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 wouldn’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 1893 – Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated the Kinetoscope for the first time at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.

In 1941 – British destroyers captured a German U-110 submarine south of Iceland and recovered a naval version of the highly secret cipher machine known as Enigma. The sub was sunk to hide its capture and the machine taken to Bletchley Park where Alan Turing and other cryptographers broke the naval code.

In 1989 – Apple previewed its new System 7 operating system at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose. It was announced users would need at least a Mac Plus to run it as well as 2 megs of RAM.

In 2006 – Nintendo announced that its next game console, previously referred to as the Nintendo Revolution, would be called the Nintendo Wii.

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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 at the time 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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In 1895 – The first demonstration of A A Popov’s electromagnetic wave receiver took place at a meeting of the Russian Physical Chemical Society in St.- Petersburg. It was essential to the development of wireless communications.

In 1895 – Otto Steiger received a patent for the Millionaire calculating machine. Switzerland’s Hans Egli made 4,700 of the 120-pound things. The Millionaire’s chief feature was the ability to do direct multiplication with a single rotation of the handle!

In 1952 – British radar engineer Geoffrey Dummer introduced the concept of the integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C.

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In 1896 – Samuel Pierpoint Langley’s Aerodrome No. 5 made the first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft of substantial size.

In 1949 – The EDSAC, the first practical stored program computer, performed its first calculation. It operated at a speed of 714 operations per second.

In 2002 – Apple’s Steve Jobs previewed Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar during his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. It featured a handwriting technology dubbed Inkwell, an iChat instant messenger client, QuickTime 6 integration and more.

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In 1961 – First NASA astronaut Alan Shepard piloted the Freedom 7 Mercury capsule on its 15-minute 28-second suborbital flight.

In 1992 – Id Software released Wolfenstein 3-D. It wasn’t the original first person shooter, but it launched the form into widespread popularity.

In 1999 – Microsoft shipped Windows 98 SE to manufacturers. The new version included Internet Connection Sharing, Internet Explorer 5, Windows NetMeeting 3.

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In 1995 – German electronics company Escom AG bought the rights to the name, patents and intellectual property of Commodore Electronics Ltd. for $10 million. Commodore had gone bankrupt the year before.

In 2000 – The “I Love You” virus spread to 55 million computers around the world, hijacking hard drives and deleting, renaming, or damaging files. The damage reached billions of dollars.

In 2004 – Apple announced that Steve Jobs would kick off that year’s Worldwide Developers Conference by talking about Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

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In 1978 – Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sent the first unsolicited mass commercial email to 600 west coast ARPANET users. The message informed users of DEC’s new computer and operating system with ARPANET support, the DECSYSTEM-2020 and TOPS-20.

In 1997 – In New York City, Gary Kasparov began his re-match match against IBM’s Deep Blue computer. He had won the previous match in February 1996 4-2.

In 2000 – A “geocache” was hidden outside Beaver Creek, Oregon, kicking off the first “Great American GPS Stash Hunt” and the hobby now called geocaching.

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