1951 -TV viewers witnessed the live detonation of an atomic bomb blast, as KTLA in Los Angeles broadcast the explosion of a nuclear device dropped on Frenchman Flats, Nevada.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/02/0201ktla-atomic-test/
1972 – Hewlett-Packard introduced the first scientific handheld calculator, the famous HP-35 for $395. It was the first handheld calculator to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions with one keystroke.
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/the_hp-35_calculator.html
1985 – Shortly after its founding the November before, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute kicked off operations.
http://www.seti.org/about-us
1997 – Dave Winer changed how he displayed ‘Scripting News’ so that it always showed the last ten days of posts. In other words, the way every blog does it now. Whether this makes it the ‘first blog’ or not, it was extremely influential and is definitely one of the oldest blogs out there, predating the term blog, of course.
http://scripting.com/stories/siteChanges.html
Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.