Nov. 17Th Another, Occuring at the End of the Year 9999, When the 4-Digit Minuteman I Year Field Using by Openvms Will Nov
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Actually, this calamity will be preceded much sooner by Guiding a Nov. 17th another, occuring at the end of the year 9999, when the 4-digit Minuteman I year field using by OpenVMS will Nov. 17, 1961 The Modified max out. This day saw the first successful Julian Date For links to more date/time launch from a silo of the related problems, see [Jan 1]. Minuteman I ICBM, which US Nov. 17, 1868 President John F. Kennedy referred to as his “ace in the The Smithsonian Astrophysical Gödel Completes hole” during the Cuban Missile Observatory (SAO) started Crisis (Oct. 1962). tracking satellites in 1957 soon after Sputnik was launched [Oct Incompleteness The Minuteman’s inertial 4], and stored the data on a 36- Nov. 17, 1930 guidance system used the bit IBM 704 [May 7]. completely solid-state Kurt Gödel [April 28] completed Autonetics D-17B computer. It This information naturally his paper, “Über formal contained 1,500 transistors, and included the Julian Day (JD) unentscheidbare Sätze der could execute almost 13,000 which is measured in days since Principia Mathematica und additions per second. Each D- Jan. 1, 4713 B.C.. However, this verwandter Systeme I” (“On 17B was cylindrical (to fit inside meant that Jan. 1, 1957 would be Formally Undecidable a missile), about the size of a encoded as 2,435,839, which Propositions of Principia fifty-five-gallon drum, and was too big to fit into an 18-bit Mathematica and Related weighed around 62 pounds. field on the machine. Memory Systems I”). was expensive back then, and so rather than be wasteful and The paper sets out Gödel 's utilize a 36-bit word, the incompleteness theorems, which astronomers came up with the answer the first two parts of Modified Julian Day (MJD), David Hilbert’s three-part which was calculated like so: "second problem" [Sept 3]: is mathematics complete, is it MJD = JD - 2,400,000.5 consistent, and is it decidable? It just so happens that Nov. 17, No and no. In other words, any 1858 is the Julian Day (JD) system powerful enough to 2,400,000, and predated the describe arithmetic must oldest star catalog in use at the contain statements which can SAO, thereby avoiding having to neither be proved true nor false An Autonetics D-17B guidance use negative MJD values in any (i.e. the system is "incomplete"). computer from a Minuteman I satellite tracking calculations. In essence, Gödel had showed missile. Photo by Jnanna. CC BY- The 0.5 was included so that an that any reasonably powerful SA 3.0. MJD day starts at noon so that system of maths has limits. nighttime observation times (as The Air Force spent millions This left the decidability preferred by astronomers) fall question, often known by its improving the reliability of the in the middle of a 24 hour catchy Germany name, the D-17B's transistors, which period. Entscheidungsproblem greatly reduced the failure rate of all transistor production lines, An MJD starting from Nov. 17, (Decision Problem). Working and lowered costs. In turn, this 1858, stored in an 18-bit word, independently, Alonzo Church encouraged the uptake of would supply enough space for [June 14], Alan Turing [June 23], transistors by the general seven centuries. Even better, and Emil Post [Feb 11] electronics industry. dates could still cover 3 published answers in 1936. (All centuries in only 17-bits, with of them amounting to "no".) Even after the Air Force the other bit used to represent Also, Turing by framing his decommissioned a 1,000 negatives. approach in terms of a 'machine' Minuteman l missiles in the showed that Gödel 's results early 1970's, their D-17B's still MJD is still employed in impose similar limitations on proved to be useful. For just OpenVMS [Oct 25], but with 100 computer algorithms. $100 shipping, and a qualifing nanosecond granularity, and letter from the National Science stored in 63-bits. This means Foundation, colleges and that OpenVMS should have no universities could receive one. trouble with dates until: Each D-17B came with thirty July 31, 31086 02:48:05.47 pounds of manuals, but no software or peripherals. At that moment, time will overflow, and become negative. 1 The next-generation Minuteman early designs created by David “The Hacker Manifesto” [Jan 8] II [Aug 5] also had a massive May and Robert Milne. by “The Mentor”, published in effect on the electronics the seventh issue. Each transputer included a built- industry, but in the area of IC in simple OS for running design. “Smashing The Stack For Fun processes in parallel, its own And Profit” by "Aleph One", memory, and four high speed published in issue 49. It (20 Mbit/s full duplex) bi- explained the joys of causing Second E-book directional serial links to talk to stack buffer overflows. other transputers. Nov. 17, 1982 “The Art of Scanning” by The plan was to program Fyodor, in issue 51, which The second electronically transputers using the high-level introduced the nmap network published novel, “Blind Occam language which scanning tool. Pharaoh” was made available supported concurrency and chapter-by-chapter to channel-based communication, subscribers of "The Source", an and was based on Tony Hoare’s early online service [Dec 3]. It [Jan 11] CSP process calculus. Veronica was written by Canadian Burke Campbell on an Apple III [May Nov. 17, 1992 19] during a single massive 61.5 Steven Foster and Fred Barrie at hour writing session (with brief the University of Nevada toilet breaks). released Veronica (“Very Easy The three-day writing spree was Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index a media event held at a Toronto to Computer Archives”), one of art gallery to coincide with a the earliest search engines for local computer show. Campbell the Gopher protocol [Feb 7]. It later recalled, ”I arrived in a maintained a database of nearly black chauffeur-driven every menu item on nearly limousine in a sweat suit made An Immos T414 transputer chip. every active Gopher server. Photo by Letdorf. CC BY 2.5. out of black sequins and I wore Its name was chosen to match black cowboy boots. I mounted the still-popular Archie FTP Although a great idea, the black vinyl stage and there search service [Sept 10] in transputers were expensive and was the microcomputer." reference to the Archie Andrews relatively slow for their price. As and Veronica Lodge characters “Blind Pharaoh” is a thriller a result, few transputer-based in Archie Comics. about a mysterious man who machine were ever built; the travels around North America in most notable probably being the Veronica was followed by his limousine manipulating the Atari [June 27] Transputer Jughead in 1993, an alternative lives of others. Workstation (1988), which was search engine system for Gopher The first electronic novel was canceled after only a few (Jughead Jones is Archie “Mylar’s Warp”, a science fiction hundred had been produced. Andrews’ pal). It was developed work by Floyd Flanagan, by Rhett Jones (no relation to released in 1981, also on 'The Jughead) at the University of Source". Its story involves PHRACK Starts Utah. A backronym was cryogenic preservation, suggested later: “Jonzy’s electronic world domination, Nov. 17, 1985 Universal Gopher Hierarchy and Johnny Mylar, a modern-day Excavation And Display.” everyman. PHRACK was an "e-zine" (electronic magazine) covering a wide range of topics including computer and physical security, Classmates Transputer hacking, cryptography, and the Nov. 17, 1995 counter culture. It took its name Announced from the words “phreak” and Randy Conrads' Classmates.com Nov. 17, 1983 “hack”. was probably the first social networking website. Originally Craig Neidorf (aka “Knight launched as a list of school The transputer (a name derived Lightning” [July 23]) and Randy affiliations, it later incorporated from "transistor" and Tischler (aka “Taran King”) features like member profiles "computer") was the first edited the first 30 issues, which and friends lists. It also general purpose microprocessor were uploaded to Tischler’s maintained an online archive of intended for parallel computing "Metal Shop" BBS. Its best over 300,000 yearbooks, the systems. It was developed at known articles include: Inmos, a semiconductor world’s largest digital yearbook company in Bristol, UK, with collection. The oldest was the 1885 yearbook from Central 2 High School in Manchester, New Hampshire. Other possibilities for “first social network site” are SixDegrees.com [Dec 00] and SocialNet.com [Aug 5]. Geometry Wars Nov. 17, 2003 "Geometry Wars" was a 2D arcade style shooter created by Stephen Cakebread at Bizarre Creations. It began as a mini- game inside the Xbox [Nov 15] game “Project Gotham Racing 2”, but was such a big hit that it was released standalone through the Xbox Live Marketplace. Despite never being a boxed game sold on store shelves, it proved to be extremely popular, and demonstrated the viability of moving away from physical game discs towards downloads. CrackStation Nov. 17-18, 2007 Security consultant Nick Breese described his “CrackStation” project at the Kiwicon hacker conference in New Zealand. The CrackStation's password cracking software employed six of the PlayStation 3’s [Nov 11] processors (out of 8) to perform 1.4 billion calculations per second to generate MD5 cryptographic hash functions [May 6]. This was a dramatic increase in speed over similar software running on Intel architectures, which could only manage a meager 10 - 15 million calculations per second. His announcement raised serious concerns over the safety of MD5 for encryption. In 2010, the CMU Software Engineering Institute stated that MD5 was “cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use”.