1911 – The Tabulating Company (founded by Herman Hollerith), the Computing Scale Company, and the International Time Recording Company merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York. They would later change the company name to International Business Machines,and later just IBM.

In 1963 – Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space, orbiting the Earth 48 times.l

In 1977 – Software Development Laboratories was incorporated in Redwood Shores, California, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. They later came up with the catchier name, Oracle.

1869, John Wesley Hyatt and Isaiah Hyatt received a U.S. patent for pyroxylin plastic, which they called “Improved Method of Making Solid Collodion” (No. 91,341). The process was slightly flammable, but was essential to the development of plastics.

In 1878 – Photographer Eadweard Muybridge used high-speed photography to capture a horse’s motion. The photos showed the horse with all four feet in the air during some parts of its stride. Stop-motion photography was born.
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In 1949 – Jay Forrester wrote down a proposal for core memory in his notebook. Core memory was the standard for computer memory until advances in semiconductors in the 1970s.

1822 – Charles Babbage announced his difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables”.

1941 – John Mauchly visited John Atanasoff in Iowa City to see his computer. The two computer pioneers later battled in court over who was the legal inventor of the electronic digital computer.

In 1951 – The U.S. Census Bureau officially put UNIVAC I into service calling it the world’s first commercial computer.

In 1925 – Charles Jenkins publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of silhouette pictures and sound, becoming the first person to demonstrate TV in the US.

In 1944 – Germany launched the first guided missile attack in history, sending V-1 rockets into London.

In 1983 – Pioneer 10 became the first human-made object to pass outside Pluto’s orbit and leave the central solar system.

In 1897 – Karl Elsener legally registered his “soldiers’ knife” for use by the Swiss army. The original had a wooden handle, a blade, a screwdriver and a can opener.

In 1936 – The first radio station with 500,000 watt power began testing as W8XAR in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Test broadcasts took place from 1 AM to 6 AM. The station is now known as KDKA.

In 1997 – 3Com Corp. and U.S. Robotics Corp. completed their merger. The two companies combined US Robotics modems with 3Com’s interface cards.

In 1978 – Texas Instruments introduced the Speak & Spell, the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. It used linear predictive coding to make a mathematical model of the human vocal tract and predict a speech sample.

In 1997 – Philippe Kahn took the first cameraphone photograph of his newborn daughter and then wirelessly transmitted the photo to more than 2,000 people around the world. He had hacked together a digital camera and a phone. Kahn went on to form the company LightSurf.

In 1998 – Compaq Computer paid $9.1 billion to acquire what remained of Digital Equipment Corporation, the company that had brought the world PDP and VAX.

In 1943 – Hungarians László and Georg Bíró, while living in Argentina, patented the first successful implementation of the ballpoint pen.

1977 – A few days after going on sale, Apple began shipping the Apple II for the first time.

In 2003 – The Spirit Rover launched on a Delta II rocket, beginning NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission.

In 1902 – Joe Horn and Frank Hardart opened the first US Automat at 818 Chestnut St. in Philadelphia. The waiterless restaurant charged a nickel for most dishes.

In 1931 – Robert Goddard received a patent for rocket-fueled aircraft design (U.S. No. 1,809,271). Sadly we do not have a lot of rocket-planes in operation.

1986 – The Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center opened to support the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET, which linked five supercomputer centers. NSFNET would eventually allow commercial uses and transition to the open Internet.

In 1637 – Rene Descartes published “Discourse on the Method for Guiding One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences”, which formed the basis of the modern scientific method. It’s also the source of the quote “I think, therefore I am.”

In 1949 – George Orwell’s book 1984 was published. The book still affects notions of privacy and inspired the conic Apple commercial that introduced the Macintosh computer.

In 1955 – Tim Berners-Lee was born in London. He grew up to develop the World Wide Web.

In 2008 – Apple announced Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

In 1954 – Computer science hero Alan Turing killed himself by eating an apple containing cyanide. Turing formulated the famous Turing test and broke code at Bletchley park during World War II.

In 1975 – Sony introduced the Betamax video recorder for sale.

In 1980 – The first U.S. solar power plant was dedicated at the Natural Bridge National Monument, Utah.