The standard for the compact disc was first proposed by Philips (Netherlands) and Sony (Japan) in 1980, and agreed upon in 1981 by the Compact Disc Standard Digital Audio Disc Committee. The first CDs became available to the public in Europe and Japan in the autumn of 1982, and the USA in 1983, where 800,000 discs were sold in the first year alone. Optical discs, which are written and read with a laser, have become the standard medium for home entertainment and computing.
Echo 1 (sometimes called Echo 1A) was launched on 10 July 1962 from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA. It was a 30m (98 ft) diameter balloon with a reflective aluminium coating, allowing radio and television signals to be passively reflected back to Earth. It ceased operations on 24 May 1968.
The first computer controlled deathmatch opponent was the Reaper Bot, created for Quake by programmer Steve Polge who would go on to work for Epic Games on Unreal Tournament series. Indeed, Unreal was the first game to officially include deathmatch bots created by the programmers.
The first computer programme that replicates itself surreptitiously was demonstrated by Fred Cohen, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA, on 11 Nov 1983.
The earliest competiton for snow body-boarders was held in Switzerland in 2002; three years later on 8 January 2005, the first race which allowed entrants to use these snow body-boards to compete against regular skiers was the Tahoe Winter Blue Adventure Race at Northstar-at-Tahoe Ski Resort, California, USA where seven out of 28 competitors raced on an Airboard® Classic – the first all-mountain body-board for snow-surfing.
The earliest game to receive a downloadable patch was Unreal Championship on the Xbox which featured a small software update patch that was issued to address performance issues with the game.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi (Japan, b. 16 March 1916) was in Hiroshima on a business trip on 6 August 1945, when a US B-29 aeroplane dropped the 12-15-kiloton “Little Boy” atomic bomb on the city, killing 140,000 people. Suffering burns to his upper body, Tsutomu managed to return to his hometown of Nagasaki on 8 August. The next day the US Army dropped “Fat Boy”, a 20-22-kiloton bomb on the city, the first use of a plutonium weapon. Around 73,000 people died in the attack, but Tsutomu
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In May 2006, Shayne Ward (UK), the winner of X-Factor 2005 became the first artist to perform live at 11 Downing Street – the home of the British Prime Minister. NB Tony Blair choses to live at No. 11.
The 1893 Women’s Suffrage Petition led to New Zealand becoming the earliest self-governing nation in the developing world to grant women the right to vote. Governor Glasgow signed the Electoral Bill on 19 September 1893.
The first countries in the world to announce plans to ban incandescent light bulbs (and to then replace them with more energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs) were Cuba and Venezuela (in 2005). Two years later, Australia’s environment minister announced their plan on 20 February 2007. These moves could potentially reduce Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 800,000 tonnes by 2009 or 4 million tonnes by 2012.