1995 – German electronics company Escom AG bought the rights to the name, patents and intellectual property of Commodore Electronics Ltd. for $10 million. Commodore had gone bankrupt the year before.

2000 – The “I Love You” virus spread to 55 million computers around the world, hijacking hard drives and deleting, renaming, or damaging files. The damage reached billions of dollars.

2004 – Apple announced that Steve Jobs would kick off that year’s Worldwide Developers Conference by talking about Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

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1978 – Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sent the first unsolicited mass commercial email to 600 west coast ARPANET users. The message informed users of DEC’s new computer and operating system with ARPANET support, the DECSYSTEM-2020 and TOPS-20. Spam before it was spam.

1997 – In New York City, Gary Kasparov began his re-match match against IBM’s Deep Blue computer. He won the previous match in February 1996 4-2.

2000 – A “geocache” was hidden outside Beaver Creek, Oregon, kicking off the first “Great American GPS Stash Hunt” and the hobby now called geocaching.

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1887 – 65-year-old Rev. Hannibal Goodwin applied for a patent on his nitrocellulose flexible film. He beat the Eastman Kodak company by two years, but his vaguely-worded patent led to a 27-year legal battle.

1983 – Microsoft announced the two-button Microsoft Mouse built for IBM computers and meant to be used with the new Microsoft Word processor. Microsoft only sold 5,000 of the 10,000 made.

2000 – The United States government shut off Selective Access of the GPS system. That meant accurate positioning was no longer restricted to the US military. Positioning accuracy on the first day without Selective Access went from a 45-meter radius to a 6-meter radius.

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1884 – Construction began in Chicago on the Home Insurance Building, generally acknowledged as the first steel-frame high-rise skyscraper.

1959 – Shortly after construction had begun, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland was officially named in honor of the pioneering rocket scientist.

1964 – Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny of Dartmouth College, launched a time-sharing system using a language meant to be learned quickly, called BASIC.

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1904 – George Stibitz was born. He pioneered the principles of relay-based computing. And named the “model K” design after his kitchen table. His work led to the Complex Number Calculator, the first remotely accessed computer.

1916 – Claude Elwood Shannon was born. He is considered the father of information theory and is the man who coined the term ‘bit’ for the fundamental unit of both data and computation.

1939 – RCA began regularly scheduled television service in New York City, with a telecast of President Franklin D. Roosevelt opening the New York World’s Fair. Programs were transmitted from mobile camera trucks to the main transmitter, which was connected to an aerial atop the Empire State Building. The broadcasting division of RCA was called the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC).

1993 – CERN released a statement declaring the software protocols developed for the World Wide Web would be available in the public domain.

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1882 – Ernst Werner von Siemens presented his “trackless trolley” called the “Elektromote” in a Berlin suburb. The system pulled electricity from overhead wires, but used road wheels instead of tracks.

1953 – KECA-TV, an ABC affiliate in Los Angeles, California, broadcast the first US experimental 3D-TV. An episode of Space Patrol required specially polarized glasses to watch.

2005 – Apple released‘ Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, introducing spotlight search and dashboard functionality.

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2001 – Dennis Tito became the first “space tourist” in human history paying his own way to the International Space Station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

2003 – Apple opened the iTunes Music Store with 200,000 songs at 99 cents a piece. Songs could play on any iPod and up to three authorised Macs. Windows users were out of luck but tracks could be burned to unlimited numbers of CDs.

2003 – Apple unveiled the “third-generation” iPod. The new iPods were thinner and featured the bottom Dock Connector port rather than the top-mounted FireWire port. The iPod controls also became entirely touch sensitive.

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1981 – The first mouse integrated with a personal computer made its appearance with the Xerox Star workstation.

1995 – The Justice Department sued to block Microsoft’s purchase of Intuit, claiming the acquisition would raise prices and squash innovation. Intuit still exists but Microsoft Money is long gone.

1998 – Roughly 8,000 AOL subscribers joined the first known live interspecies chat with Koko the gorilla. Koko signed her answers; Penny Patterson interpreted them; and an AOL chat facilitator entered them in the computer.

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1884 – The New York Times reported that “sending mails by electricity” was to be investigated by the Post Office Committee of the US House, by providing for contracts with an existing telegraph company. The article promised it could lead to 10 cent telegrams!

1970 – The Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization entered into force.

1986 – Design flaws made worse by human error during a safety test, led to the worst nuclear disaster yet, and a partial meltdown at the Chernobyl Nuclear Plant.

1999 – RePlay TV began shipping the first Digital Video Recorder. It could pause and rewind live TV as well as schedule shows to be recorded. Models ranged from being able to store 6 hours to 26 hours of recorded shows.

2014 – A team of archaeologists hired by Fuel Entertainment and Xbox Entertainment Studios uncovered a pile of buried Atari E.T. games in a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico. The games were dumped 31 years before after the game flopped in sales.

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1944 – Lt. Carter Harman of the 1st Air Commando Group rescued four men from the jungle in Burma, flying a Sikorsky YR-4 helicopter. It was the first combat rescue by helicopters in the US Army Air Forces.

1953 – Watson and Crick presented their findings on the double helical structure of DNA in the publication Nature. They noted that the structure “suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” 50 Years later the Human Genome Project had concluded sequencing the genome and published a follow-on in Nature on their vision for genetic research.

1961 – Robert Noyce received the US patent for the silicon-based integrated circuit. He went on to found the Intel Corporation with Gordon E. Moore in 1968. Noyce fought a long patent rights battle with Jack Kilby who invented a germanium based integrated circuit.

2014 – Microsoft completed its acquisition of Nokia’s handset business. Nokia retained its mapping, research and network infrastructure business. Microsoft gained most of the mobile phone parts of the company.

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