1973 – Lexis launched Computerized Legal Searching. It was limited to searching the full text of cases in Ohio and New York.

1978 – The patent expired on Swiss inventor George de Mestral’s invention of a hook and loop fastener he called Velcro. Soon children everywhere no longer had to learn to tie shoes quite so early in life.

1980 – Microsoft Corporation announced its first hardware product the Z80 SoftCard for Apple. It was a microprocessor on a printed circuit board that plugged into the Apple II and sold for $349.00.

2014 – Amazon announced Fire TV, it’s set-top TV box to deliver streaming TV shows and video games. It also included voice commands spoken into a Bluetooth remote control.

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

1976 – Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne decided to change their garage project into a partnership and Ron Wayne typed up the papers. Wayne would leave the partnership after 11 days and Apple Comupter would be incorporated the following January.

2004 – In one of the best April Fool’s jokes ever, Google launched a real product. Weren’t expecting that, were you Internet? Gmail launched in invite-only mode, making a Gmail account temporarily prestigious in the geek world.

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

1939 – Harvard and IBM signed an agreement to build the Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). It weighed 5 tons and read data from paper tape and punch cards.

1993 – Richard Depew accidentally posted 200 identical messages to news.admin.policy while testing some auto-moderation software. It became the first USENET postings to be referred to as spam.

1998 – After three years of development and much wrangling with the Warcraft engine it was originally built on, Blizzard released the iconic game Starcraft.

2013 – IBM shut down the Roadrunner supercomputer, the first computer to run at more than one petaflop.

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

240 BC – Chinese astronomers observed a new broom-shaped “star” in the sky. It was the first confirmed sighting of Halley’s Comet.

1950 – Bell Telephone Laboratories announced the invention of a new kind of electric eye called the phototransistor. Dr. John Northrup Shive invented the transistor, which operated by light rather than electricity.

1951 – The Census UNIVAC System was accepted and subsequently devoted almost exclusively to tabulating results of the 1950 Census of Population and Housing. It was the first UNIVAC and was capable of completing 1,905 operations per second, which it stored on magnetic tape.

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