1884 – A group of people interested in the new field of electricity met in New York to start the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/AIEE_History_1884-1963

1939 – Franklin Doolittle put experimental station W1XPW on the air, making it the first commercial FM radio station in the United States. The station later became WDRC-FM in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

http://www.wdrcobg.com/history30s.html

1958 – The trademark “Velcro” was registered, protecting the name of the multi-purpose material that manages cables everywhere.

https://trademarks.justia.com/720/29/velcro-72029769.html

1976 – Atari released the video game “Breakout,” making the paddle controller useful for something besides “Pong.

http://www.webpronews.com/play-ataris-breakout-in-google-image-search-with-this-awesome-easter-egg-2013-05

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

1936 – University of Washington education professor August Dvorak received a patent for his new more efficient keyboard layout. While widely recognised as superior to the QWERTY layout, the Dvorak keyboard is not widely used.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=WSNkAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1941 – German engineer Konrad Zuse presented the Z3, the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. It succeeded the Z1 which was the first binary digital computer.

http://www.dw.com/en/konrad-zuse-and-the-digital-revolution-he-started-with-the-z3-computer-75-years-ago/a-19249238

2005 – Elijah Wood revealed the Xbox 360 on the MTV Music Awards. Microsoft didn’t announce price or release dates, only saying it would arrive for sale by the end of the year.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1501783/new-xbox-designed-customization.jhtml

2015 – Verizon announced it would acquire AOL, including its ISP, advertising and blogging opertions as a wholly-owned subsidiary.

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/verizon-buying-aol-4-4-billion-twitter-reacts/

2017 – Ransomware called WannaCry took advantage of a leaked NSA security tool called EternalBlue and spread to unpatched and out of date Windows installations. It infected more than 200,000 machines in more than 150 countries.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39901382

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

1951 – Jay Forrester filed a patent application for matrix core memory. Professor Forrester led a team at MIT that developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind. It was the first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high-speed.

https://www.google.com/patents/US2736880

1979 – Daniel Bricklin and Robert Frankston gave the first demonstration of VisiCalc, the program that made the Apple II popular with businesses.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/May/11/

1997 – Deep Blue won its final match against Chess master Garry Kasparov, becoming the first computer to defeat a chess champion in match play.

https://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/watch/html/c.html

2016 – Hyperloop One conducted the first test of its linear-electric motors for propelling Hyperloop pods on a test track north of Las Vegas, NV.

http://gizmodo.com/watch-the-first-full-scale-demo-of-the-hyperloop-1776048315

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

1946 – The US launched its second V-2 rocket at White Sands Proving Ground, which became the first successful launch of a large rocket on US soil. The rocket climbed straight up then pitched to the north reaching an altitude of 71 miles and impacted about 35 miles uprange.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/449089main_White_Sands_Missile_Range_Fact_Sheet.pdf

1960 – The nuclear-powered USS Triton submarine arrived in Groton, Connecticut, after completing the first completely submerged circumnavigation of Earth.

http://www.navalhistory.org/2011/05/10/uss-triton-circumnavigates-the-globe

2011 – Google announced its Open Hardware Platform and the Google Music service which would eventually become Google Play Music.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/05/google-releases-movie-rental-service-announces-music-service-in-closed-beta.ars

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