1851 – The first public message was sent on the submarine telegraph cable under the English Channel between Dover, England and Calais, France.

http://books.google.com/books?id=6nM0AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA21&lpg=PA21&dq=november+13+1851+submarine+telegraph&source=bl&ots=71yU-Y_Dva&sig=mZmBJzfqw9fKkwaYU-4xVL_v-5k&hl=en&sa=X&ei=XZJ6UvetBMGRiAL1noGIBA&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=november%2013%201851%20submarine%20telegraph&f=false

1982 – 15-year-old Scott Safran of Cherry Hill, New Jersey set the world record score on Asteroids. His record stood for 27 years, the longest-running high score in videogame history.

https://www.wired.com/2010/04/asteroids-record/

1983 – The MIT TX-0, an experimental transistorized computer, was brought back to life for the last time at The Computer Museum in Marlboro, Massachusetts.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/November/13/

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1946 – The US Army held a contest between an abacus used by Kiyoshi Matsuzaki from Japan’s postal ministry and an electric calculator operated by Private Thomas Nathan Wood. The abacus won 4 to 1.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/11/1112abacus-beats-calculator/

1970 – The Oregon Highway Divisions made an ill-advised attempt to destroy a dead whale by blowing it up with explosives. The results, documented by local news, eventually became Internet gold as the “exploding whale” video.
http://www.offbeatoregon.com/H001_ExplodWhale.html

1990 – Tim Berners-Lee published a formal proposal for a hypertext project. The proposal referred to a “web of information nodes” and implementing “browsers” The project eventually became the World Wide Web.

http://www.w3.org/Proposal

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

1675 – Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of good ol y=f(x). That is, if you believe what he wrote in his notebooks.
http://books.google.com/books?id=bOIGAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA213&lpg=PA213&dq=november+11+1675+leibniz&source=bl&ots=U_y9jNxYoF&sig=BIPDX5dry5lv_bLJUXmLTelcDIg&hl=en#v=onepage&q=november%2011%201675%20leibniz&f=false

1930 – Albert Einstein, yes that Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard received a US patent for a refrigerator that required no electricity, just a heat source. Electrolux bought up the patents.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=t0BRAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

2006 – The Sony PS3 went on sale with a built-in Blu-ray player and hard drive.

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/playstation-3-in-akihabara-japan-on-november-11-2006-the-news-photo/110832129#playstation-3-in-akihabara-japan-on-november-11-2006-the-playstation-picture-id110832129

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

1983 – Fred Cohen demonstrated a way to insert code into a Unix command in order to gain control of systems. His academic adviser, Len Adelman (the A in RSA) compared the self-replicating code to a virus. It wasn’t the first code of it’s kind, but it’s the one that inspired the name.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/11/1110fred-cohen-first-computer-virus/

1983 – At the plaza hotel in New York, Bill Gates announced Windows. It originally was called Interface Manager until Rowland Hanson convinced Gates to change the name. It would take two years before Microsoft would put it on sale.
http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventions/a/Windows.htm

2001 – The first Apple iPod went on sale. Analysts agreed that the price of $399 was too high, and Apple was too inexperienced in consumer electronics to make it a success.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/10/23Apple-Presents-iPod.html
http://liveweb.archive.org/http://news.cnet.com/2100-1040-275054.html&tag=mn_hd

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

1967 – NASA launched a Saturn V rocket carrying Apollo 4, a test craft launched from Cape Kennedy. It was the first launch in the Apollo program and the first time using the Launch Control Center at Kennedy Space Center.

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/history/apollo/apollo-4/apollo-4.html

1979 – The NORAD computers detected a massive Soviet Nuclear Strike. Thankfully raw data from satellites were reviewed along with early warning radar, proving it was a false alarm. A technician had loaded a test tape but failed to switch the system status to “test”. Oops!

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/nukevault/ebb371/

2004 – The Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 1.0. It featured tabbed browsing and a popup blocker.

http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/press/mozilla-2004-11-09.html

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