September 17, 2011

Good morning! It's The Nerd's Almanac for Saturday, September 17, 2011.

It was on this date in 1976 that NASA unveiled the Space Shuttle Enterprise. Its original name was to be Constitution, and today is Constitution Day. But there was a letter-writing campaign by Star Trek fans to try and influence the name of this first Space Shuttle; it is unknown how much sway this actually had.

This date marks the anniversary in 1991 of the first release of Linux, version 0.01. It certainly has come a long way since then hasn't it!

Today is the birthday of Astronaut Thomas Patten Stafford -- USAF test pilot, two Gemini missions, Apollo 10, and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

And it's the birthday of Yuji Naka, lead programmer of Sonic the Hedgehog.

Here is a quote for today...
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones."
-- Linus Torvalds, August 25, 1991 in a post to comp.os.minix. I guess he was pretty far along! :)

And that's the almanac for today. Nerds of the world, we salute you!

Sources:
Wikipedia: September 17
Wikipedia: Space Shuttle Enterprise
Wikipedia: Linux
Wikipedia: Thomas Patten Stafford
Wikipedia: Apollo-Soyuz Test Project
Wikipedia: Yuji Naka
Wikipedia: Sonic the Hedgehog
WikiQuote: Linus Torvalds