1926 – Robert Goddard conducted his first successful launch of a liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts.

1999 – Sony released Everquest the Massively multiplayer 3D world where you could play as a wizard, rogue or knight. It followed two years after Ultima Online and would be followed several years later by World of Warcraft.

1999 – Mac OS X Server 1.0, the highly-anticipated precursor of OS X desktop version (code name Hera) was released.

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

1959 – The first atomic reactor built in the US for medical research, achieved criticality at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY.

1985 – Symbolics, a Massachusetts computer company, registered the Internet’s first dot-com domain name, symbolics.com. The domain is now owned by an investment company who uses it as a marketing device. The remains of the original Symbolics company survived in altered form at symbolics-dks.com.

2004 – Nicolas Jacobsen posted to a forum that he had hacked into T-Mobile’s network and stolen information from major celebrities like Paris Hilton. Jacobsen was later charged with two counts of violating the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

2016 – DeepMind’s AlphaGo AI program defeated 18-time Go champion Lee Se-dol in the 5th match of a five-match series for a series win of four matches to one. Lee won only the fourth game. The Korea Baduk Association gave an honorary ninth-dan ranking to AlphaGo.

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

1839 – Sir John Herschel presented his ‘Note on the Art of Photography, or the application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the purposes of Pictorial Representation’ to the Royal Society, likely the first use of the word ‘photography’.

1879 – Albert Einstein was born in Ulm in Württemberg, Germany. He would grow up to work in the Swiss patent office. And reinvent physics.

1994 – Linus Torvalds posted to comp.os.linux.announce that Linux kernel release 1.0. had arrived.

2006 – Amazon announced its S3 storage service, designed to provide Web developers with cheap fast storage for their online services. Amazon charged $0.15 per gigabyte of storage per month and $0.20 per gigabyte of data transferred.

2013 – Samsung announced the Samsung Galaxy S IV phone would come out in April. Their broadway-influenced presentation received much criticism.

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