1906 – Alberto Santos-Dumont flew an airplane in the first heavier-than-air flight in Europe at Champs de Bagatelle, Paris, France. Some argue he should be credited with the first flight at all. But that’s a long controversy.
http://www.smithsonianeducation.org/scitech/impacto/graphic/aviation/alberto.html

1995 – A federal judge for the first time authorized a wiretap of a computer network, leading to hacking charges against a young Argentinean for breaking into sensitive US government networks.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/10/1023first-computer-wiretap/

2001 – Apple announced their new music player, the iPod. Apple used PortalPlayer’s reference platform and hired Pixo to design and implement the user interface. The iPod became the first massively successful digital music player.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2001/10/23Apple-Presents-iPod.html

2012 – Apple announced the iPad Mini at 7.9 inches.

http://techland.time.com/2012/10/23/apple-announces-ipad-mini-for-329-fourth-generation-ipad/

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1938 – Chester Carlson, tired of the exhaustive process of hand-copying or photographing patent paperwork, decided to make an easier way. On this date he produced the first electrophotographic image. Xerox would later make it automatic, popular, and make Carlson rich.
http://www.rit.edu/alumni/ihf/inductee.php?inductee=2

1968 – The US bounced back from tragedy with the first manned mission to space, Apollo 7, safely splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean after orbiting the Earth 163 times.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo7.html

1975 – The Soviet unmanned space mission Venera 9 landed on Venus. Pics or it didn’t happen you say? Well Venera 9 was the first spacecraft to return an image from the surface of another planet.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/v09_lander.html

1995 – Joost Shur posted QUAKETALK 95 to keep people up to date on the development of the forthcoming game Quake.

http://rome.ro/news/2016/6/22/happy-20th-birthday-quake

2009 – Microsoft released Windows 7. People liked it.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/10/windows-7-is-here/

2013 – Apple announced the new iPad Air and iPad Mini with retina display. They also released OS X Mavericks for free.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/10/apple-oct-event-announcements/

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

1879 – Thomas Edison finished up 14 months of testing with an incandescent electric light bulb that lasted 13½ hours. It improved on 50-year-old technology to make light bulbs safe and economical by using lower electricity, a carbon filament and an improved vacuum.

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/oct-21-1879-thomas-edison-lights-the-lamp/

1949 – An Wang filed a patent for a magnetic ferrite core memory, that he called pulse transfer controlling devices. Two years later he formed Wang computers.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=JSNjAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1983 – The seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures ruled the meter would be defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. This actually simplified it from the previous definition of 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0810.3512.pdf

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

1975 – Atari filed for a patent on the sit-down “cockpit” arcade cabinet, literally putting you inside the game. The game Hi-Way with the slogan “Hi Way — All It Needs Is Wheels”, was the first Atari game to use the cabinet. It was a first-person driver in which you had to dodge cars and– well– drive.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2FD243626

1984 – The Monterey Bay Aquarium opened in Monterey, California. It not only provided a world-class place to learn about sea life, but inspired millions of screensavers and wallpaper images.

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/about/our-history

2004 – Mark Shuttleworth sent out an email to Ubuntu developers announcing the first official release of the Linux-based operating system, Warty Warthog. Every six months since, a new version of Ubuntu comes out with a new alliterative animal-inspired name.

http://lwn.net/Articles/107267/

2016 – Nintendo released a video showing off the Nintendo Switch game console for the first time. It demonstrated the hybrid tablet nature of the console and showed off the Joy-Con controllers.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/nintendos-next-console-switch-is-a-consoletablet-hybrid/

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

1832 – Samuel Morse first conceived of the electric telegraph system. At least he said later this was the day he first thought of it.
http://books.google.com/books?id=Da6nJoa_9nQC&pg=PA43&lpg=PA43&dq=october+19+1832+samuel+morse&source=bl&ots=Kccb4Tn_UH&sig=Re6L_uE_YqFB0b8sVwiWKwHS2Uo&hl=en#v=onepage&q=october%2019%201832%20samuel%20morse&f=false

1941 – The Smith-Putnam Wind Turbine first fed AC power to the electric grid on Grandpa’s Knob in Castleton, Vermont, becoming the first wind machine to do so. The 1.25 MW turbine operated for 1100 hours before a blade failed.
http://www.historychannel.com.au/this-day-in-history/first-megawatt-wind-turbine-generates-electricity/

1973 – The Atanasoff-Berry Computer finally got its due. US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision that the ENIAC patent was invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer. But ENIAC still incorrectly gets the credit from many to this day.

http://www.columbia.edu/~td2177/JVAtanasoff/JVAtanasoff.html

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