1899 – Nippon Electric Company Ltd. (NEC) was founded by Iwadare Kunihiko, an expert in telegraphic systems who worked under Thomas Edison. Western Electric provided funding, making it the first Japanese joint-venture with a foreign company.

http://www.nec.com/en/global/about/history.html

1995 – The US Air Force announced the Global Positioning System had met requirements for Full Operational Capability. The navigation system was strictly the province of the US Department of Defense operated by the 2nd Space Operation Squadron of the 50th Space Wing at Falcon Air Force Base in Colorado.

http://www.colorado.edu/geography/gcraft/notes/gps/foc.txt

1997 – DNS was widely disrupted making email routing and web page delivery spotty throughout the day. An Ingres database failure resulted in corrupt .COM and .NET zone files. A system administrator mistakenly released the zone file without regenerating the file and verifying its integrity.

http://scripting.com/davenet/stories/DNSOutage.html

2002 – Apple announced PC versions of the iPod with MusicMatch software instead of iTunes. The company also announced a 20 GB version of the music player and touch-sensitive scroll wheel and dropped the prices.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2002/07/17Apple-Unveils-New-iPods.html

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1945 – The United States detonated a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico. The Trinity test ushered in the atomic age.

http://www.osti.gov/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/trinity.htm

1951 – VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin was born in Philadelphia.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/July/16/

1969 – Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins, blasted off from Cape Kennedy on Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo-11/apollo-11.html

1995 – Amazon.com opened for business selling books online. Shipments were packed into boxes from a desk made out of a spare door in a two-car garage in Bellevue, Washington.

http://content.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2004089,00.html

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

1928 – The Polish Cipher Bureau picked up enciphered radio signals from the German Reicswehr for the first time. The messages were encoded with Germany’s ENIGMA machine. Cracking the EMIGMA during World War II brought together some of the finest minds in computer science at Bletchley Park in England.

http://books.google.com/books?id=hfWTDr_bvMwC&pg=PA117&lpg=PA117&dq=july+15+1928+enigma&source=bl&ots=9M41qBR6P2&sig=uvtGXuu4q3DeZol6pbJs3rfzq28&hl=en&sa=X&ei=GYjMUYSBIOWciQKOv4GoDg&ved=0CFwQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=july%2015%201928%20enigma&f=false

1983 – Nintendo released the Family Computer or Famicom, along with Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye cartridges. It would later be released in the US as the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/1437208/Nintendo-console

2003 – AOL Time Warner disbanded the Netscape browser development team. In conjunction, Mozilla created the Mozilla Foundation giving the project its first independent legal existence.

http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3434

2006 – After a few months being used internally at Odeo, the Twttr service launched for public use. They later added some vowels and spun Twitter out as its own company.

http://techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/

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1867 – Alfred Nobel demonstrated dynamite for the first time at Merstham Quarry, Surrey.

http://www.information-britain.co.uk/famdates.php?id=572

1918 – Computer pioneer and MIT professor Jay Forrester was born on a cattle ranch in Climax, Nebraska. With Robert Everett, Forrester led one of the most important early computer projects, the Whirlwind, and developed and founded the field of system dynamics.

http://jsterman.scripts.mit.edu/docs/Lane-2011%20Profiles%20in%20Operations%20Research.pdf

1965 – Mariner 4 flew by Mars, taking 21 full pictures, the first close-up photos of another planet returned from space.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1964-077A

2015 – The New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Pluto after traveling for nine and a half years and three billion miles. It was the last of the nine planets to be approached by a probe, though Pluto had been reclassified as a dwarf planet after New Horizons had launched.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/15/science/space/nasa-new-horizons-spacecraft-reaches-pluto.html?_r=0

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