1903 – In one of the earliest examples of white hat hacking, Nevil Maskelyne interrupted a demonstration of the Marconi radio communications system at the Royal Institution, London. Before Marconi’s message from Poldhu, Cornwall could arrive, Maskelyne hijacked the signal sending the word “rast” repeatedly and then the phrases, “There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily.” http://books.google.com/books?id=UjXGQSPXvIcC&pg=PA108&lpg=PA108&dq=Marconi+radio+demonstration+at+the+Royal+Institution,+London+1903&source=bl&ots=5I-39pBVKI&sig=Y5yjsdCYkmsFVrm8naAcEegEW1E&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wrelT-6YLsrWiAL7puHSAg&ved=0CGgQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=Marconi%20radio%20demonstration%20at%20the%20Royal%20Institution%2C%20London%201903&f=false

1977 – JVC introduced the open standard for the VHS videocassette in North America at a press conference before the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. http://www.amoeba.com/blog/2013/09/eric-s-blog/37-years-celebrating-or-at-least-thinking-about-vhs-.html

2010 – Falcon 9 Flight 1 launched the maiden flight of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, setting a new benchmark for non-governmental space flight. The rocket put a dummy payload into orbit as a test.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-20006863-239.html

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1889 – The first long-distance transmission of electricity took place, sending power from a hydroelectric generator at Willamette Falls 14 miles to 55 street lights at 4th and Main in Portland, Oregon.
http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMH4P_FIRST_High_Tension_Power_Line_Portland_Oregon

1948 – Ed Brown Jr., a former Navy pilot, opened a fly-in movie theater near Wall Township, New Jersey. You could also drive in. The theater had space for 500 cars and 25 small planes could land in a nearby airfield and taxi over to the theater.
http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/8593

1965 – Gemini 4 launched on the first multi-day space mission by a NASA crew. Crew-member Ed White performed the first US spacewalk.
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/gemini/gemini-iv/gemini-iv.html

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1883 – Thomas Edison and Stephen D. Field built the world’s first elevated electric railway. It was a narrow-gauge 3-foot-wide track in the gallery around the edge of the main exhibition building of the Chicago Railway Exhibition. It ran nine miles per hour.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2011/06/0602first-chicago-el-runs-indoors/

1896 – Guglielmo Marconi applied for British Patent number 12039 regarding a system of telegraphy using Hertzian waves. We’d call it radio.
http://marconisociety.org/about/marconi-family/
http://www.radiomarconi.com/marconi/popov/pat763772.html

2003 – The European Space Agency launched the Mars Express probe from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. It was the fastest planetary probe to be built.
http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Mars_Express/SEMFU55V9ED_0.html

2014 – Apple announced OS X Yosemite and iOS8 at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Among the features were the ability to answer phone calls on your OS X computer, the ability for iOS apps to talk directly to each other, third=party keyboards for iOS, and a new programming language called Swift.
http://www.ibtimes.com/apple-targets-google-wwdc-2014-os-x-mavericks-ios-8-1593874

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1890 – The US Census Bureau began using Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine for the first time. This gave Hollerith the basis to later found his Tabulating Machine Company, which was one of four companies that merged to form IBM. http://www.ci.glendale.ca.us/library/this_week_in_reading_0601-0607.asp

1944 – The Colossus Mark 2 was put into service at Bletchley Park in Great Britain, just in time for the invasion at Normandy. http://books.google.com/books?id=gfL4ky-TQOMC&pg=PA80&lpg=PA80&dq=june+1+1944+colossus&source=bl&ots=LZ3i_tbzIt&sig=8RKO7B38Hpxplje8ydxyToLLB8E&hl=en&sa=X&ei=mr6iT5WVLuqciALEgaWMBw&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAw

1999 – The Windows version of music-sharing program Napster was released. http://www.oldapps.com/napster.php

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1941 – Electric eye detectors were first used to measure high-jumping height. A track meet of the Schenectady, NY, Patrolmen’s Association used equipment designed by General Electric, comprising of a movable light source and four electric eyes. http://books.google.com/books?id=9iYDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA112#v=onepage&q&f=false
http://www.schenectadypba.com/?page_id=1099

1943 – Chief consultant John Mauchly and chief engineer John Presper Eckert began leading the military commission on the new computer ENIAC. They would take one year to design the computer and 18 months to build it. http://inventors.about.com/od/estartinventions/a/Eniac.htm

2006 – Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay website and shut it down. The site relaunched from servers outside Sweden. http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bay-five-years-after-the-raid-110531/

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1966- NASA launched Surveyor 1. It achieved the first soft landing on the Moon by the United States and demonstrated the technology necessary to achieve landing and operations on the lunar surface for the manned missions to follow.

1979 – IRM was founded in Japan with the purpose of selling electric applied game machines. Two years later they started a subsidiary called Japan Capsule Computer. They eventually spun that division off as Capcom.

1987 – North American Philips Company introduced the compact disc video (CD-V), a 12 cm (4-3/4 inch) CD-sized implementation of storage for full motion video and CD-audio.

1996 – Intel planned to announce a video phone. Frank Gill, executive vice president of Intel’s Internet Communications Group, said he expected hundreds of thousands of video-phone ready computers would be sold that year. Video phones didn’t take off then.

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

1919 – Sir Arthur Eddington led a team in Africa to observe the total eclipse, while another team observed it in Brazil, to measure how the sun bent star light during a solar eclipse. The results confirmed Einstein’s theory of Relativity.
http://sunearthday.nasa.gov/2006/locations/einstein.php

1935 – Workers poured the last concrete at the iconic Hoover Dam hydroelectric site. Four months later after the concrete was well and truly set, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the dam. http://web.mst.edu/~rogersda/hoover_dam/

1992 – John Sculley introduced the Apple Newton at CES. The first one unveiled on stage had dead batteries and didn’t work. http://techland.time.com/2012/06/01/newton-reconsidered/

1999 – Space Shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with the International Space Station. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-96.html

2015 – Google announced Levi’s as the first partner for Project Jacquard, a way of weaving electronics into clothing to do things like turn cloth into a touchscreen controller. http://www.pcworld.com/article/2928372/this-smart-fabric-from-google-can-change-the-music-and-turn-off-the-lights.html

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1936 – Alan Turing submitted his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” for publication in which he postulated hypothetical Turing Machines would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.

1959 – A committee of government, military and business computer experts met at the Pentagon and laid the foundations for the COBOL computer language.

1971 – The USSR launched Mars 3. It would arrive at Mars in December and its lander would become the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars.

2014 – Apple announced it would acquire Beats Electronics and Beats Music for $3 billion. Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine would join the company with the titles of ‘Jimmy’ and ‘Dre.’

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1931 – Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took the first manned trip into the stratosphere when they rode in a pressurized cabin attached to a balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet.

1959 – After almost a decade, MIT shut down its Whirlwind computer. It ran 35 hours a week at 90 percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory.

1986 – Dragon Quest was released in Japan. It combined the full-screen map of Ultima with the battle and statistics-oriented screens of Wizardry and paved the way for RPG games.

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1969 – Apollo 10 returned to Earth after a successful eight-day test of all the components needed for the manned moon landing.

1981 – Satya Pal Asija received the first US patent for a computer software program. It was called Swift-answer. The patent took seven years to issue, and the validity of software patents has been debated ever since.

1995 – Bill Gates authored an internal memo entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave” calling the Internet the most important development since the IBM personal computer. Microsoft soon got to work on its own Web browser.

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