1885 – AT&T Incorporated

The American Telephone and Telegraph Company is incorporated in New York State as the subsidiary of American Bell Telephone. Eventually the companies would “merge” and thus AT&T was born.

1947 – The first closed-circuit broadcast of a surgical operation showed procedures to observers in classrooms at Johns Hopkins University.

1954 – The Westinghouse H840CK15 went on sale in the New York area. It is generally agreed to be the first production television receiver using NTSC color offered to the public. Only 30 sets were sold at $1,295 a pop.

1956 – MIT’s Forrester Receives Patent on “Core” Memory

Jay Forrester at MIT is awarded a patent for his coincident current magnetic core memory. Forrester’s invention, given Patent No. 2,736,880 for a “multicoordinate digital information storage device,” became the standard memory device for digital computers until supplanted by solid state (semiconductor) RAM in the mid-1970s.

1959 – Discoverer 1 was launched on a Thor-Agena A rocket and became the first man-made object ever put into a polar orbit.

1966 – Right to Privacy

With all these ways to listen in on a conversation, the FCC has to make a ruling to protect the rights of US citizens. They create the Right to Privacy act which bands evesdropping or direct and indirect use of radio – controlled devices.

2002 – Disney CEO Claims Apple Encourages Theft

Disney CEO Michael Eisner testifies at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in Washington, D.C., on the protection of digital content from piracy. Eisner lobbies for sterner enforcement of copyright laws, claiming that Apple Computer advertisements for the iPod encourage copyright violation. “Rip. Mix. Burn. … they buy this computer.”

A little over 3 years later, Eisner was later replaced as CEO by Robert Iger, who quickly arranged the buyout of Pixar Animation Studios, of which Steve Jobs was CEO. This move made Steve Jobs Disney’s largest shareholder and a member of Disney’s board. I guess it’s a small world after all!

2017 – A typo in a command to take some servers offline for maintenance caused an outage in Amazon’s S3 service that took millions of websites offline.

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1891 – David Sarnoff was born near Minsk. He would go on to befriend Marconi and rise to the Presidency of RCA and be integral in founding NBC.

1932 – English physicist James Chadwick published a letter on the existence of the neutron, some say giving birth to modern nuclear physics.

1976 – National Security Agency’s Harvest Computer Retires

The IBM 7950, a supercomputer also known as the Harvest System, ceased operating after 14 years serving the National Security Agency. The Harvest was a one-of-a-kind adjunct to the Stretch computer and was delivered in 1962. It was designed for cryptanalysis by James H. Pomerene. Its electronics, built from the same kind of discrete transistors used for Stretch, were about twice as big (physically) as the Stretch Harvest added a small number of instructions to the Stretch, was attached to it and could not operate independently.

1986 – The United States Senate voted to allow its debates to be televised on a trial basis. The trial was successful.

1998 – Apple Discontinues Newton

After Steve Jobs takes the role of Acting CEO (After the firing of Gil Amelio) he decided to trim some of the product fat. In result, the Apple Newton – it’s attempt at a PDA – was officially discontinued after 5 years. But no all was lost off this, for the mobile applications got shifted into their other Mac OS technologies. Cyberdog and OpenDOC were two other Apple programs that were discontinued after Jobs took the helm again.

2001 – V.92 Introduced

US Robotics introduces the V.92 modem standard. Given that broadband Internet had begun to take significant hold and that supporting V.92 required ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure, V.92 never really made much of an impact in the marketplace.

2007 – CompUSA Restructures

CompUSA announces that it will close 126 retail stores by June and restructure its remaining 103 stores. Eventually those 103 stores also close. Once a major player in the computer retails sales market, CompUSA was eventually purchased by Systemax. Systemax now runs 35 stores bearing the CompUSA name.

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1896 – Hoping to test the sun’s ability to create X-ray, Henri Becquerel placed a wrapped photographic plate in a closed desk drawer, with phosphorescent uranium rocks laid on top. He left it in the drawer for several days until the sun came out. It was cloudy.

1909 – The first successful color motion picture process, Kinemacolor, was shown to the general public at the Palace Theatre in London.

1935 – Scottish physicist Robert Watson-Watt demonstrated Radio Detection and Ranging to Air Ministry officials at Daventry, England. This RADAR proved quite helpful a few years later when war broke out.

1966 – First Saturn 1B Rocket Launch

The first Saturn 1B rocket is launched from Cape Canaveral. The Saturn 1B was primarily used for testing the Apollo spacecraft while the larger Saturn V rocket that was necessary for travel to the Moon was being developed. Later, after completion of the Moon landing program, The Saturn 1B was used for manned Skylab flights and the Apollo Soyuz Test Project. In total, the Saturn 1B was launched 9 times with no failures.

1991 – Introduction of first Web Browser – WorldWideWeb

Sir Tim Berners-Lee showed everyone the first web browser and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editor. The Browsers’ name was called “WorldWideWeb”, but was later changed to “Nexus”. Burners-Lee ran it on the NeXTSTEP platform and worked with not only the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), but the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Nexus is not in production anymore.

2015 – The US FCC voted 3-2 to implement new Open Internet Rules and classify Internet Service Providers as telecommunications services under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.

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1837 – The US Patent Office approved Thomas Davenport’s application for a patent on an “Improvement in Propelling machinery by Magnetism and Electro-Magnetism.”We’d call it an electric motor.

1925 – First Check Photographing Device Patented

The first bank check photographing device patent is issued in the US to its inventor, George McCarthy, who called it the Checkograph. The machine photographed checks onto 16mm motion picture film using a conveyor belt. The Kodak company bought this invention in 1928 and marketed it under its Recordak division.

1928 – Charles Jenkins Laboratories of Washington, DC became the first holder of a television license from the Federal Radio Commission.

1930 – A US patent for a photographing apparatus was issued to George Lewis McCarthy, who called it a Checkograph. It was the first bank check photographing device.

1999 – Gigabyte, Female Hacker of Sharpei, C#

Microsoft’s newest programming language at the time – C# (pronounced “C-Sharp”) was hacked on this day. The perpetrator was a seventeen year old female hacker from Belgium, calling herself “Gigabyte”.

2002 – Gigabyte posts the source code to the virus on her website. Kim Vanvaeck would be arrested in 2004 for writing the malicious code. The reason why she did it?

2010 – Apple Sells 10 Billionth Song

Apple announces that its has sold its ten billionth song through its iTunes Store. The ten billionth song, “Guess Things Happen That Way” by Johnny Cash, was purchased by Louie Sulcer of Woodstock, Georgia, whom Apple awarded a US$10,000 iTunes Gift Card. It took Apple over five years to sell its first five billion songs but only a year and a half to sell its second five billion songs.

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1949 – A modified German V-2 ballistic missile launched from White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, reaching an altitude of 244 miles, and putting it well above the Karman line. It was the first US rocket to reach “outer space.”

1955 – Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs is born. Jobs was instrumental in developing the Macintosh, the computer that took Apple to unprecedented levels of success. After leaving the company he started with Steve Wozniak, Jobs returned to Apple to lead the company into a new era based on NeXT technologies and consumer electronics. Some of Jobs’ achievements in this new era include the iMac, the iPhone, the iTunes music store, the iPod, and the iPad. Under Jobs’ leadership Apple was at one time the world’s most valuable company.

1962 – First Phone and TV Satellite Relays

The first satellite telephone and television relays are established through the communications satellite Echo 1. The satellite was basically a big metallic balloon that simply bounced microwaves off its surface. Simple, but effective.

1986 – First Fly-By of Uranus

Voyager 2 performs the first fly-by of the planet Uranus. Voyager 2 still is transmitting data to this day, and a Twitter feed reports on its progress.

1997 – Walt Disney and Pixar enter into a 5 movie agreement in 10 months. They would share costs, profit and logo credits. The two would come into issue after Toy Story2, which ultimately were resolved in 2006 when Disney purchased Pixar.

2011 – The Space Shuttle Discovery lifted off from Cape Canaveral on its final mission.

2014 – Samsung announced the Galaxy S5 with a heart rate sensor and water and dust proofing.

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1455 – Holy Type

While maybe not exactly accurate, February 23^rd, 1455 is generally accepted as the date the Gutenberg Bible was first published. This was the first book on record to be printed on movable type. Until that point, books were copied by hand, which was obviously a slow, laborious process.

On a side note, I challenge anyone to come up with a historical date in technology earlier than this one! Good luck!

1893 – Germany’s Imperial Patent Office granted Rudolph Diesel Patent No. 67207 for “a new efficient thermal engine”. We just call it, the Diesel engine.

1896 – Tootsie Roll Introduced

A little Geeky knowledge for ya – The Tootsie roll is introduced. Austrian immigrant Leo Hishfield took the idea to a New York store and sold the idea. The name comes from her 5 year old daughter, whom everyone called “Tootsie”. It became the first “Penny Candy” and was even a War time ration since it could withstand severe weather conditions.

1905 – Prime Number Theorist Derrick Lehmer Born

Derrick Lehmer, one of the world’s best known prime number theorists, is born in Berkeley, California. Before World War II, Lehmer invented a number of electromechanical sieves for finding prime numbers and made many important contributions in prime number theory throughout his life. Prime numbers are of interest in themselves as mathematical curiosities but are also of great importance to cryptography. The Computer History Museum has three Lehmer Sieves in its permanent collection. Lehmer died in 1991.

1927 – US President Calvin Coolidge signed Public Law no. 632 establishing the Federal Radio Commission which was later replaced by the Federal Communications Commission.

1927 – German physicist Werner Heisenberg wrote a letter to Wolfgang Pauli, describing the uncertainty principle for the first time. He submitted a paper on the principle for publication the following March.

2005 – First Mobile Phone Virus

The discovery of the first mobile phone virus, Cabir, is accounced. Specially, Cabir is a worm which infects phones running the Symbian OS. Whenever an infected phone is activated, the message “Caribe” is displayed. Infected phones also attempts to spread the virus through Bluetooth signals.

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1857 – Heinrich Rodolf Hertz was born in Hamburg, Germany. Hertz made key discoveries in optics but also transmitted and received electromagnetic waves. His name has become used for the common unit of frequency, Hz.

1924 – First Presidential Radio Address

The first presidential radio address is delivered by Calvin Coolidge. Broadcast from the White House, the talk is carried on five stations with an estimated five million listeners.

1928 – BASIC Co-Inventor Thomas Kurtz Born

BASIC co-inventor Thomas Kurtz is born. With John Kemeny, Kurtz developed he easy-to-learn programming language for his students at Dartmouth College   in the early 1960s. He said:”if Fortran is the lingua franca … BASIC is the lingua playpen.”

1995 – Chicago stockbroker Steve Fossett completed the first hot air balloon flight over the Pacific Ocean. At 9600 km it was also the longest balloon flight.

1995 – US President Clinton signed an Executive Order directing the declassification of intelligence imagery acquired by the CORONA, ARGON and LANYARD US photo-reconnaissance satellites. More than 860,000 images of the Earth’s surface, collected between 1960 and 1972 were made public.

1997 – Dolly Unveiled

In Roslin, Scotland, scientists announce that they have successfully cloned an adult sheep they named Dolly. The cell used in the cloning came from an adult sheep’s mammary gland, hence the name Dolly. As in Parton. No joke. Or I guess it was.

1999 – AMD K6-III Sharptooth Processor

AMD releases the AMD K6-III Processor in speeds of 400 and 450 MHz. it would feature a 64 KB Level 1 cache and a 256KB Level 2 cache. The 3DNow! Graphics instructions would be supported, along with Direct X 6.0. There were 21.3 million transistors on the 0.25 micron process wafer.

1999 – First Internet Only Bank

The first Internet Bank of Indiana opens, becoming the first full-service bank accessible only through the Internet. Who knew it would take a couple of hoosiers to start the first Internet bank?

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1858 – First Burglar Alarm Installed

The first electrical burglar alarm is installed by inventor Edwin T. Holmes in Boston, Massachusetts.

1878 – First Telephone Book Published

The first telephone book is issued in New Haven, Connecticut by the New Haven Telephone Company. It lists twenty-one names. You probably have at least twice as many names in your cell phone today!

1893 – Edison Patents Light Switch, Sort Of

Thomas Edison receives three US patents on this day, two of which are in essence the first light switches: “Cut Out for Incandescent Electric Lamps” (US Patent 491,992) and “Stop Device.” (US Patent 491,993).

1937 – Waldo Waterman flew the first test flight of the Arrowbile, and found the aircraft easy to fly and virtually spin and stall proof. It is considered the first successful flying cat to actually fly.

1947 – Edwin H. Land demonstrated his one-step instant camera and film at a meeting of the Optical Society of America. The first Polaroid camera was on sale within two years.

1986 – The Legend of Zelda, the first in the ongoing series, was released in Japan for Nintendo’s Famicom console.

1996 – Cox Enterprises Buys into Digital Domain

Cox Enterprises announces it was buying a one-third interest in Digital Domain, a computer-generated special effects company, in order to heighten the use of special effect in media. The deal reflects “another step in the rapid convergence of various computer, software, entertainment and media companies,” The New York Times wrote.

2001 – iMac Special Edition

At Macworld Expo in Tokyo, Japan, Apple Computer introduced the iMac Special Edition. It would be available in Flower Power, Dalmatian Blue, or Graphite designs. This special edition would only be available for 1 year as chip technology was climbing fast.

“iMac has evolved into an entertainment center, where you can create desktop movies, manage your digital music library and custom music CDs,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iMovies and iTunes are so easy to learn and use, even your parents can use them without getting confused.”

The iMac Special Edition featured a 500 or 600 MHz PowerPC G3 processor, 64 or 128 MB RAM, 256 KB Lever 2 cache, a CD-RW drive, and a 15-inch monitor. Price: US$1199-1499.

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1900 – John F. Pickering of Haiti received a US patent for his design of an airship.

1947 – Alan Turing Suggests Testing Artificial Intelligence with the Game of Chess

Computer pioneer Alan Turing suggests testing artificial intelligence with the game of chess in a lecture to the London Mathematical Society. Computers, he argued, must like humans be given training before their IQ is tested. A human mathematician has always undergone an extensive training. This training may be regarded as not unlike putting instruction tables into a machine, he said. One must therefore not expect a machine to do a very great deal of building up of instruction tables on its own.

1962 – Following the USSR, the United States put its first man into orbit. John Glenn piloted the Mercury-Atlas 6 Friendship 7 spacecraft to a successful conclusion of the mission.

1986 – Launch of Mir Space Station

The first piece of the Mir Space Station is launched. With 6 docking ports and labs for research, the Space Station was expected to push us into the stars. The term “Mir” is Russian for “Peace”.

2004 – Apple’s first iPod Mini arrived in Apple retail stores and online. It was the first size variation of the iPod.

2013 – Sony announced the PlayStation 4 without giving out price or even showing what the hardware would look like.
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1856 – Professor Hamilton L. Smith of Gambier, Ohio received the first US patent for the tintype photographic picture process. It described a method for “the obtaining of positive impression upon a japanned surface previously prepared upon an iron or other metallic or mineral sheet or plate by means of collodion and a solution of a salt of silver.”

1878 – Thomas Edison received a US patent (No. 200521) for the phonograph. His first recording was of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” spoken into a large horn which transmitted vibrations to a needle that cut the recording on a hand-rotated cylinder.

1946 – Alan Turing Presents the “Proposal for the Development in the Mathematics Division of an Automatic Computing Engine (ACE)

This research proposal was presented to a meeting of the Executive Committee of the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in Teddington, England, and approved at a second meeting held a month later.

Turing based this research on von Neumann’s “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.” He had studied it in summer 1945 when he was recruited by J.R. Womersley to join the staff of the NPL.

1971 – First Warrant to Search Computer Data

The first warrant is issued to search a computer’s storage. This event would lead to increasingly sophisticated method of encryption to hide computer files from law enforcement agents.

1987 – In the Beginning Apple.com Was Created

The Internet domain apple.com is created. Note that this was a full 4 years before the World Wide Web was launched or Microsoft.com was registered … I’m just sayin’.

1990 – John and Thomas Knoll launched a small software package for manipulating images meant to be bundled with scanners. It was called Photoshop.

2002 – Odyssey, the first of six current operational Mars vehicles began its mission to map the planet.

2008 – HD DVD Surrenders

The “war” over the High Definition successor to the DVD ends when the supporters of the HD DVD format discontinue it. The Sony-baked Blu-ray format had garnered the support of many players in the industry, leading to the demise of HD DVD.

2014 – Facebook announced it was acquiring messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion.

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