In 1888 – George Eastman was issued U.S. patent No. 388,850 for his roll-film box camera.

In 1956 – IBM introduced the IBM 350 Disk storage unit for the RAMAC 305, the first commercial computer to use magnetic disk storage.

In 1998 – Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed for incorporation of Google, allowing them to cash a $100,000 check Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun, had written to Google Inc.

In 2013 – Samsung announced a smartwatch called Galaxy Gear that could only be used with its own phones and tablets that ran Android 4.3.

MP3

Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1930 – An experimental electric engine was put in service by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad between Hoboken and Montclair, NJ. Thomas Edison served as engineer at the throttle.

In 1976 – Viking 2 landed on Mars and began taking high resolution pictures, measuring the atmosphere and surface, and looking for evidence of life.

In 1993 – Infogear filed an application for a U.S. trademark on “I PHONE” for its “communications terminals. The company would later register “IPhone” as well. Cisco acquired Infogear in 2000 and later worked out a deal with Apple to share the name.

In 2013 – Nokia announced it would sell its devices and services unit, the division in chatge of making mobile phones, to Microsoft for $7.2 billion.

MP3

Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1859 – A unique combination of solar events including a magnetic explosion severely affected the young telegraph network in North America and Europe. Wires shorted out, fires started and some machines reportedly worked even when disconnected from batteries.

1997 – IBM announced that its RS/6000 SP model parallel supercomputer, was now 58 percent faster than Deep Blue, the computer that beat Kasparov at chess.

In 2001 – At ECTS in London, Blizzard announced an online RPG version of its popular Warcraft franchise, called “World of Warcraft”.

MP3

Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1902 -Georges Méliès’ Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) debuted in France. It is often considered the first real science fiction film.

In 1994 – The United States Library of Congress held the first of several meetings to plan the conversion of its materials to digital form to make them accessible by computer networks.

In 1996 – Apple released its Pippin game console in the US. The idea was to provide an inexpensive game-focused computer. Apple licensed third parties like Bandai to make Pippin consoles.

In 2008 – Google launched its Web browser called Google Chrome.

MP3

Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1897 – Thomas Edison received a patent for the kinetographic camera, the forerunner of the motion picture film projector.

In 1994 – Stockholders approved the merger of Aldus Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. It united the two driving forces behind desktop publishing software. Aldus Pagemaker became Adobe Pagemaker.

In 1997 – The developer release of Apple’s new OS, code name Grail1Z4 / Titan1U was released. It was known formally as Rhapsody and would evolve into OS X.

MP3

Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1885 – Gottlieb Daimler received a patent for adding an internal combustion engine to a bicycle to make the first gasoline-driven motorcycle.

In 1963 – A direct line of communication between the leaders of the USA and USSR, dubbed “The Hotline” began operation.

In 1969 – BBN delivered the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) to the Network Measurements Center at UCLA. It was built from a Honeywell DDP 516 computer with 12K of memory, and would be used in October to make the first Internet connection with Stanford. Graduate students Vinton Cerf, Steve Crocker, Bill Naylor, Jon Postel, and Mike Wingfield were charged with installation.

In 1982 – A copyright was issued to 16-year-old V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai for a computer program he called “EMAIL,” short for “electronic mail.” While Ayyadurai may not be considered the inventor of email he definitely deserves credit for establishing the name.

MP3

Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1831 – Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, which is used in power generation and power transmission by generators, transformers, induction motors, electric motors, synchronous motors, and solenoids.

In 1965 – Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, orbiting 100 miles above the Earth in Gemini 5 talked with aquanaut M. Scott Carpenter in Sealab II, 205 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. It happened to be Cooper’s wedding anniversary.

In 1990 – The British Computer Misuse Act went into effect. The Act resulted from a long debate in the 1980s over failed prosecutions of hackers.

In 2003 – Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis founded Skype, the Voice over Internet Provider that would go on to dominate the space.

MP3

Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1845 – Scientific American began publication with the issue for this day. It would become the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States.

In 1991 – The crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis sent an electronic mail message using AppleLink. The message read: “Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first Applelink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here!”

In 2009 – Apple released Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard featuring many minor improvements and integration with Microsoft Exchange.

MP3

Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1962 – NASA launched the Mariner 2 unmanned space mission to Venus.

In 1989 – The first direct-to-home TV satellite launched from Cape Canaveral. Marco Polo I delivered the British Satellite Broadcasting service to homes in the UK.

In 2003 – Fairbanks, Alaska got the world’s biggest UPS backup. The city hooked up the world’s largest storage battery, built to provide an uninterrupted power supply of 40 megawatts.

MP3

Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1938 – A New York radio station first used the Philips-Miller system of tape recording on a radio broadcast.

In 1984 – Miss Manners confronted her first computer issue. The columnist responded to a reader’s concern about typing personal correspondence on a personal computer.

In 1996 – Netscape Communications Corp. announced it had partnered with several other big companies to create a software company called Navio Corp. Navio was meant to create an operating system to compete with Windows.

MP3

Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.