1888 – John Logie Baird was born in Helensburgh, Scotland. He would grow up to invent the first working television system in the world.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/baird_logie.shtml

1912 – The US Department of Commerce issued its first experimental radio license in compliance with the International Radio Convention and Radio Act of 1912. St. Joseph’s College received a license with serial number 1 to operate 2 kilowatts station 3XJ.

http://www.nrcdxas.org/articles/1stfacts.txt

2004 – Adam Curry launched an RSS feed of audio recordings called “Daily Source Code” and podcasting became a thing.

http://radio-weblogs.com/0001014/categories/dailySourceCode/2004/08/13.html

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1877 – Thomas Edison sketched his idea for the phonograph, and may have even completed a model. The first working model wasn’t completed until December 6.

http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/recon/jb_recon_phongrph_1.html

1960 – The first NASA communications satellite, Echo 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral. The satellite was a balloon of mylar polyester film.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/masterCatalog.do?sc=1960-009A

1977 – The space shuttle Enterprise carried out its first free flight test, when the orbiter was released from the back of a 747 in flight.

http://abcnews.go.com/Archives/video/aug-12-1977-shuttle-enterprise-test-9563114

1981 – IBM introduced the model 5150 personal computer. It had a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 microprocessor and used Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc25/pc25_birth.html

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1942 – Hedy Markey and composer George Antheil received a US patent for a frequency-hopping device. The technique has led to many advancements in wireless technology including Wi-Fi. Markey was better known under her stage name of Hedy Lamarr.
http://www.google.com/patents?id=R4BYAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1950 – Steve Wozniak was born in San Jose, California. He would grow up to invent the first successful personal computer, and revolutionize desktop computing.
http://mashable.com/category/steve-wozniak/

1965 – Shinji Mikami was born in Japan. He grew up to become a video game designer for Capcom, revolutionizing survival-horror games with his popular series, Resident Evil.
https://www.giantbomb.com/shinji-mikami/3040-32999/

1994 – Net Market founder Dan Kohn watched his friend buy a Sting CD online from Net Market using his credit card. This is sometimes considered the first ecommerce transaction.
http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2015/11/26/the-first-ecommerce-transaction-wasnt-a-pizza-hut-pizza-or-weed-it-was-a-sting-cd/

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1519 – Ferdinand Magellan set sail to find that pesky trade route that Columbus was looking for, and instead circumnavigated the globe. Well, at least his ship did.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1998-08-10/news/9808100080_1_serial-killings-james-smithson-new-brunswick

1990 – The Magellan space probe, named after Ferdinand Magellan, reached Venus, beginning its mission to map the planet’s surface.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/magellan.html

2004 – The iTunes Music Store library passed the mark of 1,000,000 songs available.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/08/10iTunes-Music-Store-Catalog-Tops-One-Million-Songs.html

2015 – Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced a new company called Alphabet had been created to oversee a slimmed down Google as well as other companies Google owned like Calico, Nest and more. Sundar Pichai was named CEO of the new Google. Alphabet continued to be traded under the stock tickers GOOG and GOOGL.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/08/google-alphabet.html

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1859 – US Patent no. 25,076 was issued to Nathan Ames of Saugus, Mass. for the first escalator-type moving staircase.
http://www.google.com/patents/US25076

1927 – Computer pioneer Marvin Minsky was born in New York City. Minsky grew up to become a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence research and wrote the book “The Society of Mind.”
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/384568/Marvin-Minsky

1995 – Netscape Communications staged an IPO. Shares opened at $28 and shot up to $75 per share in one day, becoming one of the indicators of the beginning of the dot-com boom.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4792365

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1876 – Thomas Edison received a US patent for a mimeograph, which combined with an invention by A. B. Dick led to the first widely successful mimeograph machine.
http://museumofprinting.org/pdfs/MOPWinter07.pdf

1908 – For the first time in public, Wilbur Wright showed off the Wright Brothers’ flying machine at the racecourse in Le Mans, France. French doubts about the Wright Brothers’ claims to flight were put to rest for the time being.

http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/1908-the-year-the-airplane-went-public-8791602/?no-ist

2007 – Barbara Morgan became the first educator to safely reach space on the US. Space Shuttle Endeavour.

http://idahoptv.org/productions/specials/barbaramorgan/2007Aug8.cfm

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1944 – IBM officially presented the Mark I computer, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, or ASCC, to Harvard. The computer produced reliable results and ran continuously.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/markI/markI_chronology5.html

1955 – Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering released Japan’s first commercially produced transistor radio, the TR-55, sold under the company’s new name, Sony.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/08/dayintech_0807/

1966 – Jimmy Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama. He grew up to co-found Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales

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1943 – Jon Postel was born in Altadena, California. He created the Internet’s address system, and administered it for 30 years as director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

http://www.internetsociety.org/what-we-do/grants-and-awards/awards/postel-service-award/ten-year-tribute-jon-postel

1963 – Skilled hacker, future government prisoner, and eventual famous security expert Kevin Mitnick was born in Van Nuys, California.

http://www.nndb.com/people/448/000022382/

1991 – Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary of his WorldWideWeb Project to alt.hypertext and pointed to a simple browser and a Web page describing the project. Thus the WWW became a publicly available service on the Internet.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!msg/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoWTAY/bJGhZyooXzkJ

1997 – At MacWorld in Boston, Microsoft announced it would invest $150 million in Apple, and continue to make Microsoft Office for Mac for at least five years. The two companies also ended their lawsuit.

https://news.microsoft.com/1997/08/06/microsoft-and-apple-affirm-commitment-to-build-next-generation-software-for-macintosh/

2014 – The European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe became the first spacecraft to maneuver alongside a speeding body as it caught up with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-28659783

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1858 – The west end of the first transatlantic cable was completed when the ship Niagara anchored at the Newfoundland coast having laid 1,016 miles of telegraph cable.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/first-transatlantic-telegraph-cable-completed

1914 – The American Traffic Signal Co. installed their first electric traffic light at East 105th street and Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, Ohio.

http://allthingsclevelandohio.blogspot.com/2008/03/cleveland-birthplace-of-first-electric.html

1921 – The first radio broadcast of a baseball game happened on KDKA from Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field. Harold W. Arlin announced the game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies.

http://www.digitaldeliftp.com/Recommendations/KDKAFirst1921.htm

2011 – The Juno space probe launched on a mission to explore Jupiter.

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/overview/index.html

2012 – The Mars Science Laboratory, known as the Curiosity Rover successfully landed on the surface of Mars in one of the most complicated automated landings ever, involving a sky crane.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/mars-curiosity-rover-lands-successfully-mars/story?id=16934302#.UeHYyz54Zvg

2014 – Justin.TV announced its closure. It had started as a lifecasting channel for Justin Kan and spawned the massively successful Twitch video game streaming channel.

http://gigaom.com/2014/08/05/live-streaming-pioneer-justin-tv-shuts-down-as-company-focuses-on-twitch/

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1921 – The first facsimile was transmitted by radio across the Atlantic Ocean using the Belinograph invented by Edouard Belin. A message written by C. V. Van Anda, managing editor of The New York Times and addressed to the Matin in Paris, was sent in seven minutes.

http://todayinsci.com/B/Belin_Edouard/Belinogram1921-NYT.htm

1988 – A computer halted an engine test in preparation for the launch of the space shuttle Discovery. The flight would be the first since the Challenger explosion in 1986.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/August/4/

2007 – NASA’s Phoenix spaceship launched on its mission to survey the Martian Arctic in search of water, geological discoveries, and evidence of conditions for biological life.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/phoenix/launch/index.html

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