1933 – The world’s first drive-in movie theater opened in Camden, New Jersey. Richard Hollingshead Jr. had developed the system by using a 1928 Kodak projector mounted on the hood of his car and aimed at a screen pinned to some trees.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-drive-in-movie-theater-opens

1984 – Soviet programmer Alexei Pazhitnov completed the first playable version of Tetris, one of the best-selling video games of all-time, was released. It was popularized by Hank Rogers who bought the rights and distributed it.
http://www.wired.com/2009/06/tetris/

1995 – The Los Angeles Times reported that Father Leonard Boyle was working to put the Vatican’s library on the World Wide Web through a site funded by IBM.
http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/June/6/

2013 – The Guardian published another leak from Edward Snowden about the PRISM project used to gather data held by Google, Facebook, Apple and other US tech companies. The tech companies denied “back door access” to their systems.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1833 – Ada Gordon, daughter of Lord Byron (and future Countess Lovelace) met Charles Babbage for the first time. He designed an early computer, and she published a description of his work and wrote the first computer program. http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/June/5/

1977 – The Apple II went on sale. It had a bus speed of 1 MHz and 64 KB of memory. http://www.itwire.com/science-news/energy/12646-apple-ii-thirty-years-ago-the-first-pc-went-on-sale

2002 – Mozilla.org announced the release of Mozilla 1.0, an open-source browser built on the Gecko engine that also powered Netscape. http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article2278.html

2013 – The Guardian published its first exclusive based on Edward Snowden’s leaks, revealing a secret court order forced Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of customers to the US government.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1903 – In one of the earliest examples of white hat hacking, Nevil Maskelyne interrupted a demonstration of the Marconi radio communications system at the Royal Institution, London. Before Marconi’s message from Poldhu, Cornwall could arrive, Maskelyne hijacked the signal sending the word “rast” repeatedly and then the phrases, “There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily.” http://books.google.com/books?id=UjXGQSPXvIcC&pg=PA108&lpg=PA108&dq=Marconi+radio+demonstration+at+the+Royal+Institution,+London+1903&source=bl&ots=5I-39pBVKI&sig=Y5yjsdCYkmsFVrm8naAcEegEW1E&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wrelT-6YLsrWiAL7puHSAg&ved=0CGgQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=Marconi%20radio%20demonstration%20at%20the%20Royal%20Institution%2C%20London%201903&f=false

1977 – JVC introduced the open standard for the VHS videocassette in North America at a press conference before the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. http://www.amoeba.com/blog/2013/09/eric-s-blog/37-years-celebrating-or-at-least-thinking-about-vhs-.html

2010 – Falcon 9 Flight 1 launched the maiden flight of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, setting a new benchmark for non-governmental space flight. The rocket put a dummy payload into orbit as a test.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-20006863-239.html

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1889 – The first long-distance transmission of electricity took place, sending power from a hydroelectric generator at Willamette Falls 14 miles to 55 street lights at 4th and Main in Portland, Oregon.
http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMH4P_FIRST_High_Tension_Power_Line_Portland_Oregon

1948 – Ed Brown Jr., a former Navy pilot, opened a fly-in movie theater near Wall Township, New Jersey. You could also drive in. The theater had space for 500 cars and 25 small planes could land in a nearby airfield and taxi over to the theater.
http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/8593

1965 – Gemini 4 launched on the first multi-day space mission by a NASA crew. Crew-member Ed White performed the first US spacewalk.
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/gemini/gemini-iv/gemini-iv.html

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.