Javascript, a cross-platform object scripting language for enterprise networks and the Internet designed to be accessible to non-programmers. Borland, Mitsubishi Electronics, Sybase, and Symantec announce plans to license Java."
The United States Department of Justice launches an investigation of Microsoft. The investigations cites allegations that installation of Microsoft Windows 95 purposely disables and overwrites competing Internet browsers without the user’s consent.
1996
General Motors (GM) releases the first electric car to be mass-produced, the EV1. While GM had developed previous electric cars, such as the “Impact,” they were mostly prototypes, where the EV1 is the first intended for the general market. However, it will never be offered to the public. It was only ever available to consumers under a lease program that didn’t allow consumers to purchase the vehicle. Visit an archive of the vehicle’s official website."
2001
"The Pentagone or “Goner” e-mail worm is identified by anti-virus experts at McAfee.
"Version 2.7.0 of PHPMyAdmin, is released
2007
Padmasree Warrior – after leaving AT&T, joins Cisco.
2008
Boxee gets Netflix streaming
Bernie Ebbers, the former CEO of WorldCom who is serving a 25-year prison term for masterminding an $11 billion accounting scandal, wants President Bush to lighten his sentence.
Wordpress 2.7 is released
Koobface virus is spotted on Facebook
2009
Yahoo, Microsoft finalize the search deal. Just 24 hours after Bing goes down.
2011
HP chair Patricia Dunn passed away
