1945 – The First Conference on Digital Computer Technique Was Held at MIT

The conference was sponsored by the National Research Council, Subcommittee Z on Calculating Machine and Computation. Attended by the Whirlwind team, it influenced the direction of this computer.

2000 – The Soyuz TM-31 launched, carrying Expedition 1 the first resident crew to the International Space Station, including Yuri Gidzenko, Sergei Krikalev and William Shepherd. The tm-31 was used as the crew’s lifeboat while on the station.

2000 – Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) and Napster agreed to develop a service for swapping and sharing music. The service never materialized.

2007 – Nintendo of Japan finally ended support for the repair of FamiCom game consoles, the Japanese name for NES, citing a shortage of parts. End of an 8-bit era.

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1884 – US inventor George Eastman received a patent on his new paper-strip photographic film. It would reign for more than 100 years until digitalstole its thunder.

1957 – British Computer Society is Founded

October 14 is the anniversary of the British Computer Society (BCS), founded in 1957. BCS is one of the several international societies that have an afiliate membership relationship with the IEEE Computer Society. Since 1984 BCS has operated under a Royal Charter which requires it to: “…promote the study and practice of Computing and to advance knowledge therein for the benefit of the public.”

1977 – Atari Launches Home Video Gaming

Atari releases their video Computer System (known as the VCS and later as the Atari 2600). It took two years for the VCS to gain traction, but by 1979 it was the best selling gift of the christmas season. Once it was established, the Atari VCS took the market by storm, popularized home video gaming, and helped cement the video game movement into mainstream culture.

1985 – The first official reference guide for the C++ programming language was published. It was written by the language’s creator, Bjarne Stroustrup.

1986 – Open Source Zmodem Released

Telenet funded a project to develop an improved public domain application to application file transfer protocol. This protocol would alleviate the throughput problems their network customers were experiencing with XMODEM and Kermit file transfers. ZMODEM could provide high performance and reliability over packet switched networks while preserving XMODEM’s simplicity. It made Xmodem and Ymodem obsolete.

1996 – Matthias Ettrich posted about his new project Kool Desktop Environment, or KDE, attempting to create a GUI for the enduser of Linux.

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1884 – Geographers and astronomers adopted Greenwich as the Prime Meridian, making it the International standard for zero degrees longitude. Today the Greenwich observatory shoots a laser northwards at night to indicate the meridian. It is not a dangerous laser.

1915 – Computer Pioneer Burks Born

A principal designer of the ENIAC, Arthur Burks, was born. Burks – who was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and educated at DePauw University and the University of Michigan – did extensive work on the ENIAC, the machine designed at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School and completed in 1946. After working with J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly on the ENIAC, Burks moved on to Princeton University, where he helped John von Neumann develop his computer at the Institute for Advanced Studies.

1983 – Cellular Goes Live in US

Ameritech Mobile Communications executive Bob Barnett makes a phone call from a car parked near Soldier Field in Chicago, officially launching the first cellular network in the United States.

1985 – The first observation of a proton-antiproton collision was made by the Collider Detector at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

1999 – Priceline Lawsuit on Microsoft, Expedia

Priceline field a lawsuit against Microsoft and its Expedia travel service. The suit outlined how they violated U.S. patent number 5,794,207, “Method and Apparatus for a Cryptographically Assisted Network System Designed to Facilitate Buyer-Driven Conditional Purchase Offers.” The two sites come to terms in 2001,in where Microsoft pays a fine.

2000 – Tristan Louis suggested sound and video tags be added to the 0.92 spec for RSS feeds. This led to enclosures which allowed media files to be delivered through RSS and paved the way for podcasting.

2016 – The PlayStation VR headset began shipping.

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1979 – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first published unleashing in book form, the world of Vogon Poetry essential towel behaviour, and the BabelFish.

1988 – Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer

Hailed by Steve Jobs as a computer “five years ahead of its time”, NeXT Inc. introduces their NeXT Computer. Due to its cube-shaped case, the computer was often referred to as “The Cube” or “the NeXT Cube”, which led to the subsequent model offically being named “NeXTcube”. The new computer introduced several innovations to personal computers, such as including an optical storage disk drive, a built-in digital signal processor for voice recognition, and an object-oriented development environment that was truly years ahead of its time.

While not a commercial success, the NeXT Computer and the technology developed for it have long and storied history. Tim Berners-Lee developed the first world wide web server and web browser on a NeXT Computer, crediting the NeXT developed tools for allowing him to rapidly develop the now ubiquitous Internet system. After Apple purchased NeXT in 1997, they used the operating system of the NeXT computer to form the base of Mac OS X. eventually Apple’s iOS, which runs the iPhone and iPad, was itself based upon Mac OS X and hence draws its lineage to NeXT. Finally, the object-oriented development environment that Berners-Lee used to create the World Wide Web is the forerunner of the development environment that today’s programmers use to develop iPhone and iPad Apps. If it wasn’t for the NeXT Computer back in 1988, you may not have your Angry Birds today.

1996 – Helmut Hoelzer, a German electrical engineer and remote-controlled guidance specialist who known for designing an electronic simlator for the V-2 rocket control system and built an analog computer to calculate and simulate V-2 rocket trajectories passed away at the age of 84.

2001 – An era ended as the Polarioid Corporation file for federal bankruptcy protection, killed off by 1-hour developing and the rise of digital cameras. Bank One bought most of the company and re-launched a company under the same name.

2003 – Adam Curry posted and AppleScript called RSS2iPod that took MP3s downloaded by RSS to a folder and automatically transferred them to a connected iPod. Christopher Lydon’s Radio UserLand was used as the example.

2004 – Microsoft Windows XP Media center edition 2005 is released.

2005 – After previously asuring us nobody wanted to watch videos on an iPod, Steve Jobs reversed course and Apple started making videos available on iTunes. ABC/Disney was the only TV network available at the time but you could get episodes of Lost and Desperate Hoursewives the day after they aired.

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1887 – Comptometer Invertor Receives Patent

Dorr E. Felt was granted a patent for the Comptometer. He experimented with an adding device that he built in a “Macaroni box.” The comptometer, an adder, displayed a single register of results. Subtraction was carried out by nines-complement arithmetic and multiplication by repeated addition. The comptometer was a commercial success for businesses, and “Comptometer schools” were established early in the 20^th century to teach the efficient operation of this machine.

1950 – CBS’s mechanical color system was the first to be licensed for broadcast by the FCC. Color TV would not become widespread until the late 1960s.

1957 – The Jodrell Bank observatory, with the world’s largest radio telescope, designed by Sir Bernard Lovell, began operation. It’s first job was to track the just-launched Sputnik satellite.

1958 – NASA’s First Launch

NASA launches Pioneer 1, the first spacecraft launched by the newly formed space agency. Originally intended to fly by the Moon, a launch malfunction due to a programming error caused Pioneer 1 to only attain a ballistic trajectory, which caused it to fall back to the Earth after 43 hours of flight. However, some useful scientific data was returned by the spacecraft.

1979 – Visicalc – First Killer PC App Released

Visicalc is released by Dan Bricklin. The spreadsheet application is called the first killer app for personal computers. It turned the PC from a hobby to a business tool. Only downfall for Bricklin was he did not patent the system, therefore, clones like SuperCalc, Microsoft’s MultiPlan and Lotus 1-2-3, would show up.

2016 – Samsung announces it is permanently discontinuing the production of the Galaxy Note 7 after several of the early versions and recalled version were catching on fire. The company says the decision could cost the company as much as $3 billion.

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1964 – The opening ceremonies of the summer Olympics in Tokyo became the first Olympic broadcast relayed live by geostationary communication satellite. Too bad all the US networks gave up on live broadcasts of the Olympics.

1967 – The Outer Space Treaty came into force, banning nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction from being placed in Earth orbit or on any other celestial body. It also prevented any state from claming sovereignty over any celestial resource like the Moon.

1980 – Pac-Man Fever Begins

Midway releases the video game Pac-Man to arcades in North America. While the Japanese release under the name “Puck-Man” occurred in May of that year, the game’s popularity didn’t take off until being released in the United States. Pac-Man will become the first true mega-hit video game in history, sparking “Pac-Man Fever” and catapulting the video game industry into mainstream culture.

1994 – Hakon Wium Lie published “Cascading HTML style sheets – a proposal.” He proposed addressing the problem of existing style sheets being static, platform-specific and not allowing enough influence by the HTML author.

1995 – A Day in the Life of Cyberspace Published

The Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology chronicled the World Wide Web in its A Day in the Life of Cyberspace project. To celebrate its 10^th anniversary, the Media Lab invited submission for the days leading up to October 10, 1995, on a variety of issues related to technology and the Internet, including privacy, expression, age, wealth, faith, body, place, languages, and the environment. On October 10, a team at MIT collected, edited, and published the contributions to “create a mosaic of life at the dawn of the digital revolution that is transforming our planet.”

2002 – Keith Uncapher an American computer engineer and manager worked on several pioneer computer projects at RAND. As director of the computer science division at RAND, uncapher pioneered work on the technology of packet switching and helped develop the Internet. He also founded the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California, School of Engineering. Uncapher was passed away on this day at the age of 80.

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1876 – First Phone Call Over Outdoor Wires

Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson demonstrate the first two-way phone call over outdoor wires. Bell and Watson made their call between the cities of Boston and Cambridge.

1947 – BINAC Computer to Be Built

A contract was signed to develop the BINAC. The “Binary Automatic Computer” was the only computer ever built by the Eckert-Mauchly Commputer co., founded by ENIAC pioneers J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. The company became a division of Remington Rand Corp. before completing its next project, the UNIVAC. The first electronic digital computer with a stored-program capability to be completed in the United States, the BINAC had a capacity of 512 words. At a price of $278,000, the BINAC improved on the ENIAC primarily by improving speed and power with only 700 vacuum tubes instead of 18,000.

2001 – AMD announces a new branding scheme. Instead of identifying processors by their clock speed the AMD XP will bear monikers of 1800+,1700+,1600+, and 1500+, with each lower model  number representing a lower clock speed.

2006 – Google announces plans to purchase YouTube for 1.65 Billion.

2006 – Raymond J. Noorda, a co-founder of Novell Inc., a software company that helped pioneer computer networking, died at 82 at home in Orem, Utah.

2009 – The first lunar impact of the Centaur and LCROSS spacecrafts kicked up some dust as part of NASA’s Lunar precursor Robotic program. The impact led to greater certainty that is water on the moon.

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1860 – Telegraph lines opened between Los Angeles and San Francisco. This allowed gold miners to tell backers father south that they still hadn’t found any gold.

1921 – KDKA radio in Pittsburgh conducted the first live broadcast of a football game from Forbes Field. The University of Pittsburgh beat West Virginia University.

1992 – Finish Him!

The video game Mortal Kombat is released into arcades. Now one of the most popular fighting game series in history, the original Mortal Kombat became well-known for its graphic display of blood and deadly finishing moves known as “fatalities”. As often happens in situation like these, the controversy surrounding the game only served to fuel its popularity.

1996 – Special US Stamp Commemorates ENIAC

The US Postal Service issued a special “Computer Technology” stamp to mark the 50^th anniversary of the ENIAC. In a ceremony at the Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground, speakers paid tribute to computer pioneers with circuit board of a brain partially covered by small blocks that contain parts of circuit boards and binary language. The stamp was designed entirely on a computer. A Postal Service news release from October 8 introduced the stamp with a discussion of the ENIAC’s origins: “Long before PCs became standard office equipment and surfing on the information superhighway became a national obsession, calculations were done the ‘old-fashioned way’ by hand. And, as is often the case, it took a war to bring the world into the computer age specifically, the need for the United States Army to rapidly compute ballistic firing table.”

2003 – TO allow IT departments to prepare for critical updates, Microsoft conducted the first regularly scheduled Windows patch release. It became lovingly known as “Patch Tuesday”.

2011 – Android version 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) is released.

2014 – The proposal for Time Warmer Cable and Comcast merger is approved.

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1893 – A US copyright was issued to William K.L. Dickson for a “Publication” consisting of “Edison Kinetoscopic Record.” It was the first motion picture copyright in North America. No torrents were uploaded until much later.

1914 – Edwin H. Armstrong received a US patent for a “Wireless Receiving System” which described his famous regenerative, or feedback, circuit. Armstrong would go on to pioneer FM radio.

1927 – Al Jolson appeared on a movie screen in New York City and said for all to hear “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet.” It was the first talkie.

1942 – Photocopying Patented

Chester Carison is issued a patent on a process called electrophotography, now commonly known as photocopying. It was not until 1946 that a company had any interest in pursuing photocopying commercially. The Haloid Company finally licensed Carlson’s patent and created the word xerography to differentiate the process from traditional photography. Eventually, photocopying became such a large part of the  company’s revenue that Haloid changed their name to Xerox.

1983 – Lotus Development Goes Public

Lotus Development Corp. went public after recording revenues of $12.8 million for the previous 12 months. The company, founded by Mitch Kapor and Jonathan Sachs in 1982, found its success with Kapor’s spreadsheet program, Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus 1-2-3 bypassed the operating system of the IBM PC, making it much faster than its competitors. In addition, its combination of spreadsheet capabilities with graphics and data retrieval made the program popular. IBM acquired Lotus in 1995.

2014 – HP announced it planned to split into two companies. Hewlett-Packard Enterprise would become an IT company with all of HP’s enterprise level offerings. HP Inc. would take the existing logo and the personal systems and printing division.

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