1947 – The aircraft-carrier Midway became the first US vessel from which a long-range rocket was launched. The rocket had a mishap though, and exploded at 5,000 feet.

1954 – US President Eisenhower waved a ceremonial “neutron wand” over a neutron counter in Denver, Colorado, to signal a bulldozer in Shippingport, Pennsylvania to begin construction on the first commercial nuclear power plant. It was part of the “Atoms for Peace” program.

1997 – The USS Grace Murray Hopper, guided missile destroyer, was commissioned by the US Navy in San Francisco, named after the computer pioneer.

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1977 – NASA launched Voyager 1 after a brief delay. Although it was launched 16 days after Voyager 2, it’s faster flight path would take it past Jupiter first.

1980 – The last IBM 7030 mainframe computer, AKA STRETCH, was decommissioned at Brigham Young University.

2007 – Apple introduced the iPod Touch, bringing multitouch functionality to its popular iPod line.

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1888 – George Eastman was issued US. patent No. 388,850 for his roll-film box camera.

1956 – IBM introduced the IBM 350 disk storage unit for the RAMAC 305, the first commercial computer to use magnetic disk storage.

1998 – Larry Page and Sergey Brin filed for incorporation of Google, allowing them to cash a $100,000 check Andy Bechtolsheim, co-founder of Sun, had written to Google Inc.

2013 – Samsung announced a smartwatch called Galaxy Gear that could only be used with its own phones and tablets that ran Android 4.3.

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1930 – An experimental electric engine was put in service by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad between Hoboken and Montclair, NJ. Thomas Edison served as engineer at the throttle.

1976 – Viking 2 landed on Mars and began taking high resolution pictures, measuring the atmosphere and surface, and looking for evidence of life.

1993 – Infogear filed an application for a US trademark on “I PHONE” for its “communications terminals. The company would later register “IPhone” as well. Cisco acquired Infogear in 2000 and later worked out a deal with Apple to share the name.

2013 – Nokia announced it would sell its devices and services unit, the division in charge of making mobile phones, to Microsoft for $7.2 billion.

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1859 – A unique combination of solar events including a magnetic explosion severely affected the young telegraph network in North America and Europe. Wires shorted out, fires started and some machines reportedly worked even when disconnected from batteries.

1997 – IBM announced that its RS/6000 SP model parallel supercomputer, was now 58 percent faster than Deep Blue, the computer that beat Kasparov at chess.

2001 – At ECTS in London, Blizzard announced an online RPG version of its popular Warcraft franchise, called “World of Warcraft”.

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1902 -Georges Méliès’ film Le voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon) debuted in France. It is often considered the first real science fiction film.

1994 – The United States Library of Congress held the first of several meetings to plan the conversion of its materials to digital form and make them accessible by computer networks.

1996 – Apple released its Pippin game console in the US. The idea was to provide an inexpensive game-focused computer. Apple licensed third

2008 – Google launched its Web browser called Google Chrome.

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1897 – Thomas Edison received a patent for the kinetographic camera, the forerunner of the motion picture film projector.

1994 – Stockholders approved the merger of Aldus Corp. and Adobe Systems Inc. It united the two driving forces behind desktop publishing software. Aldus Pagemaker became Adobe Pagemaker.

1997 – The developer release of Apple’s new OS, code name Grail1Z4 / Titan1U was released. It was known formally as Rhapsody and would evolve into OS X.

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1885 – Gottlieb Daimler received a patent for adding an internal combustion engine to a bicycle to make the first gasoline-driven motorcycle.

1907 – John Mauchly was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. He would grow up to pioneer the design and construction of ENIAC along with Presper Eckert as well as contribute to the creation of BINAC and UNIVAC.

1963 – A direct line of communication between the leaders of the USA and USSR, dubbed “The Hotline” began operation.

1969 – BBN delivered the first Interface Message Processor (IMP) to the Network Measurements Center at UCLA. It was built from a Honeywell DDP 516 computer with 12K of memory, and would be used in October to make the first Internet connection with Stanford. Graduate students Vinton Cerf, Steve Crocker, Bill Naylor, Jon Postel, and Mike Wingfield were charged with installation.

1982 – A copyright was issued to 16-year-old V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai for a computer program he called “EMAIL,” short for “electronic mail.” While Ayyadurai may not be considered the inventor of email he definitely deserves credit for establishing the name.

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1831 – Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, which is used in power generation and power transmission by generators, transformers, induction motors, electric motors, synchronous motors, and solenoids.

1965 – Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper, orbiting 100 miles above the Earth in Gemini 5 talked with aquanaut M. Scott Carpenter in Sealab II, 205 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean. It happened to be Cooper’s wedding anniversary.

1990 – The British Computer Misuse Act went into effect. The Act resulted from a long debate in the 1980s over failed prosecutions of hackers.

1997 – Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings founded Kibble Inc. The service initially let you rent individual DVDs by mail without late fees. There was no subscription service and no streaming. And the service was later renamed Netflix.

2003 – Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis founded Skype, the Voice over Internet Provider that would go on to dominate the space.

2005 – Music service Pandora left preview and became open for all to use.

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1845 – Scientific American began publication with the issue for this day. It would become the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States.

1991 – The crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis sent an electronic mail message using AppleLink. The message read: “Hello Earth! Greetings from the STS-43 Crew. This is the first Applelink from space. Having a GREAT time, wish you were here!”

2009 – Apple released Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard featuring many minor improvements and integration with Microsoft Exchange.

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