1890 – Louis Le Prince boarded a train to Paris at Dijon station. Neither he nor his bags ever arrived and his disappearance was never solved. In 188 he had patented a system for taking 16 pictures a second and playing them back as a moving picture.

1959 – The first successful photocopier, the Xerox 914, was introduced at the Sherry-Netherland hotel in New York City. One of them caught fire. The demo that was carried live on television did not catch fire.

1985 – Steve Jobs spent his last day as an employee of Apple after submitting his resignation to the board.

1997 – After purchasing NeXT the previous December, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company, the Apple Board named Jobs as interim CEO, replacing Gil Amelio.

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

1947 – The Association for Computing Machinery was founded as the Eastern Association for Computing Machinery, during a meeting at Columbia University in New York. It developed into the world’s largest organization of computer professionals.

1947 – RCA released the 12AX7 vacuum tube for public sale. The miniature dual triode vacuum tube with high voltage gain became popular with tube amplifier enthusiasts and has been in continuous production since. The tube is also known as the ECC83 in the European Union.

2008 – Electronics retailer Best Buy acquired the Napster music service for $121 million, preventing the once dominating music-sharing service from going out of business.

2014 – Microsoft announced they would purchase Mojang, makers of the Minecraft universe. Mojang’s founders, Notch, Carl, and Jakob, announced they would leave the company.

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

1959 – After 33.5 hours of flight, Luna 2 became the first human-made object to strike the moon.

2000 – Microsoft released Windows ME. The ME stood for Millenium Edition but deserving or not, would eventually become code for a bad or unnecessary OS update.

2001 – The Nintendo GameCube went on sale in Japan. It was the first Nintendo game console that did not use cartridges.

2015 – The Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, LIGO, detected gravitational waves of two merging black holes. It was the first direct observation of gravitational waves.

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

1983 – Osborne Computer declared bankruptcy in Oakland, California federal bankruptcy court, listing assets of $40 million, liabilities of $45 million, and 600 creditors. Two years earlier, Osborne had produced the first portable computer, the 24-pound Osborne I.

1985 – Nintendo released Super Mario Brothers in Japan. It became the best selling video game for 20 years until it was surpassed by Wii Sports.

2000 – The public beta of Apple’s Mac OS X, code named Kodiak, was released. Users had to pay $29.95 for the beta.

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

1962 – US President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at the stadium of Rice University, declaring “We choose to go to the moon.” Many consider the speech the beginning of the space race.

1985 – Steve Jobs announced to the Apple board that he would resign. Jobs said, “I’ve been thinking a lot, and it’s time for me to get on with my life. It’s obvious that I’ve got to do something. I’m 30 years old.”

1994 – Mosaic Communications introduced its first software, the Mosaic NetScape network navigator and the Mosaic Netsite server line.

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

1928 – Radio station WGY of General Electric made the first simulcast in Schenectady, New York. A play called “The Queen’s Messenger” had its audio broadcast over radio with the picture in sync over television at same time.

1985 – ISEE-3, renamed the International Cometary Explorer (ICE), flew through the gas tail of comet P/Giacobini-Zinner.

1998 – The US Congress released the contents of the Starr report on the Internet. The report led to the impeachment, but not the removal, of President Clinton. The websites that hosted the report were slammed with traffic.

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

1990 – Peter Deutsch posted to comp.archives about the Internet Archive Server called “Archie” that he, Alan Emtage, and Bill Heelan had put together. It is often considered the Internet’s first search engine.

1991 – Paul Lindner posted to comp.unix.misc introducing “The Internet Gopher” a distributed information service. Before the World Wide Web, Gopher was the primary way to find and share documents online.

2008 – The Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva,Switzerland, powered up on its quest to discover the secrets of particle physics, especially evidence of the Higgs Boson.

2013 – Apple announced two new phones, the iPhone 5S with a fingerprint scanner, and the iPhone 5C a cheaper and colored version of the iPhone 5.

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

1940 – In McNutt Hall at Dartmouth College, George Stibitz demonstrated the first remote operation of a computer. He connected to his Complex Number Generator at Bell labs by telephone using 28-wire teletype cable.

1947 – While troubleshooting the Harvard University Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator, operators found a moth trapped between the points of relay #70 in Panel F. They affixed the bug to the log and wrote “First actual case of bug being found.” While this was not the first use of the term ’bug’ for a computer problem, ‘debugging’ became popular for fixing bugs after this case.

1995 – The Sony PlayStation went on sale in North America.

1999 – The Sega Dreamcast debuted in North America. However many were distracted by the supposed 9/9/99 bug that ended up being just as much of a non-problem as the Y2K bug.

2014 – Apple announced the 4.7-inch iPhone 6 and 5.5-inch iPhone 6+ along with Apple Pay, a system that used NFC for payments. The company also unveiled the Apple Watch.

2015 – Apple announced a new 12.9-inch iPad Pro, a new Apple TV with a hard drive and remote with a touchpad and the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus with force touch capability.

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

1930 – The first roll of waterproof, transparent, pressure-sensitive tape was sold. Its brand name “Scotch” has become synonymous with cellophane tape.

1966 – The TV show Star Trek made its network television debut with the episode “The Man Trap”. Star Trek would have a profound influence on future technology thought and design.

2004 – NASA’s unmanned spacecraft Genesis crash-landed when its parachute failed to open.

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

1927 – The first fully electronic television system was demonstrated by Philo Taylor Farnsworth in San Francisco.

1979 – The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, ESPN, made its debut. It would become one of the main drivers of cable TV adoption and one of the main factors in the switch to Internet television.

1981 – The first large parallel processing computer, ILLIAC IV, ended its nearly decade-long life at the University of Illinois.

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