1860 – Telegraph lines opened between Los Angeles and San Francisco. This allowed gold miners to tell backers farther south that they still hadn’t found any gold.
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/chron5.html

1921 – KDKA radio in Pittsburgh conducted the first live broadcast of a football game from Forbes Field. The University of Pittsburgh beat West Virginia University.

http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2010/04/01/kdka-firsts/

2003 – To allow IT departments to prepare for critical updates, Microsoft conducted the first regularly scheduled Windows patch release. It became lovingly known as “Patch Tuesday”.

http://www.zdnet.com/celebrating-10-years-of-patch-tuesday-7000021664/

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

1806 – Englishman Ralph Wedgwood received the first patent on carbon paper, which led to the initials cc to indicate a carbon copy which led to the email option to “cc” somebody.
http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/Part_Three/HTML/letterEEd.26.1228.html

1954 – IBM sounded the death knell of vacuum tubes, building the first calculating machine to use solid-state transistors. It was an experimental version of the IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch, that was desktop-sized and slow just like it’s vacuum-tube powered brother, but it used 5% of the power!

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/10/1007ibm-transistor-calculator/

1959 – The Soviet Space Probe Luna 3 took the first photographs of the dark side of the moon. You’re welcome Pink Floyd.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/luna/

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

1893 – A US. copyright was issued to William K. L. Dickson for a “publication” consisting of “Edison Kinetoscopic Records.” It was the first motion picture copyright in North America. No torrents were uploaded until much later.

http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/edhtml/edtime.html

1914 – Edwin H. Armstrong received a US patent for a “Wireless Receiving System” which described his famous regenerative, or feedback, circuit. Armstrong would go on to pioneer FM radio.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=-RhkAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1927 – Al Jolson appeared on a movie screen in New York City and said for all to hear “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” It was the first talkie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018037/

2014 – HP announced it planned to split into two companies. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise would become an IT company with all of HP’s enterprise level offerings. HP Inc. would take the existing logo and the personal systems and printing divisions.

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-news/press-release.html?id=1809455#.VDLYvyldXA5

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

1969 – The first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus aired on the BBC. The show created the Spam sketch that would eventually inspire the slang term for unsolicited email.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8287931.stm

1991 – Linux Kernel version 0.02 was released, attracting a lot of attention. Author Linus Torvalds felt this version was at least usable and worth a wider release.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!msg/comp.os.minix/4995SivOl9o/GwqLJlPSlCEJ%5B1-25%5D

1992 – IBM announced the ThinkPad line of Notebook computers at offices in New York City.

http://www.zdnet.com/happy-20th-birthday-to-the-ibm-thinkpad-a-design-classic-7000002561/

2002 – “Xbox Media Player” and its first beta source code was released. The code was a result of Frodo, the founder of “YAMP” (Yet Another Media Player), joining the Xbox Media Player team. The project was later changed to Xbox Media Center and then just XBMC.

http://xbmc.org/10-years-of-xbmc/

2011 – Steve Jobs died at his home surrounded by family. The co-founder and CEO of Apple had fought pancreatic cancer for years.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/steve-jobs-dies-apple-chief-innovated-personal-computer/story?id=14383813#.UDY7lt1lRG0

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