In 1890 – The U.S. Census Bureau began using Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine for the first time. This gave Hollerith the basis to later found his Tabulating Machine Company, which was one of four companies that merged to form IBM.

In 1944 – The Colossus Mark 2 was put into service at Bletchley Park in Great Britain, just in time for the invasion at Normandy.

In 1999 – The Windows version of music-sharing program Napster was released.

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In 1941 – Electric eye detectors were first used to measure high-jumping height. A track meet of the Schenectady, NY, Patrolmen’s Association used equipment designed by General Electric, comprising of a movable light source and four electric eyes.

In 1943 – Chief consultant John Mauchly and chief engineer John Presper Eckert began leading the military commission on the new computer ENIAC. They would take one year to design the computer and 18 months to build it.

In 2006 – Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay website and shut it down. The site relaunched from servers outside Sweden.

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In 1966- NASA launched Surveyor 1. It achieved the first soft landing on the Moon by the United States and demonstrated the technology necessary to achieve landing and operations on the lunar surface for the manned missions to follow.

In 1979 – IRM was founded in Japan with the purpose of selling electric applied game machines. Two years later they started a subsidiary called Japan Capsule Computer. They eventually spun that division off as Capcom.

In 1987 – North American Philips Company introduced the compact disc video (CD-V), a 12 cm (4-3/4 inch) CD-sized implementation of storage for full motion video and CD-audio.

In 1996 – Intel planned to announce a video phone.Frank Gill, executive vice president of Intel’s Internet Communications Group, said he expected hundreds of thousands of video-phone ready computers would be sold that year. Video phones didn’t take off then.

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In 1935 – Workers poured the last concrete at the iconic Hoover Dam hydroelectric site. Four months later after the concrete was well and truly set, President Franklin Roosevelt dedicated the dam.

In 1992 – John Sculley introduced the Apple Newton at CES. The first one unveiled on stage had dead batteries and didn’t work.

In 1999 – Space Shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with the International Space Station.

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In 1936 – Alan Turing submitted his paper “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem“ for publication in which he postulated hypothetical Turing Machines would be capable of performing any conceivable mathematical computation if it were representable as an algorithm.

In 1959 – A committee of government, military and business computer experts met at the Pentagon and laid the foundations for the COBOL computer language.

In 1971 – The U.S.S.R. launched Mars 3. It would arrive at Mars in December and its lander would become the first spacecraft to land successfully on Mars.

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In 1931 – Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took the first manned trip into the stratosphere when they rode in a pressurized cabin attached to a balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet.

In 1959 – After almost a decade, MIT shut down its Whirlwind computer. It ran 35 hours a week at 90 percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory.

In 1986 – Dragon Quest (also known as Dragon Warrior) was released in Japan. It combined the the full-screen map of Ultima with the battle and statistics-oriented screens of Wizardry and paved the way for RPG games.

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In 1969 – Apollo 10 returned to Earth after a successful eight-day test of all the components needed for the manned moon landing.

In 1981 – Satya Pal Asija received the first US patent for a computer software program. It was called Swift-answer. The patent took seven years to issue, and the validity of software patents has been debated ever since.

In 1995 – Bill Gates authored an internal memo entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave” calling the Internet the most important development since the IBM personal computer. Microsoft soon got to work on its own Web browser.

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In 1945 – Arthur C. Clarke began privately circulating copies of his paper “The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications” which suggested geostationary space stations could be used for worldwide television broadcasts.

In 1949 – Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia. He would later go by the name Joybubbles and develop a talent to whistle at 2600 Hz, allowing him to control phone switching equipment.

In 1961 – US President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech to Congress declaring the United States would go to the Moon.

In 1994 – CERN hosted the first international World Wide Web conference, which continued through May 27.

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In 1825 – William Sturgeon exhibited the electromagnet in a practical form for the first time. The exhibition accompanied the reading of a paper, recorded in the Transactions of the Society of Arts for 1825 (Vol xliii, p.38).

In 1908 – John Bardeen was born. He grew up to win the Nobel Prize twice, once for inventing the transistor, and once for figuring out superconductivity.

In 1995 – Sun Microsystems Inc. announced the programming language Java and the accompanying Web browser HotJava at the SunWorld ’95 convention.

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In 1973 – Bob Metcalfe of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center wrote a memo on an IBM selectric typewriter, outlining how to connect personal computers to a shared printer. Metcalfe says “If Ethernet was invented in any one memo, by any one person, or on any one day, this was it.”

In 1980 – Namco released an arcade game called Puck-Man. When it was released in the US in October the name was altered to Pac-Man.

In 1990 – Microsoft released Windows 3.0. It featured big improvements in interface and multitasking. It’s Control Panel feature caught the eye of Apple which sued, and lost.

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