1790 – The French National Assembly acted on a motion from Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand to create a simple, stable, decimal system of measurement units. The earliest metre unit chosen was the length of a pendulum with a half-period of a second. The system eventually evolved into the metric system.

1988 – A fire broke out in the main switching room of the Hinsdale Central Office of the Illinois Bell telephone company, causing a telephone service outage for more than 40,000 local phone lines. It was considered to be the ‘worst telecommunications disaster in US telephone industry history.’

1995 – The New York Times announced it would join eight other newspapers in the New Century Network. The network aimed to connect local online news services into a national service on the Web.

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1895 – The first demonstration of A. A. Popov’s electromagnetic wave receiver took place at a meeting of the Russian Physical Chemical Society in St.- Petersburg. It was essential to the development of wireless communications.

1895 – Otto Steiger received a patent for the Millionaire calculating machine. Switzerland’s Hans Egli made 4,700 of the 120-pound things. The Millionaire’s chief feature was the ability to do direct multiplication with a single rotation of the handle!

1952 – British radar engineer Geoffrey Dummer introduced the concept of the integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, DC.

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1896 – Samuel Pierpoint Langley’s Aerodrome No. 5 made the first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft of substantial size.

1949 – The EDSAC, the first practical stored program computer, performed its first calculation. It operated at a speed of 714 operations per second.

2002 – Apple’s Steve Jobs previewed Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar during his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. It featured a handwriting technology dubbed Inkwell, an iChat instant messenger client, QuickTime 6 integration and more.

2003 – Eve Online launched. The massively multiplayer space adventure differed from others in that its storylines were created mostly by the players of the game.

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1995 – German electronics company Escom AG bought the rights to the name, patents and intellectual property of Commodore Electronics Ltd. for $10 million. Commodore had gone bankrupt the year before.

2000 – The “I Love You” virus spread to 55 million computers around the world, hijacking hard drives and deleting, renaming, or damaging files. The damage reached billions of dollars.

2004 – Apple announced that Steve Jobs would kick off that year’s Worldwide Developers Conference by talking about Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

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