Search Results for "october 17"

1922 – Six telecom companies joined to found the British Broadcasting Company in order to provide radio broadcasts in Britain. The private company was later replaced by the non-commercial British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927.

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/1920s.pdf

1954 – Texas Instruments announced the Regency TR-1, the first transistor radio, produced jointly with the Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates in Indianapolis. TI executive Vice President Pat Haggerty hoped the product would show what transistors could do and spur demand.

http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/company/history/timeline/semicon/1950/docs/54regency.htm

1985 – Nintendo introduced the Nintendo Entertainment System aka the NES at FAO Schwarz in New York. A little game called Super Mario Brothers was introduced on the same day. The NES was the North American version of the Famicom sold in Japan. It was test-marketed in New York and eventually conquered the continent, becoming an 8-bit classic.
http://news.cnet.com/Nintendos-NES-game-console-turns-20/2100-1043_3-5900089.html

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

1843 – Sir William Rowan Hamilton finally hit on the idea of Quaternions, and needing a bit more space than his hand to jot it down, he carved it into the stone of Brougham Bridge in Dublin. Why do you care about quaternions? Because calculations involving three-dimensional rotations are essential for 3D computer graphics and computer vision. Video games people.

http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Biographies/Hamilton.html

1923 – Distributor M. J. Winkler, contracted to distribute the “Alice Comedies” marking the founding of the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio which eventually changed its name to the Walt Disney Company, at Roy’s suggestion. So don’t expect anything after this date to ever go out of copyright.

http://d23.disney.go.com/archives/a-history-of-the-walt-disney-company/

1959 – Control Data Corp. released its model 1604 computer, the first from William Norris’s group that left Sperry Rand Corp.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/October/16/

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

1878 – The Edison Electric Light Company began operation. They would go on to become more general. As in making up a significant part of General Electric.

http://books.google.com/books?id=w0o5Ld53wAEC&pg=PT130&lpg=PT130&dq=Edison+Electric+Light+Company+october+15+1878&source=bl&ots=s8fwfna3c3&sig=8HzXtv0nHRnYOKS6kAmAE-ieNaM&hl=en#v=onepage&q=Edison%20Electric%20Light%20Company%20october%2015%201878&f=false

1956 – Fortran, the first modern computer language was shared with the public for the first time. The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System made John Backus a legend, kicked off modern programming, and is still developed by the Fortran Standards Technical Committee.

http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortranStandards

2003 – China launched the Shenzhou 5, its first manned space mission, becoming the third country in the world to have independent human spaceflight capability. Yang Liwei piloted the capsule showing the flags of the People’s Republic of China and the United Nations.

http://spaceflightnow.com/shenzhou/031015launch.html

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

1884 – US inventor George Eastman received a patent on his new paper-strip photographic film. It would reign for more than 100 years until digital stole its thunder.

http://www.uspto.gov/news/pr/2001/01-44.jsp

1977 – The Atari 2600 was released in North America, though it may have been available in Macy’s and Sears on September 11.
http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/happy-35th-atari-2600-175216071.html http://www.theverge.com/products/atari-2600/1710

1985 – The first official reference guide for the C++ programming language was published. It was written by the language’s creator, Bjarne Stroustrup.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/10/1014cplusplus-released/all/1

1996 – Matthias Ettrich posted about his new project Kool Desktop Environment, or KDE, attempting to create a GUI for the enduser of Linux.

https://www.kde.org/announcements/announcement.php

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

1884 – Geographers and astronomers adopted Greenwich as the Prime Meridian, making it the International standard for zero degrees longitude. Today the Greenwich observatory shoots a laser northwards at night to indicate the meridian. It is not a dangerous laser.

http://books.google.com/books?id=2PCEPLT4aZgC&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=october+13+1884+greenwich&source=bl&ots=OL5dRVJ8tz&sig=ItRzcm7zjEFOe33oFSMowrADBwk&hl=en#v=onepage&q=october%2013%201884%20greenwich&f=false

1983 – Bob Barnett, president of Ameritech Mobile communications, called Alexander Graham Bell’s nephew from Chicago’s Soldier Field using a Motorola DynaTAC handset. It marked the launch of the first cellular telephone network in the US.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10064633-94.html

1985 – The first observation of a proton-antiproton collision was made by the Collider Detector at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

http://www.fnal.gov/pub/tevatron/milestones/interactive-timeline.html

2000 – Tristan Louis suggested sound and video tags be added to the 0.92 spec for RSS feeds. This led to enclosures which allowed media files to be delivered through RSS and paved the way for podcasting.
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/syndication/conversations/topics/698

2016 – The PlayStation VR headset began shipping.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/12/13255384/playstation-vr-launch-availability-where-how-to-buy

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

1979 – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first published unleashing in book form, the world of Vogon Poetry, essential towel behaviour, and the BabelFish.

http://www.information-britain.co.uk/famdates.php?id=1237

2001 – An era ended as the Polaroid Corporation filed for federal bankruptcy protection, killed off by 1-hour developing and the rise of digital cameras. Bank One bought most of the company and re-launched a company under the same name.

http://money.cnn.com/2001/10/12/companies/polaroid/

2003 – Adam Curry posted an AppleScript called RSS2iPod that took MP3s downloaded by RSS to a folder and automatically transferred them to a connected iPod. Christopher Lydon’s Radio UserLand was used as the example.

http://radio-weblogs.com/0001014/2003/10/12.html#a4604

2005 – After previously assuring us nobody wanted to watch videos on an iPod, Steve Jobs reversed course and Apple started making videos available on iTunes. ABC/Disney was the only TV network available at the time but you could get episodes of Lost and Desperate Housewives the day after they aired.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/10/12Apple-Announces-iTunes-6-With-2-000-Music-Videos-Pixar-Short-Films-Hit-TV-Shows.html

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