Today in Tech History – June 27, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1967 – The world’s first ATM was installed at a Barclays Bank branch in Enfield Town, England, United Kingdom.

In 1972 – Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney filed incorporation papers for Atari, Inc. and got ready to release it’s first product, a game called Pong.

In 1995 – Spyglass Inc. went public, the year after it began distributing its Spyglass Mosaic Web browser. The Spyglass browser powered the first version of Internet Explorer and had code in IE all the way up to IE 7.

In 2008 – Bill Gates spent his last day as an employee of the company he founded, Microsoft, to focus on the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. He remained Chairman of the Board.

In 2012 – Sergey Brin interrupted a Google announcement of the new Google + app to show off the Project Glass smart glasses by having sky divers wearing the prototypes, jump out of a zeppelin and land on the Moscone Convention Center in downtown San Francisco, while streaming video in a Google hangout.

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Today in Tech History – June 26, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1954 – At 5:30 PM the world’s first nuclear power station was connected to the power grid in Obninsk, U.S.S.R., a small town 60 miles south of Moscow.

In 1974 – At 8:01 AM, a supermarket cashier scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum across a bar-code scanner at Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. It was the first product ever checked out by Universal Product Code.

In 1997 – The US Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Communications Decency Act as violating the first amendment protecting free speech.

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Today in Tech History – June 25, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1967 – The very first Consumer Electronics Show opened in New York occupying the Americana and New York Hilton Hotels. It was devoted to home entertainment electronics and featured such advances as portable color TVs and video tape recorders.

In 1981 – After six years as a company, Microsoft incorporated in the state of Washington.

In 1998 – Microsoft released Windows 98 with less hype than Windows 95, but more consumer focus. It was the last version of Windows meant to be based on DOS however Windows ME, while meant to be based on the NT kernel, ended up being the last based on DOS.

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Today in Tech History – June 24, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1963 – The first demonstration of a home video recorder was made at the BBC News Studios in London. A Telcan, short for television in a can, could record up to 20 minutes of black and white television using quarter-inch tape on a reel to reel system.

In 1993 – “Severe Tire Damage,” conducted the first known Internet concert. The band set their gear up on the patios of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and sent their show out on the Internet Multicast Backbone, or Mbone.

In 2000 – President Clinton gave his weekly radio address live on the Internet for the first time.

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Today in Tech History – June 23, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1912 – Alan Turing was born in London, although his father worked for the Indian Civil Service and his parents lived in India. He helped break the code of the German enigma machine and developed the Turing test for artificial intelligence.

In 1943 – Vint Cerf was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He grew up to become known as one of the fathers of the Internet, most famously for his co-creation of the protocols underlying TCP/IP.

In 1983 – Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel ran the first successful test of the automated, distributed Domain Name System at the University of Southern California School of Engineering’s Information Sciences.

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Today in Tech History – June 22, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1675 – Britain’s King Charles II established the observatory at Greenwich with the main purpose of determining precise longitudes to aid in navigation. This purpose led to Greenwich being marked as the prime meridian and later Greenwich Mean Time.

In 1799 – The first definitive prototype metre bars (mètre des Archives) and kilograms were constructed in platinum.

In 1999 – The first demonstration of live rats directly controlling a robot arm with their thoughts was published by Nature Neuroscience.

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Today in Tech History – June 21, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1948 – The Small-Scale Experimental Machine, SSEM took 52 minutes to run its first program, written by Professor Tom Kilburn. SSEM was the first computer to store programs electronically. The SSEM was nicknamed the “Manchester Baby”.

In 1981 – IBM retired the last of its “STRETCH” mainframes. These mainframes were part of the 7000 series that made up the company’s first transistorized computers.

In 2004 – SpaceShipOne became the first privately developed piloted vehicle to leave Earth’s atmosphere and reach the edge of space.

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Today in Tech History – June 20, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1840 – Samuel F.B. Morse received a U.S. patent for “Improvement in the mode of communicating information by signals by the application of electro-magnetism.” We call it Morse code.

In 1963 – A hotline was established between the Soviet Union and the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis. While later it would become the famous “red telephone” it started as a teletype.

In 2003 – The WikiMedia Foundation was founded in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales to oversee the various Wiki projects like Wikipedia.

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Today in Tech History – June 19, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 240 B.C. – Greek astronomer, geographer, mathematician and librarian in Alexandria, Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference. His data was based on the length of shadows in different locations and simple geometry, but his calculations were not far wrong.

In 1623 – Mathematician Blaise Pascal was born in France. He invented a digital calculator, the Pascaline, to help his father in his tax-collecting work.

In 2003 – Apple released dock connector-to-USB 2.0 cables and drivers for third-generation iPods. Previous iPods had been FireWire only.

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Today in Tech History – June 18, 2014

20140404-073853.jpgIn 1908 – Scottish electrical engineer, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, published a brief letter in the journal Nature, describing the essentials of making and receiving television images. He described using an electron gun in the neck of a cathode-ray tube to shoot electrons toward the flat end of the tube, which was coated with light-emitting phosphor. Others like Farnsworth and Baird would make just such devices years later.

In 2002 – Kevin Warwick had his chip removed. Warwick implanted the chip earlier that year in order to experiment with human-computer interaction, culminating in a direct connection to his wife.

In 2009 – The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a NASA robotic spacecraft was launched on its mission to collect information about the Moon, particularly around the poles.

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