1878 – The first commercial telephone exchange in the US was installed at New Haven, Connecticut, and served 21 subscribers connected by a single strand of iron wire. Only two conversations could be handled simultaneously and six connections had to be made for each call.
1960 – The Communications Moon Relay System was inaugurated publicly when a facsimile picture of the USS Hancock was transmitted wirelessly by radio wave to Washington DC, by being bounced off the moon.
1986 – The Space Shuttle Challenger experienced an O-ring failure in the right solid rocket booster during flight. 73 seconds after liftoff a catastrophic explosion claimed crew and vehicle.
2001 – The Baltimore Ravens and the New York Giants faced off in Tampa Bay, Florida, for Super Bowl XXXV, and facial-recognition surveillance cameras pointed at tens of thousands of fans entering the game. It found 12 false positives.
Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.
Microsoft has good earnings, Intel and Alphabet have mixed results and Seagate brings a 12 TB drive.
Hugo Barra leaves Xiaomi for Facebook, HTC’s designer joins Google’s DayDream, and Apple may join the AI industry group.
Cisco buys AppDynamics, D-Wave releases a new quantumish computer, and Wine 2.0 is released.