timeline
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(When times are listed, they are translated into Earth Standard Time, formerly known as UTC.)
 
 
1912: 15 Apr:     0200hrs: The RMS Titanic began its final voyage, nearly 13,000 feet to the bottom of the North Atlantic. Some of the Titanic survivors; as well as the lookout crew aboard the Carpathia; reported seeing unidentified, moving lights in the sky above the ship, just before it went down.
 
1914: 28 July:     1315hrs: Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Countess Sophie Chotek are assassinated in Sarajevo, after making a wrong turn down a side street. This event is referenced as the “spark” which caused the powder-keg of alliances in Europe to explode into “The War To End All Wars”.
 
1918: 11 Nov:     1600hrs:      Less than a year after the United States of America entered the war and following telegraphed negotiations with US President Woodrow Wilson, the Government of the Empire of Germany agreed to an armistice, including the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II.
 
1919: 28 June:      Following six months of negotiations, which included the abandonment of the talks by the German Government, Germany was handed the peace treaty in a “take it or leave it” offer of peace. After confirming that the German Army had effectively disbanded and could offer only token resistance to a renewed conflict, the new democratic government of Germany signed the humiliating Treaty of Versailles.
 
1939: 1 Sept:     0940hrs:      Nearly 1,200 civilians of the Polish town of Wieluń are murdered when the German Luftwaffe destroys 75% of the city. Five minutes later the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte in the Free City of Danzig on the Baltic Sea. In the matter of only a few minutes, Nazi ruler Adolf Hitler had slashed any hope of peace.
 
1941: 7 Dec:      1155hrs:      Naval Destroyer DD-139 U.S.S. Ward unknowingly fires the first American shots when the No.3 gun is used to sink a midget sub just outside the entrance to Pearl Harbor.
7 Dec:      1251hrs:      Fighter aircraft launched from Naval Aircraft Carriers of the Empire of Japan attack the United States “Pacific Fleet” in dock at the US Naval Station of Pearl Harbor. 2,459 people are killed, drawing the United States into the global conflict.
 
1944: 7 Dec:      Three years to the day after firing America's opening shots of World War 2, the U.S.S. Ward is scuttled to prevent her from being captured by Japanese forces after a bomber-strike amidships brings her to a dead-stop.
 
1945: 16 July:      Humankind enters the atomic age with the United States of America’s test detonation of a uranium-235 fission-based atomic warhead at the nuclear proving grounds in the Nevada desert.
26 July:      The Potsdam Declaration; drafted by the United States, United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China at the Potsdam Conference; called for the immediate unconditional surrender of Japan. Failure to surrender would result in "prompt and utter destruction". At the time, no one knew the "utter destruction" would change the political landscape of Earth for all time.
6 Aug:      Hiroshima, Japan is vaporized by “Little Boy”, a uranium-gun style warhead in Earth’s first detonation of a nuclear weapon in wartime.
9 Aug:      Nagasaki, Japan is vaporized by “Fat Man”, a plutonium-implosion style warhead. It is hoped that this would be mankind's final nuclear detonation in wartime.
15 Aug:      Japanese Emperor Michi Hirohito's speech in which he announced to the world that the Imperial Forces of Japan would surrender to the Allied Forces was broadcast following a failed Coup d'état to prevent the surrender.
2 Sept:      1402hrs:      Aboard the American battleship U.S.S. Missouri, Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu and General Yoshijiro Umezu, (representing the Japanese government and Imperial Headquarters, respectively) signed the official instrument of surrender, ending major hostilities between Japan and the Allies, effectively bringing World War 2 to a close.
 
1951: MIT Lincoln Lab is founded in response to a US Air Force request for MIT to work on an Air Defense system. Later in the year, MIT's Whirlwind (a super computer before the term was coined) demonstrated real-time computation, something that would be critical is SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment) was to succeed.
 
1952: 1 Nov:      Using liquid deuterium, the United States test detonates the Earth’s first thermonuclear hydrogen-fusion device. As their detonation of an atomic fission signalled the rapid advance into the controlled reaction for power generation, it was assumed that this heralded the rapid development of stable fusion reactions to provide for power generation without all the dangerous radioactive waste.
 
1957: 15 Oct:      The United Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) launches Sputnik 1; the Earth’s first artificial satellite; into orbit. In response, the United States Department of Defense creates the Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) to help restore and maintain America’s scientific and technological superiority during the “Cold War”.
Late Oct:      With Sputnik 1 flying overhead, Coalwood West Virginia native teenager Homer Hickam Jr. is inspired to reach for the stars. Forcing himself to learn advanced math and chemistry, he and his friends establish the "Big Creek Missile Agency" as their amateur rocketry range. Homer would go on to work for NASA in support of many space shuttle missions as well as the International Space Station.
3 Nov:      With the USSR's launch of Sputnik 2, humanity realizes for the first time that technology has given them the capability of escaping their planetary craddle. What had been artistic license until this point, was suddenly proven true by Laika, the first Terran lifeform to reach orbit.
 
1960: Irving Reed and Gustave Solomon publish a paper that would be the genesis of grouping individual bits into bytes, as well as adding checksum bits into bytes creating error-correction capabilities. Their codes helped make high-definition television possible as well as allowed the Voyager and Galileo spacecraft to have internal data-repair capabilities, helping make their missions succeed.
 
1961: 25 May:      American President John F. Kennedy makes a novel speech to a joint session of the Congress in response to the Soviet Yuri Gagarin's successful orbit of the Earth. It was this speech that set the goal of the race as the landing on the moon and returning safely to Earth.
 
1962: 12 Sept:      American President Kennedy delivers a speech on the Nation's Space Efforts at Rice University in Austin Texas. This speech is the origin of his famous "We choose to go to the moon in this decade...".
16 Oct:      US President John Kennedy and his Cabinet meet to consider the United States’ response to the Soviet Union's (USSR/CCCP) deployment of nuclear warhead-equipped ballistic missiles on the island-nation of Cuba. Thus begins the Cuban Missile Crisis.
22 Oct:      United States Armed Forces upgrade to Defense Readiness Condition (DEFCON) Three.
23 Oct:      US Strategic Air Command is upgraded to DEFCON 2, the highest ever acknowledged in American history.
26 Oct:      =/\= Entry Sanitized in compliance with Starfleet Temporal Prime Directive =/\=
28 Oct:      Crisis is adverted. USSR and USA remove their missiles from the offending locations.
 
1965: 1 Sept:      First distributed computer network links the systems at Lincoln Lab (MIT) and System Development Corporation (Santa Monica, CA). The DEC ARPA computer was added to the “Experimental Network” later on.
 
1967: 27 Jan:      2331hrs:      After more than 5 hours into their pre-flight test of the Apollo Command/Service module to operate from internal power, the crew of what would have been the first crewed flight of the Apollo capsule were caught in a flash fire on the launch pad. American's mourned the loss of the first Apollo crew while their space program was setback 20months for a complete investigation and comamnd module redesign.
 
1968: 11 Oct:      1502hrs:      After more 20 months of investigations, redesigns, evaluations, planning and doing it all over again and again, America returned to manned spaceflight with the liftoff of the Apollo 7 mission. Though it was only a return to low-Earth-orbit (LEO), it proved that the new capsule could safely ferry the astronauts to the moon.
21 Dec:      1318hrs:      2hrs, 27min after lifting off from Launch Complex 34 at the Kennedy Space Center on Merrit Island, Florida, USA, Apollo 8 became the first human-crewed spacecraft to leave the gravitational control of their home planet. The successful splashdown of the capsule eleven days later proved that humanity could expand their civilization behond the planet of their birth.
 
1969: 16 July:      1332hrs:     Massing more than 2,500tonnes at liftoff, the Saturn 5 rocket began its ascent with the Apollo 11 crew.
20 July:      2017hrs:     "The Eagle Has Landed," with those words, humanity had touched down on another orbital body other than their homeworld. It would inspire engineers and scientists for generations to reach for the stars.
24 July:      1650hrs:     "With the splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, Apollo 11 came to a successful and safe end, but it laid the foundation for humanity's continued scientific exploration of space.
2 Sept:     ARPA-Net Node 1: UCLA, installed on 30 Aug, goes online. Additional nodes become operational over the next several weeks.
1 Oct:     Node 2: Stanford Research Institute (SRI) goes online.
29 Oct:     UCLA sends first data packets to SRI, the message was supposed to be "login" but the system crashed after only transmitting"L O".
1 Nov:     Node 3: University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) becomes operational.
?? Dec:     Node 4: University of Utah is connected to the network.
 
1972: 29 Oct:      Ray Tomlinson sent the very first email. He modified the SNDMSG application to allow sending messages to users on other computers. His work on standardizing the process is credited with originating the "@" to seperate the user from the host designators..
 
1973: ARPANet's first international connections are made with the addition of a node at the University College of London (England).
 
Spawned by the introduction of Talkomatic; developed by Doug Brown and David Woolley at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the precurser to the ubiquitous Nearly instantaneous communication with international scientists spawns new levels of international cooperation and discussion. Human genome projects gain the most traction in the following months.
?? May:     Ethernet technology is theorized and tested on Xerox-PARC computer systems. Initially a wired technology, the underlaying protocol would go on to be adapted for the wireless "wifi" rush of the late 2010's.
 
1976: Massachusetts Institute of Technology announces the completed mapping of the human genetic code.
 
Martin Clemens is born; due to adult activities, juvenile history is destroyed.
 
1978: Transfer & Communications Protocol (T/CP) is broken into the Transfer Command Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP); forming the communications-protocol-backbone of the coming "international network" for decades to come.
 
1980: Transfer & Communications Protocol (T/CP) is broken into the Transfer Command Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP); forming the communications-protocol-backbone of the coming "international network" for decades to come.
 
1939: 1 Sept:      0440hrs:      Nearly 1,200 civilians of the Polish town of Wieluń are murdered when the German Luftwaffe destroys 75% of the city. Five minutes later the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte in the Free City of Danzig on the Baltic Sea. In the matter of only a few minutes, Nazi ruler Adolf Hitler had slashed any hope of peace.