In 1944 – Harvard University President James Conant wrote to IBM founder Thomas Watson Sr. to let him know that the Harvard Mark I was operating smoothly. It was used in conjunction with the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships.

In 1967 – The Surveyor 3 spacecraft was successfully launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida on its mission to the Moon. It was the first to carry a surface soil sampling scoop.

1970 – The Apollo 13 spacecraft returned safely to Earth after a frightening malfunction caused the team to orbit landing on the Moon and scramble to keep themselves alive.

In 1959 – The programming language LISP had its first public presentation. Created by John McCarthy, LISP offered programmers flexibility in organization.

In 1971 – Abhay Bhushan proposed FTP (File Transfer Protocol) in RFC 114.

In 1976 – The Helios-B deep-space probe made what was then the closest controlled approach to the Sun at 43 million km or within 0.3 AU.

In 1452 – Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest artist, inventor and engineer in history, was born near the Tuscan town of Vinci.

In 1892 – The Edison General Electric Company and the Thomson-Houston Company merge to form the General Electric Company, manufacturer of dynamos and electric lights.

In 1977 – The first West Coast Computer Faire takes place in Palo Alto. The star of the show would turn out to be the Apple II. The computer featured a built-in keyboard, 16 kilobytes of memory, BASIC, and eight expansion slots all for $1,300.

In 1894 – Alfred Tate, a former Edison associate and the Holland Brothers, opened a public Kinetoscope in New York City at 1155 Broadway, on the corner of 27th Street—the first commercial motion picture house.

In 1956 – Ampex demonstrated the VRX-1000 videotape recorder at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters Convention in Chicago. It was the first successful commerical videotape recorder.

In 1996 – Jennifer Kaye Ringley hooked up a camera in her dorm room at Dickinson College and set it to upload a picture every three minutes as an experiment. The JenniCam would eventually reach 4 million hits per day at its peak.

In 1960 – The United States launched Navy Transit 1-B. It demonstrated the first engine restart in space and more famously the feasiblity of using satellites as navigational aids, proving systems like GPS would work.

In 1970 – The crew of Apollo 13 heard a sharp bang and vibration followed by a warning light. Jack Swigert radioed back the famous words “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”

In 1974 – Western Union, NASA and Hughes Aircraft, teamed up to launch the United States’ first commercial geosynchronous communications satellite, Westar 1. The system relayed data, voice, video, and fax transmissions to the continental U.S., Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Alaska, and the Virgin islands.