Search Results for "october 17"

1950 – CBS’s mechanical color system was the first to be licensed for broadcast by the FCC. Color TV would not become widespread until the late 1960s.
http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adaccess/timeline/1946-1950/

1957 – The Jodrell Bank observatory, with the world’s largest radio telescope, designed by Sir Bernard Lovell, began operation. It’s first job was to track the just-launched Sputnik satellite.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/the_queens_diamond_jubilee/9307367/Queens-Diamond-Jubilee-60-crowning-glories.html

1958 – NASA launched the lunar probe Pioneer 1 the first of the Pioneer program. It didn’t get very far, falling back to Earth and burning up in the atmosphere.

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2372.html

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

1964 – The opening ceremonies of the summer Olympics in Tokyo became the first Olympic broadcast relayed live by geostationary communication satellite. Too bad all the US networks gave up on live broadcasts of the Olympics.
http://blogs.wsj.com/japanrealtime/2013/09/05/the-1964-tokyo-olympics-a-turning-point-for-japan/

1967 – The Outer Space Treaty came into force, banning nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction from being placed in Earth orbit or on any other celestial body. It also prevented any state from claiming sovereignty over any celestial resource like the Moon.
http://www.state.gov/www/global/arms/treaties/space1.html

1994 – Håkon Wium Lie published “Cascading HTML style sheets – a proposal.” He proposed addressing the problems of existing style sheets being static, platform-specific and not allowing enough influence by the HTML author.
http://www.w3.org/People/howcome/p/cascade.html

1995 – The Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrapped up “A Day in the Life of Cyberspace” an attempt to chronicle what people did online that day.

http://www.media.mit.edu/events/1010/1010_intro.html

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

1876 – The first two-way telephone conversation occurred over outdoor wires between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, Watson. They used a two-mile telegraph line linking Boston and East Cambridge.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0118.html

1947 – Eckert-Mauchly Computer Co. signed a contract with Northrop to develop the BINary Automatic Computer. BINAC was the only computer ever built by the company founded by ENIAC pioneers J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.
http://what-when-how.com/inventions/binac-computer-inventions/

2009 – The first lunar impact of the Centaur and LCROSS spacecrafts kicked up some dust as part of NASA’s Lunar precursor Robotic program. The impact led to greater certainty that there is water on the moon.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2009/09-131AR.html

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

1860 – Telegraph lines opened between Los Angeles and San Francisco. This allowed gold miners to tell backers farther south that they still hadn’t found any gold.
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/chron5.html

1921 – KDKA radio in Pittsburgh conducted the first live broadcast of a football game from Forbes Field. The University of Pittsburgh beat West Virginia University.

http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2010/04/01/kdka-firsts/

2003 – To allow IT departments to prepare for critical updates, Microsoft conducted the first regularly scheduled Windows patch release. It became lovingly known as “Patch Tuesday”.

http://www.zdnet.com/celebrating-10-years-of-patch-tuesday-7000021664/

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

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.