1905 – 110 acres of land in southern Nevada were auctioned off, founding a new city. They would become downtown Las Vegas which would grow to become the host for major tech events like Comdex, CES and more.

1987 – The Soviet Union launched the Polyus prototype orbital weapons platform from Baikonur Cosmodrome Site 250 in Kazakhstan. It failed to reach orbit. Polyus was designed to destroy SDI satellites with a megawatt carbon-dioxide laser.

1997 – Amazon stock went public on NASDAQ.

2004 – Using a computer with a 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 processor, Josh Findley discovered the 41st Mersenne prime, 224,036,583 – 1. Mersenne primes have a close connection to perfect numbers, which are equal to the sum of their proper divisors.

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

1973 – The United States launched Skylab, the country’s first space station as part of the Apollo space program.

1984 – According to his Facebook profile Mark Zuckerberg was born in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He would grow up to found Facebook.

1992 – Texas Instruments decided to take on the dominance of Intel, announcing its own 486 microprocessor chip. Cyrix corp. designed the chip for TI, but it proved unsuccessful in weakening Intel’s dominance.

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

1884 – A group of people interested in the new field of electricity met in New York to start the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

1939 – Franklin Doolittle put experimental station W1XPW on the air, making it the first commercial FM radio station in the United States. The station later became WDRC-FM in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

1958 – The trademark “Velcro” was registered, protecting the name of the multi-purpose material that manages cables everywhere.

1976 – Atari released the video game “Breakout,” making the paddle controller useful for something besides “Pong.

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

1936 – University of Washington education professor August Dvorak received a patent for his new more efficient keyboard layout. While widely recognised as superior to the QWERTY layout, the Dvorak keyboard is not widely used.

1941 – German engineer Konrad Zuse presented the Z3, the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. It succeeded the Z1 which was the first binary digital computer.

2005 – Elijah Wood revealed the Xbox 360 on the MTV Music Awards. Microsoft didn’t announce price or release dates, only saying it would arrive for sale by the end of the year.

2015 – Verizon announced it would acquire AOL, including its ISP, advertising and blogging opertions as a wholly-owned subsidiary.

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

1951 – Jay Forrester filed a patent application for matrix core memory. Professor Forrester led a team at MIT that developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind. It was the first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high-speed.

1979 – Daniel Bricklin and Robert Frankston gave the first demonstration of VisiCalc, the program that made the Apple II popular with businesses.

1997 – Deep Blue won its final match against Chess master Garry Kasparov, becoming the first computer to defeat a chess champion in match play.

2016 – Hyperloop One conducted the first test of its linear-electric motors for propelling Hyperloop pods on a test track north of Las Vegas, NV.

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

1946 – The US launched its second V-2 rocket at White Sands Proving Ground, which became the first successful launch of a large rocket on US soil. The rocket climbed straight up then pitched to the north reaching an altitude of 71 miles and impacted about 35 miles uprange.

1960 – The nuclear-powered USS Triton submarine arrived in Groton, Connecticut, after completing the first completely submerged circumnavigation of Earth.

2011 – Google announced its Open Hardware Platform and the Google Music service which would eventually become Google Play Music.

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

1893 – Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated the Kinetoscope for the first time at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.

1941 – The British Royal Naval ship HMS Bulldog captured a German U-110 submarine south of Iceland and recovered a naval version of the highly secret cipher machine known as Enigma. The sub was sunk to hide its capture and the machine taken to Bletchley Park where Alan Turing and other cryptographers broke the naval code.

1989 – Apple previewed its new System 7 operating system at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose. It was announced users would need at least a Mac Plus to run it as well as 2 megs of RAM.

2006 – Nintendo announced that its next game console, previously referred to as the Nintendo Revolution, would be called the Nintendo Wii.

2012 – Snapchat co-founder Evan Spiegel wrote the first blog post about Snapchat which had launched in the iOS app store in September 2011 after changing it’s name from Picaboo.

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

1790 – The French National Assembly acted on a motion from Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand to create a simple, stable, decimal system of measurement units. The earliest metre unit chosen was the length of a pendulum with a half-period of a second. The system eventually evolved into the metric system.

1988 – A fire broke out in the main switching room of the Hinsdale Central Office of the Illinois Bell telephone company, causing a telephone service outage for more than 40,000 local phone lines. It was considered to be the ‘worst telecommunications disaster in US telephone industry history.’

1995 – The New York Times announced it would join eight other newspapers in the New Century Network. The network aimed to connect local online news services into a national service on the Web.

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

1895 – The first demonstration of A. A. Popov’s electromagnetic wave receiver took place at a meeting of the Russian Physical Chemical Society in St.- Petersburg. It was essential to the development of wireless communications.

1895 – Otto Steiger received a patent for the Millionaire calculating machine. Switzerland’s Hans Egli made 4,700 of the 120-pound things. The Millionaire’s chief feature was the ability to do direct multiplication with a single rotation of the handle!

1952 – British radar engineer Geoffrey Dummer introduced the concept of the integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, DC.

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

1896 – Samuel Pierpoint Langley’s Aerodrome No. 5 made the first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft of substantial size.

1949 – The EDSAC, the first practical stored program computer, performed its first calculation. It operated at a speed of 714 operations per second.

2002 – Apple’s Steve Jobs previewed Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar during his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. It featured a handwriting technology dubbed Inkwell, an iChat instant messenger client, QuickTime 6 integration and more.

2003 – Eve Online launched. The massively multiplayer space adventure differed from others in that its storylines were created mostly by the players of the game.

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