1822 – Charles Babbage announced his difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables.”
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Babbage.html

1951 – The US Census Bureau officially put UNIVAC I into service calling it the world’s first commercial computer.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/industry/06/14/computing.anniversary/

1962 – The European Space Research Organization, which would become the European Space Agency, was established in Paris.
http://www.jaxa.jp/library/space_law/chapter_1/1-2-2-4_e.html

1967 – NASA launched Mariner 5 on its mission to fly by Venus.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1967-060A

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

1925 – Charles Jenkins publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of silhouette pictures and sound, becoming the first person to demonstrate TV in the US.
http://www.bairdtelevision.com/jenkins.html

1941 – John Mauchly visited John Atanasoff to see his computer. The two computer pioneers later battled in court over who was the legal inventor of the electronic digital computer.
http://jva.cs.iastate.edu/mauchlyinames.php

1944 – Germany launched the first guided missile attack in history, sending V-1 rockets into London.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/germans-launch-v-1-rocket-attack-against-britain

1983 – Pioneer 10 became the first human-made object to pass outside Pluto’s orbit and leave the central solar system.
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/sso/cool/pioneer10/mission/

2016 – At the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple announced it was changing the name of OS X to macOS starting with the next version of the operating system, macOS Sierra.
http://www.businessinsider.com/wwdc-2016-os-x-becomes-macos-2016-6

2016 – Microsoft announced the Xbox One S, a white slimmed down version of the Xbox One, capable of 4K video and Project Scorpio, a beefed up Xbox capable of 4K gameplay.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/xbox-project-scorpio-hardware-specs-can-it-do-4k/

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

1897 – Karl Elsener received a design patent for his “soldiers’ knife” for use by the Swiss army. The original had a wooden handle, a blade, a screwdriver and a can opener.
http://books.google.com/books?id=y5JW0YqRRhAC&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=june+12+1897+elsener&source=bl&ots=EVu9fyf4Uy&sig=XVkpORwhAsrVJ7ujG9ULMSqwXYA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=U6WuUeK4M4fgiAK3_oGoAg&ved=0CEAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=june%2012%201897%20elsener&f=false

1936 – The first radio station with 500,000 watt power began testing as W8XAR in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Test broadcasts took place from 1 AM to 6 AM. The station is now known as KDKA.
http://www.nrcdxas.org/articles/1stfacts.txt

1997 – 3Com Corp. and US. Robotics Corp. merged. The two companies combined US Robotics modems with 3Com’s interface cards.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1997-06-12/business/9706120201_1_casey-cowell-robotics-chairman-maker-of-computer-modem

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

1959 – The first experimental hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell’s SRN-1 made its first trials at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/11/newsid_4333000/4333329.stm

1978 – Texas Instruments introduced the Speak & Spell, the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. It used linear predictive coding to make a mathematical model of the human vocal tract and predict a speech sample.
http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/June/11/

1983 – IRM took its Japan Capsule Computer subsidiary and formed Capcom Company, Limited “for the purpose of selling software.”
http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/06/12/capcom-marks-25th-anniversary

1997 – Philippe Kahn took the first cameraphone photograph of his newborn daughter and then wirelessly transmitted the photo to more than 2,000 people around the world. He had hacked together a digital camera and a phone. Kahn went on to form the company LightSurf.
http://www.petapixel.com/2011/09/27/the-first-camera-phone-photograph-was-taken-in-1997/

1998 – Compaq Computer paid $9.1 billion to acquire what remained of Digital Equipment Corporation, the company that had brought the world PDP and VAX.
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=266844

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

1943 – Hungarians László and Georg Bíró, while living in Argentina, patented the first successful implementation of the ballpoint pen.
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa101697.htm

1977 – A few days after going on sale, Apple began shipping the Apple II for the first time.
http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/misc_cmds/misc_cmds-6/calendar/calendars/calendar.computer

2003 – The Spirit Rover launched on a Delta II rocket, beginning NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission.
http://marsrover.nasa.gov/mission/launch_e.html

2013 – Apple introduced iOS 7 and Apple OS X Mavericks at their Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. They also gave a sneak peek at the new cylindrical Mac Pro and announced their streaming music service called iTunes Radio.
http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/10/apples-packed-wwdc-2013-keynote-now-live

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

1902 – Joe Horn and Frank Hardart opened the first US Automat at 818 Chestnut St. in Philadelphia. The waiterless restaurant charged a nickel for most dishes.
http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1291&dat=20021226&id=vVpUAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ko4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=3964,7574304

1931 – Robert Goddard received a patent for rocket-fueled aircraft design (US. No. 1,809,271). Sadly we do not have a lot of rocket-planes in operation.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=pxxBAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1986 – The Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center opened to support the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET, which linked five supercomputer centers. NSFNET would eventually allow commercial uses and transition to the open Internet.
http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/June/9/

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

1637 – Rene Descartes published “Discourse on the Method for Guiding One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences”, which formed the basis of the modern scientific method. It’s also the source of the quote “I think, therefore I am.”
http://books.google.com/books?id=UPGVFEDVc0wC&pg=PA226&lpg=PA226&dq=descartes+1637+june+8&source=bl&ots=IRzDxujrmz&sig=8Zo5pCV6q5e18OY_U4o26FCcwB4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=x3iqUaOyCumdiAK4zIH4DA&ved=0CCwQ6AEwADgK#v=onepage&q=descartes%201637%20june%208&f=false

1949 – George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. The book still affects notions of privacy and inspired the iconic Apple commercial that introduced the Macintosh computer.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/10/1984-george-orwell

1955 – Tim Berners-Lee was born in London. He grew up to develop the World Wide Web. http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Longer.html

2008 – Apple announced Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Apple_Announces_Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard/

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

1954 – Computer science hero Alan Turing died. His death was ruled a suicide from eating an apple containing cyanide. Turing formulated the famous Turing test and broke code at Bletchley park during World War II.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/

1975 – Sony introduced the Betamax video recorder for sale. It would lose the format war to VHS but find a niche in broadcast production.
http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/this+history+june+1975/6745667/story.html

1980 – The first US solar power plant was dedicated at the Natural Bridge National Monument, Utah.
http://books.google.com/books?id=jC1QAAAAYAAJ&q=natural+bridges+solar+june+7+1980&dq=natural+bridges+solar+june+7+1980&hl=en&sa=X&ei=9sGnUda-E8iaiALLk4DgBQ&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA

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

1933 – The world’s first drive-in movie theater opened in Camden, New Jersey. Richard Hollingshead Jr. had developed the system by using a 1928 Kodak projector mounted on the hood of his car and aimed at a screen pinned to some trees.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-drive-in-movie-theater-opens

1984 – Soviet programmer Alexei Pazhitnov completed the first playable version of Tetris, one of the best-selling video games of all-time, was released. It was popularized by Hank Rogers who bought the rights and distributed it.
http://www.wired.com/2009/06/tetris/

1995 – The Los Angeles Times reported that Father Leonard Boyle was working to put the Vatican’s library on the World Wide Web through a site funded by IBM.
http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/June/6/

2013 – The Guardian published another leak from Edward Snowden about the PRISM project used to gather data held by Google, Facebook, Apple and other US tech companies. The tech companies denied “back door access” to their systems.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

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

1833 – Ada Gordon, daughter of Lord Byron (and future Countess Lovelace) met Charles Babbage for the first time. He designed an early computer, and she published a description of his work and wrote the first computer program. http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/June/5/

1977 – The Apple II went on sale. It had a bus speed of 1 MHz and 64 KB of memory. http://www.itwire.com/science-news/energy/12646-apple-ii-thirty-years-ago-the-first-pc-went-on-sale

2002 – Mozilla.org announced the release of Mozilla 1.0, an open-source browser built on the Gecko engine that also powered Netscape. http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article2278.html

2013 – The Guardian published its first exclusive based on Edward Snowden’s leaks, revealing a secret court order forced Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of customers to the US government.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

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