In 1930 – An experimental electric engine was put in service by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad between Hoboken and Montclair, NJ. Thomas Edison served as engineer at the throttle.

In 1976 – Viking 2 landed on Mars and began taking high resolution pictures, measuring the atmosphere and surface, and looking for evidence of life.

In 1993 – Infogear filed an application for a US trademark on “I PHONE” for its “communications terminals. The company would later register “IPhone” as well. Cisco acquired Infogear in 2000 and later worked out a deal with Apple to share the name.

In 2013 – Nokia announced it would sell its devices and services unit, the division in charge of making mobile phones, to Microsoft for $7.2 billion.

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In 1859 – A unique combination of solar events including a magnetic explosion severely affected the young telegraph network in North America and Europe. Wires shorted out, fires started and some machines reportedly worked even when disconnected from batteries.

1997 – IBM announced that its RS/6000 SP model parallel supercomputer, was now 58 percent faster than Deep Blue, the computer that beat Kasparov at chess.

In 2001 – At ECTS in London, Blizzard announced an online RPG version of its popular Warcraft franchise, called “World of Warcraft”.

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In 1902 -Georges Méliès’ film Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) debuted in France. It is often considered the first real science fiction film.

In 1994 – The United States Library of Congress held the first of several meetings to plan the conversion of its materials to digital form and make them accessible by computer networks.

In 1996 – Apple released its Pippin game console in the US. The idea was to provide an inexpensive game-focused computer. Apple licensed third parties like Bandai to make Pippin consoles.

In 2008 – Google launched its Web browser called Google Chrome.

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In 1897 – Thomas Edison received a patent for the kinetographic camera, the forerunner of the motion picture film projector.

In 1994 – Stockholders approved the merger of Aldus Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. It united the two driving forces behind desktop publishing software. Aldus Pagemaker became Adobe Pagemaker.

In 1997 – The developer release of Apple’s new OS, code name Grail1Z4 / Titan1U was released. It was known formally as Rhapsody and would evolve into OS X.

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