1893 – A US. copyright was issued to William K. L. Dickson for a “publication” consisting of “Edison Kinetoscopic Records.” It was the first motion picture copyright in North America. No torrents were uploaded until much later.

1914 – Edwin H. Armstrong received a US patent for a “Wireless Receiving System” which described his famous regenerative, or feedback, circuit. Armstrong would go on to pioneer FM radio.

1927 – Al Jolson appeared on a movie screen in New York City and said for all to hear “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” It was the first talkie.

2014 – HP announced it planned to split into two companies. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise would become an IT company with all of HP’s enterprise level offerings. HP Inc. would take the existing logo and the personal systems and printing divisions.

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1969 – The first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired on the BBC. The show created the Spam sketch that would eventually inspire the slang term for unsolicited email.

1991 – Linux Kernel version 0.02 was released, attracting a lot of attention. Author Linus Torvalds felt this version was at least usable and worth a wider release.

1992 – IBM announced the ThinkPad line of Notebook computers at offices in New York City.

2002 – “Xbox Media Player” and its first beta source code was released. The code was a result of Frodo, the founder of “YAMP” (Yet Another Media Player), joining the Xbox Media Player team. The project was later changed to Xbox Media Center and then just XBMC.

2011 – Steve Jobs died at his home surrounded by family. The co-founder and CEO of Apple had fought pancreatic cancer for years.

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1957 -The Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, becoming the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, and motivating the US to get into gear and heat up the space race.

1985 – Richard Stallman started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation, dedicated to promoting the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF among other things, enforces the copyleft requirements of the GNU General Public License often referred to as the GPL.

2004 – SpaceShipOne returned from its third journey, a reusable spacecraft that could carry passengers beyond the earth’s atmosphere. It won the $10 million Ansari X prize for private spaceflight.

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1942 – Germany conducted the first successful test of the V-2/A4 rocket, launched from Test Stand VII at Peenemünde. It traveled 118 miles.

1950 – John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley received US patents for circuits that would eventually be called the transistor.

1967 – Air Force Major William “Pete” Knight flew the rocket-powered X-15 aircraft to 4,520 mph, Mach 6.72. That is the fastest manned aircraft ever flown.

1972 – The first USA/Japan Computer Conference was held in Tokyo.

1985 – STS-51J lifted off Sending the Space Shuttle Atlantis on its maiden flight. It was the fourth shuttle created and eventually became the last shuttle to fly in July 2011.

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1925 – John Logie Baird performed the first test of a working television system. It delivered a grayscale 30-line vertically scanned image, at five frames per second. After a ventriloquist’s dummy appeared on screen, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton became the first person televised in full tonal range.

1955 – ENIAC was shut down for the last time. After 11 years running at 5,000 operations a second and taking up 1,000 square feet of floor space, it had earned its retirement.

1996 – US President Bill Clinton signed amendments to the Freedom of Information Act requiring the US government to make electronic documents available online.

2015 – Google officially reorganized, merging with a new parent company called Alphabet. Subsidiaries included Google, Google Fiber, Calico and Life Sciences, Google Ventures and Google Capital, Nest, and Google X. Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Google while Larry Page became CEO of Alphabet and Sergey Brin became President of Alphabet.

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1958 – The National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics was officially absorbed by the brand new National Aeronautics and Space Agency. Another expanded government bureaucracy that was only good for putting people on the moon.

1971 – The first clinical human CT scan was performed on a middle aged lady with a suspected frontal lobe tumor, at Atkinson Morley’s Hospital in South London.

1982 – Sony started selling the first CD players to the public, the CDP-101 for 168,000 yen (that’s about $730 US). At the time you could get Billy Joel’s album 52nd street on CD– and soon many more.

2003 – 4Chan launched its main page, intended as a sister-site to the Japanese 2Chan for discussions of manga and anime. They provided the fertile ground for the growth of lolcats, Rickrolling, Anonymous, Pedobear and more.

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1882 – Thomas Edison’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant began operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin.

1954 – The USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, was commissioned at Groton, CT.

1980 – Xerox published the Version 1.0 specifications for Ethernet in conjunction with Intel and Digital Equipment Corporation.

2014 – Microsoft announced its next operating system would be called Windows 10, not Windows 9 and would arrive sometime in 2015.

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1954 – CERN officially came into being. In addition to countless advancements in science, it would go on to foster the invention of the World Wide Web.

1994 – Programmers first demonstrated the HotJava prototype browser to executives at Sun Microsystems Inc. It was an attempt to port the Java language to the Web. It worked.

1995 – The Sony PlayStation went on sale in Europe.

1996 – The Nintendo 64 launched in North America spreading its 3D world controlled by an analog stick to a new continent.

2015 – Google announced the Nexus 5X and 6P phones, new Chromecast and Chromecast Audio, and an Android tablet called the Pixel C.

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1998 – Microsoft’s Internet Explorer passed Netscape Navigator as the Web browser with the greatest market share, according to a report from the International Data Corporation.

2008 – SpaceX launched the Falcon 1, the first ever private spacecraft to enter orbit.

2011 – Amazon shook up the tablet market, announcing the the Amazon Kindle Fire 7-inch tablet for $199.

2015 – NASA announced definitive signs of liquid water on Mars had been found near the equator. Dr. Alfred S. McEwen and other scientists published a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, describing the direct identification of water in the the form of hydration salts.

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1922 – Scientists at the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory near Washington, DC, demonstrated radar by showing that if a ship passed through a radio wave broadcast between two stations, that ship could be detected.

1983 – Richard Stallman announced the GNU project which aimed at the time to develop a free Unix-like operating system.

1996 – Kevin Mitnick was indicted on charges he broke into the systems of major software companies, then transferred stolen material to computers at USC via the Internet. Seems prosaic today, but was unheard of at the time.

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