1873
Pierre-Jules Hetzel publishes Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne in French. Download it at Project Gutenberg.
1910
Georges Rignoux of La Rochelle, France describes a primitive “television” system using a matrix of sixty-four photocells to producing a limited grey scale picture. Rignoux had developed the system over the course of several months, with several successful practical experiments, including the first demonstration of the instantaneous transmission of black and white still images in 1909.
1933
The Lone Ranger premieres on the radio WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan. The radio serial will run for thirteen consecutive years with a total of 2,956 episodes. The western adventures of the masked Texas Ranger will inspire the creation of a bevy of future super heroes, and the show’s success will pave the way for their popularization in mainstream media.
1947
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules that granting CBS approval for their new color television system would be premature and that the system requires further testing.
1950
United States President Harry Truman orders the development of the hydrogen fusion bomb, otherwise known as the “H-bomb.” The codename “Super” will later be given to the project to reflected the superiority of thermonuclear devices over earlier fission bombs used at the end of World War II.
1952
Two new Mersenne primes numbers (M521 and M607) are discovered by researchers using the Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) to run a program written by Raphael Robinson for the first time. These are the first prime numbers ever discovered using computer software. The first of the two numbers, M521, will consist of 157 digits and the second, M607, will consist of 183 digits. Three more primes will be discovered on June 25 and one more will be discovered on both October 7 and October 9 using the same method.
1953
The first television test transmissions in Norway are broadcast.
1957
The first external artificial pacemaker with an internal heart electrode is put into use. In order to maintain a patient’s heartbeat rhythm, an electrode is sewn to the wall of the patient’s heart and connected through the chest to an external desktop pulse generator. The device turns out to be a poor solution, though. Not only is the equipment bulky, infections will frequently occur along the electrode wires, and the device requires uninterrupted electrical supply.
1964
The US Hard Lander, Ranger 6, is launched.
1974
Atari begins using “Innovative leisure” as the company slogan. Atari will later apply for to trademark the term in April 1976 and be granted a trademark in February 1977.
Atari introduces Superpong.
1979
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) introduces two new processors, the IBM 4331 and IBM 4341, for intermediately sized computers.
1981
Universal Pictures releases the science fiction comedy film The Incredible Shrinking Woman, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Lily Tomlin, Charles Grodin, Ned Beatty, John Glover, and Elizabeth Wilson, to 789 US theaters. In it, a woman is exposed to chemicals that make her begin to physically shrink. It will gross US$4,279,264 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG) Running Time: 1 hr 28 mins
1982
According to Twin Galaxies, Tim Vargo, age 20, scores a record-setting 51,957,175 points playing the Atari arcade game Missile Command for thirty hours and forty minutes at the Play Palace arcade in Kent, Ohio. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.
Richard Skrenta writes the first PC virus code. It’s four hundred lines long, and it poses as an Apple boot program calling itself “Elk Cloner.”
1989
The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Unnatural Selection” first airs. (No. 207) In it, the Enterprise responds to the USS Lantree’s distress signal. The Lantree’s crew are all suffering from rapid aging and it falls to the Enterprise to uncover its cause before its too late. Memory Alpha entry
The USSR Phobos 2 Flyby/Lander, launched July 12, 1988, arrives at Mars and enters orbit. The orbiter will proceed to pass within eight hundred kilometers of Phobos, before failing.
1993
Rusty & Edie’s BBS of Boardman, Ohio, is raided by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for allegedly distributing copyrighted software programs. The FBI seize computers, hard drives, and telecommunications equipment along with financial records. The raid is the result of an on-going collaboration with the Software Publishers Association (SPA), which initiated the investigation after receiving complaints from a number of SPA members that their software was being illegally distributed on the bulletin board system (BBS). Before the raid dismantled it, Rusty & Edie’s was one of the largest private bulletin boards in the US. with one hundred twenty-four nodes and over fourteen thousand subscribers calling it at a rate of over four thousand connections a day. In all, the BBS had logged over 3.4 million phone calls from its in 1987 up to the time of the raid. The system includes a staggering nineteen gigabytes of storage holding over a hundred thousand files available to download. Read more about Rusty & Edie’s at Textfiles.com. Visit the official website of the Software Publishers Association.
1995
Apple Computer releases the MessagePad 120, featuring a 20MHz ARM 610 processor and 4 or 8MB RAM, in the US. At the time of its release, over 100 third-party applications are available.
1996
Comet Hyakutake, otherwise dubbed “The Great Comet of 1996″, is discovered by Japanese amateur astronomer Yuji Hyakutake.
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