In 1920 – A US Navy F5L seaplane took off from Hampton Roads, Virginia, using a radio compass for the first time. The pilots located and flew to the Battleship Ohio about 94 miles offshore.

In 1947 – The AK-47 went into production in the Soviet Union– the name stands for Automatic rifle Kalashnikov model of 1947.

In 1996 – AOL settled lawsuits in California that accused the company of misleading subscribers about monthly service charges.

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In 1945 – Arthur C. Clarke began privately circulating copies of his paper “The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications” which suggested geostationary space stations could be used for worldwide television broadcasts.

In 1949 – Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia. He would later go by the name Joybubbles and develop a talent to whistle at 2600 Hz, allowing him to control phone switching equipment.

In 1961 – US President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech to Congress declaring the United States would go to the Moon.

In 1989 – The first Magellan GPS NAV 1000s were shipped to retailers. They ran for a few hours on six AA batteries, and sold for $3,000.

In 1994 – CERN hosted the first international World Wide Web conference, which continued through May 27.

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

In 1941 – British destroyers 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.

In 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.

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

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

In 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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In 1973 – Larry Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan. He would go on to help invent and co-found Google.

In 1976 – Queen Elizabeth II sent the first royal email, from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern as a part of a demonstration of networking technology.

In 1999 – The “Melissa” worm showed up in a file on the alt.sex usenet group and became the first successful mass-mailing worm. The worm’s creator, David L. Smith, apparently named the worm after a lap dancer in Florida.

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In 1800 – Alessandro Volta dated a letter announcing his invention of the voltaic pile to Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, London. We’ve been dealing with battery life ever since.

In 1886 – The first alternating current power plant in the United States began providing power to Main Street in Great Barrington, Mass.

In 1916 – The Annalen der Physik received a paper titled ‘Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie’ by Albert Einstein. “The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity” changed physics and technology dramatically.

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In 1781 – English astronomer William Herschel observed what he initially thought was a comet but turned out to be the planet Uranus. It was the first planet to be discovered using a telescope.

In 1882 – At the Royal Institution, Eadweard J. Muybridge demonstrated his zoopraxiscope, an optical apparatus that exhibited photographs of moving animals. It is sometimes considered the first movie projector.

In 1969 – Apollo 9 returned safely to Earth after orbital testing of the first crewed Lunar Module.

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In 1955 – Doug Ross demonstrated the Director tape for MIT’s Whirlwind machine, the first digital computer with real-time text and graphics. The idea of the Director Tape was to allow multiple problems to be read by the computer in one session without humans having to intervene and change tapes. In other words, an operating system.

In 1978 – The first radio episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, was transmitted on BBC Radio 4. Some credit Adams with accidentally predicting the PDA and smartphone.

In 1979 – Philips publicly demonstrated a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference called “Philips Introduces Compact Disc.”

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I had the distinct honor of being the first guest on Michael Gaines’ new show Yestergear. The show is all about old tech and how it affected our lives. We had a great conversation about TI, both the TI-30 caluclator and the TI-99/4A. Man my Dad put me in a spot about the TI 99 but I’m glad he did.

Get the episode here.

In 1971 – The Soviet Union’s Mars 2 orbiter released its descent module which probably had too steep an angle of entry, and malfunctioned and crashed. But hey, it was still the first manmade object to reach the surface of Mars.

In 1995 – Microsoft released Internet Explorer 2.0, touting its privacy and encryption, and stepping up the browser war with Netscape.

In 2001 – Scientists announced they had used the Hubble telescope to detect and analyze the atmosphere on an extrasolar planet for the first time. The planet HD 209458 b, unofficially called Osiris was found to have sodium in its atmosphere.

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Subscribe to the podcast. Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.