commercially, and it had a major published by FTL (Faster Than influence on later games. For Light) Games for the Atari ST Dec. 15th example, it introduced the idea [Jan 10]. It sold 40,000 copies in of awarding players for its first year, becoming the ST’s performing quests. best-selling game. It heavily Project Lincoln influenced the design of several other 3D dungeon crawlers, Begins including “Eye of the Beholder” and “Hired Guns”. Dec. 15, 1950 General Vandenberg, the US Air Force's chief of staff, wrote a The Wizard letter to James Killian, Jr., president of MIT, requesting Released that the university set up a lab devoted to air defense. It was Dec. 15, 1989 prompted by a recent report Screenshot from the "Island of “The Wizard” is a comedy-drama that had concluded that the US " directed by Todd Holland, and was unprepared for the threat of starring Fred Savage, Christian a Soviet air attack [Aug 29]. “Island” utilized a 2D scrolling Slater, and Beau Bridges as three Project Lincoln was born; the grid made up of colored ASCII friends who hitchhike across the site chosen for the new lab was graphics. However, an inspired country to compete in the the Laurence G. Hanscom Air hacker later created a mod that Nintendo World Field, where the towns of replaced the ASCII with bit- Championships. Bedford, Lexington and Lincoln mapped color graphics on Macs. The movie is primarily meet. Two of the towns' names Game play was through simple remembered for its extensive were already in use: Project phrases and abbreviations product placement of NES [Oct Bedford (on antisubmarine (e.g. “n nw n” to make your 18] games, especially Super warfare) and a Project Lexington character move north, then Mario Bros [Sept 13], and its (on aircraft nuclear propulsion), northwest, then north again). prominent use of the Nintendo so Major General Putt, who was Power Glove [Oct 00]. For in charge of drafting the lab's Flinn and Taylor were also example, at one point one of the charter, had little choice left. responsible for 1986’s “”, the first multiplayer kids boasts, “I love the Power The lab became the home for game combining 3D graphics Glove. It’s so bad.” Some 15 work on the Semi-Automatic and real-time combat. It was years later, this saying (briefly) Ground Environment (SAGE initially offered through GEnie became an Internet meme [Nov [June 26]) Air Defense System, [Oct 1], and later CompuServe. 15]. and innovative hardware such On the movie poster, Sauvage as the Whirlwind [April 20] and can be seen wearing the Power TX-0 [Nov 20]. Glove on his left hand, but only Dungeon Master right-handed versions were ever Released made. The Island of Dec. 15, 1987 Kesmai "Dungeon Master" was a real- HyperText ’91 on Dec. 15, 1985 time role-playing game featuring a pseudo-3D first-person the Web The ideas behind “Island of perspective. The real-time Kesmai” began forming in the element meant that your game Dec. 15-18, 1991 summer of 1980, when character had to eat, drink, and The first academic presentation University of Virginia classmates sleep at regular intervals, or about the Web was given by Tim John Taylor and suffer the consequences. The Berners-Lee [June 8] at wrote “Dungeons of Kesmai”, a game also had a notably complex Hypertext ’91 in San Antonio. six player Z80 game inspired by magic system – players cast The conference had actually Dungeons & Dragons [July 27]. spells by stringing together rejected the paper, but had On this day, they launched the runes, but only certain offered Berners-Lee a timeslot MMORPG version, “Island of sequences produced results. to demonstrate his new-fangled Kesmai”, on CompuServe [Sept Players could also set how much Web foolishness. Unfortunately, 24], capable of supporting up to magical energy was expended there was no Internet 100 players. It wasn’t the first on a spell. connectivity, so the demo was MMORPG (which was probably The game was developed by limited to his NeXT computer, MUD [April 6]), but it was the Doug Bell and Andy Jaro, and which Berners-Lee had brought first one published with him from CERN [Sept 29].

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The demo page included the game). The concept of a monthly there were versions in Italian, disclaimer: game subscription was also Spanish, Russian, Swedish and invented by M59. several other languages. "We will show you hypertext which we brought on an optical In 2012, the brothers released Zafi.D, modified the Windows’ disk, but not the large range of M59 as open source. registry so the virus would information on the "web" across automatically start when the the world." computer was rebooted. It also overwrote antivirus and firewall On his way to San Antonio, AltaVista applications. Berners-Lee stopped off at UNC Chapel Hill to visit Paul Jones, Dec. 15, 1995 Its main aim was to turn the who happened to have his own system into a zombie for Researchers at DEC, led by Paul NeXT machine. Berners-Lee set sending or launching Flaherty, Louis Monier, and up a copy of his page on Jones’ distributed denial of service Michael Burrows, released the machine, which can still be attacks. It created a backdoor at AltaVista search engine. The accessed at port 8181 so it could upload and name was chosen because all the http://ibiblio.org/pjones/ execute files. old.page.html. In May 2013 developers were based in Palo when CERN was restoring its Alto. The first version of Zafi had been discovered back in April, and it first website, Jones' pages The software was primarily only tried to send itself to turned out to be the oldest created to test one of DEC’s new addresses inside Hungary. Zafi.C, surviving source. supercomputers, the from October, was programmed AlphaServer 8400 TurboLaser, Although, Jones' page went live to launch DDOS attacks on particularly its ability to rapidly in the fall of 1991, the Stanford several web sites, including the search very large databases. Linear Accelerator Center [Dec Hungarian Prime Minister's 12] (SLAC) website is usually Monier created AltaVista's web page. labeled as the first outside crawler tool, Scooter, which Europe. completed its first scan in August. It added around 10 million pages to the AltaVista Wikipedia vs. index, which was implemented Meridian 59 by Burrows. His indexer was the Britannica Dec. 15 1995 first to catalogue the full text Dec. 15, 2005 contents of web pages. Meridian 59 (M59) is considered A report by Jim Giles published the first 3D graphical MMORPG . Altavista's superior coverage in the journal Nature compared (Habitat [June 23] was the first made it the first really popular the accuracy of the Encyclopedia 2D MMORPG.) The name refers search engine. On the first day, it Britannica [Dec 6] with that of to the fifty-ninth provincial received over 300,000 search Wikipedia [Jan 15] by examining colony of the ancient sword-and- requests, and a year later, it was 42 articles on scientific topics sorcery empire depicted in the serving 19 million visitors every which appeared in both. game. It was launched in beta on day. By 1997, it was attracting this day, and attracted some 80 million daily. For other early 25,000 players; it was released search engines, see [June 30], commercially by 3DO [Oct 4] on [Sept 00]. Sept. 27, 1996. Google was born on [Sept 7] Andrew and Chris Kirmse 1998, but didn’t overtake started coding M59 in the AltaVista in popularity until basement of their parents’ house 2001. AltaVista was purchased in Virginia. Later they were by Yahoo! in 2003, and sold and joined by John Hanke, who resold a few times before being subsequently went on to co- closed down in 2013. develop Google Earth [June 11] and Pokémon Go [July 6]. Encyclopædia Britannica. Photo by The term “massively Zafi.D Reported Ziko. CC BY-SA 3.0. multiplayer” and the acronym Dec. 15, 2004 MMPRPG (Massively Multi- Giles found just eight serious Player Role-Playing Game), The "Zafi Merry Christmas" errors (i.e. a misunderstanding emerged from brain-storming worm (aka Zafi.D) distributed its of a vital concept), four from sessions held at 3DO (beating code in an email attachment. each source. In the category of out other ideas such as “large-n The English version of the factual errors, omissions or game”). However, the Kirmse message bore the subject line misleading statements, brothers preferred MMOG “Merry Christmas” and the Wikipedia had 162 problems, (massively multiplayer online words “Happy Hollydays” but while Britannica had 123.

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Giles had been prompted to playing a musical instrument, write the report after several and painting. Britannica officials criticized Wikipedia’s quality. For example, Robert McHenry had written an article entitled “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia”. On March 13, 2012, Britannica announced it would scrap its print edition after sales had fallen to just 25% of their 1990 peak. It refocused on digital media and rebranded itself a “learning business”. In Aug. 2012, the Wikimedia Foundation released its own study which compared a sample of 22 English Wikipedia articles to equivalent ones in Encyclopaedia Britannica, and also compared the Spanish version of Wikipedia to Enciclonet, and the Arabic Wikipedia to the Arabic Encyclopaedia. The Wikipedia articles scored higher in each of the three languages, and fared particularly well in terms of accuracy and references. In Dec. 2020 Wikipedia contained more than 50 million pages across 300 languages, with over 6 million in the English Wikipedia.

ZZZ-Mailing Dec. 15, 2008 According to a report by University of Toledo researchers in the journal Sleep Medicine, a 44-year-old sleepwalker logged onto her computer and emailed out party invitations to friends. Each message was written in a random mix of upper and lower case characters, was badly formatted, and containing odd expressions. One read: “Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4.pm. Bring wine and caviar only.” The woman had no memory of sending the messages when she woke up the next day. The researchers dubbed this kind of sleepwalking ‘zzz- mailing’. Other reported cases of sleepwalking activities have included driving a car, cooking,

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