In 1885 – Gottlieb Daimler received a patent for adding an internal combustion engine to a bicycle to make the first gasoline-driven motorcycle.

In 1963 – A direct line of communication between the leaders of the USA and USSR, dubbed “The Hotline” began operation.

In 1969 – BBN delivered the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) to the Network Measurements Center at UCLA. It was built from a Honeywell DDP 516 computer with 12K of memory, and would be used in October to make the first Internet connection with Stanford. Graduate students Vinton Cerf, Steve Crocker, Bill Naylor, Jon Postel, and Mike Wingfield were charged with installation.

In 1982 – A copyright was issued to 16-year-old V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai for a computer program he called “EMAIL,” short for “electronic mail.” While Ayyadurai may not be considered the inventor of email he definitely deserves credit for establishing the name.

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In 1831 – Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, which is used in power generation and power transmission by generators, transformers, induction motors, electric motors, synchronous motors, and solenoids.

In 1965 – Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, orbiting 100 miles above the Earth in Gemini 5 talked with aquanaut M. Scott Carpenter in Sealab II, 205 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. It happened to be Cooper’s wedding anniversary.

In 1990 – The British Computer Misuse Act went into effect. The Act resulted from a long debate in the 1980s over failed prosecutions of hackers.

In 2003 – Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis founded Skype, the Voice over Internet Provider that would go on to dominate the space.

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In 1845 – Scientific American began publication with the issue for this day. It would become the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States.

In 1991 – The crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis sent an electronic mail message using AppleLink. The message read: “Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first Applelink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here!”

In 2009 – Apple released Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard featuring many minor improvements and integration with Microsoft Exchange.

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In 1962 – NASA launched the Mariner 2 unmanned space mission to Venus.

In 1989 – The first direct-to-home TV satellite launched from Cape Canaveral. Marco Polo I delivered the British Satellite Broadcasting service to homes in the UK.

In 2003 – Fairbanks, Alaska got the world’s biggest UPS backup. The city hooked up the world’s largest storage battery, built to provide an uninterrupted power supply of 40 megawatts.

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In 1938 – A New York radio station first used the Philips-Miller system of tape recording on a radio broadcast.

In 1984 – Miss Manners confronted her first computer issue. The columnist responded to a reader’s concern about typing personal correspondence on a personal computer.

In 1996 – Netscape Communications Corp. announced it had partnered with several other big companies to create a software company called Navio Corp. Navio was meant to create an operating system to compete with Windows.

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In 1609 – Galileo Galilei craftily beat a Dutch telescope maker to an appointment with the Doge of Venice. Galileo impressed the Doge and received a lifetime appointment and a doubled salary. Later that autumn, Galileo pointed his telescope to the Moon, and trouble began.

In 1981 – Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Saturn. Eight years later on the same day in 1989, Voyager 2 would make its closest approach to Neptune.

In 1991 – 21-year-old Finnish student Linus Torvalds wrote a newsgroup post about a free operating system he was working on. He said it was “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu.” His OS would eventually be called Linux.

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In 1456 – According to a handwritten note by illustrator Heinrich Cremer, the final binding of the Gutenberg Bible took place.

In 1995 – Microsoft released Windows 95. During development it was referred to as Windows 4.0 or by the internal codename “Chicago.”

In 2001 – WebKit received its first commit of code from Apple. The Safari browser appeared two years later and WebKit was open sourced in 2005.

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In 1852 – The first time signals were transmitted by telegraph from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

In 1966 – Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photograph of Earth from orbit around the Moon.

In 1993 – Nintendo agreed to use Silicon Graphics Inc. technology in a video game player it was developing.

In 2012 – Microsoft unveiled a new logo for the first time in 25 years, opting for simple squares of color and block type with an overlapping ‘f’ and ‘t’.

In 2013 – Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced he would retire within the next 12 months.

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In 1932 – The BBC began public television broadcasts.

In 1955 – The first computer user group, SHARE was founded by users of IBM’s Model 704 computer. The first meeting was held in the basement conference room of the RAND Corporation.

In 2007 – The Storm botnet sent out a record 57 million virus-infected emails. It failed to take down the Internet.

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In 1888 – William Seward Burroughs received four patents, including one for a ‘Calculating Machine’. It would lead to the creation of the Burroughs Adding Machine Company.

In 1973 – Sergey Brin was born in Moscow. His family emigrated to the US in 1979. He would grow up to co-develop a search engine with Larry Page and co-found Google.

In 1993 – NASA lost contact with the Mars Observer three days before it was supposed to enter orbit. As it began to pressurize fuel tanks, the spacecraft’s transmitters went silent and it was never heard from again.

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Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.