1860 – Parisian typesetter and inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville used his Phonoautogram to record sound onto paper but had no way to play it back.

1919 – Presper Eckert was born in Philadelphia. Eckert became famous for his work, with John Mauchly on the ENIAC project.

1959 – NASA publicly announced the selection of the United States’ first seven astronauts, who quickly became known as the “Mercury Seven”.

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1953 – The major studios were inspired by the 1952 3D hit “Bwana Devil.” Columbia beat Warner Brothers’ “House of Wax” to the theatre, with a New York City premiere, making “Man in the Dark” the first 3D motion picture produced and released by a major studio.

1959 – The Department of Defense called a meeting at the University of Pennsylvania to define the objectives for a new Common Business Language. Captain Grace Hopper led the group that kicked off COBOL.

1991 – A team moved from Sun Microsystems to work in secret on Project “Green” using its “Oak” programming language. The whole thing later bacame “Java.”

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1927 – The Bell System sent live TV images of Herbert Hoover, then the Secretary of Commerce, over telephone lines from Washington, D.C. to an auditorium in Manhattan. It was the first public demonstration in the US of long-distance television transmission.

1964 – IBM unveiled the System/360 line of mainframe computers, its most successful computer system. It was called the “360” because it was meant to address all possible sizes and types of customer with one unified software-compatible architecture.

1969 – The first Request For Comment, RFC 1 put together by Steve Crocker was distributed on the newly operational ARPANET. RFCs describe methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet.

2014 – OpenSSL issued a security advisory about a vulnerability that would come to be called ‘Heartbleed.’ The bug was in the TLS Heartbeat function, that when implemented could be used to reveal up to 64k of memory to a connected client or server. Unpatched servers could have their private keys stolen making it easy for malicious hackers to pretend to have certified secure connections.

2015 – HBO launched it’s HBO Now service, allowing US viewers to watch HBO online without a cable subscription. The service was initially sold through Apple and Cablevision.

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1917 – Following a declaration of war against Germany, President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order closing all radio communication not required by the US Navy.

1965 – Hughes Aircraft’s Early Bird launched into orbit. It was the first communications satellite to be placed in synchronous orbit and successfully demonstrated the concept of synchronous satellites for commercial communications.

1973 – NASA launched the Pioneer 11 spacecraft, the second mission to investigate Jupiter and the outer solar system and the first to explore the planet Saturn and its main rings.

1992 – Microsoft released Windows 3.1. It sold for $149 and added support for sound cards, MIDI, and CD Audio, Super VGA monitors, and support for 9600 bps modems.

2010 – Xiaomi, maker of fashionable affordable Android-based smartphones, was founded in Beijing, China.

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