1953 – The major studios were inspired by the 1952 3D hit “Bwana Devil.” Columbia beat Warner Brothers’ “House of Wax” to the theatre, with a New York City premiere, making “Man in the Dark” the first 3D motion picture produced and released by a major studio.

1959 – The Department of Defense called a meeting at the University of Pennsylvania to define the objectives for a new Common Business Language. Captain Grace Hopper led the group that kicked off COBOL.

1991 – A team moved from Sun Microsystems to work in secret on Project “Green” using its “Oak” programming language. The whole thing later bacame “Java.”

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1927 – The Bell System sent live TV images of Herbert Hoover, then the Secretary of Commerce, over telephone lines from Washington, D.C. to an auditorium in Manhattan. It was the first public demonstration in the US of long-distance television transmission.

1964 – IBM unveiled the System/360 line of mainframe computers, its most successful computer system. It was called the “360” because it was meant to address all possible sizes and types of customer with one unified software-compatible architecture.

1969 – The first Request For Comment, RFC 1 put together by Steve Crocker was distributed on the newly operational ARPANET. RFCs describe methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet.

2014 – OpenSSL issued a security advisory about a vulnerability that would come to be called ‘Heartbleed.’ The bug was in the TLS Heartbeat function, that when implemented could be
used to reveal up to 64k of memory to a connected client or server. Unpatched servers could have their private keys stolen making it easy for malicious hackers to pretend to have certified secure connections.

2015 – HBO launched it’s HBO Now service, allowing US viewers to watch HBO online without a cable subscription. The service was initially sold through Apple and Cablevision.

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1917 – Following a declaration of war against Germany, President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order closing all radio communication not required by the US Navy.

1965 – Hughes Aircraft’s Early Bird launched into orbit. It was the first communications satellite to be placed in synchronous orbit and successfully demonstrated the concept of synchronous satellites for commercial communications.

1973 – NASA launched the Pioneer 11 spacecraft, the second mission to investigate Jupiter and the outer solar system and the first to explore the planet Saturn and its main rings.

1992 – Microsoft released Windows 3.1. It sold for $149 and added support for sound cards, MIDI, and CD Audio, Super VGA monitors, and support for 9600 bps modems.

2010 – Xiaomi, maker of fashionable affordable Android-based smartphones, was founded in Beijing, China.

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1911 – Cuthbert Hurd was born in Estherville, Iowa. He would grow up to work at IBM where he quietly persuaded the company that a market for scientific computers existed. He sold 10 of the very first IBM 701s and managed the team that invented FORTRAN.

1951 – Dean Kamen was born in Rockville Centre, New York. He grew up to found DEKA Research in 1982 which developed a portable dialysis machine, a vascular stent, and the iBOT — a motorized wheelchair that climbs stairs. Oh and the Segway.

1998 – Long before texting or cell phones were considered a danger in the car, a driver in Marseilles, France was distracted by her Tamagotchi virtual pet. She ran into a group of cyclists killing one and injuring one other.

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1954 – Daniel Kottke was born in Bronxville, New York. He would go on to befriend Steve Jobs at Reed College, assemble the first Apple Computers with Steve Wozniak and work on the original Macintosh team.

1975 – Bill Gates and Paul Allen formed a partnership in Albuquerque New Mexico. The venture was later named Micro-soft.

1994 – Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark founded Mosaic Communications Corp, which they later renamed Netscape Communications Corp. Andreesen developed the Mosaic browser while at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois.

2013 – Facebook announced Facebook Home, an integrated Android app that took over the home and lock screens. The HTC First would come April 12 as the first featured Facebook Phone to run Home.

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1966 – Luna 10 became the first spacecraft to enter lunar orbit. It completed its first orbit in two hours 58 minutes.

1973 – Martin Cooper, general manager of Motorola’s Communications Systems Division made the first handheld portable phone call from a New York City street to Joel S. Engel at rival Bell Labs. Presumably he gloated at least a little.

1981 – Adam Osborne unveiled the Osborne 1 at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco. It cost $1,795 at retail.

2000 – US District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson ruled Microsoft violated the nation’s antitrust laws by using its monopoly position in personal computer operating systems to stifle competition.

2010 – The first Apple iPad went on sale in the US, starting at $499.

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1973 – Lexis launched Computerized Legal Searching. It was limited to searching the full text of cases in Ohio and New York.

1978 – The patent expired on Swiss inventor George de Mestral’s invention of a hook and loop fastener he called Velcro. Soon children everywhere no longer had to learn to tie shoes quite so early in life.

1980 – Microsoft Corporation announced its first hardware product the Z80 SoftCard for Apple. It was a microprocessor on a printed circuit board that plugged into the Apple II and sold for $349.00.

2014 – Amazon announced Fire TV, it’s set-top TV box to deliver streaming TV shows and video games. It also included voice commands spoken into a Bluetooth remote control.

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1976 – Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne decided to change their garage project into a partnership and Ron Wayne typed up the papers. Wayne would leave the partnership after 11 days and Apple Comupter would be incorporated the following January.

2004 – In one of the best April Fool’s jokes ever, Google launched a real product. Weren’t expecting that, were you Internet? Gmail launched in invite-only mode, making a Gmail account temporarily prestigious in the geek world.

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In 1939 – Harvard and IBM signed an agreement to build the Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). It weighed 5 tons and read data from paper tape and punch cards.

In 1993 – Richard Depew accidentally posted 200 identical messages to news.admin.policy while testing some auto-moderation software. It became the first USENET postings to be referred to as spam.

In 1998 – After three years of development and much wrangling with the Warcraft engine it was originally built on, Blizzard released the iconic game Starcraft.

In 2013 – IBM shut down the Roadrunner supercomputer, the first computer to run at more than one petaflop.

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In 240 BC – Chinese astronomers observed a new broom-shaped “star” in the sky. It was the first confirmed sighting of Halley’s Comet.

In 1950 – Bell Telephone Laboratories announced the invention of a new kind of electric eye called the phototransistor. Dr. John Northrup Shive invented the transistor, which operated by light rather than electricity.

In 1951 – The Census UNIVAC System was accepted and subsequently devoted almost exclusively to tabulating results of the 1950 Census of Population and Housing. It was the first UNIVAC and was capable of completing 1,905 operations per second, which it stored on magnetic tape.

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