On January 30, 1835, Andrew Jackson became the first American president to experience an assassination attempt. Richard Lawrence, an unemployed house painter, approached Jackson as he left a congressional funeral held in the House chamber of the Capitol building and shot at him, but his gun misfired. A furious 67-year-old Jackson confronted his attacker, clubbing Lawrence several times with his walking cane. During the scuffle, Lawrence managed to pull out a second loaded pistol and pulled the trigger, but it also misfired. Jackson’s aides — including Davy Crockett — then wrestled Lawrence away from the president, leaving Jackson unharmed but angry and, as it turned out, paranoid.
On January 30, 1982 Richard Skrenta wrote the first PC virus code, which is 400 lines long and disguised as an Apple boot program called “Elk Cloner”.
January 30, 1992 Inventor Ray Kurzweil published his first book “The Age of Intelligent Machines” on artificial intelligence, predicting the popularity of the Internet.
—
Today’s feature article is a guest piece by SurvivalBlog reader Scarecrow. It was too short to be included in the judging in the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest.
More than $870,000 worth of prizes have been awarded since we started running this contest. We recently polled blog readers, asking for suggested article topics. Refer to that poll if you haven’t yet chosen an article topic. Round 110 ends tomorrow, January 31st, so get busy writing and e-mail us your entry. Remember that there is a 1,500-word minimum, and that articles on practical “how-to” skills for survival have an advantage in the judging.