Tech History Today – March 25, 2013

In 1925 – John Logie Baird gave his first public demonstration of his ‘Silhouette Television’ at the Selfridges department store, Oxford Street, London. It was part of the stores birthday celebration.

In 1979 – The first fully functional space shuttle orbiter, Columbia, was delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center in preparation for its first launch.

In 1995 – Ward Cunningham installed the First Wiki, WikiWikiWeb on a $300 computer someone gave him. He connected it to the Internet, using a 14.4-baud dial-up modem.

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Tech History Today – March 24, 2013

In 1802 – Richard Trevithick and Andrew Viviane of Camborne Parish in the County of Cornwall, enrolled a patent for a steam engine that could power a full-sized road locomotive. He had previously demonstrated it by driving up a hill in a car he called the “Puffing Devil”.

In 1896 – A. S. Popov supposedly made the first radio transmission in human history. Popov is said to have transmitted the words “Heinrich Hertz” from one building to another on the campus of St. Petersburg University, though the assertion was not published until years later because of the need for military secrecy.

In 2001 – Apple released its new operating system Mac OS X, code named Cheetah, with a retail price of $130.l

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Tech History Today – March 23, 2013

In 1857 – The first department store elevator for passengers was installed at E.V. Haughwout & Co. in New York City. This was a significant development towards the building of skyscrapers.

In 1996 – The U.S. space shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir for the third time, and for the first time dropped off a U.S. astronaut. Shannon Lucid began her record-breaking stay on the space station.

In 2001 – The final commands to light the engines of the Progress supply ship were sent to the Russian Mir space station, which then broke up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near Fiji.

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Tech News Today 716: The Kleenex of Cloud Storage

Hosts: Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Iyaz Akhtar and Jason Howell

Google building a smartwatch, Apple winning the storage wars, why Stephen Elop threw an iPhone, and more.

Guest: Darren Kitchen

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Running time:: 0:46:16

Tech History Today – March 22, 2013

In 1895 – The Lumiere brothers showed their first film to an audience. It was a romantic comedy about a crowd of mostly women leaving a building.

In 1960 – Arthur Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes were granted the first patent for a laser (U.S. No. 2,929,922) under the title “Masers and Maser Communications System.”

In 1981 – RCA first SelectaVision VideoDisc the SFT100W went on sale. The machine used Capacitance Electronic Discs to fit a couple hours of video programming on a 12-inch vinyl disc that sold for around $15.

In 1993 – The Intel Corporation shipped the first Pentium chips featuring 60 and 66 MHz CPUs.

Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

Tech News Today 715: The S Stands for Sapphire

Hosts: Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane, Iyaz Akhtar and Jason Howell

Google launches Evernote challenger, ChromeOS and Android to stay parted, why Facebook is losing in Asia, and more.

Guest: Jeff Bakalar

Download or subscribe to this show at twit.tv/tnt.

Submit and vote on story coverage at technewstoday.reddit.com.

Check out the full show notes for today’s episode.

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Thanks to Cachefly for the bandwidth for this show.

Running time:: 0:52:34

International Geek Girl Pen Pals Club!


Hey ladies! If you’ve been looking for more geeky-inclined female friends, check out the International Geek Girl Pen Pals Club. Here’s how it works:​

This is a new project for us and we are figuring it out as we go along. We are just two nerdy dames reaching out into the vast, tangled web to see if we can find some new friends and help others find new friends too. The basic idea is you fill the form in, then we will collate everyone’s info and we then we’ll match you up with someone in the same age range with similar interests to you. Then you can swap addresses and get putting pens to paper!

​Sounds like fun! Sign-up is open through April 1st, so get to it!