Today in Tech History – October 24

1861 - First Transcontinental Telegraph Line
              Western Union completes the first transcontinental telegraph line across the United States, making nearly instantaneous cross-country communication possible for the first time. Previously, it took 10 days for a letter to be sent from Missouri to California via the Pony Express. Not coincidentally, 2 days later the Pony Express shutdown operations.

1922 - Werner Buchholz Born
              Werner Buchholz was a member of the teams that designed the IBM 701 Stretch models. Buchholz used the term “byte" to describe a sequence of 8 bits- although in the 1950s, when the term first was used, equipment used 6 bit chunks of information, and byte equaled 6 bits. Buchholz describe a byte at the group of bits required to encode a character, or the number of bits transmitted in parallel in a communication channel.

1995 - Internet Coined by Federal Networking Council
             The Federal Networking Council officially coined the term Internet: the council's committee on computing, Information and Communication (CCIC) created the FNC on September 20th, 1995 to act as a forum for networking collaboration among Federal agencies. From nitrd.gov Resolution: The Federal Networking Council (FNC) agrees that the following language reflects our definition of the term "Internet.” Internet refers to the global information system that - (i) is logically linked together by a globally unique address space based on the Internet Protocol (IP) or it's subsequent extensions/ follow-ons, (ii) is able to support communication using the transmission control protocol/ internet protocol (TCP/IP) suite.

1998 - NASA launched Deep Space 1. It's mission to seek out an asteroid, specifically, asteroid 9969 Braille. When that mission ended up being only partially successful, it went after   Comet Borrelly where it got some choice information.

2003 - Last Flight of Concorde
             The Concorde supersonic jet makes its last commercial flight, while being able to cross the Atlantic in about 3.5 hours, low passenger numbers and rising maintenance costs maid operating the Concord and profitable for British Airways and Air France.

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