Search Results for "october 13"

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.

1675 – Gottfreid Leibniz wrote the integral sign in an unpublished manuscript. It’s a sign that would later haunt the nightmares of students and be widely misapplied on blackboards in movies. So happy Integral Day!

1969 – The first ever computer to computer link was established on the ARPANET. UCLA student Charley Kline sent the characters l and o to Stanford. The connection crashed before he could finish sending ‘login’. The Internet has been crashy right from the start.

1988 – Sega launched the Mega Drive console in Japan. It would be released elsewhere in the world later as the ‘Genesis.’

1998 – The Space Shuttle Discovery blasted off on STS-95 with 77-year old John Glenn on board, making him the oldest person to go into space.

2012 – Apple announced Scott Forstall would leave the company in one year, and that retail head John Browett had left the company as well.

2013 – Motorola announced its modular phone project called Project ARA. It would end up becoming Google’s project after Google sold Motorola.

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

1904 – The first underground New York City subway line opened. The line ran from City Hall in lower Manhattan through Grand Central, Times Square and ended north in Harlem. Rides cost five cents.

1994 – HotWired launched bringing with it the first large quantity sales of banner ads. AT&T, Zima, MCI, Volvo, Club Med and 1-800-COLLECT all plunked down for the privilege.

2005 – The European Space Agency launched its first satellite, a micro-satellite called the SSETI Express Satellite, designed and built by European students.

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

1938 – Chester Carlson, tired of the exhaustive process of hand-copying or photographing patent paperwork, decided to make an easier way. On this date he produced the first electrophotographic image. Xerox would later make it automatic, popular, and make Carlson rich.

1968 – The US bounced back from tragedy with the first manned mission to space, Apollo 7, safely splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean after orbiting the Earth 163 times.

1975 – The Soviet unmanned space mission Venera 9 landed on Venus. Pics or it didn’t happen you say? Well Venera 9 was the first spacecraft to return an image from the surface of another planet.

1995 – Joost Shur posted QUAKETALK 95 to keep people up to date on the development of the forthcoming game Quake.

2009 – Microsoft released Windows 7. People liked it.

2013 – Apple announced the new iPad Air and iPad Mini with retina display. They also released OS X Mavericks for free.

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

1879 – Thomas Edison finished up 14 months of testing with an incandescent electric light bulb that lasted 13½ hours. It improved on 50-year-old technology to make light bulbs safe and economical by using lower electricity, a carbon filament and an improved vacuum.

1949 – An Wang filed a patent for a magnetic ferrite core memory, that he called pulse transfer controlling devices. Two years later he formed Wang computers.

1983 – The seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures ruled the meter would be defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. This actually simplified it from the previous definition of 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum.

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