http://www.google.com/patents/US7074
1944 – At Bletchley Park in Great Britain, the Colossus Mk I attacked its first Lorenz-encrypted message. Enigma had been cracked but Lorenz was a tougher cipher used in communications between Hitler and his generals in World War II.
1974 – The US space probe Mariner 10 returned the first close-up images of Venus and became the first spacecraft to use a gravity assist from one planet to help it reach another.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1973-085A
1999 – Victoria’s Secret’s online fashion show became the first major webcast, attracting an estimated 1.5 million viewers worldwide. Proving even back then, the Internet is for shopping.
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/05/vicweb.idg/
Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.