In 1954 – At 5:30 PM the world’s first nuclear power station was connected to the power grid 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.

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.

And In 1998 – Microsoft released Windows 98 with less hype than Windows 95, but more consumer focus. Windows 98 was the last version of Windows that was based on DOS.

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. Teh 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.

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.

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.

In 1948 – The Small-Scale Experimental Machine, SSEM took 52 minutes to run its first program, written by Professor Tom Kilburn. SSEM was the first computer to store programs electronically.

In 1981 – IBM retired the last of its “STRETCH” mainframes. These mainframes were part of the 7000 series that made up the company’s first transistorized computers.

In 2004 – SpaceShipOne became the first privately developed piloted vehicle to leave Earth’s atmosphere and reach the edge of space.

In 1840 – Samuel F.B. Morse received a U.S. patent for “Improvement in the mode of communicating information by signals by the application of electro-magnetism.” We call it Morse code.

1963 – A hotline was established between the Soviet Union and the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis. While later it would become the famous “red telephone” it started as a teletype.

In 2003 – The WikiMedia Foundation was founded in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales to oversee the various Wiki projects like Wikipedia.

In 240 B.C. – Greek astronomer, geographer, mathematician and librarian in Alexandria, Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference. His data was based on the length of shadows in different locations and simple geometry, but his calculations were not far wrong.

In 1623 – Mathematician Blaise Pascal was born in France. He invented a digital calculator, the Pascaline, to help his father in his tax-collecting work.

In 2003 – Apple released dock connector-to-USB 2.0 cables and drivers for third-generation iPods. Previous iPods had been FireWire only.

In 1908 – Scottish electrical engineer, Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, published a brief letter in the journal Nature, describing the essentials of making and receiving television images. He described using an electron gun in the neck of a cathode-ray tube to shoot electrons toward the flat end of the tube, which was coated with light-emitting phosphor. Others like Farnsworth and Baird would make just such devices years later.

In 2002 – Kevin Warwick had his chip removed. Warwick implanted the chip earlier that year in order to experiment with human-computer interaction, culminating in a direct connection to his wife.

In 2009 – The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a NASA robotic spacecraft was launched on its mission to colelct information abotu the Moon, particularly around the poles.

In 1862 – During the US Civil War, W.H. Fancher and C.M. French of Waterloo, New York, received a patent for the “New and Improved Ordnance Plow,” a horse-drawn plow with a gun attached.

In 1936 Edwin Armstrong presented FM radio at FCC headquarters. Armstrong played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. “[I]f the audience of 50 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room.”

In 1997 – Programmers deciphered code written in the impenetrable Data Encryption Standard, the strongest legally exportable encryption software in the United States. The hackers organized over the Internet and cracked the software in five months, proving that stronger encryption was needed.