1905 – 110 acres of land in southern Nevada were auctioned off, founding a new city. They would become downtown Las Vegas which would grow to become the host for major tech events like Comdex, CES and more.

http://www.lasvegasnevada.gov/portal/faces/home/our-city/oc-then-now?_adf.ctrl-state=o1bpgew0l_4&_afrLoop=1042646663388628

1987 – The Soviet Union launched the Polyus prototype orbital weapons platform from Baikonur Cosmodrome Site 250 in Kazakhstan. It failed to reach orbit. Polyus was designed to destroy SDI satellites with a megawatt carbon-dioxide laser.

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1241842

1997 – Amazon stock went public on NASDAQ.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/amazon

2004 – Using a computer with a 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 processor, Josh Findley discovered the 41st Mersenne prime, 224,036,583 – 1. Mersenne primes have a close connection to perfect numbers, which are equal to the sum of their proper divisors.

http://books.google.com/books?id=1MTcYrbTdsUC&pg=PA155&lpg=PA155&dq=may+15+2004+41st+Mersenne+prime,+224,036,583&source=bl&ots=9F92FdSlZa&sig=KP-aMfsLahUdnkaB9TtyKHRDX0I&hl=en&sa=X&ei=M66KUeSEFMPKiwK3hoH4Bg&ved=0CGcQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=may%2015%202004%2041st%20Mersenne%20prime%2C%20224%2C036%2C583&f=false

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1973 – The United States launched Skylab, the country’s first space station as part of the Apollo space program.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/this-week-in-nasa-history-skylab-launches-may-14-1973

1984 – According to his Facebook profile Mark Zuckerberg was born in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He would grow up to found Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/info

1992 – Texas Instruments decided to take on the dominance of Intel, announcing its own 486 microprocessor chip. Cyrix corp. designed the chip for TI, but it proved unsuccessful in weakening Intel’s dominance.

http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-14/business/fi-3052_1_texas-instruments

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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.