1921
Harry Houdini patents a diver’s suit. (US No. 1,370,316)
1929
The term Super Computing is coined by the New York World, in the title of an article about several large tabulators built by IBM for Columbia University.
1954
The hydrogen bomb, code-named Castle Bravo, is detonated in a test over the Pacific archipelago of Bikini Atoll, a part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. With a force equivalent to twenty megatons (million tons) of TNT, it is the most powerful of all US thermonuclear bomb tests. It is believed that the hydrogen bomb is up to one thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. Radioactivity renders the islands an unsafe wasteland to which the evacuated indigenous people won’t be able to return to for decades to come. The natives were moved to the island of Rongerik, only to be moved to Ujelan a year later and then to Kili Island. Read more about the test at Znet, in the article entitled Bikini and the Hydrogen Bomb: A Fifty Year Perspective or at the Atomic Bomb Museum.
1960
John McCarthy releases the LISP Programmer’s Manual, marking the release of the first recursive and symbolic programming language. Considered the mother tongue of artificial intelligence (AI), LISP will be one of the most enduring high-level languages ever created. Read more about the history of LISP at John McCarthy’s Standford website.
1976
Less than two months after being married at the age of twenty-five, Steve Wozniak completes the basic design of his computer, and shows it to the Homebrew Computer Club meetings. Steven Jobs realized the design’s potential, and he convinces Wozniak not to give away schematics of the computer for free. Jobs will convince Wozniak to produce to printed circuit boards to sell. Story on Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World’s Most Colorful Company
1990
In an early-morning raid, the Secret Service raids the offices of Steve Jackson Games, a maker of roleplaying games, in Chicago. Two of the workers, known online as Erik Bloodaxe and Mentor, are alleged to have ties to a hacker group that the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating. The agents keep the employees out of the offices through the morning and into the afternoon. They seize the server which hosts the company’s bulletin board system (BBS), Illuminati, along with an employee’s work computer, miscellaneous computer equipment, and hundreds upon hundreds of floppy disks. The agents find the soon to be published rulebook for a game called G.U.R.P.S. Cyberpunk. The raiders mistake the book for a computer hacking tutorial and subsequently seize all the recent versions of the book, including a large section of the draft which had been made publicly available on Illuminati. Steve Jackson Games will later mount a campaign to retrieve the seized equipment. In the ensuing legal battle, the company will ultimately prevail, but their equipment will never be returned in its entirety. The incident will later be the inspiration for a card game called Hacker. [1]
1991
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigation of Microsoft for alleged monopolistic practices becomes public knowledge.
1995
Jerry Yang and David Filo incorporate Yahoo! It was first started in their trailer in Feb 1994 as “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”, but changed it to “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”, or Yahoo! By October, it celebrated their 1 millionth hit.[2]
1999
[Compaq]] Computer begins shipping the Aero 2100 handheld computer, featuring a 256-color display, 8MB RAM, an integrated microphone and speaker, and the Windows CE operating system. A lithium-ion battery powers the unit for about ten hours. Price: US$449
Oracle begins shipping Oracle 8i database software, for a variety of operating systems. Visit the official Oracle website. Price: Starting at US$1,475 for a five user license.
2000
3Com holds an initial public offering (IPO) for its subsidiary Palm, Inc. on the NASDAQ market, making it a publicly traded company.
2001
Forty ecommerce and banking websites in twenty states are hacked by Eastern European organized crime (Russian) groups. More than a million credit card numbers are stolen in the incident.
2002
Version 1.6.7 of the Ruby programming language is released.
2003
The Alias Systems Corporation is honored with an Oscar award for scientific and technical achievement by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the development of Maya software.
2004
The national registrars of Austria, Germany, and Switzerland adopt Punycode, a computer encoding syntax which translates Unicode strings into the character set which is permitted for network host names. Visit the Punycode translator at NameISP.com.
Version 8.4.6 of the Tcl/Tk programming language is released. Tcl/Tk is widely used in the programming of graphical user interfaces (GUI’s). Read more about the history of Tcl at the Tcl Developer Xchange.
Yahoo!announces that it will begin including paid entries in its search engine results, though it is quick to assure consumers that it will continue to rely on free web crawl results for most of its content.
2006
Msnbc.com publicly launches the Newsvine community website.
Wikipedia reaches one million articles in the English language with the creation of an entry entitled Jordanhill railway station.
2007
The American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) changes its name to the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in order to reflect the organization’s increasingly international membership. Read the official press release at the official AAAI website.
Leister Productions releases version 9 of the Reunion genealogy software for the Mac OS X.
2008
AOL discontinues the Netscape web browser.
2010
Four men used a network of computers and automated software to buy up online tickets to concerts and sporting events then sold them at a profit were indicted on fraud, conspiracy, and computer hacking charges. They allegedly made more than $25 million by re-selling more than 1.5 million of the most coveted tickets
Google Purchases online photo editor Picnik for an undisclosed sum
Roger Ebert announces he will be speaking for the first time on the Oprah Winfrey show after loosing his voice and lower jaw to caner. This is due to a company called CereProc that takes hours of audio and reproduces a voice.
2011
Apple’s Manager of Asian Sales Paul Devine admitted he took part in a Money laundering scheme while working at Apple
2012
Andrew Breitbart, a publisher and commentator for the Washington times, along with editor of the Drudge Report, passed away.
2013
Yahoo removed the “Digital Media” tagline and re-branded themselves as a Technology Company.
Yahoo! also shuts down Avatars, App Search, Sports IQ, and Clues
uStream cuts 6 percent of their team and hires two VP’s to concentrate on Pro Broadcasting products
Google launched sign language interpreter app