Search Results for "october 15"

1975 – Atari filed for a patent on the sit-down “cockpit” arcade cabinet, literally putting you inside the game. The game Hi-Way with the slogan “Hi Way — All It Needs Is Wheels”, was the first Atari game to use the cabinet. It was a first-person driver in which you had to dodge cars and– well– drive.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2FD243626

1984 – The Monterey Bay Aquarium opened in Monterey, California. It not only provided a world-class place to learn about sea life, but inspired millions of screensavers and wallpaper images.

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/about/our-history

2004 – Mark Shuttleworth sent out an email to Ubuntu developers announcing the first official release of the Linux-based operating system, Warty Warthog. Every six months since, a new version of Ubuntu comes out with a new alliterative animal-inspired name.

http://lwn.net/Articles/107267/

2016 – Nintendo released a video showing off the Nintendo Switch game console for the first time. It demonstrated the hybrid tablet nature of the console and showed off the Joy-Con controllers.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/nintendos-next-console-switch-is-a-consoletablet-hybrid/

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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/

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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

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.

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.

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.

1942 – Germany conducted the first successful test of the V-2/A4 rocket, launched from Test Stand VII at Peenemünde. It traveled 118 miles.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/germany-conducts-first-successful-v-2-rocket-test

1950 – John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley received US patents for circuits that would eventually be called the transistor.

https://www.google.com/patents/US2524035?dq=2,524,035&hl=en&sa=X&ei=_bwVVJGDOorioAS14IHwBg&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA

1967 – Air Force Major William “Pete” Knight flew the rocket-powered X-15 aircraft to 4,520 mph, Mach 6.72. That is the fastest manned aircraft ever flown.

http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/x-15-walkaround-22512890/

1972 – The first USA/Japan Computer Conference was held in Tokyo.

http://books.google.com/books/about/First_USA_Japan_Computer_Conference_proc.html?id=eY4mAAAAMAAJ

1985 – STS-51J lifted off Sending the Space Shuttle Atlantis on its maiden flight. It was the fourth shuttle created and eventually became the last shuttle to fly in July 2011.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/archives/sts-51J.html

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

1925 – John Logie Baird performed the first test of a working television system. It delivered a grayscale 30-line vertically scanned image, at five frames per second. After a ventriloquist’s dummy appeared on screen, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton became the first person televised in full tonal range.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/research/general/tvstory2

1955 – ENIAC was shut down for the last time. After 11 years running at 5,000 operations a second and taking up 1,000 square feet of floor space, it had earned its retirement.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/October/2/

1996 – US President Bill Clinton signed amendments to the Freedom of Information Act requiring the US government to make electronic documents available online.

http://www.justice.gov/oip/foia_updates/Vol_XVII_4/page2.htm

2015 – Google officially reorganized, merging with a new parent company called Alphabet. Subsidiaries included Google, Google Fiber, Calico and Life Sciences, Google Ventures and Google Capital, Nest, and Google X. Sundar Pichai was named CEO of Google while Larry Page became CEO of Alphabet and Sergey Brin became President of Alphabet.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000119312515336577/0001193125-15-336577-index.htm

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

1958 – The National Advisory Committee of Aeronautics was officially absorbed by the brand new National Aeronautics and Space Agency. Another expanded government bureaucracy that was only good for putting people on the moon.

http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/nasa.html

1971 – The first clinical human CT scan was performed on a middle aged lady with a suspected frontal lobe tumor, at Atkinson Morley’s Hospital in South London.

https://www.birpublications.org/doi/pdf/10.1259/bjr/29444122

1982 – Sony started selling the first CD players to the public, the CDP-101 for 168,000 yen (that’s about $730 US). At the time you could get Billy Joel’s album 52nd street on CD– and soon many more.

http://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/SonyHistory/2-09.html

2003 – 4Chan launched its main page, intended as a sister-site to the Japanese 2Chan for discussions of manga and anime. They provided the fertile ground for the growth of lolcats, Rickrolling, Anonymous, Pedobear and more.

http://www.4chan.org/news?all#2

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