1953 – Dudley Buck entered the idea for the Cryotron into his MIT notebook. The cryotron is a four-terminal superconductive computer component.

1965 – Gemini 6A, crewed by Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida. Four orbits later, it achieved the first space rendezvous, with Gemini 7.

1994 – Netscape shipped version 1.0 of the Netscape Navigator Web browser.

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

1900 – German physicist Max Planck published his theory that radiant energy is made up of particle-like components, known as “quantum.” And quantum physics was born.

1972 – Eugene Cernan ended a 7 hour and 15 minute EVA, climbed back aboard the Apollo 17 Lunar Module and became the last person to walk on the moon.

1996 – John Tu and David Sun, the founders of Kingston Technology took $100 million from the sale of their privately held enterprise and gave it to employees, a spontaneous gesture to those who had helped make the memory-module company a market leader.

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

1962 – NASA “Relay 1” launched, the first active repeater communications satellite in orbit.

1977 – Young Bill Gates was arrested for a traffic violation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, leading to one of the most famous mugshots ever.

1977 – Robert Metcalfe et. al were awarded a patent for “Multipoint data communication system with collision detection” also known as ethernet.

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

1896 – Guglielmo Marconi amazed a group at Toynbee Hall in East London with a demonstration of wireless communication across a room. Every time Marconi hit a key a bell would ring from a box across the room being carried by William Henry Preece.

1973 – Founder of LinkExchange, CEO of Zappos, and promoter of customer-centric business, Tony Hsieh was born.

1980 – Apple’s stock was initially offered for sale. Regulators in Massachusetts prohibited individual investors in the state from buying the stock, as it was deemed too risky.

1991 – Paul Kunz set up the first website in North America. It searched particle physics literature at Stanford.

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

1910 – Georges Claude, the first person to apply an electrical discharge to a sealed tube of neon gas, displayed the first neon lamp to the public at the Paris Motor Show.

1967 – The Concorde, a joint British-French venture and the world’s first supersonic airliner, was unveiled in Toulouse, France. Bigger news than the speed of the jet was the announcement that it was finally agreed that the British and French planes would both be spelled with an “e” at the end.

1972 – Apollo 17 became the sixth and last Apollo mission to land on the Moon.

1998 – The Mars Climate Orbiter was successfully launched on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Station in Florida. However, the probe disappeared on September 23rd before reaching Mars, apparently destroyed because scientists had failed to convert English measures to metric values.

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

1815 – Ada Byron was born in London, England to the poet Lord Byron and Anne Isabelle Milbanke. She would later marry William King and take on his title as Lady Lovelace. But she is best remembered as Charles Babbage’s friend, and writer of the first program for his Difference Engine. She is considered by many to be the first computer programmer.

1942 – Germany conducted the first powered test flight of a V-1 Rocket, launched from beneath an Fw-200.

1944 – Paul Otlet died. His theories presciently described a global interlinked “web” of documents, presaging the World Wide Web almost 50 years before its invention.

1993 – John Carmack and friends at iD Software released the video game Doom. It would launch a million mods and make the first person shooter the dominant form of video game for decades.

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

1906 – Grace Hopper was born. She would rise to the rank of Rear Admiral but be best remembered for popularizing the term “debugging” for hunting down computer errors. She conceptualized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL.

1968 – Computer scientist Douglas Engelbart gave a legendary product demonstration of NLS that would become known as “the mother of all demos.” Among other things it introduced the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor.

1987 – Microsoft released Windows 2.0 which among other improvements could run the first Windows versions of Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel.

2015 – The Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency probe Akatsuki successfully went into orbit around Venus.

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

1931 – US Patent No. 1,835,031 for a “concentric conducting system” was awarded to Lloyd Espenschied of Kew Gardens, New York, and Herman A. Affel of Ridgewood, New Jersey, and assigned to the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. Coaxial Cable had been patented.

1993 – The US Secretary of Defense declared the GPS system a dual use system that had Initial Operation Capability and opened the Standard Positioning System to civilians, which gave accuracy of nine meters horizontally.

2010 – With the second launch of the SpaceX Dragon, SpaceX became the first privately held company to successfully launch, orbit and recover a spacecraft.

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

1962 – Ferranti Ltd. switched on the Atlas, the UK’s first supercomputer. It was the most powerful computer in the world at the time and doubled the UK’s scientific computing capability.

1963 – The CBS broadcast of the college football game between Army and Navy featured the first use of video instant replay during a sports telecast. Some people got confused and called to complain.

1972 – The last Apollo moon mission, Apollo 17 was launched. The crew took the famous Blue Marble picture that now graces desktop background everywhere.

1999 – The Recording Industry Association of America sued 6-month-old Napster. The Industry refused to settle, thus insuring that digital music sales would remain low for years to come.

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

1877 – Thomas Edison tested out his new phonograph invention, by recording the first lines of the poem “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” He recreated the event in 1927.

1957 – Responding to Sputnik, the United States launched the Vanguard TV3. The rocket only made it a little over a meter off the launchpad before it fell back and was destroyed. A fuel leak was thought to have caused the failure.

2006 – NASA revealed photographs from the Martian Global Surveyor, of two craters called Terra Sirenum and Centauri Montes which appeared to show evidence that water existed on the surface of Mars, as recently as five years before.

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