February 18

1977
Space Shuttle Enterprise embarks on its maiden flight in captive mode, attached to the top of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet.

1979
Snow falls in Sahara Desert, in Southern Algeria during a storm which lasts about half an hour.

1983
Paul Allen resigns as executive Vice President of Microsoft, but he remains a member of the company’s Board of Directors. Visit the official Microsoft website.

1997
A Buddist temple in Hiroshima, Japan announces plans to open a virtual graveyard on the Internet. on which the deceased can be represented by government records, photos, and virtual gravestones. Families of the deceased can establish memorials for the deceased at no charge, choosing from a range of tombstones and flowers which can be customized with text and photos. Registrants can also create their own memorials and informal wills in advance of their own death.

Corel begins shipping the WordPerfect Suite for DOS. The office suite includes WordPerfect 6.2, Quattro Pro 5.6, and Presentations 2.1. Visit the official Corel website. Price: US$495 or US$149 (Upgrade)

Sun Microsystems releases version 1.1 of the Java Development Kit (JDK).

1999
Abdul Traya, 16, of Calgary, Canada, receives a threatening letter from the legal representation of Apple Computer, Fenwick & West LLP. The letter demands that that the teenager turn over his Internet domain, www.Appleimac.com, without making any offer of compensation. Traya decides to keep the domain, which he had registered in July 1998 to draw attention to the web-hosting business that he was running out of his parent’s basement, WestNet. Westnet is the first Canadian host to offer city-wide WiFi access. The threat makes news when Reuters reports the story. In April, the matter will be settled out of court when Apple pays Traya’s legal fees and an additional token payment in exchange for the domain.

Version 2.0 (draft 1) of the JavaScript programming language is released.

2000
The website of the Charles Schwab Corporation suffers a thirty minute outage beginning at approximately 1:45pm EST, preventing the leading US discount brokerage from fulfilling customer stock orders during that time. The company will later announce that the outage was caused by a software error.

2002
Global Terabit Research Network (GTRN) is formed, composed of two OC-48 2.4GB circuits connecting the CANARIE CA*net3, GEANT, and Internet2 Abiline networks.

2003
Version 7.02 of the Netscape internet suite is released. Visit an archived version of the official Netscape website.

2009
Google wins a suit by a Pittsburg couple that found their house on Google Street View.

White House launches Recovery.gov

Hulu pulls all content off the Boxxe Application.

2014
NVidia introduced the GeForece GTX 750 Ti and GTX 750 with Maxwell archetecture. The GPU uses 28-nanometer chips and sports 640 Cuda cores (750 Ti). Prices $149 (750 Ti) and $119 (750)