1954 – Computer science hero Alan Turing died. His death was ruled a suicide from eating an apple containing cyanide. Turing formulated the famous Turing test and broke code at Bletchley park during World War II.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/

1975 – Sony introduced the Betamax video recorder for sale. It would lose the format war to VHS but find a niche in broadcast production.
http://www.vancouversun.com/sports/this+history+june+1975/6745667/story.html

1980 – The first US solar power plant was dedicated at the Natural Bridge National Monument, Utah.
http://books.google.com/books?id=jC1QAAAAYAAJ&q=natural+bridges+solar+june+7+1980&dq=natural+bridges+solar+june+7+1980&hl=en&sa=X&ei=9sGnUda-E8iaiALLk4DgBQ&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAA

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1933 – The world’s first drive-in movie theater opened in Camden, New Jersey. Richard Hollingshead Jr. had developed the system by using a 1928 Kodak projector mounted on the hood of his car and aimed at a screen pinned to some trees.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-drive-in-movie-theater-opens

1984 – Soviet programmer Alexei Pazhitnov completed the first playable version of Tetris, one of the best-selling video games of all-time, was released. It was popularized by Hank Rogers who bought the rights and distributed it.
http://www.wired.com/2009/06/tetris/

1995 – The Los Angeles Times reported that Father Leonard Boyle was working to put the Vatican’s library on the World Wide Web through a site funded by IBM.
http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/June/6/

2013 – The Guardian published another leak from Edward Snowden about the PRISM project used to gather data held by Google, Facebook, Apple and other US tech companies. The tech companies denied “back door access” to their systems.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

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1833 – Ada Gordon, daughter of Lord Byron (and future Countess Lovelace) met Charles Babbage for the first time. He designed an early computer, and she published a description of his work and wrote the first computer program. http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/June/5/

1977 – The Apple II went on sale. It had a bus speed of 1 MHz and 64 KB of memory. http://www.itwire.com/science-news/energy/12646-apple-ii-thirty-years-ago-the-first-pc-went-on-sale

2002 – Mozilla.org announced the release of Mozilla 1.0, an open-source browser built on the Gecko engine that also powered Netscape. http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article2278.html

2013 – The Guardian published its first exclusive based on Edward Snowden’s leaks, revealing a secret court order forced Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of customers to the US government.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

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1903 – In one of the earliest examples of white hat hacking, Nevil Maskelyne interrupted a demonstration of the Marconi radio communications system at the Royal Institution, London. Before Marconi’s message from Poldhu, Cornwall could arrive, Maskelyne hijacked the signal sending the word “rast” repeatedly and then the phrases, “There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily.” http://books.google.com/books?id=UjXGQSPXvIcC&pg=PA108&lpg=PA108&dq=Marconi+radio+demonstration+at+the+Royal+Institution,+London+1903&source=bl&ots=5I-39pBVKI&sig=Y5yjsdCYkmsFVrm8naAcEegEW1E&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wrelT-6YLsrWiAL7puHSAg&ved=0CGgQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=Marconi%20radio%20demonstration%20at%20the%20Royal%20Institution%2C%20London%201903&f=false

1977 – JVC introduced the open standard for the VHS videocassette in North America at a press conference before the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. http://www.amoeba.com/blog/2013/09/eric-s-blog/37-years-celebrating-or-at-least-thinking-about-vhs-.html

2010 – Falcon 9 Flight 1 launched the maiden flight of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, setting a new benchmark for non-governmental space flight. The rocket put a dummy payload into orbit as a test.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-19514_3-20006863-239.html

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