1876 – Alexander Graham Bell spoke the immortal words “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” over a telephone in his Boston laboratory, summoning his assistant from the next room. It is widely considered the first instance of someone using technology when they bloody well could have just got up and spoke to someone in person. It is also widely considered the first phone call.

1891 – Almon B. Strowger was issued a US patent for his electromechanical switch to automate a telephone exchange. Strowger wasn’t the first to think of of automatic switching but he was the first to make a practical switch.

2000 -The Nasdaq hit 5,048.62, the highest point of the dot-com boom. The bust began the next day.

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1948 – The University of California at Berkeley and the Atomic Energy Commission announced the artificial production of mesons using the 184-inch cyclotron at the university’s Radiation Laboratory.

1961 – Sputnik 9 successfully launched, carrying a human dummy and and the dog Chernushka. It completed 1 orbit and was successfully recovered upon return. Yes, the dog made it back unharmed.

2011 – Space Shuttle Discovery on Mission STS-133 made its final landing after 39 flights.

2015 – Apple and HBO announced a new Internet-only streaming version of HBO called HBO Now would launch in early April exclusively on Apple products including the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. Apple also announced the Apple Watch would come April 24.

2016 – In the first of 5 games, DeepMind’s AlphaGo machine intelligence defeated 18-time Go champion Lee See-dol in Seoul, Korea.

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

1955 – Doug Ross demonstrated the Director tape for MIT’s Whirlwind machine, the first digital computer with real-time text and graphics. The idea of the Director Tape was to allow multiple problems to be read by the computer in one session without humans having to intervene and change tapes. In other words, an operating system.

1978 – The first radio episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, was transmitted on BBC Radio 4. Some credit Adams with accidentally predicting the PDA and smartphone.

1979 – Philips publicly demonstrated a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference called “Philips Introduces Compact Disc.”

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