A air-crash brings about the release of GPS to the public, IBM ships new microprocessors and Chrome is accidentally released. All on today’s On This Day from TESTHuddle.
1983 – The catalyst for GPS release
On the boarder of the USSR and Japan, in the sea of Japan, a Soviet jet shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007. The incident resulted in the deaths of all 269 passengers and crew on board. The flight was enroute from from New York City to Seoul via Anchorage. The airplane deviated off course into the sea of Japan resulting in it crossing into Soviet air space. One of the aspects of the fallout of the incident was President Ronald Regan making the previously classified US military’s GNSS system (later to become known as Global Positioning System (GPS)) would be made available for civilian use, free of charge, once completed in order to avert similar navigational errors in future.
1998 – IBM ship new Microprocessors
On this day in 1998, IBM announces the shipment of the world’s first copper-based microprocessors. The new processors include a PowerPC 740/750 operating at 400MHz. The reasons for using copper technologies is that copper represents a significant improvement over previous traditional aluminum technologies. IBM also releases the fastest embedded processor on the market at the time, a 400MHz embedded PowerPC chip.
2008 – Chrome is (accidentally) Released
Someone in Google accidentally hit a “Send” button too soon and release the beta of Google Chrome. Chrome brought some new features with its launch including the novel aspect that the browser ran an independent process for each instance. Chrome was launched as only available to PC users. Also Google would later discover that Chrome had the same Carpetbomb issues that Safari had earlier in the year.
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/Google
