1959 – The first experimental hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell’s SRN-1 made its first trials at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/11/newsid_4333000/4333329.stm
1978 – Texas Instruments introduced the Speak & Spell, the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. It used linear predictive coding to make a mathematical model of the human vocal tract and predict a speech sample.
http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/June/11/
1983 – IRM took its Japan Capsule Computer subsidiary and formed Capcom Company, Limited “for the purpose of selling software.”
http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/06/12/capcom-marks-25th-anniversary
1997 – Philippe Kahn took the first cameraphone photograph of his newborn daughter and then wirelessly transmitted the photo to more than 2,000 people around the world. He had hacked together a digital camera and a phone. Kahn went on to form the company LightSurf.
http://www.petapixel.com/2011/09/27/the-first-camera-phone-photograph-was-taken-in-1997/
1998 – Compaq Computer paid $9.1 billion to acquire what remained of Digital Equipment Corporation, the company that had brought the world PDP and VAX.
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=266844
Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.