1893 – Thomas Alva Edison demonstrated the Kinetoscope for the first time at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.

1941 – The British Royal Naval ship HMS Bulldog captured a German U-110 submarine south of Iceland and recovered a naval version of the highly secret cipher machine known as Enigma. The sub was sunk to hide its capture and the machine taken to Bletchley Park where Alan Turing and other cryptographers broke the naval code.

1989 – Apple previewed its new System 7 operating system at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose. It was announced users would need at least a Mac Plus to run it as well as 2 megs of RAM.

2006 – Nintendo announced that its next game console, previously referred to as the Nintendo Revolution, would be called the Nintendo Wii.

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1790 – The French National Assembly acted on a motion from Bishop Charles Maurice de Talleyrand to create a simple, stable, decimal system of measurement units. The earliest metre unit chosen was the length of a pendulum with a half-period of a second. The system eventually evolved into the metric system.

1988 – A fire broke out in the main switching room of the Hinsdale Central Office of the Illinois Bell telephone company, causing a telephone service outage for more than 40,000 local phone lines. It was considered to be the ‘worst telecommunications disaster in US telephone industry history.’

1995 – The New York Times announced it would join eight other newspapers in the New Century Network. The network aimed to connect local online news services into a national service on the Web.

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1895 – The first demonstration of A. A. Popov’s electromagnetic wave receiver took place at a meeting of the Russian Physical Chemical Society in St.- Petersburg. It was essential to the development of wireless communications.

1895 – Otto Steiger received a patent for the Millionaire calculating machine. Switzerland’s Hans Egli made 4,700 of the 120-pound things. The Millionaire’s chief feature was the ability to do direct multiplication with a single rotation of the handle!

1952 – British radar engineer Geoffrey Dummer introduced the concept of the integrated circuit at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C.

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1896 – Samuel Pierpoint Langley’s Aerodrome No. 5 made the first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft of substantial size.

1949 – The EDSAC, the first practical stored program computer, performed its first calculation. It operated at a speed of 714 operations per second.

2002 – Apple’s Steve Jobs previewed Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar during his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. It featured a handwriting technology dubbed Inkwell, an iChat instant messenger client, QuickTime 6 integration and more.

2003 – Eve Online launched. The massively multiplayer space adventure differed from others in that its storylines were created mostly by the players of the game.

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1961 – First NASA astronaut Alan Shepard piloted the Freedom 7 Mercury capsule on its 15-minute 28-second suborbital flight.

1992 – Id Software released Wolfenstein 3-D. It wasn’t the original first person shooter, but it launched the form into widespread popularity.

1999 – Microsoft shipped Windows 98 SE to manufacturers. The new version included Internet Connection Sharing, Internet Explorer 5, Windows NetMeeting 3.

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1995 – German electronics company Escom AG bought the rights to the name, patents and intellectual property of Commodore Electronics Ltd. for $10 million. Commodore had gone bankrupt the year before.

2000 – The “I Love You” virus spread to 55 million computers around the world, hijacking hard drives and deleting, renaming, or damaging files. The damage reached billions of dollars.

2004 – Apple announced that Steve Jobs would kick off that year’s Worldwide Developers Conference by talking about Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

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1978 – Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) sent the first unsolicited mass commercial email to 600 west coast ARPANET users. The message informed users of DEC’s new computer and operating system with ARPANET support, the DECSYSTEM-2020 and TOPS-20. Spam before it was spam.

1997 – In New York City, Gary Kasparov began his re-match match against IBM’s Deep Blue computer. He won the previous match in February 1996 4-2.

2000 – A “geocache” was hidden outside Beaver Creek, Oregon, kicking off the first “Great American GPS Stash Hunt” and the hobby now called geocaching.

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1887 – 65-year-old Rev. Hannibal Goodwin applied for a patent on his nitrocellulose flexible film. He beat the Eastman Kodak company by two years, but his vaguely-worded patent led to a 27-year legal battle.

1983 – Microsoft announced the two-button Microsoft Mouse built for IBM computers and meant to be used with the new Microsoft Word processor. Microsoft only sold 5,000 of the 10,000 made.

2000 – The United States government shut off Selective Access of the GPS system. That meant accurate positioning was no longer restricted to the US military. Positioning accuracy on the first day without Selective Access went from a 45-meter radius to a 6-meter radius.

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1884 – Construction began in Chicago on the Home Insurance Building, generally acknowledged as the first steel-frame high-rise skyscraper.

1959 – Shortly after construction had begun, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland was officially named in honor of the pioneering rocket scientist.

1964 – Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny of Dartmouth College, launched a time-sharing system using a language meant to be learned quickly, called BASIC.

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1904 – George Stibitz was born. He pioneered the principles of relay-based computing. And named the “model K” design after his kitchen table. His work led to the Complex Number Calculator, the first remotely accessed computer.

1916 – Claude Elwood Shannon was born. He is considered the father of information theory and is the man who coined the term ‘bit’ for the fundamental unit of both data and computation.

1939 – RCA began regularly scheduled television service in New York City, with a telecast of President Franklin D. Roosevelt opening the New York World’s Fair. Programs were transmitted from mobile camera trucks to the main transmitter, which was connected to an aerial atop the Empire State Building. The broadcasting division of RCA was called the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC).

1993 – CERN released a statement declaring the software protocols developed for the World Wide Web would be available in the public domain.

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