Today in Tech History – August 25, 2017

1609 – Galileo Galilei craftily beat a Dutch telescope maker to an appointment with the Doge of Venice. Galileo impressed the Doge and received a lifetime appointment and a doubled salary. Later that autumn, Galileo pointed his telescope to the Moon, and trouble began.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post/400-years-ago-galileos-telescope-wa-2009-08-26/?id=400-years-ago-galileos-telescope-wa-2009-08-26

1981 – Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Saturn. Eight years later on the same day in 1989, Voyager 2 would make its closest approach to Neptune.

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/fastfacts.html

1991 – 21-year-old Finnish student Linus Torvalds wrote a newsgroup post about a free operating system he was working on. He said it was “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu.” His OS would eventually be called Linux.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/comp.os.minix/dlNtH7RRrGA

2014 – Amazon announced it had acquired Twitch.TV the popular video game streaming site. Rumors had indicated Google was going to buy the company, but the deal fell through.
http://blog.twitch.tv/2014/08/a-letter-from-the-ceo-august-25-2014/

2016 – NuTonomy began the first public trial of an autonomous taxi service. Customers could hail a self-driving taxi in Singapore’s One North business district. A human engineer sat in the driver’s seat ready to assume control if needed.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/08/24/mit-spinout-nutonomy-just-beat-uber-to-launch-the-worlds-first-self-driving-taxi/

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