In 1979 – Sony introduced the Sony Walkman TPS-L2. It weighed 14 ounces, was blue and silver, and had a second earphone jack. It was originally marketed in the US as the Sound-About and in the UK as the Stowaway.

In 1991 – Finnish Prime Minister Harri Holkeri made the world’s first GSM call over a privately operated network to Vice Mayor Kaarina Suonio in Tampere. The Prime Minister used Nokia gear on GSM’s original 900MHz band.

In 1984 – The book Neuromancer by William Gibson was published. The cyberpunk novel would go on to win the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards. The book is credited with popularizing the term cyberspace and laying out a blueprint for what the World Wide Web would become.

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In 1945 – The first draft of a Report on the EDVAC was published. It discussed the advantages of using just one large internal memory, in which instructions as well as data could be held.

In 1948 – Bell Labs introduced the point-contact transistor, demonstrated by its inventors, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at a press conference in Murray Hill, NJ.

In 1948 – The FCC authorization of recording devices in connection with interstate or foreign telephone service went into effect. Users of the service had to be given adequate notice including a tone warning signal at regular intervals.

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In 1975 – Steve Wozniak built the first prototype of the Apple I, the first computer to show letters on the screen as you typed them.

In 1995 – The Space Shuttle Atlantis docked with the space station Mir, the first-ever docking of a Shuttle to a Space Station.

In 2007 – The Apple iPhone went on sale for the first time.

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In 1928 – Austrian Friedrich Schmiedl launched his first experimental rocket from a balloon 50,000 feet over Graz, Austria. The rocket was not recovered, but later tests were successful leading to rocket delivered mail.

In 1965 – Officials in the US and Europe conducted the first commercial telephone conversation over satellite Early Bird I. The satellite also began operating for television transmissions “live via satellite.”

In 1982 – Microsoft unveiled a new corporate logo with the famous “blibbet” of horizontal lines in the first O. New packaging, and a comprehensive set of retail dealer support materials came along with the blibbet.

In 2011 – Google announced their latest social network attempt. Google + let you put friends in circles and share different things with different circles.

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In 1967 – The world’s first ATM was installed at a Barclays Bank branch in Enfield Town, England, United Kingdom.

In 1972 – Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney filed incorporation papers for Atari, Inc. and got ready to release it’s first product, a game called Pong.

In 1995 – Spyglass Inc. went public, the year after it began distributing its Spyglass Mosaic Web browser. The Spyglass browser powered the first version of Internet Explorer and had code in IE all the way up to IE 7.

In 2008 – Bill Gates spent his last day as an employee of the company he founded, Microsoft, to focus on the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. He remained Chairman of the Board.

In 2012 – Sergey Brin interrupted a Google announcement of the new Google + app to show off the Project Glass smart glasses by having sky divers wearing the prototypes, jump out of a zeppelin and land on the Moscone Convention Center in downtown San Francisco, while streaming video in a Google hangout.

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In 1954 – At 5:30 PM the world’s first nuclear power station was connected to the power grid in Obninsk, U.S.S.R., a small town 60 miles south of Moscow.

In 1974 – At 8:01 AM, a supermarket cashier scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum across a bar-code scanner at Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. It was the first product ever checked out by Universal Product Code.

In 1997 – The US Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Communications Decency Act as violating the first amendment protecting free speech.

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In 1967 – The very first Consumer Electronics Show opened in New York occupying the Americana and New York Hilton Hotels. It was devoted to home entertainment electronics and featured such advances as portable color TVs and video tape recorders.

In 1981 – After six years as a company, Microsoft incorporated in the state of Washington.

In 1998 – Microsoft released Windows 98 with less hype than Windows 95, but more consumer focus. It was the last version of Windows meant to be based on DOS however Windows ME, while meant to be based on the NT kernel, ended up being the last based on DOS.

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In 1963 – The first demonstration of a home video recorder was made at the BBC News Studios in London. A Telcan, short for television in a can, could record up to 20 minutes of black and white television using quarter-inch tape on a reel to reel system.

In 1993 – “Severe Tire Damage,” conducted the first known Internet concert. The band set their gear up on the patios of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and sent their show out on the Internet Multicast Backbone, or Mbone.

In 2000 – President Clinton gave his weekly radio address live on the Internet for the first time.

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In 1912 – Alan Turing was born in London, although his father worked for the Indian Civil Service and his parents lived in India. He helped break the code of the German enigma machine and developed the Turing test for artificial intelligence.

In 1943 – Vint Cerf was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He grew up to become known as one of the fathers of the Internet, most famously for his co-creation of the protocols underlying TCP/IP.

In 1983 – Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel ran the first successful test of the automated, distributed Domain Name System at the University of Southern California School of Engineering’s Information Sciences.

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In 1675 – Britain’s King Charles II established the observatory at Greenwich with the main purpose of determining precise longitudes to aid in navigation. This purpose led to Greenwich being marked as the prime meridian and later Greenwich Mean Time.

In 1799 – The first definitive prototype metre bars (mètre des Archives) and kilograms were constructed in platinum.

In 1999 – The first demonstration of live rats directly controlling a robot arm with their thoughts was published by Nature Neuroscience.

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