1948 – IBM dedicated its “SSEC” in New York City. The Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator handled both data and instructions using electronic circuits made with 13,500 vacuum tubes and 21,000 relays.
1967 – The first US astronauts died in the line of duty. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed on the launch pad when a flash fire engulfed their command module during testing for the first Apollo-Saturn mission.
2006 – Western Union discontinued its Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. The company still handles money transfers.
2010 – Apple announced the iPad, a tablet computer running the same operating system as the iPhone.
2016 – Google’s DeepMind researchers published a paper in Nature announcing that their machine intelligence AlphaGo had defeated Fan Hui, a three-time European Go champion. The computer won five games of Go without a defeat.
Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.
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.
