In 1923 – The first patent application for the rotary-dial telephone was submitted in France by Antoine Barnay.

In 1969 – Apollo 10 launched, completing all the stages of a moon landing mission without landing on the Moon. Astronauts Eugene Cernan and Thomas Stafford descended in the Lunar Module to within 15KM of the lunar surface.

In 1998 – The United States Department of Justice and twenty US states filed civil actions against Microsoft, alleging the company abused monopoly power regarding operating system and Web browser sales.

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In 1902 – While going through objects recovered by divers near Antikythera off the coast of Greece, archaeologist Valerois Stais discovered a strange device with gear-wheels inside. The Antikythera mechanism has been puzzling investigators for over a hundred years.

In 1943 – The US. Army and the University of Pennsylvania signed a contract to develop ENIAC. It was planned to use vacuum tubes and calculate ballistic firing tables.

In 1954 – The first shovel load of earth was dug on the Meyrin site of the first CERN Laboratory building in Geneva.

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In 1888 – Emile Berliner demonstrated his flat disc audio recording and reproduction in a lecture he gave to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, which was printed in the institute’s Journal (vol. 125, no. 60).

In 1939 – The National Broadcasting Company televised the first sporting event, the second game of a doubleheader baseball game between Columbia and Princeton. About 400 TV sets were capable of receiving the broadcast. Princeton won 2-1 in the 10th.

In 1946 – At the meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE, now IEEE) in San Francisco, Jack Mullin demonstrated the world’s first professional-quality tape recorded in the US.

In 1960 – While working at the Hughes Research Laboratories of the Hughes Aircraft company in Malibu, California, physicist Theodore Maiman used an artificial ruby to create the first laser.

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In 1905 – 110 acres of land in southern Nevada were auctioned off, founding a new city. They would become downtown Las Vegas which would grow to become the host for major tech events like Comdex, CES and more.

In 1987 – The Soviet Union launched the Polyus prototype orbital weapons platform from Baikonur Cosmodrome Site 250 in Kazakhstan. It failed to reach orbit. Polyus was designed to destroy SDI satellites with a megawatt carbon-dioxide laser.

In 2004 – Using a computer with a 2.4-GHz Pentium 4 processor, Josh Findley discovered the 41st Mersenne prime, 224,036,583 – 1. Mersenne primes have a close connection to perfect numbers, which are equal to the sum of their proper divisors.

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In 1973 – The United States launched Skylab, the country’s first space station as part of the Apollo space program.

In 1984 – According to his Facebook profile Mark Zuckerberg was born in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He would grow up to found Facebook.

In 1992 – Texas Instruments decided to take on the dominance of Intel, announcing its own 486 microprocessor chip. Cyrix corp. designed the chip for TI, but it proved unsuccessful in weakening Intel’s dominance.

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In 1884 – A group of people interested in the new field of electricity met in New York to start the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

In 1939 – Franklin Doolittle put experimental station W1XPW on the air, making it the first commercial FM radio station in the United States. The station later became WDRC-FM in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

In 1958 – The trademark “Velcro” was registered, protecting the name of the multi-purpose material that manages cables everywhere.

In 1976 – Atari released the video game “Breakout,” making the paddle controller useful for something besides “Pong.

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In 1936 – University of Washington education professor August Dvorak received a patent for his new more efficient keyboard layout. While widely recognised as superior to the QWERTY layout, the Dvorak keyboard is not widely used.

In 1941 – German engineer Konrad Zuse presented the Z3, the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. It succeeded the Z1 which was the first binary digital computer.

In 2005 – Elijah Wood revealed the Xbox 360 on the MTV Music Awards. Microsoft didn’t announce price or release dates, only saying it would arrive for sale by the end of the year.

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In 1951 – Jay Forrester filed a patent application for matrix core memory. Professor Forrester led a team at MIT that developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind. It was the first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high-speed.

In 1979 – Daniel Bricklin and Robert Frankston gave the first demonstration of VisiCalc, the program that made the Apple II popular with businesses.

In 1997 – Deep Blue won its final match against Chess master Garry Kasparov, becoming the first computer to defeat a chess champion in match play.

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In 1946 – The US launched its second V-2 rocket at White Sands Proving Ground, which became the first successful launch of a large rocket on US soil. The rocket climbed straight up then pitched to the north reaching an altitude of 71 miles and impacted about 35 miles uprange.

In 1960 – The nuclear-powered USS Triton submarine arrived in Groton, Connecticut, after completing the first completely submerged circumnavigation of Earth.

In 2011 – Google announced its Open Hardware Platform and the Google Music service which would eventually become Google Play Music.

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In 1790 – The French National Assembly acted on a motion from Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand to create a simple, stable, decimal system of measurement units. The earliest metre unit chosen was the length of a pendulum with a half-period of a second. The system eventually evolved into the metric system.

In 1988 – A fire broke out in the main switching room of the Hinsdale Central Office of the Illinois Bell telephone company, causing a telephone service outage for more than 40,000 local phone lines. It was considered to be the ‘worst telecommunications disaster in US telephone industry history.’

In 1995 – The New York Times announced it would join eight other newspapers in the New Century Network. The network aimed to connect local online news services into a national service on the Web.

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