Today in Tech History – – June 17, 2018

1936 – Edwin Armstrong presented FM radio at FCC headquarters. Armstrong played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. “[I]f the audience of 50 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room.”

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/FM_broadcasting_in_the_USA.html

1946 – The first mobile telephone call was made from a car in St. Louis, Missouri. Teams from Bell Labs and Western Electric had collaborated to develop the technology.

http://ethw.org/The_Foundations_of_Mobile_and_Cellular_Telephony

1997 – Programmers deciphered code written in the impenetrable Data Encryption Standard, the strongest legally exportable encryption software in the United States. The hackers organized over the Internet and cracked the software in five months, proving that stronger encryption was needed.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ce_nUNxdKV8C&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=june+17+1997+data+encryption+standard&source=bl&ots=ujMF0OF7CC&sig=Gbddn5qlPT5nih1yDkbbke-LiEQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=5ra0UZIHxpuIAqLPgYgO&ved=0CEQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=june%2017%201997%20data%20encryption%20standard&f=false

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Today in Tech History – – June 16, 2018

1911 – The Tabulating Company (founded by Herman Hollerith), the Computing Scale Company, and the International Time Recording Company merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York. They would later change the company name to International Business Machines,and later just IBM.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/founded/

1963 – Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space, orbiting the Earth 48 times.

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_level2/tereshkova.html

1977 – Software Development Laboratories was incorporated in Redwood Shores, California, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. They later came up with the catchier name, Oracle.

https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/06/16/a-day-full-of-legendary-origins.aspx

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Today in Tech History – – June 15, 2018

1878 – Photographer Eadweard Muybridge used high-speed photography to capture a horse’s motion. The photos showed the horse with all four feet in the air during some parts of its stride. Stop-motion photography was born.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/91483062/

1949 – Jay Forrester wrote down a proposal for core memory in his notebook. Core memory was the standard for computer memory until advances in semiconductors in the 1970s.

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4375442/Forrester-records-a-proposal-for-core-memory-in-his-notebook–June-15–1949

1987 – Compuserve’s Sandy Trevor and his team, which included inventor Steve Wilhite, released GIF version 87a. The new enhanced format allowed people to create compressed animations. “Under Construction” GIFs everywhere became possible.

http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/gif-history-steve-wilhite-olia-lialina-interview/

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Today in Tech History – – June 14, 2018

1822 – Charles Babbage announced his difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables.”

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

1951 – The US Census Bureau officially put UNIVAC I into service calling it the world’s first commercial computer.

http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/industry/06/14/computing.anniversary/

1962 – The European Space Research Organization, which would become the European Space Agency, was established in Paris.

http://www.jaxa.jp/library/space_law/chapter_1/1-2-2-4_e.html

1967 – NASA launched Mariner 5 on its mission to fly by Venus.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1967-060A

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Today in Tech History – – June 13, 2018

1925 – Charles Jenkins publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of silhouette pictures and sound, becoming the first person to demonstrate TV in the US.

http://www.bairdtelevision.com/jenkins.html

1941 – John Mauchly visited John Atanasoff to see his computer. The two computer pioneers later battled in court over who was the legal inventor of the electronic digital computer.

http://jva.cs.iastate.edu/mauchlyinames.php

1944 – Germany launched the first guided missile attack in history, sending V-1 rockets into London.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/germans-launch-v-1-rocket-attack-against-britain

1983 – Pioneer 10 became the first human-made object to pass outside Pluto’s orbit and leave the central solar system.

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/history/pioneer.html

2016 – At the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple announced it was changing the name of OS X to macOS starting with the next version of the operating system, macOS Sierra.

http://www.businessinsider.com/wwdc-2016-os-x-becomes-macos-2016-6

2016 – Microsoft announced the Xbox One S, a white slimmed down version of the Xbox One, capable of 4K video and Project Scorpio, a beefed up Xbox capable of 4K gameplay.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/xbox-project-scorpio-hardware-specs-can-it-do-4k/

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Today in Tech History – – June 10, 2018

1943 – Hungarians László and Georg Bíró, while living in Argentina, patented the first successful implementation of the ballpoint pen.

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa101697.htm

1977 – A few days after going on sale, Apple began shipping the Apple II for the first time.

http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/misc_cmds/misc_cmds-6/calendar/calendars/calendar.computer

2003 – The Spirit Rover launched on a Delta II rocket, beginning NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission.

http://marsrover.nasa.gov/mission/launch_e.html

2013 – Apple introduced iOS 7 and Apple OS X Mavericks at their Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. They also gave a sneak peek at the new cylindrical Mac Pro and announced their streaming music service called iTunes Radio.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/06/10/apples-packed-wwdc-2013-keynote-now-live

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Today in Tech History – – June 9, 2018

1902 – Joe Horn and Frank Hardart opened the first US Automat at 818 Chestnut St. in Philadelphia. The waiterless restaurant charged a nickel for most dishes.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1291&dat=20021226&id=vVpUAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ko4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=3964,7574304

1931 – Robert Goddard received a patent for rocket-fueled aircraft design (US. No. 1,809,271). Sadly we do not have a lot of rocket-planes in operation.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=pxxBAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1986 – The Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center opened to support the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET, which linked five supercomputer centers. NSFNET would eventually allow commercial uses and transition to the open Internet.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/June/9/

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Today in Tech History – – June 8, 2018

1637 – Rene Descartes published “Discourse on the Method for Guiding One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences”, which formed the basis of the modern scientific method. It’s also the source of the quote “I think, therefore I am.”

http://books.google.com/books?id=UPGVFEDVc0wC&pg=PA226&lpg=PA226&dq=descartes+1637+june+8&source=bl&ots=IRzDxujrmz&sig=8Zo5pCV6q5e18OY_U4o26FCcwB4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=x3iqUaOyCumdiAK4zIH4DA&ved=0CCwQ6AEwADgK#v=onepage&q=descartes%201637%20june%208&f=false

1949 – George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. The book still affects notions of privacy and inspired the iconic Apple commercial that introduced the Macintosh computer.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/10/1984-george-orwell

1955 – Tim Berners-Lee was born in London. He grew up to develop the World Wide Web.

http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/Longer.html

1978 – Intel launched the 8086 microprocessor, the first of the long-lived x86 processor architecture line.

https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-still-going-strong/

2008 – Apple announced Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/Apple_Announces_Mac_OS_X_Snow_Leopard/

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Today in Tech History – – June 7, 2018

1954 – Computer science hero Alan Turing died. His death was ruled a suicide from eating an apple containing cyanide. Turing formulated the famous Turing test and broke code at Bletchley park during World War II.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/

1975 – Sony introduced the Betamax video recorder for sale. It would lose the format war to VHS but find a niche in broadcast production.

http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/this+history+june+1975/6745667/story.html

1980 – The first US solar power plant was dedicated at the Natural Bridge National Monument, Utah.

http://books.google.com/books?id=jC1QAAAAYAAJ&q=natural+bridges+solar+june+7+1980&dq=natural+bridges+solar+june+7+1980&hl=en&sa=X&ei=9sGnUda-E8iaiALLk4DgBQ&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA

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Today in Tech History – – June 6, 2018

1933 – The world’s first drive-in movie theater opened in Camden, New Jersey. Richard Hollingshead Jr. had developed the system by using a 1928 Kodak projector mounted on the hood of his car and aimed at a screen pinned to some trees.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-drive-in-movie-theater-opens

1984 – Soviet programmer Alexei Pazhitnov completed the first playable version of Tetris, one of the best-selling video games of all-time, was released. It was popularized by Hank Rogers who bought the rights and distributed it.

http://www.wired.com/2009/06/tetris/

1995 – The Los Angeles Times reported that Father Leonard Boyle was working to put the Vatican’s library on the World Wide Web through a site funded by IBM.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/June/6/

2013 – The Guardian published another leak from Edward Snowden about the PRISM project used to gather data held by Google, Facebook, Apple and other US tech companies. The tech companies denied “back door access” to their systems.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

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