The first theater to use electric lights opened, NASA launched one of the first communications satellites, and the “mother of all demos” introduces the computer mouse.… It all happened this week in tech history.
This week in 1882 – The Bijou Theatre opened in Boston, MA and became the first theatre to be lighted by electricity, which Thomas Edison himself installed and supervised..
1960 – Sperry Rand Corporation of St. Paul, MN unveiled a new computer, known as Univac 1107. The electronic wizard employed what was known as thin-film memory. This massive computer tipped the scales at about 5,200 pounds.
1962 – NASA launched Relay 1. The satellite was developed by RCA and was the first active repeater communications satellite in orbit. Relay 1 was also the first satellite to broadcast television from the United States to Japan.
1967 – The French prototype Concorde number 1 was rolled out in Toulouse, France (the British number 2 prototype was not quite finished in Bristol). The joint British-French venture and the world’s first supersonic airliner, took two more years of testing and fine-tuning the powerful engines before it made its maiden flight.
And this week in 1968 – Douglas Engelbart gave what became known as “The Mother of All Demos”, publicly debuting the computer mouse, hypertext, and the bit-mapped graphical user interface.