Archive for March 4, 2024
The World’s First Internet Election
March 4, 2007
The 2007 Parliamentary elections held on Estonia on this day were the world’s first nationwide election where voting was allowed over the Internet. A little over 30,000 out of 940,000 registered Estonian voters participated in Internet voting that year, which was conducted from February 26-28 prior to the election. Voters had to use their state-issued ID and enter two passwords to cast their votes online. From the 3.4% of voters who voted over the Internet in 2007, nearly 44% of Estonian voters did so in their 2019 elections.
Japan Goes Crazy for Playstation 2!
March 4, 2000
Sony released the Playstation 2, the follow-up to their wildly successful original Playstation, in Japan to a waiting crowd of 10,000 people, many of whom had started waiting four days earlier. Sony promptly sold out of all 1 million Playstation 2 launch units in a single weekend. Interestingly, because there were only 11 launch title games available, the fact that the PS2 could play DVDs at a significantly lower price than most standalone DVD players of the time drove much of the early demand.
First Cray Supercomputer Shipped
March 4, 1977
The first Cray-1 supercomputer is shipped to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. This supercomputer, which cost nineteen million dollars, will be used to design sophisticated weapons systems. The system is a cylindrical tower seven feet tall, nine feet in diameter, and weighs about 5.5 tons. The machine produced so much heat that it required a built-in freon-based refrigeration system. It required its own electrical substation to power it, at a cost of about US$35,000 a month.