1889 – Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in Kyoto, Japan, to manufacture hanafuda, Japanese playing cards. Mario came much later.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/09/0923nintendo-founded/

1999 – NASA lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. It began orbit normally, but after it went behind the planet and out of range, it never made contact again. It was later determined that the approach attitude was wrong because software put out imperial units instead of metric units.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mco990923.html

1999 – Two years after its founding, Netflix launched its subscription DVD rental service which proved much more popular than renting DVDs individually by mail.

http://archive.fortune.com/2009/01/27/news/newsmakers/hastings_netflix.fortune/index.htm

2002 – Mozilla Phoenix 0.1 was released. It was the first public version of the web browser, that would become Mozilla Firefox.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/History:Timelines

2008 – The T-Mobile G1 launched, the first phone to use Google’s Android OS, as it began it’s competition against the barely year-old iPhone.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409863,00.asp

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1791 – Michael Faraday was born in south London. He grew up to discover electromagnetic induction and coined the terms ‘electrode’, ‘cathode’ and ‘ion.’ He also lent his name to the Faraday cage.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/faraday_michael.shtml

1986 – In NEC Corp. Vs. Intel Corp., the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that microprograms are copyrightable literary works. And so all the trouble began.

http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v03/03HarvJLTech209.pdf

2011 – Facebook announced its new Timeline feature which would collect all your posts and materials in chronological order, replacing the old profile.

https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150289612087131

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1866 – Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, England. He would grow up to write under the name H. G. Wells and help form the genre of science fiction.

http://www.britannica.com/biography/H-G-Wells

1999 – Google came out of beta. The young company announced its new Google Scout feature and the launch of its new website, removing the beta designation from the Google search engine.

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/1999/09/googles-new-googlescout-feature-expands.html

2000 – Kevin Mitnick was released from a Lompoc, California prison after almost five years of incarceration.

http://news.cnet.com/Mitnick-released-from-prison/2100-1023_3-235933.html

2015 – Christopher Poole aka ‘moot’ sold 4Chan to its inspiration 2Channel. Hiroyuki Nishimura became 4Chan’s president.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/21/4chan-has-been-sold-to-2channel-after-12-years-of-independence/

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1848 – At noon in the library of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, members of the former Association of American Geologists and Naturalists met to create the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

https://www.aaas.org/news/aaas-celebrates-its-168th-anniversary

1954 – John Backus and his team at IBM ran the first FORTRAN program. FORTRAN stands for FORmula TRANslation and was the first high-level language and compiler developed.

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4396778/1st-FORTRAN-program-runs–September-20–1954

1983 – A patent for the RSA Algorithm for public-key cryptography was awarded. RSA stands for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who first publicly described it in 1977.

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

2012 – Makerbot Industries released the Replicator 2 3D printer, meant for non-expert users, and providing 100 micron resolution printing. They also announced the opening of a store in Manhattan.

http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/09/19/a-whole-new-makerbot-introducing-replicator-2-desktop-3d-printer/

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1982 – In a posting made at 11:44 AM, Professor Scott Fahlman first proposed using the characters 🙂 to indicate jokes on a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University. In the same post he suggested :-(.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm

1989 – About 100 hospitals that used software from Shared Medical Systems saw their computers go into a loop when the date was entered. The day was 32,768 days from January 1, 1900, which caused a system overflow.

http://books.google.com/books?id=k29i2RUzg0EC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=september+19+1989+hospital+bug&source=bl&ots=LGg9GLyZD9&sig=fCpVkfK7qoMCUGiKvhpgeFpC48A&hl=en&sa=X&ei=aIUlUMSFIsLtiwL914GICg&ved=0CFkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=september%2019%201989%20hospital%20bug&f=false

1995 – International Talk Like a Pirate Day was first celebrated by John Baur (Ol’ Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (Cap’n Slappy), of Albany, Oregon. They had come up with the idea on June 6th while playing racquetball, but that was D-Day. The 19th was Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday, and the only day he could reliably remember.

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/

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1822 – Jean-François Champollion, permanent secretary of the French Académie des Inscriptions, presented his Lettre a M. Dacier, describing his solution to the mystery of the Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. A nifty bit of decryption.

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/philology/gallery/champollion.html

1991 – The first version of the Linux kernel (0.01) was posted to a Finnish FTP server in Helsinki. Originator Linus Torvalds wanted to call the OS FreaX, but the FTP admin didn’t like the name and renamed it Linux.

http://www.h-online.com/open/features/The-history-of-Linux-1331088.html

2007 – AOL announced plans to refocus the company on advertising and relocate its corporate headquarters from Dulles, Virginia to New York City.

http://observer.com/2007/09/aol-to-move-corporate-headquarters-to-770-broadway/

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1890 – Louis Le Prince boarded a train to Paris at Dijon station. Neither he nor his bags ever arrived and his disappearance was never solved. In 1888 he had patented a system for taking 16 pictures a second and playing them back as a moving picture.

https://web.archive.org/web/19991128020048/http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/local_heroes/biogs/biogleprince.shtml

1959 – The first successful photocopier, the Xerox 914, was introduced at the Sherry-Netherland hotel in New York City. One of them caught fire. The demo that was carried live on television did not catch fire.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZYurhbUh_2gC&pg=PA61&dq=#v=onepage&q&f=false

1985 – Steve Jobs spent his last day as an employee of Apple after submitting his resignation to the board.

http://gizmodo.com/5639822/25-years-ago-today-steve-jobs-left-apple

1997 – After purchasing NeXT the previous December, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company, the Apple Board named Jobs as interim CEO, replacing Gil Amelio.

http://techcrunch.com/2008/09/16/today-in-history-steve-jobs-returns-to-apple/

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1947 – The Association for Computing Machinery was founded as the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery, during a meeting at Columbia University in New York. It developed into the world’s largest organization of computer professionals.

http://www.acm.org/about/history

1947 – RCA released the 12AX7 vacuum tube for public sale. The miniature dual triode vacuum tube with high voltage gain became popular with tube amplifier enthusiasts and has been in continuous production since. The tube is also known as the ECC83 in the European Union.

https://www.effectrode.com/knowledge-base/the-12ax7-tube-the-cornerstone-of-guitar-tone/

2008 – Electronics retailer Best Buy acquired the Napster music service for $121 million, preventing the once dominating music-sharing service from going out of business.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/15/best-buy-bails-out-failing-napster/

2014 – Microsoft announced they would purchase Mojang, makers of the Minecraft universe. Mojang’s founders, Notch, Carl, and Jakob, announced they would leave the company.

https://mojang.com/2014/09/yes-were-being-bought-by-microsoft/

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1956 – IBM introduced the IBM 350 disk storage unit for the RAMAC 305, the first commercial computer to use magnetic disk storage.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_350.html

1959 – After 33.5 hours of flight, Luna 2 became the first human-made object to strike the moon.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/solarsystem/space_missions/luna_2

2000 – Microsoft released Windows ME. The ME stood for Millenium Edition but deserving or not, would eventually become code for a bad or unnecessary OS update.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-245728.html

2001 – The Nintendo GameCube went on sale in Japan. It was the first Nintendo game console that did not use cartridges.

http://cube.gamespy.com/articles/500/500516p1.html

2015 – The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, LIGO, detected gravitational waves of two merging black holes. It was the first direct observation of gravitational waves.

http://www.wired.com/2016/02/scientists-spot-the-gravity-waves-that-flex-the-universe/

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1983 – Osborne Computer declared bankruptcy in Oakland, California federal bankruptcy court, listing assets of $40 million, liabilities of $45 million, and 600 creditors. Two years earlier, Osborne had produced the first portable computer, the 24-pound Osborne I.

http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n3/24_Osborne_Comptuer_Corporat.php

1985 – Nintendo released Super Mario Brothers in Japan. It became the best selling video game for 20 years until it was surpassed by Wii Sports.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20016209-17.html

2000 – The public beta of Apple’s Mac OS X, code named Kodiak, was released. Users had to pay $29.95 for the beta.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2000/09/13Apple-Releases-Mac-OS-X-Public-Beta.html

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