1954 – At 5:30 PM the world’s first nuclear power station was connected to the power grid in Obninsk, US.S.R., a small town 60 miles south of Moscow.

http://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/2004/obninsk.html

1974 – At 8:01 AM, a supermarket cashier scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum across a bar-code scanner at Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. It was the first product ever checked out by Universal Product Code.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/technology/26barcode.html

1997 – The US Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Communications Decency Act as violating the first amendment protecting free speech.

http://www.cnn.com/US/9706/26/cda.overturned.hfr/index.html?eref=sitesearch

2014 – Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects lab stole the show at the Google I/O developer conference, with a demonstration of Project Tango’s 3D-mapping capability and Project Ara’s modular phone.

http://mashable.com/2014/06/26/google-project-tango-ara/

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

1967 – The very first Consumer Electronics Show opened in New York occupying the Americana and New York Hilton Hotels. It was devoted to home entertainment electronics and featured such advances as portable color TVs and video tape recorders.

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/first-consumer-electronics-show/

1981 – After six years as a company, Microsoft incorporated in the state of Washington.

http://www.microsoft.com/investor/InvestorServices/FAQ/default.aspx

1998 – Microsoft released Windows 98 with less hype than Windows 95, but more consumer focus.

http://money.cnn.com/1998/06/25/technology/win98_pkg/

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

1963 – The first demonstration of a home video recorder was made at the BBC News Studios in London. A Telcan, short for television in a can, could record up to 20 minutes of black and white television using quarter-inch tape on a reel to reel system.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/aNhfBgCgSByEMns5XPxXqA

1993 – “Severe Tire Damage,” conducted the first known Internet concert. The band set their gear up on the patios of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and sent their show out on the Internet Multicast Backbone, or Mbone.

http://www.std.org/text/press/internetguiden.html

1994 – Geffen Records released the first major label song for digital download. Aerosmith’s “Head First” was available on CompuServe as a .WAV file. It took more than an hour to download.

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/go-aerosmith-how-head-first-became-the-first-song-available-for-digital-download-20-years-ago-today

2000 – President Clinton gave his weekly radio address live on the Internet for the first time.

http://clinton5.nara.gov/WH/Accomplishments/eightyears-09.html

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

1912 – Alan Turing was born in London, although his father worked for the Indian Civil Service and his parents lived in India. He helped break the code of the German enigma machine and developed the Turing test for artificial intelligence.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/people/alan_turing

1943 – Vint Cerf was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He grew up to become known as one of the fathers of the Internet, most famously for his co-creation of the protocols underlying TCP/IP.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0148576/bio

1983 – Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel ran the first successful test of the automated, distributed Domain Name System at the University of Southern California School of Engineering’s Information Sciences.

http://www.infoworld.com/d/applications/dns-marks-20th-birthday-128

1996 – The Nintendo 64 launched in Japan becoming the first home console to rely on the analog stick as its primary control.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2011/09/24/nintendo-64-launching-a-legacy

2005 – Reddit launched online with a submission about the Downing Street memo.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/33809408@N00/315068778/in/photostream/

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

1675 – Britain’s King Charles II established the observatory at Greenwich with the main purpose of determining precise longitudes to aid in navigation. This purpose led to Greenwich being marked as the prime meridian and later Greenwich Mean Time.

http://books.google.com/books?id=KXFLAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA140&lpg=PA140&dq=june+22+1675+greenwich+royal+warrant&source=bl&ots=Wq9jymLyYF&sig=aIu0NBzBNBOKCLwJfhH-gS1D-Pc&hl=en&sa=X&ei=He65UYGiMeWKjALA_IDgDw&ved=0CEYQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=june%2022%201675%20greenwich%20royal%20warrant&f=false

1799 – The first definitive prototype metre bars (mètre des Archives) and kilograms were constructed in platinum.

http://www.sizes.com/units/meter.htm

1996 – Quake, the successor to the first-person shooter Doom was released by id Software with music composed by Trent Reznor. The Quake engine offered full real-time 3D rendering and had early support for 3D acceleration through OpenGL. It also added several multiplayer options.

http://rome.ro/news/2016/6/22/happy-20th-birthday-quake

1999 – The first demonstration of live rats directly controlling a robot arm with their thoughts was published by Nature Neuroscience.

https://corporate.dukehealth.org/news-listing/rats-operate-robotic-arm-brain-activity

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

1948 – The Small-Scale Experimental Machine, SSEM took 52 minutes to run its first program, written by Professor Tom Kilburn. SSEM was the first computer to store programs electronically. The SSEM was nicknamed the “Manchester Baby”.

http://curation.cs.manchester.ac.uk/computer50/www.computer50.org/mark1/new.baby.html

1981 – IBM retired the last of its “STRETCH” mainframes. These mainframes were part of the 7000 series that made up the company’s first transistorized computers.

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/other/4375893/IBM-retires-7030–STRETCH–computer–June-21–1981

2004 – SpaceShipOne became the first privately developed piloted vehicle to leave Earth’s atmosphere and reach the edge of space.

https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/spaceshipone

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

1840 – Samuel F.B. Morse received a US patent for “Improvement in the mode of communicating information by signals by the application of electro-magnetism.” We call it Morse code.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=Xx5AAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1963 – A hotline was established between the Soviet Union and the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis. While later it would become the famous “red telephone” it started as a teletype.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/united-states-and-soviet-union-will-establish-a-hot-line

2003 – The WikiMedia Foundation was founded in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales to oversee the various Wiki projects like Wikipedia.

http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Press_releases/Relocation

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

240 B.C. – Greek astronomer, geographer, mathematician and librarian in Alexandria, Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference. His data was based on the length of shadows in different locations and simple geometry, but his calculations were not far wrong.

http://www.wired.com/2012/06/june-19-240-b-c-the-earth-is-round-and-its-this-big/

1623 – Mathematician Blaise Pascal was born in France. He invented a digital calculator, the Pascaline, to help his father in his tax-collecting work.

http://www.biography.com/people/blaise-pascal-9434176#synopsis

2003 – Apple released dock connector-to-USB 2.0 cables and drivers for third-generation iPods. Previous iPods had been FireWire only.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/instant-expert-a-brief-history-of-ipod/

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

1908 – Scottish electrical engineer, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, published a brief letter in the journal Nature, describing the essentials of making and receiving television images. He described using an electron gun in the neck of a cathode-ray tube to shoot electrons toward the flat end of the tube, which was coated with light-emitting phosphor. Others like Farnsworth and Baird would make just such devices years later.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/06/0618swinton-describes-tv/

2002 – Kevin Warwick had his chip removed. Warwick implanted the chip earlier that year in order to experiment with human-computer interaction, culminating in a direct connection to his wife.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/57924893/I-CYBORG

2009 – The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a NASA robotic spacecraft was launched on its mission to collect information about the Moon, particularly around the poles.

http://lro.gsfc.nasa.gov/mission.html

2014 – Amazon announced its first cell phone the Fire Phone at an event in Seattle. The phone featured object recognition and a dynamic perspective 3D interface.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27911029#sa-ns_mchannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

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

1936 – Edwin Armstrong presented FM radio at FCC headquarters. Armstrong played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. “[I]f the audience of 50 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room.”

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/FM_broadcasting_in_the_USA.html

1946 – The first mobile telephone call was made from a car in St. Louis, Missouri. Teams from Bell Labs and Western Electric had collaborated to develop the technology.

http://ethw.org/The_Foundations_of_Mobile_and_Cellular_Telephony

1997 – Programmers deciphered code written in the impenetrable Data Encryption Standard, the strongest legally exportable encryption software in the United States. The hackers organized over the Internet and cracked the software in five months, proving that stronger encryption was needed.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ce_nUNxdKV8C&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=june+17+1997+data+encryption+standard&source=bl&ots=ujMF0OF7CC&sig=Gbddn5qlPT5nih1yDkbbke-LiEQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=5ra0UZIHxpuIAqLPgYgO&ved=0CEQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=june%2017%201997%20data%20encryption%20standard&f=false

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