1637 – Rene Descartes published “Discourse on the Method for Guiding One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences”, which formed the basis of the modern scientific method. It’s also the source of the quote “I think, therefore I am.”

1949 – George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. The book still affects notions of privacy and inspired the iconic Apple commercial that introduced the Macintosh computer.

1955 – Tim Berners-Lee was born in London. He grew up to develop the World Wide Web.

2008 – Apple announced Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

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1954 – Computer science hero Alan Turing died. His death was ruled a suicide from eating an apple containing cyanide. Turing formulated the famous Turing test and broke code at Bletchley park during World War II.

1975 – Sony introduced the Betamax video recorder for sale. It would lose the format war to VHS but find a niche in broadcast production.

1980 – The first US solar power plant was dedicated at the Natural Bridge National Monument, Utah.

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1933 – The world’s first drive-in movie theater opened in Camden, New Jersey. Richard Hollingshead Jr. had developed the system by using a 1928 Kodak projector mounted on the hood of his car and aimed at a screen pinned to some trees.

1984 – Soviet programmer Alexei Pazhitnov completed the first playable version of Tetris, one of the best-selling video games of all-time, was released. It was popularized by Hank Rogers who bought the rights and distributed it.

1995 – The Los Angeles Times reported that Father Leonard Boyle was working to put the Vatican’s library on the World Wide Web through a site funded by IBM.

2013 – The Guardian published another leak from Edward Snowden about the PRISM project used to gather data held by Google, Facebook, Apple and other US tech companies. The tech companies denied “back door access” to their systems.

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1833 – Ada Gordon, daughter of Lord Byron (and future Countess Lovelace) met Charles Babbage for the first time. He designed an early computer, and she published a description of his work and wrote the first computer program.

1977 – The Apple II went on sale. It had a bus speed of 1 MHz and 64 KB of memory.

2002 – Mozilla.org announced the release of Mozilla 1.0, an open-source browser built on the Gecko engine that also powered Netscape.

2013 – The Guardian published its first exclusive based on Edward Snowden’s leaks, revealing a secret court order forced Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of customers to the US government.

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1903 – In one of the earliest examples of white hat hacking, Nevil Maskelyne interrupted a demonstration of the Marconi radio communications system at the Royal Institution, London. Before Marconi’s message from Poldhu, Cornwall could arrive, Maskelyne hijacked the signal sending the word “rast” repeatedly and then the phrases, “There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily.”

1977 – JVC introduced the open standard for the VHS videocassette in North America at a press conference before the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago.

2010 – Falcon 9 Flight 1 launched the maiden flight of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, setting a new benchmark for non-governmental space flight. The rocket put a dummy payload into orbit as a test.

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1889 – The first long-distance transmission of electricity took place, sending power from a hydroelectric generator at Willamette Falls 14 miles to 55 street lights at 4th and Main in Portland, Oregon.

1948 – Ed Brown Jr., a former Navy pilot, opened a fly-in movie theater near Wall Township, New Jersey. You could also drive in. The theater had space for 500 cars and 25 small planes could land in a nearby airfield and taxi over to the theater.

1965 – Gemini 4 launched on the first multi-day space mission by a NASA crew. Crew-member Ed White performed the first US spacewalk.

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1883 – Thomas Edison and Stephen D. Field built the world’s first elevated electric railway. It was a narrow-gauge 3-foot-wide track in the gallery around the edge of the main exhibition building of the Chicago Railway Exhibition. It ran nine miles per hour.

1896 – Guglielmo Marconi applied for British Patent number 12039 regarding a system of telegraphy using Hertzian waves. We’d call it radio.

2003 – The European Space Agency launched the Mars Express probe from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. It was the fastest planetary probe to be built.

2014 – Apple announced OS X Yosemite and iOS8 at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Among the features were the ability to answer phone calls on your OS X computer, the ability for iOS apps to talk directly to each other, third=party keyboards for iOS, and a new programming language called Swift.

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1890 – The US Census Bureau began using Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine for the first time. This gave Hollerith the basis to later found his Tabulating Machine Company, which was one of four companies that merged to form IBM.

1944 – The Colossus Mark 2 was put into service at Bletchley Park in Great Britain, just in time for the invasion at Normandy.

1999 – The Windows version of music-sharing program Napster was released.

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1941 – Electric eye detectors were first used to measure high-jumping height. A track meet of the Schenectady, NY, Patrolmen’s Association used equipment designed by General Electric, comprising of a movable light source and four electric eyes.

1943 – Chief consultant John Mauchly and chief engineer John Presper Eckert began leading the military commission on the new computer ENIAC. They would take one year to design the computer and 18 months to build it.

2006 – Swedish police raided The Pirate Bay website and shut it down. The site relaunched from servers outside Sweden.

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1966- NASA launched Surveyor 1. It achieved the first soft landing on the Moon by the United States and demonstrated the technology necessary to achieve landing and operations on the lunar surface for the manned missions to follow.

1979 – IRM was founded in Japan with the purpose of selling electric applied game machines. Two years later they started a subsidiary called Japan Capsule Computer. They eventually spun that division off as Capcom.

1987 – North American Philips Company introduced the compact disc video (CD-V), a 12 cm (4-3/4 inch) CD-sized implementation of storage for full motion video and CD-audio.

1996 – Intel planned to announce a video phone. Frank Gill, executive vice president of Intel’s Internet Communications Group, said he expected hundreds of thousands of video-phone ready computers would be sold that year. Video phones didn’t take off then.

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