1928 – Austrian Friedrich Schmiedl launched his first experimental rocket from a balloon 50,000 feet over Graz, Austria. The rocket was not recovered, but later tests were successful leading to rocket delivered mail.

1965 – Officials in the US and Europe conducted the first commercial telephone conversation over satellite Early Bird I. The satellite also began operating for television transmission “live via satellite.”

1982 – Microsoft unveiled a new corporate logo with the famous “blibbet” of horizontal lines in the first O. New packaging, and a comprehensive set of retail dealer support materials came along with the blibbet.

2011 – Google announced their latest social network attempt. Google + let you put friends in circles and share different things with different circles.

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1967 – The world’s first ATM was installed at a Barclays Bank branch in Enfield Town, England, United Kingdom.

1972 – Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney filed incorporation papers for Atari, Inc. and got ready to release its first product, a game called Pong.

1995 – Spyglass Inc. went public, the year after it began distributing its Spyglass Mosaic Web browser. The Spyglass browser powered the first version of Internet Explorer and had code in IE all the way up to IE 7.

2008 – Bill Gates spent his last day as an employee of the company he founded, Microsoft, to focus on the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. He remained Chairman of the Board.

2012 – Sergey Brin interrupted a Google announcement of the new Google + app to show off the Project Glass smart glasses by having sky divers wearing the prototypes, jump out of a zeppelin and land on the Moscone Convention Center in downtown San Francisco, while streaming video in a Google hangout.

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1954 – At 5:30 PM the world’s first nuclear power station was connected to the power grid in Obninsk, US.S.R., a small town 60 miles south of Moscow.

1974 – At 8:01 AM, a supermarket cashier scanned a 10-pack of Wrigley’s chewing gum across a bar-code scanner at Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio. It was the first product ever checked out by Universal Product Code.

1997 – The US Supreme Court struck down a portion of the Communications Decency Act as violating the first amendment protecting free speech.

2014 – Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects lab stole the show at the Google I/O developer conference, with a demonstration of Project Tango’s 3D-mapping capability and Project Ara’s modular phone.

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1967 – The very first Consumer Electronics Show opened in New York occupying the Americana and New York Hilton Hotels. It was devoted to home entertainment electronics and featured such advances as portable color TVs and video tape recorders.

1981 – After six years as a company, Microsoft incorporated in the state of Washington.

1998 – Microsoft released Windows 98 with less hype than Windows 95, but more consumer focus.

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1963 – The first demonstration of a home video recorder was made at the BBC News Studios in London. A Telcan, short for television in a can, could record up to 20 minutes of black and white television using quarter-inch tape on a reel to reel system.

1993 – “Severe Tire Damage,” conducted the first known Internet concert. The band set their gear up on the patios of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and sent their show out on the Internet Multicast Backbone, or Mbone.

1994 – Geffen Records released the first major label song for digital download. Aerosmith’s “Head First” was available on CompuServe as a .WAV file. It took more than an hour to download.

2000 – President Clinton gave his weekly radio address live on the Internet for the first time.

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1912 – Alan Turing was born in London, although his father worked for the Indian Civil Service and his parents lived in India. He helped break the code of the German enigma machine and developed the Turing test for artificial intelligence.

1943 – Vint Cerf was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He grew up to become known as one of the fathers of the Internet, most famously for his co-creation of the protocols underlying TCP/IP.

1983 – Paul Mockapetris and Jon Postel ran the first successful test of the automated, distributed Domain Name System at the University of Southern California School of Engineering’s Information Sciences.

1996 – The Nintendo 64 launched in Japan becoming the first home console to rely on the analog stick as its primary control.

2005 – Reddit launched online with a submission about the Downing Street memo.

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1675 – Britain’s King Charles II established the observatory at Greenwich with the main purpose of determining precise longitudes to aid in navigation. This purpose led to Greenwich being marked as the prime meridian and later Greenwich Mean Time.

1799 – The first definitive prototype metre bars (mètre des Archives) and kilograms were constructed in platinum.

1999 – The first demonstration of live rats directly controlling a robot arm with their thoughts was published by Nature Neuroscience.

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1948 – The Small-Scale Experimental Machine, SSEM took 52 minutes to run its first program, written by Professor Tom Kilburn. SSEM was the first computer to store programs electronically. The SSEM was nicknamed the “Manchester Baby”.

1981 – IBM retired the last of its “STRETCH” mainframes. These mainframes were part of the 7000 series that made up the company’s first transistorized computers.

2004 – SpaceShipOne became the first privately developed piloted vehicle to leave Earth’s atmosphere and reach the edge of space.

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1840 – Samuel F.B. Morse received a US patent for “Improvement in the mode of communicating information by signals by the application of electro-magnetism.” We call it Morse code.

1963 – A hotline was established between the Soviet Union and the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis. While later it would become the famous “red telephone” it started as a teletype.

2003 – The WikiMedia Foundation was founded in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales to oversee the various Wiki projects like Wikipedia.

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240 B.C. – Greek astronomer, geographer, mathematician and librarian in Alexandria, Eratosthenes calculated the Earth’s circumference. His data was based on the length of shadows in different locations and simple geometry, but his calculations were not far wrong.

1623 – Mathematician Blaise Pascal was born in France. He invented a digital calculator, the Pascaline, to help his father in his tax-collecting work.

2003 – Apple released dock connector-to-USB 2.0 cables and drivers for third-generation iPods. Previous iPods had been FireWire only.

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