Tech History Today

In 1959 – The first experimental hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell’s SRN-1 made its first trials at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

In 1987 – North American Philips Company introduced the compact disc video (CD-V), a 12 cm (4-3/4 inch) CD-sized implementation of storage for full motion video and CD-audio.

In 1996 – AT&T announced they finally had a system that would allow computers to make and receive video phone calls over standard telephone lines. It was not called Skype. It did not catch on.

In 1919 – The observation of starlight bending as it passed through the sun’s gravitational field during a total solar eclipse allowed the first experimental test of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The test was later used to confirm the relativistic effect.

In 1935 – Workers poured the last concrete at the iconic Hoover Dam hydroelectric site. Four months later after the concrete was well and truly set, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the dam.

In 1999 – Space Shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with the International Space Station.

In 1936 – Alan Turing submitted his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem“ for publication in which he postulated hypothetical Turing Machines would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.

In 1959 – A committee of government, military and business computer experts met at the Pentagon and laid the foundations for the COBOL computer language.

In 1971 – The U.S.S.R. launched Mars 3. It would arrive at Mars in December and its lander would become the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars.

In 1931 – Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took man’s first trip into the stratosphere when they rode in a pressurised cabin attached to a balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet.

In 1959 – After almost a decade, MIT shut down its Whirlwind computer. It ran 35 hours a week at 90 percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory.

In 1986 – Dragon Quest was released in Japan. It combines the the full-screen map of Ultima with the battle and statistics-oriented screens of Wizardry and paved the way for RPG games.

In 1969 – Apollo 10 returned to Earth after a successful eight-day test of all the components needed for the manned moon landing.

In 1981 – Satya Pal Asija received the first U.S. patent for a computer software program. It was called Swift-answer. The patent took seven years to issue, and the validity of software patents has been debated ever since.

In 1995 – Bill Gates authored an internal memo entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave” calling the Internet the most important development since the IBM personal computer. Microsoft soon got to work on its own Web browser.

In 1945 – Arthur C. Clarke began privately circulating copies of his paper ““The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications” which suggested geostationary space stations could be used for worldwide television broadcasts.

In 1949 – Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia. He would later go by the name Joybubbles and develop a talent to whistle at 2600 Hz, allowing him to control phone switching equipment.

1994 – CERN hosted the first international World Wide Web conference, which continued through May 27.

In 1844 – Samuel Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol to the Mount Clair train depot in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the first public demonstration of the telegraph.

In 1935 – General Electric Co. sold the first spectrophotometer. It could detect two million different shades of color and make a permanent record chart of the results.

1961 – Wes Clark began working on the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC), at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. It was one of the earliest examples of a user-friendly machine that you could communicate with while it operated. It’s credited with setting th standard for personal computer design.

In 1825, William Sturgeon exhibited the electromagnet in a practical form for the first time. The exhibition accompanied the reading of a paper, recorded in the Transactions of the Society of Arts for 1825 (Vol xliii, p.38).

In 1908 – John Bardeen was born. He grew up to become to win the Nobel Prize twice, once for inventing the transistor, and once for figuring out superconductivity.

In 1994 – Sun Microsystems Inc. announced the programming language Java and the accompanying Web browser HotJava at the SunWorld ’95 convention.

In 1973 – Bob Metcalfe of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center wrote a memo on an IBM selectric typewriter, outlining how to connect personal computers to a shared printer. Metcalfe says “If Ethernet was invented in any one memo, by any one person, or on any one day, this was it.”

1980 – Namco released an arcade game called Puck-Man. When it was released in the US in October the name was altered to Pac-Man.

In 1990 – Microsoft released Windows 3.0. It featured big improvements in interface and multitasking. It’s Control Panel feature caught the eye of Apple which sued, and lost.

1937 – North Pole-1 became the first scientific research station to operate on the drift ice of the Arctic Ocean. The Soviet Union established it about 20 km from the North Pole. It operated for 9 months, and travelled 2,850 kilometres.

1952 – IBM announced the Model 701, the first computer designed for scientific calculation. The 701 used electrostatic storage tube memory and kept information on magnetic tape. It sold much better than expected with 19 governments and large companies snapping them up.

In 2010 – The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), launched a solar-sail spacecraft IKAROS aboard an H-IIA rocket. The vessel would test out the performance of solar sails, and make a Venus flyby later in the year.