1960 – For the first time, a US presidential debate was televised. Vice President Nixon and Senator Kennedy debated in Chicago and were perceived differently by those who listened on radio versus those who watched on television.

1983 – 17-year-old Neal Patrick, of the hacking group 414s testified before the US House of Representatives about computer break-ins and how they might be stopped.

1991 – Eight people entered Biosphere 2, an airtight replica of the Earth’s biosphere in Oracle, Arizona. They left exactly two years later in 1993. Results of the experiment are still controversial.

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1956 – The first submarine transatlantic telephone cable system, TAT-1 was inaugurated, replacing slow telegraph and unreliable radio systems.

2001 – Apple announced the release of Mac OS X 10.1 Puma, the first major upgrade to OS X.

2012 – Blizzard launched its 4th World of Warcraft expansion, called Mists of Pandaria.

2013 – Amazon announced the Kindle HDX tablets with a service called “Mayday” that promised to let users speak with a real person by video over the Internet within 15 seconds of tapping a button.

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1979 – CompuServe began offering a consumer version of its dial-up online information service called MicroNET. The name would later be changed to CompuServe and offer public email among other online services.

1993 – Broderbund Software released the game Myst, for the Macintosh computer. It became a record-setting bestseller and helped popularize CD-ROM drives.

1997 – Ultima Online launched, revolutionizing online gaming by supporting thousands of simultaneous players in a persistent shared world.

2013 – Valve announced their new Steam OS, a free version of Linux built around the Steam video game service.

2014 – The shellshock vulnerability was made public. The way bash handled variables could allow malicious code to be run on computers running Linux and OS X. This meant routers, webcams and other connected devices were also vulnerable.

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1889 – Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in Kyoto, Japan, to manufacture hanafuda, Japanese playing cards. Mario came much later.

1999 – NASA lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. It began orbit normally, but after it went behind the planet and out of range, it never made contact again. It was later determined that the approach attitude was wrong because software put out imperial units instead of metric units.

1999 – Two years after its founding, Netflix launched its subscription DVD rental service which proved much more popular than renting DVDs individually by mail.
2002 – Mozilla Phoenix 0.1 was released. It was the first public version of the web browser, that would become Mozilla Firefox.

2008 – The T-Mobile G1 launched, the first phone to use Google’s Android OS, as it began it’s competition against the barely year-old iPhone.

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1791 – Michael Faraday was born in south London. He grew up to discover electromagnetic induction and coined the terms ‘electrode’, ‘cathode’ and ‘ion.’ He also lent his name to the Faraday cage.

1986 – In NEC Corp. Vs. Intel Corp., the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that microprograms are copyrightable literary works. And so all the trouble began.

2011 – Facebook announced its new Timeline feature which would collect all your posts and materials in chronological order, replacing the old profile.

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1866 – Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, England. He would grow up to write under the name H. G. Wells and help form the genre of science fiction.

1999 – Google came out of beta. The young company announced its new Google Scout feature and the launch of its new website, removing the beta designation from the Google search engine.

2000 – Kevin Mitnick was released from a Lompoc, California prison after almost five years of incarceration.

2015 – Christopher Poole aka ‘moot’ sold 4Chan to its inspiration 2Channel. Hiroyuki Nishimura became 4Chan’s president.

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1848 – At noon in the library of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, members of the former Association of American Geologists and Naturalists met to create the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

1954 – John Backus and his team at IBM ran the first FORTRAN program. FORTRAN stands for FORmula TRANslation and was the first high-level language and compiler developed.

1983 – A patent for the RSA Algorithm for public-key cryptography was awarded. RSA stands for Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman, who first publicly described it in 1977.

2012 – Makerbot Industries released the Replicator 2 3D printer, meant for non-expert users, and providing 100 micron resolution printing. They also announced the opening of a store in Manhattan.

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1982 – In a posting made at 11:44 AM, Professor Scott Fahlman first proposed using the characters 🙂 to indicate jokes on a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University. In the same post he suggested :-(.

1989 – About 100 hospitals that used software from Shared Medical Systems saw their computers go into a loop when the date was entered. The day was 32,768 days from January 1, 1900, which caused a system overflow.

1995 – International Talk Like a Pirate Day was first celebrated by John Baur (Ol’ Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (Cap’n Slappy), of Albany, Oregon. They had come up with the idea on June 6th while playing racquetball, but that was D-Day. The 19th was Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday, and the only day he could reliably remember.

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1830 – America’s first native locomotive, the “Tom Thumb” lost a race to a draft horse at Ellicotts Mills, Maryland.

1927 – The Columbia Phonograph Broadcasting System went on the air with 47 radio stations. Within two years it would be sold and become the Columbia Broadcasting System and later simply CBS.

1998 – The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers aka ICANN was created in order to take over Internet administrative tasks from the US Government. The most famous of those tasks is overseeing the Domain Name System.

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1822 – Jean-François Champollion, permanent secretary of the French Académie des Inscriptions, presented his Lettre a M. Dacier, describing his solution to the mystery of the Hieroglyphic inscriptions on the Rosetta Stone. A nifty bit of decryption.

1991 – The first version of the Linux kernel (0.01) was posted to a Finnish FTP server in Helsinki. Originator Linus Torvalds wanted to call the OS FreaX, but the FTP admin didn’t like the name and renamed it Linux.

2007 – AOL announced plans to refocus the company on advertising and relocate its corporate headquarters from Dulles, Virginia to New York City.

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