Today in Tech History – June 24, 2017

Today in Tech History logo1963 – 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

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Today in Tech History – June 23, 2017

Today in Tech History logo1912 – 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/

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Today in Tech History – June 22, 2017

Today in Tech History logo1675 – 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.
http://onlineathens.com/stories/062299/new_robots.shtml

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Today in Tech History – June 21, 2017

Today in Tech History logo1948 – 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://www.computer50.org/

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

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Today in Tech History – June 20, 2017

Today in Tech History logo1840 – 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

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Today in Tech History – June 19, 2017

Today in Tech History logo240 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/

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Today in Tech History – June 18, 2017

Today in Tech History logo1908 – 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

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Today in Tech History – June 17, 2017

Today in Tech History logo1936 – 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.
http://www.corp.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/46mobile.html

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

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Today in Tech History – June 16, 2017

Today in Tech History logo1911 – The Tabulating Company (founded by Herman Hollerith), the Computing Scale Company, and the International Time Recording Company merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York. They would later change the company name to International Business Machines,and later just IBM.
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/founded/

1963 – Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space, orbiting the Earth 48 times.
http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_level2/tereshkova.html

1977 – Software Development Laboratories was incorporated in Redwood Shores, California, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. They later came up with the catchier name, Oracle.
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/06/16/a-day-full-of-legendary-origins.aspx

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Today in Tech History – June 15, 2017

Today in Tech History logo1878 – Photographer Eadweard Muybridge used high-speed photography to capture a horse’s motion. The photos showed the horse with all four feet in the air during some parts of its stride. Stop-motion photography was born.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/91483062/

1949 – Jay Forrester wrote down a proposal for core memory in his notebook. Core memory was the standard for computer memory until advances in semiconductors in the 1970s.
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4375442/Forrester-records-a-proposal-for-core-memory-in-his-notebook–June-15–1949

1987 – Compuserve’s Sandy Trevor and his team, which included inventor Steve Wilhite, released GIF version 87a. The new enhanced format allowed people to create compressed animations. “Under Construction” GIFs everywhere became possible.
http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/gif-history-steve-wilhite-olia-lialina-interview/

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