1970 – The Chang Zheng-1 rocket launched, carrying the first Chinese satellite, the Dong Fang Hong-1.

1981 – At a meeting called “Apple II Forever“, Apple introduced the portable Apple IIc. The machine came with 128 kilobytes of RAM and a 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive.

1990 – The Space Shuttle Discovery launched with the Hubble Space Telescope on board. The following day, Hubble was released into space.

2015 – The Apple Watch started shipping. It could be bought in some high-end fashion stores but Apple Stores had none in stock. Only online orders could be taken through Apple.

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1827 – Mathematics student William Rowan Hamilton presented his “Theory of Systems of Rays” at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. It led to the development of the wave theory of light which led to the development of quantum mechanics.

1940 – A patent was granted to Herman Anthony for a leak-proof dry-cell battery. The patent was assigned to Ray-o-Vac.

1941 – Ray Tomlinson was born in Amsterdam, New York. In 1971 he would expand SNDMSG to work between computers on the Arpanet, which would become email. He chose the @ symbol to separate the recipient’s name from the computer domain.

1982 – Sinclair launched the ZX Spectrum which popularised home computing in the UK.

2005 – At 8:27 PM, Jawed Karim, one of the co-founders of YouTube, uploaded the video Me at the zoo making it the first video ever to be uploaded to YouTube.

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1592 – Wilhelm Schickard was born. He would grow up to create an early form of calculating machine called the “calculating clock”, that could add and subtract up to six-digit numbers.

1993 – NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was released, becoming the first web browser to achieve popularity among the general public.

2000 – The Big Number Change took place in the United Kingdom, changing how phone numbers were dialed in many areas. With the boom in mobile devices, the UK had almost exhausted all possible numbers, and needed the change to increase the pool of numbers to be assigned.

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

1962 – President John F. Kennedy opened the Seattle World’s Fair by telephone from Palm Beach, Florida. He pressed a gold telegraph key which focused an antenna at Andover, Maine and a Navy radio telescope station in Maryland on a star to pick up a 10,000 year-old radio signal. That in turn set in motion various exhibits at the fair.

1964 – Satellite Transit-5BN-3 failed to reach orbit after launch. It carried 2.1 pounds (0.95 kg) of radioactive plutonium from its SNAP RTG power source.

1988 – Tandy Corp. held a press conference in New York to announce its plans to build IBM PS/2 clones.

1989 – Nintendo released the original GameBoy in Japan. It sported the same controls as the NES and used black and gray pixels for the display.

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