1936 – Edwin Armstrong presented FM radio at FCC headquarters. Armstrong played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. “[I]f the audience of 50 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room.”

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/FM_broadcasting_in_the_USA.html

1946 – The first mobile telephone call was made from a car in St. Louis, Missouri. Teams from Bell Labs and Western Electric had collaborated to develop the technology.

http://ethw.org/The_Foundations_of_Mobile_and_Cellular_Telephony

1997 – Programmers deciphered code written in the impenetrable Data Encryption Standard, the strongest legally exportable encryption software in the United States. The hackers organized over the Internet and cracked the software in five months, proving that stronger encryption was needed.

http://books.google.com/books?id=ce_nUNxdKV8C&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=june+17+1997+data+encryption+standard&source=bl&ots=ujMF0OF7CC&sig=Gbddn5qlPT5nih1yDkbbke-LiEQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=5ra0UZIHxpuIAqLPgYgO&ved=0CEQQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=june%2017%201997%20data%20encryption%20standard&f=false

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1911 – The Tabulating Company (founded by Herman Hollerith), the Computing Scale Company, and the International Time Recording Company merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York. They would later change the company name to International Business Machines,and later just IBM.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/founded/

1963 – Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space, orbiting the Earth 48 times.

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/whos_who_level2/tereshkova.html

1977 – Software Development Laboratories was incorporated in Redwood Shores, California, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. They later came up with the catchier name, Oracle.

https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/06/16/a-day-full-of-legendary-origins.aspx

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1878 – Photographer Eadweard Muybridge used high-speed photography to capture a horse’s motion. The photos showed the horse with all four feet in the air during some parts of its stride. Stop-motion photography was born.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/91483062/

1949 – Jay Forrester wrote down a proposal for core memory in his notebook. Core memory was the standard for computer memory until advances in semiconductors in the 1970s.

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4375442/Forrester-records-a-proposal-for-core-memory-in-his-notebook–June-15–1949

1987 – Compuserve’s Sandy Trevor and his team, which included inventor Steve Wilhite, released GIF version 87a. The new enhanced format allowed people to create compressed animations. “Under Construction” GIFs everywhere became possible.

http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/gif-history-steve-wilhite-olia-lialina-interview/

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1822 – Charles Babbage announced his difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables.”

http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Babbage.html

1951 – The US Census Bureau officially put UNIVAC I into service calling it the world’s first commercial computer.

http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/industry/06/14/computing.anniversary/

1962 – The European Space Research Organization, which would become the European Space Agency, was established in Paris.

http://www.jaxa.jp/library/space_law/chapter_1/1-2-2-4_e.html

1967 – NASA launched Mariner 5 on its mission to fly by Venus.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1967-060A

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