1822 – Charles Babbage announced his difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables.”
http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Babbage.html

1951 – The US Census Bureau officially put UNIVAC I into service calling it the world’s first commercial computer.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/industry/06/14/computing.anniversary/

1962 – The European Space Research Organization, which would become the European Space Agency, was established in Paris.
http://www.jaxa.jp/library/space_law/chapter_1/1-2-2-4_e.html

1967 – NASA launched Mariner 5 on its mission to fly by Venus.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1967-060A

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1925 – Charles Jenkins publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of silhouette pictures and sound, becoming the first person to demonstrate TV in the US.
http://www.bairdtelevision.com/jenkins.html

1941 – John Mauchly visited John Atanasoff to see his computer. The two computer pioneers later battled in court over who was the legal inventor of the electronic digital computer.
http://jva.cs.iastate.edu/mauchlyinames.php

1944 – Germany launched the first guided missile attack in history, sending V-1 rockets into London.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/germans-launch-v-1-rocket-attack-against-britain

1983 – Pioneer 10 became the first human-made object to pass outside Pluto’s orbit and leave the central solar system.
http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/sso/cool/pioneer10/mission/

2016 – At the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple announced it was changing the name of OS X to macOS starting with the next version of the operating system, macOS Sierra.
http://www.businessinsider.com/wwdc-2016-os-x-becomes-macos-2016-6

2016 – Microsoft announced the Xbox One S, a white slimmed down version of the Xbox One, capable of 4K video and Project Scorpio, a beefed up Xbox capable of 4K gameplay.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/06/xbox-project-scorpio-hardware-specs-can-it-do-4k/

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1897 – Karl Elsener received a design patent for his “soldiers’ knife” for use by the Swiss army. The original had a wooden handle, a blade, a screwdriver and a can opener.
http://books.google.com/books?id=y5JW0YqRRhAC&pg=PA130&lpg=PA130&dq=june+12+1897+elsener&source=bl&ots=EVu9fyf4Uy&sig=XVkpORwhAsrVJ7ujG9ULMSqwXYA&hl=en&sa=X&ei=U6WuUeK4M4fgiAK3_oGoAg&ved=0CEAQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=june%2012%201897%20elsener&f=false

1936 – The first radio station with 500,000 watt power began testing as W8XAR in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Test broadcasts took place from 1 AM to 6 AM. The station is now known as KDKA.
http://www.nrcdxas.org/articles/1stfacts.txt

1997 – 3Com Corp. and US. Robotics Corp. merged. The two companies combined US Robotics modems with 3Com’s interface cards.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1997-06-12/business/9706120201_1_casey-cowell-robotics-chairman-maker-of-computer-modem

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

1959 – The first experimental hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell’s SRN-1 made its first trials at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/june/11/newsid_4333000/4333329.stm

1978 – Texas Instruments introduced the Speak & Spell, the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. It used linear predictive coding to make a mathematical model of the human vocal tract and predict a speech sample.
http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/June/11/

1983 – IRM took its Japan Capsule Computer subsidiary and formed Capcom Company, Limited “for the purpose of selling software.”
http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/06/12/capcom-marks-25th-anniversary

1997 – Philippe Kahn took the first cameraphone photograph of his newborn daughter and then wirelessly transmitted the photo to more than 2,000 people around the world. He had hacked together a digital camera and a phone. Kahn went on to form the company LightSurf.
http://www.petapixel.com/2011/09/27/the-first-camera-phone-photograph-was-taken-in-1997/

1998 – Compaq Computer paid $9.1 billion to acquire what remained of Digital Equipment Corporation, the company that had brought the world PDP and VAX.
http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=266844

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