In 1899 – Nippon Electric Company Ltd. (NEC) was founded by Iwadare Kunihiko, an expert in telegraphic systems who worked under Thomas Edison. Western Electric provided funding, making it the first Japanese joint-venture with a foreign company.

In 1995 – The US Air Force announced the Global Positioning System had met requirements for Full Operational Capability. The navigation system was strictly the province of the US Department of Defense operated by the 2nd Space Operation Squadron of the 50th Space Wing at Falcon Air Force Base in Colorado.

In 1997 – DNS was widely disrupted making email routing and web page delivery spotty throughout the day. An Ingres database failure resulted in corrupt .COM and .NET zone files. A system administrator mistakenly released the zone file without regenerating the file and verifying its integrity.

In 2002 – Apple announced PC versions of the iPod with MusicMatch software instead of iTunes. The company also announced a 20 GB version of the music player and touch-sensitive scroll wheel and dropped the prices.

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In 1945 – The United States detonated a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico. The Trinity test ushered in the atomic age.

In 1951 – VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin was born in Philadelphia.

In 1969 – Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins, blasted off from Cape Kennedy on Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.

In 1995 – Amazon.com opened for business selling books online. Shipments were packed into boxes from a desk made out of a spare door in a two-car garage in Bellevue, Washington.

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In 1928 – The Polish Cipher Bureau picked up enciphered radio signals from the German Reicswehr for the first time. The messages were encoded with Germany’s ENIGMA machine. Cracking the EMIGMA during World War II brought together some of the finest minds in computer science at Bletchley Park in England.

In 1983 – Nintendo released the Family Computer or Famicom, along with Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye cartridges. It would later be released in the US as the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES.

In 2003 – AOL Time Warner disbanded the Netscape browser development team. In conjunction, Mozilla created the Mozilla Foundation giving the project its first independent legal existence.

In 2006 – After a few months being used internally at Odeo, the Twttr service launched for public use. They later added some vowels and spun Twitter out as its own company.

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In 1867 – Alfred Nobel demonstrated dynamite for the first time at Merstham Quarry, Surrey.

In 1918 – Computer pioneer and MIT professor Jay Forrester was born on a cattle ranch in Climax, Nebraska. With Robert Everett, Forrester led one of the most important early computer projects, the Whirlwind, and developed and founded the field of system dynamics.

In 1965 – Mariner 4 flew by Mars, taking 21 full pictures, the first close-up photos of another planet returned from space.

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