February 7

1973
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is introduced as a standard for the transfer of files between networked computers.

1979
Pluto moves inside the orbit of Neptune for the first time since either planet was discovered.

1981
Steve Wozniak’s private plane crashes during take-off, near the Santa Cruz Mountains in California. The accident leaves him with a loss of short-term memory for over a month.

1983
Atari seeks a legal injunction against Coleco Industries to prevent the company from selling its ColecoVision adapter to play Atari cartridges.

1984
Space Shuttle Challenger astronaut Bruce McCandless II makes the first untethered space walk using the jet-propelled Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU). (STS-41-B) Visit the mission’s official website.

1985
The Los Angeles City Attorney’s office drops the case against Sysop Tom Tcimpidis for lack of evidence and in the interests of justice. Tom Tcimpidis had previously had his system seized for a posting of a pactel card code without the sysop’s knowledge.

1997
Apple Computer completes its acquisition of Next Software for US$427 million which began February 4. [1]

Microsoft announces that it is ceasing the development of Windows NT for systems using PowerPC processors.

1998
The website of Dynatek InfoWorld is hacked by TechVoodoo Crew.

2000
At 10:15am Pacific Standard Time (PST), a 16 year old Canadian hacker, Mafiaboy, carries out a distributed denial of service attack (DoS) with a one gigabit per second flood of IP packet requests from a network of zombie servers. As a result, Yahoo goes offline for over three hours. Two days, later the same attacks continue, this time targeting Amazon, Buy.com, CNN, eBay, E*Trade, MSN, and ZDNet. After pleading guilty, Mafiaboy will later be sentenced to eight months in a youth detention center.

At the International Solid State Circuits Conference, AMD demonstrates an Athlon processor operating at 1.1GHz. Intel demonstrates a prototype 1GHz Pentium III processor. Visit the official International Solid-State Circuits Conference website.

2003
The chess match between Garry Kasparov and Deep Junior 7 in New York ends in a draw, with Kasparov having won the first game, Deep Junior having won the third game, and the other four games ending in draws. The match is the first competition between a man and a machine sanctioned by FIDE (World Chess Federation). Deep Junior was programed over ten years by Amir Ban and Shay Bushinksy of Tel Aviv. It is capable of evaluating three million moves a second, fifteen moves deep.

Two hackers who broke into Riverside County, Calif., court computers and electronically dismissed avariety of pending cases plead guilty to the crime. Both William Grace, 22, and Brandon Wilson, 28, were sentenced to nine years in jail after pleading guilty to 72 counts of illegally entering a computer system and editing data, along with seven counts of conspiracy to commit extortion.

2005
The International Solid-State Circuits Conference is held in San Francisco, California. At the event, IBM , Sony, and Toshiba reveal specifications for the Cell processor, intended for use in the next-generation PlayStation console. The Cell will feature a 64-bit IBM Power processor and eight processing units each capable of handling a separate set of tasks. The processor is expected to run at speeds faster than 4GHz, process 256 billion calculations per second, with the ability to transfer processor data at up to 100GB per second.

2012
Yahoo! chairman Roy Bostock announced he will step down

2014
GoPro cameras has announced plans to file for IPO.

Google closed a $3.2 billion dollar deal to acquire Nest home products.

California state Senator Mark Leno introduced legislation requiring all phones and tablets have a kill switch which would render the device inoperable. On August 25 the bill became law, requiring all devices in California to have the switch by July 1, 2015.