Birthdays: Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV-1642, Frederic Opper the
cartoonist of Happy Hooligan, Phillip Freneau, Roger Miller, Issac Asimov,
Julius LaRosa, Tito Schipa, Renata Tebaldi, Tex Ritter, Dick Huemer, Cuba
Gooding Jr, is 49, Tia Carrere, Kate Bosworth is 34
1843- Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman premiered
in Dresden.
1897- Young writer Stephen Crane survived a shipwreck when
the good ship SS Commodore went down off the coast of Florida. He went on to
write The Open Boat and The Red Badge of Courage.
1937- Hollywood actor Ross Alexander had hit on tough times.
He had been in a few movies like Captain Blood and A Midsummer Night’s Dream
but his career seemed to be stalled, he was in debt, and his wife committed
suicide. This day the 29 year old went into the barn behind his Valley ranch
home and shot himself. The Warner Bros. Studio looked around for a replacement
to refill their roster of male leads. They replaced Alexander with an Illinois
college sportscaster named “Dutch”- Ronald Reagan.
1975- In a letter to MITS, college kids Bill Gates and Paul
Allen offered their computer language adaptation of BASIC for the new Altair
personal computer. They called themselves Micro-Soft.
1984- The Zenith Corporation announced it would stop selling
video recorders in Betamax format and go over wholly to VHS. Other electronics
giants followed suit and VHS won out over the higher quality Beta system.
2000- Larry Saunders had a
conversation with his friend Jimmy Wales about writing data entries for
collaborative websites called wikis. Saunders conceived of an open on-line
encyclopedia encompassing all knowledge. He called it Wikipedia.
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