1962 – NASA launched the Mariner 2 unmanned space mission to Venus.
1989 – The first direct-to-home TV satellite launched from Cape Canaveral. Marco Polo I delivered the British Satellite Broadcasting service to homes in the UK.
2003 – Fairbanks, Alaska got the world’s biggest UPS backup. The city hooked up the world’s largest storage battery, built to provide an uninterrupted power supply of 40 megawatts.
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1938 – A New York radio station first used the Philips-Miller system of tape recording on a radio broadcast.
1984 – Miss Manners confronted her first computer issue. The columnist responded to a reader’s concern about typing personal correspondence on a personal computer.
1996 – Netscape Communications Corp. announced it had partnered with several other big companies to create a software company called Navio Corp. Navio was meant to create an operating system to compete with Windows.
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1609 – Galileo Galilei craftily beat a Dutch telescope maker to an appointment with the Doge of Venice. Galileo impressed the Doge and received a lifetime appointment and a doubled salary. Later that autumn, Galileo pointed his telescope to the Moon, and trouble began.
1981 – Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Saturn. Eight years later on the same day in 1989, Voyager 2 would make its closest approach to Neptune.
1991 – 21-year-old Finnish student Linus Torvalds wrote a newsgroup post about a free operating system he was working on. He said it was “just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu.” His OS would eventually be called Linux.
2014 – Amazon announced it had acquired Twitch.TV the popular video game streaming site. Rumors had indicated Google was going to buy the company, but the deal fell through.
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1456 – According to a handwritten note by illustrator Heinrich Cremer, the final binding of the Gutenberg Bible took place.
1965 – Ted Nelson presented a paper called “A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate” at the Association for Computing Machinery. In it he used the word “hypertext” a term he made up.
1995 – Microsoft released Windows 95. During development it was referred to as Windows 4.0 or by the internal codename “Chicago.”
2001 – WebKit received its first commit of code from Apple. The Safari browser appeared two years later and WebKit was open sourced in 2005.
2011 – Steve jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, handing over the job to Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook.
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1852 – The first time signals were transmitted by telegraph from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
1966 – Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photograph of Earth from orbit around the Moon.
1993 – Nintendo agreed to use Silicon Graphics Inc. technology in a video game player it was developing.
2012 – Microsoft unveiled a new logo for the first time in 25 years, opting for simple squares of color and block type with an overlapping ‘f’ and ‘t’.
2013 – Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced he would retire within the next 12 months.
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1932 – The BBC began public television broadcasts.
1955 – The first computer user group, SHARE was founded by users of IBM’s Model 704 computer. The first meeting was held in the basement conference room of the RAND Corporation.
2007 – The Storm botnet sent out a record 57 million virus-infected emails. It failed to take down the Internet.
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1888 – William Seward Burroughs received four patents, including one for a ‘Calculating Machine’. It would power the Burroughs Adding Machine Company.
1973 – Sergey Brin was born in Moscow. His family emigrated to the US in 1979. He would grow up to co-develop a search engine with Larry Page and co-found Google.
1993 – NASA lost contact with the Mars Observer three days before it was supposed to enter orbit. As it began to pressurize fuel tanks, the spacecraft’s transmitters went silent and it was never heard from again.
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1920 – The first commercial radio station, 8MK, began operating in Michigan. Now, WWJ, it is owned by CBS.
1930 – W2XCR began broadcasting at 2.1-2.2 mHz from Jersey City, New Jersey, with the first demonstration of telecasts meant for the home. A half-hour program, hosted by the cartoonist Harry Hirschfeld, was viewed on screens placed in a store in the Hotel Ansonia, the Hearst
1970 – John Carmack was born in Shawnee Mission, Kansas. He would grow up to co-found id software and bring the world Doom, Wolfenstein and Quake.
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1839 – At a crowded meeting of the Paris Academy of Sciences, Louis Daguerre demonstrated the process of making photos called daguerreotypes.
1906 – Philo Farnsworth was born on Indian Creek in Beaver County, Utah. He would grow up to inspire the beloved professor character on Futurama. He also gets credit for inventing the first completely electronic television.
1934 – Gordon Bell was born in Kirksville, Missouri. He would grow up to help build PDP computers and oversee the development of DEC’s VAX series.
2003 – Dave Winer posted an experiment with RSS enclosures. It allowed subscribers with the right aggregator to have an MP3 of an interview Chris Lydon did delivered with no click-wait. This would lead to Christopher Lydon becoming the first podcaster before it was called podcasting.
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1937 – The first Frequency Modulation or FM radio permit was granted to W1XOJ, in Paxton, Massachusetts. It went on the air with scheduled programs in May 1939 and operated with the highest output power (50 kilowatts) granted prior to World War II.
1947 – Eight years after William Hewlett and David Packard founded it, Hewlett-Packard was officially incorporated.
2005 – The largest and most widespread power outage in history happened on the Indonesian island of Java, affecting almost 100 million people.
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