In 1899 – Nippon Electric Company Ltd. (NEC) was founded by Iwadare Kunihiko, an expert in telegraphic systems who worked under Thomas Edison. Western Electric provided funding, making it the first Japanese joint-venture with a foreign company.

In 1997 – DNS was widely disrupted making email routing and web page delivery spotty throughout the day. An Ingres database failure resulted in corrupt .COM and .NET zone files. A system administrator mistakenly released the zone file without regenerating the file and verifying its integrity.

In 2002 – Apple announced PC versions of the iPod with MusicMatch software instead of iTunes. The company also announced a 20 GB version of the music player and touch-sensitive scroll wheel and dropped the prices.

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In 1945 – The United States detonated a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range in New Mexico. The Trinity test ushered in the atomic age.

In 1951 – VisiCalc creator Dan Bricklin was born in Philadelphia.

In 1969 – Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., and Michael Collins, blasted off from Cape Kennedy on Apollo 11, the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.

In 1995 – Amazon.com opened for business selling books online. Shipments were packed into boxes from a desk made out of a spare door in a two-car garage in Bellevue, Washington.

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In 1928 – The Polish Cipher Bureau picked up enciphered radio signals from the German Reicswehr for the first time. The messages were encoded with Germany’s ENIGMA machine. Cracking the EMIGMA during World War II brought together some of the finest minds in computer science at Bletchley Park in England.

In 1983 – Nintendo released the Family Computer or Famicom, along with Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr. and Popeye cartridges. It would later be released in the US as the Nintendo Entertainment System, or NES.

In 2003 – AOL Time Warner disbanded the Netscape browser development team. In conjunction, Mozilla created the Mozilla Foundation giving the project its first independent legal existence.

In 2006 – After a few months being used internally at Odeo, the Twttr service launched for public use. They later added some vowels and spun Twitter out as its own company.

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In 1867 – Alfred Nobel demonstrated dynamite for the first time at Merstham Quarry, Surrey.

In 1918 – Computer pioneer and MIT professor Jay Forrester was born on a cattle ranch in Climax, Nebraska. With Robert Everett, Forrester led one of the most important early computer projects, the Whirlwind, and developed and founded the field of system dynamics.

In 1965 – Mariner 4 flew by Mars, taking 21 full pictures, the first close-up photos of another planet returned from space.

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In 1919 – The British airship R34 finished the first airship roundtrip journey across the Atlantic from Scotland to Mineola, Long Island and back to Norfolk, England after 182 hours of flight.

In 1973 – Alexander Butterfield revealed the existence of the Nixon tapes to the US Senate committee investigating the Watergate break-in. Always make back-ups, unless you want to remain President.

In 1977 – Lightning struck a Consolidated Edison substation on the Hudson River, tripping two circuit breakers and setting off a chain of events that resulted in a massive power failure. The entire city of New York was blacked out.

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In 1854 – George Eastman was born to Maria Kilbourn and George Washington Eastman in Waterville, New York. He went on to found the Eastman Kodak Company and invented the roll of film.

In 1949 – At an IBM sales meeting, Thomas J. Watson Jr. predicted that within 10 years, electronics would replace moving parts in machines. His vision launched IBM into dominating the computer industry.

In 2004 – Apple announced the iTunes Music Store sold its 100,000,000th downloaded song. “Somersault (Dangermouse remix)” by Zero 7 was purchased by Kevin Britten of Hays, Kansas.

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In 1976 – K&E produced its last slide rule, which it presented to the Smithsonian Institution. While slide rules continue to be made, especially for marine and aviation uses, K&E had been the dominant manufacturer, and this signaled the end of an era, and the rise of the electronic calculator.

In 1979 – The US space station Skylab returned to Earth scattering debris over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia.

In 2008 – Apple’s second phone, the iPhone 3G went on sale, featuring 3G data connectivity.

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In 1856 – Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan, Lika, Croatia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a Serbian Orthodox Priest and his mother an inventor of household appliances.

In 1962 – The world’s first communication satellite, Telstar, was launched into orbit from Cape Canaveral on a Delta rocket.

In 1990 – The Electronic Frontier Foundation was formally founded, immediately coming to the aid of Steve Jackson Games, who’s BBS had been seized by the Secret Service.

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In 1971 – Marc Andreessen was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa. He would grow up to develop the Netscape browser, which powered the explosion of the Web in the late 1990s.

In 1979 – Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Jupiter, coming within 570,000 kilometers of the planet.

In 1982 – Disney released the movie Tron, which used the most extensive computer-generated graphics and special effects to that time.

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In 1908 – Charles Urban demonstrated Kinemacolor, the first successful color motion-picture process, at a scientific meeting in Paris attended by Auguste and Louis Lumière.

In 1946 – The University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering began a summer school course on computing that inspired the EDSAC, BINAC, and, many other similar computers.

In 2011 – The Space Shuttle Atlantis launched on the final Space Shuttle mission.

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