1959 – The first atomic reactor built in the US for medical research, achieved criticality at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY.

1985 – Symbolics, a Massachusetts computer company, registered the Internet’s first dot-com domain name, symbolics.com. The domain is now owned by an investment company who uses it as a marketing device. The remains of the original Symbolics company survived in altered form at symbolics-dks.com.

2004 – Nicolas Jacobsen posted to a forum that he had hacked into T-Mobile’s network and stolen information from major celebrities like Paris Hilton. Jacobsen was later charged with two counts of violating the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

2016 – DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI program defeated 18-time Go champion Lee Se-dol in the 5th match of a five-match series for a series win of four matches to one. Lee won only the fourth game. The Korea Baduk Association gave an honorary ninth-dan ranking to AlphaGo.

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

1839 – Sir John Herschel presented his ‘Note on the Art of Photography, or the application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the purposes of Pictorial Representation’ to the Royal Society, likely the first use of the word ‘photography’.

1879 – Albert Einstein was born in Ulm in Württemberg, Germany. He would grow up to work in the Swiss patent office. And reinvent physics.

1994 – Linus Torvalds posted to comp.os.linux.announce that Linux kernel release 1.0. had arrived.

2006 – Amazon announced its S3 storage service, designed to provide Web developers with cheap fast storage for their online services. Amazon charged $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred.

2013 – Samsung announced the Samsung Galaxy S IV phone would come out in April. Their broadway-influenced presentation received much criticism.

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

1781 – English astronomer William Herschel observed what he initially thought was a comet but turned out to be the planet Uranus. It was the first planet to be discovered using a telescope.

1882 – At the Royal Institution, Eadweard J. Muybridge demonstrated his zoopraxiscope, an optical apparatus that exhibited photographs of moving animals. It is sometimes considered the first movie projector.

1969 – Apollo 9 returned safely to Earth after orbital testing of the first crewed Lunar Module.

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

1790 – John Frederic Daniell was born. He would grow up to invent the Daniell cell, a battery that supplied an even current during continuous operation, thus making battery power practical.

1889 – Almon B. Strowger of Kansas City filed his patent for the first automatic telephone exchange.

1923 – Inventor Lee De Forest demonstrated the Phonofilm for the press. It was the first motion picture with a sound-on-film track.

1989 – Tim Berners-Lee wrote a paper proposing an “information management” system that became the foundation of the World Wide Web. He called it the Mesh at the time.

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

105 – Ts’ai Lun demonstrated his process for making paper to the Han emperor in China. He probably didn’t invent it, but he certainly turned it into an industry for the first time. And the industry still survives 20 centuries later even in the face of the computers that plot its doom.

1985 – The Southern New England Telephone Company turned on ConnNet, the nation’s first local, public packet-switching network. Customers could access CompuServ, NewsNet and other services at a blistering 4,800 to 56,000 bits per second. The service’s X.25 protocol went obsolete in the 1990s with the popularity of the Internet Protocol.

2011 – Apple began selling the iPad 2, a thinner version of the first iPad, that also included a camera.

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

1876 – Alexander Graham Bell spoke the immortal words “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you.” over a telephone in his Boston laboratory, summoning his assistant from the next room. It is widely considered the first instance of someone using technology when they bloody well could have just got up and spoke to someone in person. It is also widely considered the first phone call.

1891 – Almon B. Strowger was issued a US patent for his electromechanical switch to automate a telephone exchange. Strowger wasn’t the first to think of of automatic switching but he was the first to make a practical switch.

2000 -The Nasdaq hit 5,048.62, the highest point of the dot-com boom. The bust began the next day.

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

1948 – The University of California at Berkeley and the Atomic Energy Commission announced the artificial production of mesons using the 184-inch cyclotron at the university’s Radiation Laboratory.

1961 – Sputnik 9 successfully launched, carrying a human dummy and and the dog Chernushka. It completed 1 orbit and was successfully recovered upon return. Yes, the dog made it back unharmed.

2011 – Space Shuttle Discovery on Mission STS-133 made its final landing after 39 flights.

2015 – Apple and HBO announced a new Internet-only streaming version of HBO called HBO Now would launch in early April exclusively on Apple products including the iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. Apple also announced the Apple Watch would come April 24.

2016 – In the first of 5 games, DeepMind’s AlphaGo machine intelligence defeated 18-time Go champion Lee See-dol in Seoul, Korea.

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

1955 – Doug Ross demonstrated the Director tape for MIT’s Whirlwind machine, the first digital computer with real-time text and graphics. The idea of the Director Tape was to allow multiple problems to be read by the computer in one session without humans having to intervene and change tapes. In other words, an operating system.

1978 – The first radio episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, was transmitted on BBC Radio 4. Some credit Adams with accidentally predicting the PDA and smartphone.

1979 – Philips publicly demonstrated a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference called “Philips Introduces Compact Disc.”

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

1876 – Alexander Graham Bell received a US patent for an “Improvement in Telegraphy” (No.174,465) which established the principle of bidirectional signals that made the telephone possible.

1926 – The first successful transatlantic telephone call was placed between New York City and London. Transatlantic service began the following year at $75 a minute.

1994 – The Supreme Court found that 2 Live Crew’s parody of Roy Orbison’s “Oh Pretty Woman” was fair use, and not a violation of copyright, thus ensuring the future of The Onion.

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

1937 – Valentina Tereshkova was born in the Yaroslavl region of Russia. She would grow up to become the first woman in space and only woman ever to fly solo in space.

1992 – The first media-hyped computer virus reached fever pitch as the Michelangelo boot sector virus began to affect computers. Worldwide catastrophe did not follow.

2007 Safricom launched M-Pesa in
Kenya, a service to let users receive, send and store money using a basic mobile phone.

2009 – NASA launched the Kepler space observatory, with a mission to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

2012 – Google consolidated its various online stores, Android Market, Google Books, Google Music, and Google video, into one store called Google Play.

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