1957 -The Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, becoming the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, and motivating the US to get into gear and heat up the space race.

http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/

1985 – Richard Stallman started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation, dedicated to promoting the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF among other things, enforces the copyleft requirements of the GNU General Public License often referred to as the GPL.

http://www.linkedin.com/company/free-software-foundation

2004 – SpaceShipOne returned from its third journey, a reusable spacecraft that could carry passengers beyond the earth’s atmosphere. It won the $10 million Ansari X prize for private spaceflight.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2010/10/october-4-2004-spaceshipone-wins-10-million-x-prize/

2016 – Google announced two phones, the Pixel and Pixel XL, the first phones designed from the ground up by Google. The company also introduced a Google Home voice-activated assistant along with several other products.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37551413

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1942 – Germany conducted the first successful test of the V-2/A4 rocket, launched from Test Stand VII at Peenemünde. It traveled 118 miles.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/germany-conducts-first-successful-v-2-rocket-test

1950 – John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley received US patents for circuits that would eventually be called the transistor.

https://www.google.com/patents/US2524035?dq=2,524,035&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_bwVVJGDOorioAS14IHwBg&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA

1967 – Air Force Major William “Pete” Knight flew the rocket-powered X-15 aircraft to 4,520 mph, Mach 6.72. That is the fastest manned aircraft ever flown.

http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/x-15-walkaround-22512890/

1972 – The first USA/Japan Computer Conference was held in Tokyo.

http://books.google.com/books/about/First_USA_Japan_Computer_Conference_proc.html?id=eY4mAAAAMAAJ

1985 – STS-51J lifted off Sending the Space Shuttle Atlantis on its maiden flight. It was the fourth shuttle created and eventually became the last shuttle to fly in July 2011.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-51J.html

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1925 – John Logie Baird performed the first test of a working television system. It delivered a grayscale 30-line vertically scanned image, at five frames per second. After a ventriloquist’s dummy appeared on screen, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton became the first person televised in full tonal range.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/research/general/tvstory2

1955 – ENIAC was shut down for the last time. After 11 years running at 5,000 operations a second and taking up 1,000 square feet of floor space, it had earned its retirement.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/October/2/

1996 – US President Bill Clinton signed amendments to the Freedom of Information Act requiring the US government to make electronic documents available online.

http://www.justice.gov/oip/foia_updates/Vol_XVII_4/page2.htm

2015 – Google officially reorganized, merging with a new parent company called Alphabet. Subsidiaries included Google, Google Fiber, Calico and Life Sciences, Google Ventures and Google Capital, Nest, and Google X. Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Google while Larry Page became CEO of Alphabet and Sergey Brin became President of Alphabet.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000119312515336577/0001193125-15-336577-index.htm

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1958 – The National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics was officially absorbed by the brand new National Aeronautics and Space Agency. Another expanded government bureaucracy that was only good for putting people on the moon.

http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/nasa.html

1971 – The first clinical human CT scan was performed on a middle aged lady with a suspected frontal lobe tumor, at Atkinson Morley’s Hospital in South London.

https://www.birpublications.org/doi/pdf/10.1259/bjr/29444122

1982 – Sony started selling the first CD players to the public, the CDP-101 for 168,000 yen (that’s about $730 US). At the time you could get Billy Joel’s album 52nd street on CD– and soon many more.

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory/2-09.html

2003 – 4Chan launched its main page, intended as a sister-site to the Japanese 2Chan for discussions of manga and anime. They provided the fertile ground for the growth of lolcats, Rickrolling, Anonymous, Pedobear and more.

http://www.4chan.org/news?all#2

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1882 – Thomas Edison’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant began operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin.

http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/gilded/jb_gilded_hydro_1.html

1954 – The USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, was commissioned at Groton, CT.

http://www.ussnautilus.org/nautilus/index.shtml

1980 – Xerox published the Version 1.0 specifications for Ethernet in conjunction with Intel and Digital Equipment Corporation.

https://books.google.com/books?id=ioTFBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA167&lpg=PA167&dq=september+30+1980+xerox&source=bl&ots=r3kou4ggPv&sig=OUXVYAGcJqugpSYCnlNMjBc5Rwk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CD0Q6AEwBmoVChMI2Y3vuazvxwIVxDOICh22CAro#v=onepage&q=september%2030%201980%20xerox&f=false

2014 – Microsoft announced its next operating system would be called Windows 10, not Windows 9 and would arrive sometime in 2015.

http://live.theverge.com/microsoft-windows-9-event-live-blog/

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1920 – The Joseph Horne department store in Pittsburgh ran an advertisement in the Pittsburgh Sun, describing wireless Victrola music being picked up by radio. Amateur Wireless Sets were on sale for $10.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=bOo6Pj437KcC&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=september+29+1920+joseph+home+department+store&source=bl&ots=jNE7alxyrl&sig=cCNgYJ9p_ARyYDax18tNwjx1VHY&sa=X&ei=5uwuUMnaMcm1rQG3yYHYAQ&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q=september%2029%201920%20joseph%20home%20department%20store&f=false

1954 – CERN officially came into being. In addition to countless advancements in science, it would go on to foster the invention of the World Wide Web.

http://international-relations.web.cern.ch/International-Relations/ms/

1994 – Programmers first demonstrated the HotJava prototype browser to executives at Sun Microsystems Inc. It was an attempt to port the Java language to the Web. It worked.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/september/29/

1995 – The Sony PlayStation went on sale in Europe.

http://thenextweb.com/media/2015/09/09/playstation-turns-20-in-the-u-s-heres-a-look-back-at-the-consoles-evolution/

1996 – The Nintendo 64 launched in North America spreading its 3D world controlled by an analog stick to a new continent.

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

2015 – Google announced the Nexus 5X and 6P phones, new Chromecast and Chromecast Audio, and an Android tablet called the Pixel C.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2015/09/29/everything-google-announced-today-at-its-nexus-2015-event/

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1998 – Microsoft’s Internet Explorer passed Netscape Navigator as the Web browser with the greatest market share, according to a report from the International Data Corporation.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/09/0928ie-beats-netscape/

2008 – SpaceX launched the Falcon 1, the first ever private spacecraft to enter orbit.

http://www.spacex.com/press/2012/12/19/spacex-successfully-launches-falcon-1-orbit

2011 – Amazon shook up the tablet market, announcing the the Amazon Kindle Fire 7-inch tablet for $199.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/09/28/technology/amazon_tablet/index.htm

2015 – NASA announced definitive signs of liquid water on Mars had been found near the equator. Dr. Alfred S. McEwen and other scientists published a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, describing the direct identification of water in the the form of hydration salts.

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-confirms-evidence-that-liquid-water-flows-on-today-s-mars

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1922 – Scientists at the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory near Washington, DC, report on experiments with short wave radio that show if a ship passed through a radio wave broadcast between two stations, that ship could be detected. It was a development on the road to radar.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/classic/world-war-i-flight-timeline7.htm

1983 – Richard Stallman announced the GNU project which aimed at the time to develop a free Unix-like operating system.

http://www.gnu.org/gnu/initial-announcement.html

1996 – Kevin Mitnick was indicted on charges he broke into the systems of major software companies, then transferred stolen material to computers at USC via the Internet. Seems prosaic today, but was unheard of at the time.

http://articles.latimes.com/1996-09-27/local/me-47980_1_computer-hacker

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1956 – The first submarine transatlantic telephone cable system, TAT-1 was inaugurated, replacing slow telegraph and unreliable radio systems.

http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Milestones:The_First_Submarine_Transatlantic_Telephone_Cable_System_(TAT-1),_1956

2001 – Apple announced the release of Mac OS X 10.1 Puma, the first major upgrade to OS X.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/09/25First-Major-Upgrade-to-Mac-OS-X-Hits-Stores-This-Weekend.html

2012 – Blizzard launched its 4th World of Warcraft expansion, called Mists of Pandaria.

http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/07/25/mists-of-pandaria-releases-september-25/

2013 – Amazon announced the Kindle HDX tablets with a service called “Mayday” that promised to let users speak with a real person by video over the Internet within 15 seconds of tapping a button.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/25/4767996/amazon-mayday-virtual-genius-bar-kindle-fire-hdx-remote-support

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1979 – CompuServe began offering a consumer version of its dial-up online information service called MicroNET. The name would later be changed to CompuServe and offer public email among other online services.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/happy-30th-birthday-compuserve/24853

1993 – Broderbund Software released the game Myst, for the Macintosh computer. It became a record-setting bestseller and helped popularize CD-ROM drives.

https://www.giantbomb.com/myst/3030-3970/

1997 – Ultima Online launched, revolutionizing online gaming by supporting thousands of simultaneous players in a persistent shared world.

http://www.uo.com/article/Press-Around-Anniversary

2013 – Valve announced their new Steam OS, a free version of Linux built around the Steam video game service.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/23/4762370/steam-box-os

2014 – The shellshock vulnerability was made public. The way bash handled variables could allow malicious code to be run on computers running Linux and OS X. This meant routers, webcams and other connected devices were also vulnerable.

http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/09/bash-bug-as-big-as-heartbleed.html#.VCRaXildXA4

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