Today in Tech History – July 4, 2017

Today in Tech History logo1951 – Bell Labs held a press conference announcing the invention of the junction transistor. Dr. William Shockley was featured at the conference.
http://www.computerhistory.org/semiconductor/timeline/1951-First.html

1956 – The five-year-old MIT computer Whirlwind added the ability to input data directly with a keyboard. Programmers began to enjoy independence from punch cards.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/July/4/

1996 – Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith launched a free web email service called HoTMaiL, a play on HTML. Microsoft bought it a year later, and called it Hotmail for years, but it’s now Outlook.com.

http://news.microsoft.com/1999/02/08/msn-hotmail-from-zero-to-30-million-members-in-30-months/

2016 – The Juno space probe survived the high radiation of Jupiter to make a successful orbital insertion and begin a 20-month mission to examine the interior of Jupiter.

http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasas-juno-spacecraft-in-orbit-around-mighty-jupiter

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