Search Results for "june 18"

In 1833 – Ada Gordon, daughter of Lord Byron (and future Countess Lovelace) met Charles Babbage for the first time. He designed an early computer, and she published a description of his work and wrote the first computer program.

In 1977 – The Apple II went on sale. It had a bus speed of 1 MHz and 64 KB of memory.

In 2002 – Mozilla.org announced the release of Mozilla 1.0, an open-source browser built on the Gecko engine that also powered Netscape.

In 2013 – The Guardian published its first exclusive based on Edward Snowden’s leaks, revealing a secret court order forced Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of customers to the US government.

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In 1889 – The first long-distance transmission of electricity took place, sending power from a hydroelectric generator at Willamette Falls 14 miles to 55 street lights at 4th and Main in Portland, Oregon.

In 1948 – Ed Brown Jr., a former Navy pilot, opened a fly-in movie theater near Wall Township, New Jersey. You could also drive in. The theater had space for 500 cars and 25 small planes could land in a nearby airfield and taxi over to the theater.

In 1965 – Gemini 4 launched on the first multi-day space mission by a NASA crew. Crew-member Ed White performed the first US spacewalk.

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In 1883 – Thomas Edison and Stephen D. Field built the world’s first elevated electric railway. It was a narrow-gauge 3-foot-wide track in the gallery around the edge of the main exhibition building of the Chicago Railway Exhibition. It ran nine miles per hour.

In 1896 – Guglielmo Marconi applied for British Patent number 12039 regarding a system of telegraphy using Hertzian waves. We’d call it radio.

In 2003 – The European Space Agency launched the Mars Express probe from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. It was the fastest planetary probe to be built.

In 2014 – Apple announced OS X Yosemite and iOS8 at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Among the features were the ability to answer phone calls on your OS X computer, the ability for iOS apps to talk directly to each other, third=party keyboards for iOS, and a new programming language called Swift.

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In 1890 – The US. Census Bureau began using Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine for the first time. This gave Hollerith the basis to later found his Tabulating Machine Company, which was one of four companies that merged to form IBM.

In 1944 – The Colossus Mark 2 was put into service at Bletchley Park in Great Britain, just in time for the invasion at Normandy.

In 1999 – The Windows version of music-sharing program Napster was released.

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In 1840 – Samuel F.B. Morse received a U.S. patent for “Improvement in the mode of communicating information by signals by the application of electro-magnetism.” We call it Morse code.

In 1963 – A hotline was established between the Soviet Union and the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis. While later it would become the famous “red telephone” it started as a teletype.

In 2003 – The WikiMedia Foundation was founded in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales to oversee the various Wiki projects like Wikipedia.

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In 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.

In 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.

In 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.

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In 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”.

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

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

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

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In 1897 – Karl Elsener received a design patent for his “soldiers’ knife” for use by the Swiss army. The original had a wooden handle, a blade, a screwdriver and a can opener.

In 1936 – The first radio station with 500,000 watt power began testing as W8XAR in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Test broadcasts took place from 1 AM to 6 AM. The station is now known as KDKA.

In 1997 – 3Com Corp. and U.S. Robotics Corp. merged. The two companies combined US Robotics modems with 3Com’s interface cards.

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Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.