Michael Coyle (American composer) was born on May 2, 1957

Michael Patrick Coyle is an American composer. Michael Coyle is a composer/arranger in Minneapolis, and also the senior producer for an independent, multi-media production company based in Manhattan. He is the former composer-in-residence for the Manhattan Performance Group and the Cottage Theater in New York, and was the editor of Stagebill Magazine at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. Michael’s works have been featured on television, film, and stage, and in art installations in New York, Boston, and Minneapolis, and Madison, WI. He works in a wide variety of styles, but primarily enjoys writing for instrumental chamber ensembles and orchestra. Most evident in Michael’s music is a rich use of both traditional and extended harmony balanced with sections of harmonic ambiguity and atonality. He believes that the combination of tonality and atonality is critical to the appreciation of both. By his own admission, he is obsessed with novel variation in both tone color and texture. He has been recognized as an adept and imaginative orchestrator. He works with both acoustic and electronic instruments in order to have access to as wide a palette of raw sound as possible. One of Michael’s recent works, Tänzchen für vier, was a winner of the annual Zeitgeist/American Composers Forum competition and was premiered by Zeitgeist in March of 2011. In addition to music, Michael has an avid interest in science and material experimentation and in the mid-1980s accepted a position as Production Manager for McHugh-Rollins Associates, a properties and special effects design firm in New York City. While in that position he oversaw the special effects production of such large Broadway shows as The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérables and implemented the effects for Ingmar Bergman’s production of Hamlet at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as many other stage productions and films.

Radio Shack releases the Model III TRSDOS 1.3 on May 1, 1981

TRS-DOS (which stood for the Tandy Radio Shack – Disk Operating System) was the operating system for the Tandy TRS-80 line of 8-bit Zilog Z80 microcomputers that were sold through Radio Shack through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Tandy’s manuals recommended that it be pronounced triss-doss. TRS-DOS should not be confused with Tandy DOS a version of MS-DOS licensed from Microsoft for Tandy’s x86 line of personal computers (PCs). TRS-DOS was primarily a way of extending the MBASIC (BASIC in ROM) with additional I/O (input/output) commands that worked with disk files rather than the cassette tapes that were used by most other TRS-80 systems. TRS-DOS supported up to four floppy (mini-diskette) drives which used 51⁄4″ (five and one quarter inch) diskettes with a capacity of 89K (kilobytes) each (later 160K). The drives were numbered 0 through 3 and the system diskettes (which contained the TRS-DOS code and utilities) had to be in drive 0.

Larry Niven (American science fiction author) was born on April 30, 1938

Laurence van Cott Niven is an American science fiction author. His best-known work is Ringworld (1970), which received Hugo, Locus, Ditmar, and Nebula awards. His work is primarily hard science fiction, using big science concepts and theoretical physics. It also often includes elements of detective fiction and adventure stories. His fantasy includes the series The Magic Goes Away, rational fantasy dealing with magic as a non-renewable resource. Niven is the author of numerous science fiction short stories and novels, beginning with his 1964 story “The Coldest Place”. In this story, the coldest place concerned is the dark side of Mercury, which at the time the story was written was thought to be tidally locked with the Sun (it was found to rotate in a 2:3 resonance after Niven received payment for the story, but before it was published). In addition to the Nebula award in 1970[3] and the Hugo and Locus awards in 1971 for Ringworld, Niven won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story for “Neutron Star” in 1967. He won the same award in 1972, for “Inconstant Moon”, and in 1975 for “The Hole Man”. In 1976, he won the Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “The Borderland of Sol”. Niven has written scripts for various science fiction television shows, including the original Land of the Lost series and Star Trek: The Animated Series, for which he adapted his early story “The Soft Weapon”. He adapted his story “Inconstant Moon” for an episode of the television series The Outer Limits in 1996. Niven has also written for the DC Comics character Green Lantern including in his stories hard science fiction concepts such as universal entropy and the redshift effect.

Robert J. Sawyer (Canadian science fiction writer) was born on April 29, 1960

Robert James Sawyer is a Canadian science fiction writer. He has had 20 novels published, and his short fiction has appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Amazing Stories, On Spec, Nature, and many anthologies. Sawyer has won over forty awards for his fiction, including the Nebula Award (1995), the Hugo Award (2003), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (2006). Sawyer’s work frequently explores the intersection between science and religion, with rationalism frequently winning out over mysticism. He has a great fondness for paleontology, as evidenced in his Quintaglio Ascension trilogy (Far-Seer, Fossil Hunter, and Foreigner), about an alien world to which dinosaurs from Earth were transplanted, and his time-travel novel End of an Era. In addition, the main character of Calculating God is a paleontologist, Wake features a chase scene at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, and the Neanderthal Parallax novels deal with an alternate version of Earth where Neanderthals did not become extinct. Sawyer often explores the notion of copied or uploaded human consciousness, mind uploading, most fully in his novel Mindscan, but also in Flashforward, Golden Fleece, The Terminal Experiment, “Identity Theft”, “Biding Time”, and “Shed Skin”.

Terry Pratchett (English novelist) was born on April 28, 1948

Sir Terence David John “Terry” Pratchett is an English novelist, known for his frequently comical work in the fantasy genre. He is best known for his popular and long-running Discworld series of comic fantasy novels. Pratchett’s first novel, The Carpet People, was published in 1971, and since his first Discworld novel (The Colour of Magic) was published in 1983, he has written two books a year on average. His latest Discworld book, Snuff is the third-fastest-selling novel since records began in the United Kingdom selling 55,000 copies in the first three days. Pratchett was the UK’s best-selling author of the 1990s, and as of August 2010 had sold over 65 million books worldwide in thirty-seven languages. He is currently the second most-read writer in the UK, and seventh most-read non-US author in the US. Pratchett was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) “for services to literature” in 1998.

Russell T Davies (Welsh television producer and screenwriter) was born on April 27, 1963

Stephen Russell Davies, better known by his pen name Russell T Davies, is a Welsh television producer and screenwriter whose works include Queer as Folk, Bob & Rose, The Second Coming, Casanova, and the 2005 revival of the classic British science fiction series Doctor Who. Born in Swansea, Davies aspired to work as a comic artist in his adult life, until a careers advisor at his school suggested that he study English literature; he consequently focused on a career of play- and screen-writing. After he graduated from Oxford University, Davies joined the BBC’s children’s department on a part-time basis in 1985 and worked in varying positions, including writing and producing two series, Dark Season and Century Falls. He left the BBC in the early 1990s to work for Granada Television and later became a freelance writer. Davies moved into writing adult television dramas in 1994. His early scripts generally explored concepts of religion and sexuality among various backdrops: Revelations was a soap opera about organised religion and featured a lesbian vicar; Springhill was a soap drama about a Catholic family in contemporary Liverpool; The Grand explored society’s opinion of subjects such as prostitution, abortion, and homosexuality during the interwar period; and Queer as Folk, his first prolific series, recreated his experiences in the Manchester gay scene.

A. E. van Vogt (Canadian-born science fiction author) was born on April 26, 1912

Alfred Elton van Vogt was a Canadian-born science fiction author regarded as one of the most popular and complex science fiction writers of the mid-twentieth century: the “Golden Age” of the genre. Van Vogt’s first published science fiction story, “Black Destroyer” (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939), was inspired by Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin. The story depicted a fierce, carnivorous alien, the coeurl, stalking the crew of an exploration spaceship. It was the cover story of the issue of Astounding that is sometimes described as having ushered in the “Golden Age” of science fiction. The story served as the inspiration for a number of science fiction movies. In 1950 it was combined with “War of Nerves” (1950), “Discord in Scarlet” (1939) and “M33 in Andromeda” (1943) to form the novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1950). In 1941, van Vogt decided to become a full-time writer, quitting his job at the Canadian Department of National Defence. Extremely prolific for a few years, van Vogt wrote a large number of short stories. In the 1950s, many of them were retrospectively patched together into novels, or “fixups” as he called them, a term which entered the vocabulary of science fiction criticism. When the original stories were related (e.g. The War against the Rull) this was often successful. When not (e.g. Quest for the Future), the disparate stories thrown together generally made for a less coherent plot. One of van Vogt’s best-known novels of this period is Slan, which was originally serialised in Astounding Science Fiction (September – December 1940). Using what became one of van Vogt’s recurring themes, it told the story of a 9-year-old superman living in a world in which his kind are slain by Homo sapiens.