1882 – Thomas Edison’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant began operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin.

1954 – The USS Nautilus, the first nuclear submarine, was commissioned at Groton, CT.

1980 – Xerox published the Version 1.0 specifications for Ethernet in conjunction with Intel and Digital Equipment Corporation.

2014 – Microsoft announced its next operating system would be called Windows 10, not Windows 9 and would arrive sometime in 2015.

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1954 – CERN officially came into being. In addition to countless advancements in science, it would go on to foster the invention of the World Wide Web.

1994 – Programmers first demonstrated the HotJava prototype browser to executives at Sun Microsystems Inc. It was an attempt to port the Java language to the Web. It worked.

1995 – The Sony PlayStation went on sale in Europe.

1996 – The Nintendo 64 launched in North America spreading its 3D world controlled by an analog stick to a new continent.

2015 – Google announced the Nexus 5X and 6P phones, new Chromecast and Chromecast Audio, and an Android tablet called the Pixel C.

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1998 – Microsoft’s Internet Explorer passed Netscape Navigator as the Web browser with the greatest market share, according to a report from the International Data Corporation.

2008 – SpaceX launched the Falcon 1, the first ever private spacecraft to enter orbit.

2011 – Amazon shook up the tablet market, announcing the the Amazon Kindle Fire 7-inch tablet for $199.

2015 – NASA announced definitive signs of liquid water on Mars had been found near the equator. Dr. Alfred S. McEwen and other scientists published a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, describing the direct identification of water in the the form of hydration salts.

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1922 – Scientists at the Naval Aircraft Radio Laboratory near Washington, DC, demonstrated radar by showing that if a ship passed through a radio wave broadcast between two stations, that ship could be detected.

1983 – Richard Stallman announced the GNU project which aimed at the time to develop a free Unix-like operating system.

1996 – Kevin Mitnick was indicted on charges he broke into the systems of major software companies, then transferred stolen material to computers at USC via the Internet. Seems prosaic today, but was unheard of at the time.

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1960 – For the first time, a US presidential debate was televised. Vice President Nixon and Senator Kennedy debated in Chicago and were perceived differently by those who listened on radio versus those who watched on television.

1983 – 17-year-old Neal Patrick, of the hacking group 414s testified before the US House of Representatives about computer break-ins and how they might be stopped.

1991 – Eight people entered Biosphere 2, an airtight replica of the Earth’s biosphere in Oracle, Arizona. They left exactly two years later in 1993. Results of the experiment are still controversial.

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1956 – The first submarine transatlantic telephone cable system, TAT-1 was inaugurated, replacing slow telegraph and unreliable radio systems.

2001 – Apple announced the release of Mac OS X 10.1 Puma, the first major upgrade to OS X.

2012 – Blizzard launched its 4th World of Warcraft expansion, called Mists of Pandaria.

2013 – Amazon announced the Kindle HDX tablets with a service called “Mayday” that promised to let users speak with a real person by video over the Internet within 15 seconds of tapping a button.

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1979 – CompuServe began offering a consumer version of its dial-up online information service called MicroNET. The name would later be changed to CompuServe and offer public email among other online services.

1993 – Broderbund Software released the game Myst, for the Macintosh computer. It became a record-setting bestseller and helped popularize CD-ROM drives.

1997 – Ultima Online launched, revolutionizing online gaming by supporting thousands of simultaneous players in a persistent shared world.

2013 – Valve announced their new Steam OS, a free version of Linux built around the Steam video game service.

2014 – The shellshock vulnerability was made public. The way bash handled variables could allow malicious code to be run on computers running Linux and OS X. This meant routers, webcams and other connected devices were also vulnerable.

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1889 – Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in Kyoto, Japan, to manufacture hanafuda, Japanese playing cards. Mario came much later.

1999 – NASA lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. It began orbit normally, but after it went behind the planet and out of range, it never made contact again. It was later determined that the approach attitude was wrong because software put out imperial units instead of metric units.

1999 – Two years after its founding, Netflix launched its subscription DVD rental service which proved much more popular than renting DVDs individually by mail.
2002 – Mozilla Phoenix 0.1 was released. It was the first public version of the web browser, that would become Mozilla Firefox.

2008 – The T-Mobile G1 launched, the first phone to use Google’s Android OS, as it began it’s competition against the barely year-old iPhone.

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1791 – Michael Faraday was born in south London. He grew up to discover electromagnetic induction and coined the terms ‘electrode’, ‘cathode’ and ‘ion.’ He also lent his name to the Faraday cage.

1986 – In NEC Corp. Vs. Intel Corp., the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that microprograms are copyrightable literary works. And so all the trouble began.

2011 – Facebook announced its new Timeline feature which would collect all your posts and materials in chronological order, replacing the old profile.

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1866 – Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, England. He would grow up to write under the name H. G. Wells and help form the genre of science fiction.

1999 – Google came out of beta. The young company announced its new Google Scout feature and the launch of its new website, removing the beta designation from the Google search engine.

2000 – Kevin Mitnick was released from a Lompoc, California prison after almost five years of incarceration.

2015 – Christopher Poole aka ‘moot’ sold 4Chan to its inspiration 2Channel. Hiroyuki Nishimura became 4Chan’s president.

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