1877
Thomas Edison demonstrates his hand-cranked phonograph that records sound onto tinfoil cylinders for the first time.
1951
The first US underground atom bomb test, designated “Uncle,” is detonated. The low-yield 1.2 kiloton bomb is detonated seventeen feet beneath the surface of Frenchman Flat, in Nevada as part of Operation Buster-Jangle. It leaves an eighteen hundred foot diameter crater one hundred feet deep.
1961
The first US satellite carrying an animal is launched by Mercury-Atlas 5 from Cape Canaveral. The passenger, a five-year-old chimpanzee named Enos, orbits the Earth twice over the course of three hours and twenty minutes. During the mission, Enos carries out the lever-pulling performance and psychological tests that he had been conditioned for over the past sixteen months. Enos performs the tasks with a high degree of accuracy, receiving shocks for the minimal number of incorrect answers. Even when the controls malfunction and Enos begins receiving consecutive shocks for correct answers, the frustrated chimpanzee continues to the proper sequence through the end of the flight.
1965
Canadian Space Agency launches the satellite Alouette 2.
1967
The first Australian satellite, (Wresat), is launched.
1967
The first Australian satellite, the Weapons Research Establishment Satellite (Wresat), is launched on a mission to collect data on the upper atmosphere at 14:19cst from Woomera, South Australia.
1972
Without fanfare, Atari co-founders Nolan Bushnell and Al Alcorn wheel the first stand-alone Pong coin-operated arcade unit into Andy Cappa’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California. Instead of pursuing established manufacturers, Bushnell had decided to manufacture the Pong units himself. Bushnell will distribute Pong along the pre-existing arcade routes he and Ted Dabney had worked to keep Atari afloat while their first game was being created. It is his boldest move yet and will ultimately prove to be enormously successful. He leased an old roller rink in Santa Clara and converted it into a production line. Each machine will take in around US$200 a week, nearly four times what other pinball games and jukeboxes had earned on the same routes. Pong will go on to be the first commercially successful video game in history, and this day is widely marked as the first nail in the coffin of pinball era. Carl Sagan will write that, “As a result of Pong, a player can gain a deep intuitive understanding of the simplest Newtonian physics.”
1975
The name “Micro-soft” (an amalgam of the words microcomputer and software) is first used in a letter from Bill Gates to Paul Allen.
1982
Atari files a copyright infringement suit against Imagic, claiming Demon Attack is a copy of Amstar’s Phoenix arcade game, which Atari has the exclusive right to produce for the home game market.
1996
Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) announces that the company has shipped ten million units of the PlayStation video game console worldwide. The total sales include 4.2 million units in Japan, 3.45 million units in North America, and 2.35 million units in Europe.
A woman in Aurora, Illinois is charged for punching another shopper in the head while fighting over the last Nintendo 64 video game system available at a Best Buy store.
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