1938 – Chester Carlson, tired of the exhaustive process of hand-copying or photographing patent paperwork, decided to make an easier way. On this date he produced the first electrophotographic image. Xerox would later make it automatic, popular, and make Carlson rich.
http://www.rit.edu/alumni/ihf/inductee.php?inductee=2

1968 – The US bounced back from tragedy with the first manned mission to space, Apollo 7, safely splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean after orbiting the Earth 163 times.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo7.html

1975 – The Soviet unmanned space mission Venera 9 landed on Venus. Pics or it didn’t happen you say? Well Venera 9 was the first spacecraft to return an image from the surface of another planet.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/v09_lander.html

1995 – Joost Shur posted QUAKETALK 95 to keep people up to date on the development of the forthcoming game Quake.

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

2009 – Microsoft released Windows 7. People liked it.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/10/windows-7-is-here/

2013 – Apple announced the new iPad Air and iPad Mini with retina display. They also released OS X Mavericks for free.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/10/apple-oct-event-announcements/

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1879 – Thomas Edison finished up 14 months of testing with an incandescent electric light bulb that lasted 13½ hours. It improved on 50-year-old technology to make light bulbs safe and economical by using lower electricity, a carbon filament and an improved vacuum.

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/oct-21-1879-thomas-edison-lights-the-lamp/

1949 – An Wang filed a patent for a magnetic ferrite core memory, that he called pulse transfer controlling devices. Two years later he formed Wang computers.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=JSNjAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1983 – The seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures ruled the meter would be defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. This actually simplified it from the previous definition of 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0810.3512.pdf

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1975 – Atari filed for a patent on the sit-down “cockpit” arcade cabinet, literally putting you inside the game. The game Hi-Way with the slogan “Hi Way — All It Needs Is Wheels”, was the first Atari game to use the cabinet. It was a first-person driver in which you had to dodge cars and– well– drive.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2FD243626

1984 – The Monterey Bay Aquarium opened in Monterey, California. It not only provided a world-class place to learn about sea life, but inspired millions of screensavers and wallpaper images.

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/about/our-history

2004 – Mark Shuttleworth sent out an email to Ubuntu developers announcing the first official release of the Linux-based operating system, Warty Warthog. Every six months since, a new version of Ubuntu comes out with a new alliterative animal-inspired name.

http://lwn.net/Articles/107267/

2016 – Nintendo released a video showing off the Nintendo Switch game console for the first time. It demonstrated the hybrid tablet nature of the console and showed off the Joy-Con controllers.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/nintendos-next-console-switch-is-a-consoletablet-hybrid/

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1832 – Samuel Morse first conceived of the electric telegraph system. At least he said later this was the day he first thought of it.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Da6nJoa_9nQC&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq=october+19+1832+samuel+morse&source=bl&ots=Kccb4Tn_UH&sig=Re6L_uE_YqFB0b8sVwiWKwHS2Uo&hl=en#v=onepage&q=october%2019%201832%20samuel%20morse&f=false

1941 – The Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine first fed AC power to the electric grid on Grandpa’s Knob in Castleton, Vermont, becoming the first wind machine to do so. The 1.25 MW turbine operated for 1100 hours before a blade failed.
http://www.historychannel.com.au/this-day-in-history/first-megawatt-wind-turbine-generates-electricity/

1973 – The Atanasoff-Berry Computer finally got its due. US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision that the ENIAC patent was invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer. But ENIAC still incorrectly gets the credit from many to this day.

http://www.columbia.edu/~td2177/JVAtanasoff/JVAtanasoff.html

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1922 – Six telecom companies joined to found the British Broadcasting Company in order to provide radio broadcasts in Britain. The private company was later replaced by the non-commercial British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927.

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/1920s.pdf

1954 – Texas Instruments announced the Regency TR-1, the first transistor radio, produced jointly with the Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates in Indianapolis. TI executive Vice President Pat Haggerty hoped the product would show what transistors could do and spur demand.

http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/company/history/timeline/semicon/1950/docs/54regency.htm

1985 – Nintendo introduced the Nintendo Entertainment System aka the NES at FAO Schwarz in New York. A little game called Super Mario Brothers was introduced on the same day. The NES was the North American version of the Famicom sold in Japan. It was test-marketed in New York and eventually conquered the continent, becoming an 8-bit classic.
http://news.cnet.com/Nintendos-NES-game-console-turns-20/2100-1043_3-5900089.html

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1888 – Thomas Edison filed a patent for something called an optical phonograph. Despite the conflicting name, it was a film camera with images 1/32nd of an inch wide. He said it would “do for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.”
http://www.technicacommunications.com/dailytechnica-edison-film-kinetoscope/

1907 – Guglielmo Marconi’s company began the first wireless commercial radio service, and Canada got some tech first. Glace Bay, Nova Scotia was able to transmit to Clifden, Ireland. The service was used for trans-atlantic telegraph service.
http://cbwireless.ednet.ns.ca/cbwirelessp3.html

1990 – Col Needham posted a software package to rec.arts.movies which he called at the time “rec.arts.movies movie database.” It made the lists of movies on the newsgroup searchable. It would move to the web in 1992 and became known as IMDB, the Internet Movie Database.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/19/business/la-fi-himi-needham-20130120

2013 – Microsoft released Windows 8.1, a free update to the Windows 8 operating system, that among other improvements, brought back the much beloved ‘Start’ button.

http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2013/10/17/can-now-download-release-version-windows-8-1-stores-tomorrow/

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1843 – Sir William Rowan Hamilton finally hit on the idea of Quaternions, and needing a bit more space than his hand to jot it down, he carved it into the stone of Brougham Bridge in Dublin. Why do you care about quaternions? Because calculations involving three-dimensional rotations are essential for 3D computer graphics and computer vision. Video games people.

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Hamilton.html

1923 – Distributor M. J. Winkler, contracted to distribute the “Alice Comedies” marking the founding of the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio which eventually changed its name to the Walt Disney Company, at Roy’s suggestion. So don’t expect anything after this date to ever go out of copyright.

http://d23.disney.go.com/archives/a-history-of-the-walt-disney-company/

1959 – Control Data Corp. released its model 1604 computer, the first from William Norris’s group that left Sperry Rand Corp.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/October/16/

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1878 – The Edison Electric Light Company began operation. They would go on to become more general. As in making up a significant part of General Electric.

http://books.google.com/books?id=w0o5Ld53wAEC&pg=PT130&lpg=PT130&dq=Edison+Electric+Light+Company+october+15+1878&source=bl&ots=s8fwfna3c3&sig=8HzXtv0nHRnYOKS6kAmAE-ieNaM&hl=en#v=onepage&q=Edison%20Electric%20Light%20Company%20october%2015%201878&f=false

1956 – Fortran, the first modern computer language was shared with the public for the first time. The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System made John Backus a legend, kicked off modern programming, and is still developed by the Fortran Standards Technical Committee.

http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortranStandards

2003 – China launched the Shenzhou 5, its first manned space mission, becoming the third country in the world to have independent human spaceflight capability. Yang Liwei piloted the capsule showing the flags of the People’s Republic of China and the United Nations.

http://spaceflightnow.com/shenzhou/031015launch.html

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1884 – US inventor George Eastman received a patent on his new paper-strip photographic film. It would reign for more than 100 years until digital stole its thunder.

http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2001/01-44.jsp

1977 – The Atari 2600 was released in North America, though it may have been available in Macy’s and Sears on September 11.
http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/happy-35th-atari-2600-175216071.html http://www.theverge.com/products/atari-2600/1710

1985 – The first official reference guide for the C++ programming language was published. It was written by the language’s creator, Bjarne Stroustrup.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/10/1014cplusplus-released/all/1

1996 – Matthias Ettrich posted about his new project Kool Desktop Environment, or KDE, attempting to create a GUI for the enduser of Linux.

https://www.kde.org/announcements/announcement.php

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

1884 – Geographers and astronomers adopted Greenwich as the Prime Meridian, making it the International standard for zero degrees longitude. Today the Greenwich observatory shoots a laser northwards at night to indicate the meridian. It is not a dangerous laser.

http://books.google.com/books?id=2PCEPLT4aZgC&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=october+13+1884+greenwich&source=bl&ots=OL5dRVJ8tz&sig=ItRzcm7zjEFOe33oFSMowrADBwk&hl=en#v=onepage&q=october%2013%201884%20greenwich&f=false

1983 – Bob Barnett, president of Ameritech Mobile communications, called Alexander Graham Bell’s nephew from Chicago’s Soldier Field using a Motorola DynaTAC handset. It marked the launch of the first cellular telephone network in the US.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10064633-94.html

1985 – The first observation of a proton-antiproton collision was made by the Collider Detector at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/tevatron/milestones/interactive-timeline.html

2000 – Tristan Louis suggested sound and video tags be added to the 0.92 spec for RSS feeds. This led to enclosures which allowed media files to be delivered through RSS and paved the way for podcasting.
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/syndication/conversations/topics/698

2016 – The PlayStation VR headset began shipping.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/12/13255384/playstation-vr-launch-availability-where-how-to-buy

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