Year: 1968

Categories
Doctor Who Television

Doctor Who: The Invasion, Part 1

  • November 2, 1968

Doctor WhoThe 220th episode of Doctor Who airs on the BBC. Kevin Stoney guest stars as Tobias Vaughn, and Nicholas Courtney returns as the freshly-promoted Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, head of the newly created UNIT. This is the last Cybermen story until 1975.

This episode is missing from the BBC’s archives, but has been replaced on DVD with an animated reconstruction.

More about Doctor Who in the LogBook
Order VWORP!1 from theLogBook.com Store

Categories
Astronomy Science & Technology

Arecibo and the Crab Nebula Pulsar

  • November 9, 1968

AreciboCornell University student Richard Lovelace, working at the Cornell-funded Arecibo Radio Telescope in Puerto Rico, uses the massive telescope and its on-site computers to determine the rotational period of a pulsar discovered near the center of the Crab Nebula, approximately 6,500 light years from Earth. The position of the pulsar relative to the nebula strengthens the case for pulsars and (still hypothetical) neutron stars occurring at the heart of supernova remnants. The Crab Nebula pulsar had been discovered only three years earlier.

Categories
Uncrewed Spaceflight Zond

Zond 6

  • November 10, 1968

Zond 6The Soviet Union launches an unmanned Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft, designated Zond 6, on a seven-day flight around the moon and back to Earth. Like Zond 5 before it, Zond 6 carries specimens of Earth animals and plants, but a rupture of the Soyuz pressure vessel results in these specimens being exposed to hard vacuum, resulting in instant death. Furthermore, the spacecraft opens and jettisons its parachutes too early, leaving it to slam into the ground at high speed. With continued glitches plaguing the Zond flights, Soviet mission planners aren’t confident enough in the 7K-L1 capsule to put cosmonauts in it for the next flight.

Categories
Doctor Who Television

Doctor Who: The Invasion, Part 5

  • November 30, 1968

Doctor WhoThe 224th episode of Doctor Who airs on the BBC. Kevin Stoney guest stars as Tobias Vaughn, and Nicholas Courtney returns as the freshly-promoted Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, head of the newly created UNIT. This is the last Cybermen story until 1975.

This episode is missing from the BBC’s archives, but is later replaced on DVD by an animated reconstruction.

More about Doctor Who in the LogBook
Order VWORP!1 from theLogBook.com Store

Categories
Television

Fantastic Voyage: First Men On The Moon

  • November 30, 1968

Fantastic VoyageABC broadcasts the 12th episode of the Filmation animated series Fantastic Voyage, based on the 1966 movie of the same name. Marvin Miller, Ted Knight, and Jane Webb lead the voice cast of an episode that airs over eight months prior to the first manned landing on the moon.

This series is not yet chronicled in the LogBook. You could help change that.

Categories
Astronomy Science & Technology Uncrewed Spaceflight

Orbiting Astronomical Observatory 2: The Stargazer

  • December 7, 1968

OAO-1NASA launches the second Orbiting Astronomical Observatory satellite, given the nickname “Stargazer” after it successfully enters service. OAO-2 will remain in service for over four years, making significant contributions to the scientific understanding of comets and supernovae. Two separate experiments, including one designed and overseen by Dr. Fred Whipple, observe the sky in ultraviolet light from Earth orbit.

Categories
Odyssey Video Games

The Brown Box

  • December 9, 1968

Brown BoxAt Sanders Associates, Ralph Baer completes the sixth iteration of his recently-patented Television Gaming & Training Apparatus, now covered in brown woodgrain and called “The Brown Box.” Utilizing logic circuits and spot generators rather than a computer chip, the Brown Box is capable of playing video ping pong and other simple games. This is the prototype of the first mass-marketed home video game system. Sanders begins courting prospective licensees, including RCA, Zenith, General Electric, Motorola and Magnavox; companies already manufacturing television sets will be the corporate entites most likely to show an interest. RCA declines, but one of its executives, having seen the Brown Box demonstrated, later defects to Magnavox, which eventually licenses the Brown Box technology from Sanders. The result will be the Magnavox Odyssey, the first-ever home video game console.

Categories
Computers

The Mother of All Demos

  • December 9, 1968

The Mother of All DemosAt the Fall Joint Computer Conference held at the San Francisco Convention Center, computer visionary Douglas Englebart demonstrates a collaborative computer system loaded down with groundbreaking technologies: the first computer mouse, driving a point-and-click object-oriented graphical user interface, bitmapped graphics, hypertext, real-time video conferencing, and a live networked collaborative space. Decades later, computer historians give this event – billed in the conference program as “a research center for augmenting human intellect” – a new name: the mother of all demos.

Hear about it on the Sci-Fi 5 podcast