Reading 3 of 6 free1776 Club · all 6 storiesMonday, November 2
From the desk
Start with 1988, when a 23-year-old Cornell graduate student launched the first worm deployed over the Internet. Within hours it had hit an estimated 6,000 of the Internet's 60,000 computers. Worth a longer look is 1889, when Benjamin Harrison had James Blaine shuffle the papers admitting the Dakotas so he could not tell which state he signed first. Nobody recorded the order, so the two states are numbered alphabetically.
— The Patriot Compass desk
1988Featured · This day in history
A Cornell graduate student's program slips onto the Internet from a computer at MIT
In 1988 the Internet had about 60,000 computers, many of them running Berkeley Unix. At roughly 8:30 p.m. Eastern on November 2, Robert Tappan Morris, a 23-year-old Cornell computer science graduate student, launched a self-copying program from a machine at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chosen so the trail would not lead back to Cornell. The worm got in through holes in sendmail, finger, rexec and rsh, and through weak passwords. Within hours, an estimated 6,000 computers were affected.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MassachusettsStory page →
The American Throughline
The Morris worm made national news, and Morris became the first person convicted of a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986. Carnegie Mellon University's emergency response center for network incidents, grew out of the scramble that followed the worm.
Did you know
QWhat did Harvard student Paul Graham write to Morris before the worm was launched?
Clifford Stoll later recorded a rumor that Morris had worked with a friend or two in Harvard's computing department. As evidence, he pointed to mail from Harvard student Paul Graham that asked Morris for "Any news on the brilliant project." Stoll presented it as hearsay, not proof of a conspiracy, and the case that followed centered on Morris alone. Still, the line shows how casual the project looked to people close to it: a clever experiment passed around among students, with nobody yet picturing a network full of stalled machines. The word "brilliant" in that message has kept its irony ever since.
QWho was Robert Tappan Morris's father, and what did he do for a living?
His father, also named Robert Morris, was a cryptographer at the National Security Agency. That made the worm's author the son of one of the country's best-known computer security specialists, which gave the story an extra edge when the news broke. The younger Morris had grown up around the subject he exposed. Press coverage of the worm often returned to that detail.
QHow much did Morris end up paying, and who sentenced him?
Federal judge Howard Munson sentenced Morris on May 4, 1990. The terms were three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, a $10,000 fine, and the costs of court and probation. In practice the fine came to $10,050 plus supervision costs, for a total of $13,326, which is about $31,500 in 2025 dollars. There was no prison time. For a program that took thousands of machines offline and whose damage was estimated at up to $10,000,000, There was no prison time.
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2000exploration
Shepherd, Krikalev and Gidzenko dock at the space station and float inside
Two years after the first piece of the International Space Station reached orbit, the complex was still an empty set of modules. Shuttles and Russian flights had added modules, but nobody lived aboard. On November 2, 2000, the Soyuz TM-31 capsule, launched from Baikonur two days earlier, docked at the aft port of the Zvezda Service Module at 09:21 UTC. Ninety minutes later, American commander William Shepherd opened the hatch, and he and cosmonauts Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko entered as the station's first resident crew.
Shepherd, a NASA astronaut, commanded a station built by the United States and Russia together, with two cosmonauts as his flight engineers. Americans had previously stayed in orbit only on shuttle visits. Shepherd's insistence on a ship's vocabulary, including the call sign "Alpha," carried a Navy tradition of command into space.
Did you know
QHow long did it take the first station crew to switch on a food warmer that was scheduled for 30 minutes?
A day and a half. In the first month aboard, activating the food warmer in Zvezda's galley was planned as a half-hour job, and the astronauts needed roughly 36 hours to finish it. Electricity was limited, and some modules were left unheated. Electricity was limited, and some modules were left unheated. Shepherd made the same point about the pressure of the first weeks. A hot meal was one of the smaller tasks on the list, and it still ran far past its slot.
QWhich Russian space executive wanted the station's call sign to be "Beta" or "Mir 2" instead of "Alpha"?
Yuriy Semenov, president of Russian Space Corporation Energia, objected to "Alpha." He preferred "Beta" or "Mir 2," reasoning that Mir had been the first space station, so the new one should not carry the first-letter name. The crew asked for the call sign out of naval tradition. Shepherd and Krikalev, an American and a Russian, both favored "Alpha." The crew still requested and received authorization to use it, despite Semenov's objection.
QWhat did the first station crew do on Christmas Day and New Year's, 200-plus miles above the people they were calling?
On Christmas Day the crew was given the day off work. They opened presents that had arrived aboard the shuttle Endeavour and a Progress supply ship, then spoke to their families on the ground. At the turn of the year, Shepherd followed a naval tradition and wrote a poem on behalf of the crew for the New Year's entry in the station's log. Both days fell in a stretch of heavy workload. The ham radio contacts with schools and clubs, beginning with Luther Burbank School in southwest Chicago, were another way the crew stayed in touch with the ground.
1983civil-rights
Reagan signs the King holiday bill, fifteen years after the first one was introduced
The campaign for a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr. began soon after his assassination in 1968, and it took fifteen years to reach a President's desk. On November 2, 1983, Ronald Reagan signed into law the bill that Representative Katie Hall of Indiana had proposed. The holiday would fall on the third Monday of each January. Reagan had dismissed the push behind it as "an image, not reality."
King joined Washington and Columbus as people with a national holiday in their honor. Reagan had doubted the movement for the holiday, and he signed it into law after a petition drive that gathered six million signatures.
Did you know
QWhy did Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan throw a 300-page Senate document on the floor and stomp on it?
On October 3, 1983, Jesse Helms submitted a 300-page document to the Senate alleging that King had associations with communists. Moynihan, a New York Democrat, called it a "packet of filth," threw it on the Senate floor, and stomped on it. Helms had also led a filibuster against the bill and accused King of espousing "action-oriented Marxism." Reagan was asked about the communism accusation and answered, "We'll know in thirty-five years, won't we." He was referring to the release of FBI surveillance tapes that were then sealed. The Senate passed the bill sixteen days after the document was filed.
QHow did the National Football League end up costing Arizona a Super Bowl over the King holiday?
Arizona's governor Bruce Babbitt created a paid state King holiday by executive order in 1986, just before leaving office. His Republican successor, Evan Mecham, reversed it days after taking office in 1987, citing an attorney general's opinion that the order was illegal. In 1990 voters faced two ballot options. Proposition 301 would replace Columbus Day, and Proposition 302 would merge Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays. The NFL had threatened to move Super Bowl XXVII, planned for Arizona in 1993, if the holiday was voted down. Prop 302, the more popular option, drew only 49 percent, and both measures failed. The game went to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Arizona voters approved a single-option holiday in 1992.
QWhat choice did South Carolina state employees have on King's birthday until the year 2000?
South Carolina was the last state to recognize King's birthday as a paid holiday for all state employees. Before Governor Jim Hodges signed the bill in May 2000, employees could choose between the King holiday and one of three Confederate holidays. Other states paired the day with Confederate figures as well. Mississippi used "Martin Luther King's and Robert E. Lee's Birthdays," and Arkansas used a Lee-linked name from 1985 to 2017. In Wyoming, legislator Liz Byrd, the first black woman in the state legislature, introduced a bill in 1991 and accepted the name "Wyoming Equality Day" alongside King's because her colleagues would not pass it otherwise.
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Quote of the day
“Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt
“The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.”
Henry David Thoreau
“Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.”
