Tech History Today

In 1961 – Trans World Airlines began offering regular in-flight movies on scheduled flights. The first film shown, only in the first class cabin, mind you, was “By Love Possessed,” starring Lana Turner and Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

In 1983 – On July 19, 1983, Michael W. Vannier and his co-workers J. Marsh and J. Warren published the first three-dimensional reconstruction of single computed tomography (CT) slices of the human head.

In 2004 – Apple announced the fourth-generation iPod with 12-hour battery life and the ability to shuffle songs. HP announced they would sell an HP branded version of this model fo the iPod.

In 1968 – Robert Noyce, Andy Grove and Gordon Moore incorporated Moore and Noyce electronics, swiftly renamed at Noyce’s daughter’s suggestion to Integrated Electronics Corporation, or Intel for short

In 1992 – Silvano de Gennaro, an IT developer at CERN took a picture of the singing group ‘Les Horribles Cernettes’ who sang mostly about physics. Tim Berners-Lee would later use that picture as a test, making it the first photo uploaded to the World Wide Web.

In 2001 Apple announced Mac OS X 10.1 Puma, the first update to OS X.

In 1899 – Nippon Electric Company Ltd. (NEC) was founded by Iwadare Kunihiko, an expert in telegraphic systems who worked under Thomas Edison. Western Electric provided funding, making it the first Japanese joint-venture with a foreign company.

In 1997 – DNS was widely disrupted making email routing and web page delivery spotty throughout the day. An Ingres database failure resulted in corrupt .COM and .NET zone files. A system administrator mistakenly released the zone file without regenerating the file and verifying its integrity.

In 2002 – Apple announced PC versions of the iPod with MusicMatch software instead of iTunes. The company also announced a 20 GB version of the music player and touch-sensitive scroll wheel and dropped the prices.

In 1945 – The United States detonated a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico. The Trinity test ushered in the atomic age.

In 1951 – VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin was born in Philadelphia.

In 1969 – Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins, blasted off from Cape Kennedy on Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.

1928 – Germany’s ENIGMA machine encoded its first message. Crackign the EMIGMA during World War II brought together some of the finiest minds in computer science at Bletchley Park in England.

In 1983 – Nintendo released the Family Computer or Famicom, along with Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye cartridges. It would later be released in the US under as the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES.

In 2003 – AOL Time Warner disbanded the Netscape browser development team. In conjunction, Mozilla created the Mozilla Foundation giving the project its first independent legal existence. 4

In 2006 – After a few months being used internally at Odeo, the Twttr service launched for public use. They later added some vowels and spun Twitter out as its own company.

In 1867 – Alfred Nobel demonstrated dynamite for the first time at Merstham Quarryl, Surrey.

1918 – Computer pioneer and MIT professor Jay Forrester was born on a cattle ranch in Climax, Nebraska. With Robert Everett, Forrester led one of the most important early computer projects, the Whirlwind, and developed and founded the field of system dynamics.

In 1965 – The Mariner 4 did a fly-by of Mars, taking 21 full pictures, the first close-up photos of another planet returned from space.

In 1919 – The British airship R34 finished the first roundtrip journey across the Atlantic from Scotland to Mineola, Long Island and back to Norfolk, England after 182 hours of flight.

In 1973 – Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the Nixon tapes to the US Senate committee investigating the Watergate break-in. Always make back-ups, unless you want to remain President.

In 1977 – Lightning struck a Consolidated Edison substation on the Hudson River, tripping two circuit breakers and setting off a chain of events that resulted in a massive power failure. The entire city of New York was blacked out.

In 1854 – George Eastman was born to Maria Kilbourn and George Washington Eastman in Waterville, New York. He went on to found the Eastman Kodak Company and invented the roll of film.

1949 – At an IBM sales meeting, Thomas J. Watson Jr. predicted that within 10 years, electronics would replace moving parts in machines. His vision launched IBM into dominating the computer industry.

In 2004 – Apple announced the iTunes Music Store sold its 100,000,000th downloaded song. “Somersault (Dangermouse remix)” by Zero 7 was purchased by Kevin Britten of Hays, Kansas.

1976 – K&E produced its last slide rule, which it presented to the Smithsonian Institution. While slide rules continue to be made, especially for marine and aviation uses, K&E had been the dominant manufacturer, and this signaled the end of an era, and the rise of the electronic calculator.

In 1979 – The US space station Skylab returned to Earth scattering debris over the Indian ocean and Western Australia.

In 2008 – Apple’s second phone, the iPhone 3G went on sale, featuring 3G data connectivity.

In 1856 – Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan, Lika, Croatia, which was then part of the Austo-Hungarian Empire. His father was a Serbian Orthodox Priest and his mother an inventor of household appliances.

In 1962 – The world’s first communication satellite, Telstar, was launched into orbit from cape Canaveral on a Delta rocket.

In 1990 – The Electronic Frontier Foundation was formally founded, immediately coming to the aid of Steve Jackson Games, who’s BBS had been seized by the Secret Service.