1883 – Thomas Edison and Stephen D. Field built the world’s first elevated electric railway. It was a narrow-gauge 3-foot-wide track in the gallery around the edge of the main exhibition building of the Chicago Railway Exhibition. It ran nine miles per hour.
1896 – Guglielmo Marconi applied for British Patent number 12039 regarding a system of telegraphy using Hertzian waves. We’d call it radio.
1966 – US Soft Lands on Moon
NASA’s lunar lander Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”) on the Moon, becoming the first US spacecraft to soft-land on an extraterrestrial body. The previous Ranger program sent craft that had hard-landings (i.e. crash landings). However, the Soviet spacecraft, Luna 9, claims the honor of being the first to soft-land on the moon, almost exactly 4 months prior to Surveyor 1.
1983 – Microsoft Introduces 2-Button Mouse
Microsoft Corp. announced the two-button Microsoft Mouse, which it introduced to go along with its new Microsoft Word processor. Microsoft built about 100,000 of these fairly primitive units for use with IBM and IBM-compatible personal computers but sold and included only 5,000 before finding success in 1985 version that featured, among other improvements, near-silent operation on all surfaces.
1988 – IBM PS/2 Model 70
While not the first version of the PS/2, the Model 70 was introduced with the 80386 processor. 16, 20, and 25 MHz clock speeds. The Model 70 also used a 25 MHz Intel 486 processor in a complex called the Power Platform. If you wanted to upgrade to the 80486, you would have to replace the PS/2’s BIOS chip along with the processor board. The model sold for $11,295 and included 2 MB of RAM, 120 MB ESDI hard drive, MS-DOS and OS/2.
1996 – Netscape Creates Navio to Compete with Microsoft
The Washington Post ran an article speculating that Netscape Communication Corp. might one day challenge Microsoft Corp. in a story headlined, “Inside Netscape: The Software Start-Up Is Growing So Fast It May One Day Post a Threat to Microsoft.” Two years later, the two companies are embroiled in a controversy related to the Justice Department’s investigation of whether Microsoft had violated antitrust laws in bundling its Internet Explorer program with its Windows operating system. Netscape’s Navigator and Communicator browsers for the World Wide Web are Internet Explorer’s main competition.
2003 – The European Space Agency launched the Mars Express probe from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. It was the fastest planetary probe to be built.
2014 – Apple announced OS X Yosemite and iOS8 at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Among the features were the ability to answer phone calls on your OS X computer, the ability for iOS apps to talk directly to each other, third party keyboards for iOS, and a new programming language called Swift.
1896 – Guglielmo Marconi applied for British Patent number 12039 regarding a system of telegraphy using Hertzian waves. We’d call it radio.
1966 – US Soft Lands on Moon
NASA’s lunar lander Surveyor 1 lands in Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”) on the Moon, becoming the first US spacecraft to soft-land on an extraterrestrial body. The previous Ranger program sent craft that had hard-landings (i.e. crash landings). However, the Soviet spacecraft, Luna 9, claims the honor of being the first to soft-land on the moon, almost exactly 4 months prior to Surveyor 1.
1983 – Microsoft Introduces 2-Button Mouse
Microsoft Corp. announced the two-button Microsoft Mouse, which it introduced to go along with its new Microsoft Word processor. Microsoft built about 100,000 of these fairly primitive units for use with IBM and IBM-compatible personal computers but sold and included only 5,000 before finding success in 1985 version that featured, among other improvements, near-silent operation on all surfaces.
1988 – IBM PS/2 Model 70
While not the first version of the PS/2, the Model 70 was introduced with the 80386 processor. 16, 20, and 25 MHz clock speeds. The Model 70 also used a 25 MHz Intel 486 processor in a complex called the Power Platform. If you wanted to upgrade to the 80486, you would have to replace the PS/2’s BIOS chip along with the processor board. The model sold for $11,295 and included 2 MB of RAM, 120 MB ESDI hard drive, MS-DOS and OS/2.
The Washington Post ran an article speculating that Netscape Communication Corp. might one day challenge Microsoft Corp. in a story headlined, “Inside Netscape: The Software Start-Up Is Growing So Fast It May One Day Post a Threat to Microsoft.” Two years later, the two companies are embroiled in a controversy related to the Justice Department’s investigation of whether Microsoft had violated antitrust laws in bundling its Internet Explorer program with its Windows operating system. Netscape’s Navigator and Communicator browsers for the World Wide Web are Internet Explorer’s main competition.
2003 – The European Space Agency launched the Mars Express probe from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. It was the fastest planetary probe to be built.
2014 – Apple announced OS X Yosemite and iOS8 at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Among the features were the ability to answer phone calls on your OS X computer, the ability for iOS apps to talk directly to each other, third party keyboards for iOS, and a new programming language called Swift.
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