1902 – Joe Horn and Frank Hardart opened the first US Automat at 818 Chestnut St. in Philadelphia. The waiterless restaurant charged a nickel for most dishes.
1931 – Robert Goddard received a patent for rocket-fueled aircraft design (US. No. 1,809,271). Sadly we do not have a lot of rocket-planes in operation.
1986 – Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center Opens
The Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center opened to support the precursor to the modern Internet, the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET, which linked five supercomputer centers at Princeton University, Pittsburgh, University of California at San Diego, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Cornell University. Soon, several regional networks developed. Eventually, the government reassigned pieces of the ARPANET to the NSFNET. The NSF allowed commercial use of the Internet for the first time in 1991, and in 1995, it decommissioned the backbone, leaving the Internet a self-supporting industry.
1993 – Life Finds a Way
The motion picture Jurassic Park premiers in Washington D.C. The highest grossing film in history at the time, the contributions of Jurassic Park to the field of special effects is perhaps as important as the original Star Wars movie 16 years prior. During the production of the movie, the decision was made to incorporate imagery (CGI for short) in a large scale. By interweaving the use of CGI and animatronics, the movie’s special effects were of a realism unprecedented at the time (and for many still to this day). Jurassic Park jump started a wave of movies that made heavy use of CGI throughout the rest of the 90’s, and at present, the use of CGI pioneered by the movie is now entirely commonplace.
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