Steve Wozniak is born, MSBlast worm starts to spread and a computer failure at a airport. All on today’s On This Day from TestHuddle.
1950 – Steve Wozniak is born
Steve Wozniak Co-Founder and former CEO of the Apple company is born in Sunnyvale, California. Along with Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne he co-founded Apple on April 1, 1976. Wozniak is credited with single-handedly designing both the Apple I and Apple II computers in the late 1970s.
2003 – MSBlast begins to spread
Blaster worm, also known as MSBlast or Lovesan, begins to spread on the Internet, infecting Windows XP and Windows 2000 computers. It exploits a flaw in Microsoft Windows using a distributed component object model (dcom) remote procedure call (rpc). Despite the fact that a software patch was released twenty-six days earlier, the worm still infects 9.5 million computers.
2007 – Airport Failure
A computer failure left thousands trapped on planes and stuck for hours in the terminal at Los Angeles International Airport. The computer malfunction, began at 2 p.m on Saturday 11th and lasted for nearly 10 hours. Authorities were prevented from screening international passengers arriving in the U.S. It delayed more than 17,000 people arriving from overseas. The issue arose when a computer switch failed, which knocked down the entire communications system. A backup system was in place, but it was accessible only to customs officers in some of the lanes where passengers were being processed, creating huge bottlenecks. During the outage, passengers were kept on planes after the terminals that normally accept international travellers became full because the previous arrivals couldn’t be processed. Though the entire system was up and running by 11:45 p.m on the Saturday, it took officials until around 4 a.m. Sunday to finish processing the backlog of incoming passengers.
If you would like to add anything to these events, or know of other significant technology events that happened on this day in history, feel free to comment below.
Images: Wikipedia/LA Weekly
