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.

http://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/steamtown/shs4a.htm

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

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/viking.html

1993 – Infogear filed an application for a US 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.

http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=74431935

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

http://news.microsoft.com/2013/09/03/microsoft-to-acquire-nokias-devices-services-business-license-nokias-patents-and-mapping-services/

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

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.

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2003/23oct_superstorm/

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.

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/IBM+Makes+RS%2F6000+SP+Even+Faster%3B+Performance+Gains+Announced+for…-a019735249

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

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/ects-2001-world-of-warcraft-announced/1100-2810134/

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

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

http://www.euronews.com/2011/08/31/back-in-the-day-the-dawn-of-science-fiction/

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

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/September/1/

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.

http://web.archive.org/web/20100527212315/http://web.mac.com/sebangulo/Pippin/About_the_Pippin.html

2008 – Google launched its Web browser called Google Chrome.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

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

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

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2011/08/0830daimler-first-true-motorcycle/

1907 – John Mauchly was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He would grow up to pioneer the design and construction of ENIAC along with Presper Eckert as well as contribute to the creation of BINAC and UNIVAC.

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Mauchly.html

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

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/aug-30-1963-communications-hot-line-connects-soviet-and-u-s-heads-of-state/

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.

http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_arpanet.htm

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.

http://allthingsd.com/20120904/email-turns-30/

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

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.

https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200108/history.cfm

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.

http://history.nasa.gov/40thmerc7/cooper.htm

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

http://usir.salford.ac.uk/15815/7/MacEwan_Crim_LR.pdf

1997 – Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded Kibble Inc. The service initially let you rent individual DVDs by mail without late fees. There was no subscription service and no streaming. And the service was later renamed Netflix.

http://money.cnn.com/quote/profile/profile.html?symb=NFLX

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

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/09/skypes-secrets/

2005 – Music service Pandora left preview and became open for all to use.

http://blog.pandora.com/2005/08/29/pandora_for_eve/

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

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

http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/serial?id=sciam

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!”

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/6115/First%20E-mail%20From%20Space%20Is%20Sent%20from%20a%20Mac%20Portable

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

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/08/24Apple-to-Ship-Mac-OS-X-Snow-Leopard-on-August-28.html

2017 – Amazon acquired the Whole Foods grocery store chain and immediately set about cutting prices.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-28/amazon-cuts-prices-at-whole-foods-as-much-as-50-on-first-day

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

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

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1962-041A

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.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1989-067A

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.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/3312118/Worlds-biggest-battery-switched-on-in-Alaska.html

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

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

http://books.google.com/books?id=G2wGxDT0f2MC&pg=PT526&lpg=PT526&dq=tape+1938+august+26+WQXR&source=bl&ots=Kkuw9uJ6U7&sig=74PYEzrL1Xph_B5PL7ffmuyXcp0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=Tr8JUNXJNO3k2wWkmsDABw&ved=0CGAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=tape%201938%20august%2026%20WQXR&f=false

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

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/August/26/

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.

http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Netscape-Startup-Navio-Focuses-on-Non-PC-Users-2969143.php

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

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.

1456 – According to a handwritten note by illustrator Heinrich Cremer, the final binding of the Gutenberg Bible took place.

http://books.google.com/books?id=YOXt9dVq9EcC&pg=PA126&lpg=PA126&dq=august+24+1456+gutenberg&source=bl&ots=jcDMkkfxNp&sig=ctz_I-jiUtq_lpMtok5oHA2I_EA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=jBcHUIucFqOw2wXgv53IDw&ved=0CFgQ6AEwCDgU#v=onepage&q=august%2024%201456%20gutenberg&f=false

1965 – Ted Nelson presented a paper called “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate” at the Association for Computing Machinery. In it he used the word “hypertext” a term he made up.

https://gigaom.com/2015/08/24/hypertext-50/

1995 – Microsoft released Windows 95. During development it was referred to as Windows 4.0 or by the internal codename “Chicago.”

http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-windows-95-launched-20-years-ago-today/

2001 – WebKit received its first commit of code from Apple. The Safari browser appeared two years later and WebKit was open sourced in 2005.

http://www.engadget.com/2011/08/25/webkit-turns-10-celebrates-a-decade-of-speedy-standards-compli/

2011 – Steve jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, handing over the job to Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook.

http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/24/technology/steve_jobs_resigns/

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