1936 – Alan Turing submitted his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” for publication in which he postulated hypothetical Turing Machines would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.

http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/tp2-ie.pdf

1959 – A committee of government, military and business computer experts met at the Pentagon and laid the foundations for the COBOL computer language.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9906/09/1959.idg/

1971 – The USSR launched Mars 3. It would arrive at Mars in December and its lander would become the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars.

http://spider.seds.org/mars/mars-l.html

2014 – Apple announced it would acquire Beats Electronics and Beats Music for $3 billion. Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine would join the company with the titles of ‘Jimmy’ and ‘Dre.’

http://recode.net/2014/05/28/apple-buys-beats-for-3-billion/

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1931 – Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took the first manned trip into the stratosphere when they rode in a pressurized cabin attached to a balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet.

http://books.google.com/books?id=rh3YOHLvUv8C&pg=PT30&lpg=PT30&dq=may+27+1931+Auguste+Piccard+and+Charles+Knipfer&source=bl&ots=xO1JisUKos&sig=kl1iga6vBsdejUaq2558cXndkjY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hr-aUda2IeGriALCloCgBw&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAQ

1959 – After almost a decade, MIT shut down its Whirlwind computer. It ran 35 hours a week at 90 percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/May/27/

1986 – Dragon Quest was released in Japan. It combined the full-screen map of Ultima with the battle and statistics-oriented screens of Wizardry and paved the way for RPG games.

http://www.giantbomb.com/dragon-warrior/3030-16305/

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

1969 – Apollo 10 returned to Earth after a successful eight-day test of all the components needed for the manned moon landing.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo10.html

1981 – Satya Pal Asija received the first US patent for a computer software program. It was called Swift-answer. The patent took seven years to issue, and the validity of software patents has been debated ever since.

http://patents.justia.com/1981/04270182.html

1995 – Bill Gates authored an internal memo entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave” calling the Internet the most important development since the IBM personal computer. Microsoft soon got to work on its own Web browser.

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1818989,00.html

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

1945 – Arthur C. Clarke began privately circulating copies of his paper “The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications” which suggested geostationary space stations could be used for worldwide television broadcasts.

http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4407/vol3/cover.pdf

1949 – Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia. He would later go by the name Joybubbles and develop a talent to whistle at 2600 Hz, allowing him to control phone switching equipment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/us/20engressia.html

1961 – US President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech to Congress declaring the United States would go to the Moon.

http://history.nasa.gov/moondec.html

1989 – The first Magellan GPS NAV 1000s were shipped to retailers. They ran for a few hours on six AA batteries, and sold for $3,000.

http://mashable.com/2014/05/25/commercial-gps-25-anniversary/

1994 – CERN hosted the first international World Wide Web conference, which continued through May 27.

http://www94.web.cern.ch/WWW94/

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

1844 – Samuel Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol to the Mount Clair train depot in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the first public demonstration of the telegraph.

http://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/samuel-morse

1935 – General Electric Co. sold the first spectrophotometer. It could detect two million different shades of color and make a permanent record chart of the results.

http://www.opnmagazine-digital.com/opn/200911?pg=19#pg19

1961 – Wes Clark began working on the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC), at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. It was one of the earliest examples of a user-friendly machine that you could communicate with while it operated. It’s credited with setting the standard for personal computer design.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/May/24/

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