Search Results for "october 3"

1806 – Englishman Ralph Wedgwood received the first patent on carbon paper, which led to the initials cc to indicate a carbon copy which led to the email option to “cc” somebody.
http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/Part_Three/HTML/letterEEd.26.1228.html

1954 – IBM sounded the death knell of vacuum tubes, building the first calculating machine to use solid-state transistors. It was an experimental version of the IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch, that was desktop-sized and slow just like it’s vacuum-tube powered brother, but it used 5% of the power!

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/10/1007ibm-transistor-calculator/

1959 – The Soviet Space Probe Luna 3 took the first photographs of the dark side of the moon. You’re welcome Pink Floyd.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/luna/

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1893 – A US. copyright was issued to William K. L. Dickson for a “publication” consisting of “Edison Kinetoscopic Records.” It was the first motion picture copyright in North America. No torrents were uploaded until much later.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edtime.html

1914 – Edwin H. Armstrong received a US patent for a “Wireless Receiving System” which described his famous regenerative, or feedback, circuit. Armstrong would go on to pioneer FM radio.

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

1927 – Al Jolson appeared on a movie screen in New York City and said for all to hear “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” It was the first talkie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018037/

2014 – HP announced it planned to split into two companies. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise would become an IT company with all of HP’s enterprise level offerings. HP Inc. would take the existing logo and the personal systems and printing divisions.

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/press-release.html?id=1809455#.VDLYvyldXA5

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1969 – The first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired on the BBC. The show created the Spam sketch that would eventually inspire the slang term for unsolicited email.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8287931.stm

1991 – Linux Kernel version 0.02 was released, attracting a lot of attention. Author Linus Torvalds felt this version was at least usable and worth a wider release.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!msg/comp.os.minix/4995SivOl9o/GwqLJlPSlCEJ%5B1-25%5D

1992 – IBM announced the ThinkPad line of Notebook computers at offices in New York City.

http://www.zdnet.com/happy-20th-birthday-to-the-ibm-thinkpad-a-design-classic-7000002561/

2002 – “Xbox Media Player” and its first beta source code was released. The code was a result of Frodo, the founder of “YAMP” (Yet Another Media Player), joining the Xbox Media Player team. The project was later changed to Xbox Media Center and then just XBMC.

http://xbmc.org/10-years-of-xbmc/

2011 – Steve Jobs died at his home surrounded by family. The co-founder and CEO of Apple had fought pancreatic cancer for years.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-dies-apple-chief-innovated-personal-computer/story?id=14383813#.UDY7lt1lRG0

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1957 -The Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, becoming the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, and motivating the US to get into gear and heat up the space race.
http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/

1985 – Richard Stallman started a non-profit corporation called the Free Software Foundation, dedicated to promoting the universal freedom to create, distribute and modify computer software. The FSF among other things, enforces the copyleft requirements of the GNU General Public License often referred to as the GPL.
http://www.linkedin.com/company/free-software-foundation

2004 – SpaceShipOne returned from its third journey, a reusable spacecraft that could carry passengers beyond the earth’s atmosphere. It won the $10 million Ansari X prize for private spaceflight.

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2010/10/october-4-2004-spaceshipone-wins-10-million-x-prize/

2016 – Google announced two phones, the Pixel and Pixel XL, the first phones designed from the ground up by Google. The company also introduced a Google Home voice-activated assistant along with several other products.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37551413

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.

1925 – John Logie Baird performed the first test of a working television system. It delivered a grayscale 30-line vertically scanned image, at five frames per second. After a ventriloquist’s dummy appeared on screen, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton became the first person televised in full tonal range.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/research/general/tvstory2 http://www.solarnavigator.net/inventors/john_logie_baird.htm

1955 – ENIAC was shut down for the last time. After 11 years running at 5,000 operations a second and taking up 1,000 square feet of floor space, it had earned its retirement.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/October/2/

1996 – US President Bill Clinton signed amendments to the Freedom of Information Act requiring the US government to make electronic documents available online.

http://www.justice.gov/oip/foia_updates/Vol_XVII_4/page2.htm

2015 – Google officially reorganized, merging with a new parent company called Alphabet. Subsidiaries included Google, Google Fiber, Calico and Life Sciences, Google Ventures and Google Capital, Nest, and Google X. Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Google while Larry Page became CEO of Alphabet and Sergey Brin became President of Alphabet.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000119312515336577/0001193125-15-336577-index.htm

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.