In 1961 – Trans World Airlines began offering regular in-flight movies on scheduled flights. The first film shown, only in the first class cabin, mind you, was “By Love Possessed,” starring Lana Turner and Efrem Zimbalist Jr.

In 1983 – Michael W. Vannier and his co-workers J. Marsh and J. Warren published the first three-dimensional reconstruction of single computed tomography (CT) slices of the human head.

In 2004 – Apple announced the fourth-generation iPod with 12-hour battery life and the ability to shuffle songs. HP announced they would sell an HP branded version of this model of the iPod.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1968 – Robert Noyce, Andy Grove and Gordon Moore incorporated Moore and Noyce electronics, swiftly renamed at Noyce’s daughter’s suggestion to Integrated Electronics Corporation, or Intel for short.

In 1992 – Silvano de Gennaro, an IT developer at CERN took a picture of the singing group ‘Les Horribles Cernettes’ who sang mostly about physics. Tim Berners-Lee would later use that picture as a test, making it the first photo uploaded to the World Wide Web.

In 2001 – Apple announced Mac OS X 10.1 Puma, the first update to OS X.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1899 – Nippon Electric Company Ltd. (NEC) was founded by Iwadare Kunihiko, an expert in telegraphic systems who worked under Thomas Edison. Western Electric provided funding, making it the first Japanese joint-venture with a foreign company.

In 1995 – The US Air Force announced the Global Positioning System had met requirements for Full Operational Capability. The navigation system was strictly the province of the US Department of Defense operated by the 2nd Space Operation Squadron of the 50th Space Wing at Falcon Air Force Base in Colorado.

In 1997 – DNS was widely disrupted making email routing and web page delivery spotty throughout the day. An Ingres database failure resulted in corrupt .COM and .NET zone files. A system administrator mistakenly released the zone file without regenerating the file and verifying its integrity.

In 2002 – Apple announced PC versions of the iPod with MusicMatch software instead of iTunes. The company also announced a 20 GB version of the music player and touch-sensitive scroll wheel and dropped the prices.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1945 – The United States detonated a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico. The Trinity test ushered in the atomic age.

In 1951 – VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin was born in Philadelphia.

In 1969 – Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins, blasted off from Cape Kennedy on Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.

In 1995 – Amazon.com opened for business selling books online. Shipments were packed into boxes from a desk made out of a spare door in a two-car garage in Bellevue, Washington.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.