1954 – Daniel Kottke was born in Bronxville, New York. He would go on to befriend Steve Jobs at Reed College, assemble the first Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak and work on the original Macintosh team.

1975 – Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed a partnership in Albuquerque New Mexico. The venture was later named Micro-soft.

1994 – Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Mosaic Communications Corp, which they later renamed Netscape Communications Corp. Andreesen developed the Mosaic browser while at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.

2013 – Facebook announced Facebook Home, an integrated Android app that took over the home and lock screens. The HTC First would come April 12 as the first featured Facebook Phone to run Home.

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1966 – Luna 10 became the first spacecraft to enter lunar orbit. It completed its first orbit in two hours 58 minutes.

1973 – Martin Cooper, general manager of Motorola’s Communications Systems Division made the first handheld portable phone call from a New York City street to Joel S. Engel at rival Bell Labs. Presumably he gloated at least a little.

1981 – Adam Osborne unveiled the Osborne 1 at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It cost $1,795 at retail.

2000 – US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled Microsoft violated the nation’s antitrust laws by using its monopoly position in personal computer operating systems to stifle competition.

2010 – The first Apple iPad went on sale in the US, starting at $499.

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1973 – Lexis launched Computerized Legal Searching. It was limited to searching the full text of cases in Ohio and New York.

1978 – The patent expired on Swiss inventor George de Mestral’s invention of a hook and loop fastener he called Velcro. Soon children everywhere no longer had to learn to tie shoes quite so early in life.

1980 – Microsoft Corporation announced its first hardware product the Z80 SoftCard for Apple. It was a microprocessor on a printed circuit board that plugged into the Apple II and sold for $349.00.

2014 – Amazon announced Fire TV, it’s set-top TV box to deliver streaming TV shows and video games. It also included voice commands spoken into a Bluetooth remote control.

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1976 – Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne decided to change their garage project into a partnership and Ron Wayne typed up the papers. Wayne would leave the partnership after 11 days and Apple Comupter would be incorporated the following January.

2004 – In one of the best April Fool’s jokes ever, Google launched a real product. Weren’t expecting that, were you Internet? Gmail launched in invite-only mode, making a Gmail account temporarily prestigious in the geek world.

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1939 – Harvard and IBM signed an agreement to build the Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). It weighed 5 tons and read data from paper tape and punch cards.

1993 – Richard Depew accidentally posted 200 identical messages to news.admin.policy while testing some auto-moderation software. It became the first USENET postings to be referred to as spam.

1998 – After three years of development and much wrangling with the Warcraft engine it was originally built on, Blizzard released the iconic game Starcraft.

2013 – IBM shut down the Roadrunner supercomputer, the first computer to run at more than one petaflop.

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240 BC – Chinese astronomers observed a new broom-shaped “star” in the sky. It was the first confirmed sighting of Halley’s Comet.

1950 – Bell Telephone Laboratories announced the invention of a new kind of electric eye called the phototransistor. Dr. John Northrup Shive invented the transistor, which operated by light rather than electricity.

1951 – The Census UNIVAC System was accepted and subsequently devoted almost exclusively to tabulating results of the 1950 Census of Population and Housing. It was the first UNIVAC and was capable of completing 1,905 operations per second, which it stored on magnetic tape.

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1941 – 80% of US AM radio frequencies were reassigned to new channels as part of the North American Radio Broadcasting Agreement.

1945 – German soldiers blew the launch tracks for the V-1 rocket site near Letelle, Netherlands, ending the rocket attacks.

1974 – NASA’s Mariner 10 became the first space probe to cross the orbit of Mercury about 704 km from the surface.

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1905 – Cornelius Ehret of Rosemont, Pennsylvania received a patent for the “Art of Transmitting Intelligence.” It was the forerunner of the modern fax.

1935 – Robert Goddard launched the first rocket equipped with gyroscopic controls near Roswell, New Mexico. The rocket reached an altitude of 4,800 feet and flew 13,000 feet at a speed of 550 mph.

1979- A combination of equipment malfunction and human error caused a partial reactor meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania. While no injuries or deaths have been attributed to the accident, it changed US nuclear attitudes significantly.

2016 – The first Oculus Rift VR headsets for consumers began being delivered. Co-founder Palmer Luckey hand-delivered the first one the weekend before to Ross Martin in Alaska who had been the first to pre-order.

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1850 – San José was incorporated as one of the first cities in California and was the site of the first state capital. It would lose the capital to Vallejo in 1852 but eventually become the center of Silicon Valley and the de facto capital of the technology world.

1884 – The first successful long-distance telephone conversation took place. Bell and Watson experimented with a line of two twelve gauge hard-drawn copper wires connecting Boston and New York City. The line worked for about ninety minutes before finally falling.

1899 – Guglielmo Marconi made the first wireless transmission from France to England. A message was sent 32 miles from Wimereaux near Boulogne, France, to the South Foreland lighthouse near Dover, England. This became an important alternative to laying undersea cables for telegraphy.

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1973 – Larry Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan. He would go on to help invent and co-found Google.

1976 – Queen Elizabeth II sent the first royal email, from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern as a part of a demonstration of networking technology.

1999 – The “Melissa” worm showed up in a file on the alt.sex usenet group and became the first successful mass-mailing worm. The worm’s creator, David L. Smith, apparently named the worm after a lap dancer in Florida.

Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.