1850 – The first US patent for push-key operation of a calculating machine was issued to Dubois D. Parmelee of New Paltz, NY.

http://www.google.com/patents/US7074

1944 – At Bletchley Park in Great Britain, the Colossus Mk I attacked its first Lorenz-encrypted message. Enigma had been cracked but Lorenz was a tougher cipher used in communications between Hitler and his generals in World War II.

http://www.zdnet.com/colossus-celebrates-70th-anniversary-at-national-museum-of-computing-7000026002/

1974 – The US space probe Mariner 10 returned the first close-up images of Venus and became the first spacecraft to use a gravity assist from one planet to help it reach another.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1973-085A

1999 – Victoria’s Secret’s online fashion show became the first major webcast, attracting an estimated 1.5 million viewers worldwide. Proving even back then, the Internet is for shopping.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9902/05/vicweb.idg/

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

1890 – Thomas Edison received a patent for the first quadruplex telegraph, which could send two messages simultaneously in each direction. One message consisted of an electric signal of varying strength, while the second was a signal of varying polarity.

http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Quadruplex_Telegraph
http://www.google.com/patents?id=SV9BAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1998 – Noël Godin, a Belgian who made a practice of pie-ing rich and famous people struck a pie against the face of Bill Gates. Gates did not press charges.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-207832.html

2004 – Mark Zuckerberg and a few other guys at Harvard launched TheFacebook so Harvard students can look up and hook up with each other. They would eventually expand the service to the world. And drop the “the”.

https://www.facebook.com/facebook?v=info

2014 – Microsoft named 22-year employee Satya Nadella its new CEO replacing Steve Ballmer. Bill Gates stepped down as Chairman of the Board at the same time and was replaced by John Thompson.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2014/feb14/02-04newspr.aspx

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

1879 – Joseph Wilson Swan demonstrated the first practically usable incandescent filament electric light bulb to 700 people at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=5197568&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F5176125%2F5197544%2F05197568.pdf%3Farnumber%3D5197568

1966 – The Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft landed safely on the moon in the Ocean of Storms. It was the first lunar soft landing and first transmission of photographic data from the Moon to Earth.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1966-006A

2011 – The Number Resource Organization announced that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses was fully depleted. The IANA allocated the last of the blocks equally between the five Regional Internet Registries.

http://www.nro.net/news/ipv4-free-pool-depleted

2014 – Facebook launched its ‘Paper’ app for iOS in the US. Paper provided a more magazine like format for viewing Facebook content.

http://recode.net/2014/01/30/meet-paper-facebooks-answer-to-browsing-and-creating-mobile-media/

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

1046 – English monks recorded “no man then alive could remember so severe a winter as this was.” Their analog weather blog entry recorded the beginning of the Little Ice Age.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/657

1931 – Friedrich Schmiedl launched the first rocket mail (V-7, Experimental Rocket 7) with 102 pieces of mail between Schöckl and St. Radegund, Austria.
http://www.astronautix.com/s/schmiedl.html

1935 – Detective Leonarde Keeler, co-inventor of the Keeler polygraph, tried out the lie detector on two suspected criminals in Portage, Wisconsin. Both suspects were convicted of assault.

http://www.wired.com/2012/02/0202polygraph-leads-conviction/

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

1951 -TV viewers witnessed the live detonation of an atomic bomb blast, as KTLA in Los Angeles broadcast the explosion of a nuclear device dropped on Frenchman Flats, Nevada.
http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/02/0201ktla-atomic-test/

1972 – Hewlett-Packard introduced the first scientific handheld calculator, the famous HP-35 for $395. It was the first handheld calculator to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions with one keystroke.
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/the_hp-35_calculator.html

1985 – Shortly after its founding the November before, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute kicked off operations.
http://www.seti.org/about-us

1997 – Dave Winer changed how he displayed ‘Scripting News’ so that it always showed the last ten days of posts. In other words, the way every blog does it now. Whether this makes it the ‘first blog’ or not, it was extremely influential and is definitely one of the oldest blogs out there, predating the term blog, of course.

http://scripting.com/stories/siteChanges.html

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