Search Results for "october 3"

1904 – The first underground New York City subway line opened. The line ran from City Hall in lower Manhattan through Grand Central, Times Square and ended north in Harlem. Rides cost five cents.
http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/The_New_York_Subway_Souvenir_(1904)
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/oct27.html

1994 – HotWired launched bringing with it the first large quantity sales of banner ads. AT&T, Zima, MCI, Volvo, Club Med and 1-800-COLLECT all plunked down for the privilege.

http://adage.com/article/digitalnext/happy-birthday-digital-advertising/139964/

2005 – The European Space Agency launched its first satellite, a micro-satellite called the SSETI Express Satellite, designed and built by European students.
http://www.esa.int/esaMI/sseti_express/index.html

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1936 – The first electric generator went into full operation at Hoover Dam, about a month after President Roosevelt had dedicated the dam and tried to encourage people to call it the Boulder Dam.

https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4399466/First-Hoover-Dam-electric-generator-goes-into-full-operation–October-26–1936

1992 – Software deployment issues in CAD, the new ambulance dispatch system in London, caused 30-45 deaths. Poor training, a memory leak and no load testing contributed to the failure.

http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/a.finkelstein/las/lascase0.9.pdf

2004 – Apple debuted the iPod photo, capable of displaying digital photographs and album art on a built-in color screen.
http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/10/26Apple-Introduces-iPod-Photo.html

2012 – Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system went on sale, with its tile-based start screen.

http://news.microsoft.com/2012/10/25/windows-8-arrives/

2016 – Microsoft announced the Surface Studio, an all-in-one desktop PC with a touchscreen that could fold down almost flat on a desk. It worked with the new Surface Dial input device and sold for $2,999.

http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/10/26/13380462/microsoft-surface-studio-pc-computer-announced-features-price-release-date

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1955 – Tappan introduced the first microwave oven for home use. It sold for $1,295. Raytheon developed the Radarrange after engineer Percy LeBaron Spencer was working on an active radar set and accidentally melted a candy bar in his pocket.

http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4399387/1st-domestic-microwave-is-sold–October-25–1955

1977 – VAX/VMS was born. At a shareholder meeting, DEC, the Digital Equipment Corporation, released VMS v1.0 the first version of what we later would call OpenVMS, along with the VAX 11/780 architecture which increased the PDP-11 address space.

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/openvms/30th/t_past_text.html

2001 – Microsoft Windows XP hit retail shelves for the first time.
http://edition.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/10/25/xp.london.launch/

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1861 – The first Transcontinental Telegraph line across the United States was completed, ending the need for the Pony Express which had only been around for a year and a half. Pony unemployment skyrocketed.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/western-union-completes-the-first-transcontinental-telegraph-line

1998 – NASA launched Deep Space 1, it’s mission to seek out an asteroid, specifically, asteroid 9969 Braille. When that mission ended up being only partially successful, it went after Comet Borrelly where it got some choice information.

http://science.nasa.gov/missions/deep-space-1/

2003 – The Concorde made its last commercial flight, a victim of air traffic reductions and rising maintenance costs. 100 passengers, including actress Joan Collins and model Christie Brinkley, made the flight from New York to London in the aircraft’s usual three and a half hours. Flights have been slower ever since.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/10/24/concorde.final/

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

1938 – Chester Carlson, tired of the exhaustive process of hand-copying or photographing patent paperwork, decided to make an easier way. On this date he produced the first electrophotographic image. Xerox would later make it automatic, popular, and make Carlson rich.
http://www.rit.edu/alumni/ihf/inductee.php?inductee=2

1968 – The US bounced back from tragedy with the first manned mission to space, Apollo 7, safely splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean after orbiting the Earth 163 times.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/apollo/missions/apollo7.html

1975 – The Soviet unmanned space mission Venera 9 landed on Venus. Pics or it didn’t happen you say? Well Venera 9 was the first spacecraft to return an image from the surface of another planet.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/imgcat/html/object_page/v09_lander.html

1995 – Joost Shur posted QUAKETALK 95 to keep people up to date on the development of the forthcoming game Quake.

http://rome.ro/news/2016/6/22/happy-20th-birthday-quake

2009 – Microsoft released Windows 7. People liked it.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2009/10/windows-7-is-here/

2013 – Apple announced the new iPad Air and iPad Mini with retina display. They also released OS X Mavericks for free.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/10/apple-oct-event-announcements/

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

1879 – Thomas Edison finished up 14 months of testing with an incandescent electric light bulb that lasted 13½ hours. It improved on 50-year-old technology to make light bulbs safe and economical by using lower electricity, a carbon filament and an improved vacuum.

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/21/oct-21-1879-thomas-edison-lights-the-lamp/

1949 – An Wang filed a patent for a magnetic ferrite core memory, that he called pulse transfer controlling devices. Two years later he formed Wang computers.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=JSNjAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1983 – The seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures ruled the meter would be defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second. This actually simplified it from the previous definition of 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum.

http://arxiv.org/pdf/0810.3512.pdf

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

1975 – Atari filed for a patent on the sit-down “cockpit” arcade cabinet, literally putting you inside the game. The game Hi-Way with the slogan “Hi Way — All It Needs Is Wheels”, was the first Atari game to use the cabinet. It was a first-person driver in which you had to dodge cars and– well– drive.
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect2=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&d=PALL&RefSrch=yes&Query=PN%2FD243626

1984 – The Monterey Bay Aquarium opened in Monterey, California. It not only provided a world-class place to learn about sea life, but inspired millions of screensavers and wallpaper images.

http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/about/our-history

2004 – Mark Shuttleworth sent out an email to Ubuntu developers announcing the first official release of the Linux-based operating system, Warty Warthog. Every six months since, a new version of Ubuntu comes out with a new alliterative animal-inspired name.

http://lwn.net/Articles/107267/

2016 – Nintendo released a video showing off the Nintendo Switch game console for the first time. It demonstrated the hybrid tablet nature of the console and showed off the Joy-Con controllers.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/nintendos-next-console-switch-is-a-consoletablet-hybrid/

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