1979 – CompuServe began offering a consumer version of its dial-up online information service called MicroNET. The name would later be changed to CompuServe and offer public email among other online services.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/happy-30th-birthday-compuserve/24853

1993 – Broderbund Software released the game Myst, for the Macintosh computer. It became a record-setting bestseller and helped popularize CD-ROM drives.

https://www.giantbomb.com/myst/3030-3970/

1997 – Ultima Online launched, revolutionizing online gaming by supporting thousands of simultaneous players in a persistent shared world.

http://www.uo.com/article/Press-Around-Anniversary

2013 – Valve announced their new Steam OS, a free version of Linux built around the Steam video game service.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/23/4762370/steam-box-os

2014 – The shellshock vulnerability was made public. The way bash handled variables could allow malicious code to be run on computers running Linux and OS X. This meant routers, webcams and other connected devices were also vulnerable.

http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/09/bash-bug-as-big-as-heartbleed.html#.VCRaXildXA4

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

1889 – Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo Koppai in Kyoto, Japan, to manufacture hanafuda, Japanese playing cards. Mario came much later.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/09/0923nintendo-founded/

1999 – NASA lost contact with the Mars Climate Orbiter. It began orbit normally, but after it went behind the planet and out of range, it never made contact again. It was later determined that the approach attitude was wrong because software put out imperial units instead of metric units.

http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msp98/news/mco990923.html

1999 – Two years after its founding, Netflix launched its subscription DVD rental service which proved much more popular than renting DVDs individually by mail.

http://archive.fortune.com/2009/01/27/news/newsmakers/hastings_netflix.fortune/index.htm

2002 – Mozilla Phoenix 0.1 was released. It was the first public version of the web browser, that would become Mozilla Firefox.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/History:Timelines

2008 – The T-Mobile G1 launched, the first phone to use Google’s Android OS, as it began it’s competition against the barely year-old iPhone.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2409863,00.asp

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

1791 – Michael Faraday was born in south London. He grew up to discover electromagnetic induction and coined the terms ‘electrode’, ‘cathode’ and ‘ion.’ He also lent his name to the Faraday cage.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/faraday_michael.shtml

1986 – In NEC Corp. Vs. Intel Corp., the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled that microprograms are copyrightable literary works. And so all the trouble began.

http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v03/03HarvJLTech209.pdf

2011 – Facebook announced its new Timeline feature which would collect all your posts and materials in chronological order, replacing the old profile.

https://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=10150289612087131

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

1866 – Herbert George Wells was born in Bromley, England. He would grow up to write under the name H. G. Wells and help form the genre of science fiction.

http://www.britannica.com/biography/H-G-Wells

1999 – Google came out of beta. The young company announced its new Google Scout feature and the launch of its new website, removing the beta designation from the Google search engine.

http://googlepress.blogspot.com/1999/09/googles-new-googlescout-feature-expands.html

2000 – Kevin Mitnick was released from a Lompoc, California prison after almost five years of incarceration.

http://news.cnet.com/Mitnick-released-from-prison/2100-1023_3-235933.html

2015 – Christopher Poole aka ‘moot’ sold 4Chan to its inspiration 2Channel. Hiroyuki Nishimura became 4Chan’s president.

http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/09/21/4chan-has-been-sold-to-2channel-after-12-years-of-independence/

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