In 1936 – Edwin Armstrong presented FM radio at FCC headquarters. Armstrong played a jazz record over conventional AM radio, then switched to an FM broadcast. “[I]f the audience of 50 engineers had shut their eyes they would have believed the jazz band was in the same room.”

In 1946 – The first mobile telephone call was made from a car in St. Louis, Missouri.

In 1997 – Programmers deciphered code written in the impenetrable Data Encryption Standard, the strongest legally exportable encryption software in the United States. The hackers organized over the Internet and cracked the software in five months, proving that stronger encryption was needed.

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In 1911 – The Tabulating Company (founded by Herman Hollerith), the Computing Scale Company, and the International Time Recording Company merged to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in Endicott, New York. They would later change the company name to International Business Machines,and later just IBM.

In 1963 – Soviet Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space, orbiting the Earth 48 times.

In 1977 – Software Development Laboratories was incorporated in Redwood Shores, California, by Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oates. They later came up with the catchier name, Oracle.

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In 1878 – Photographer Eadweard Muybridge used high-speed photography to capture a horse’s motion. The photos showed the horse with all four feet in the air during some parts of its stride. Stop-motion photography was born.

In 1949 – Jay Forrester wrote down a proposal for core memory in his notebook. Core memory was the standard for computer memory until advances in semiconductors in the 1970s.

In 1987 – Compuserve’s Sandy Trevor and his team, which included inventor Steve Wilhite, released GIF version 87a. The new enhanced format allowed people to create compressed animations. “Under Construction” GIFs everywhere became possible.

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In 1822 – Charles Babbage announced his difference engine in a paper to the Royal Astronomical Society entitled “Note on the application of machinery to the computation of astronomical and mathematical tables”.

In 1951 – The U.S. Census Bureau officially put UNIVAC I into service calling it the world’s first commercial computer.

In 1962 – The European Space Research Organization, which would become the European Space Agency, was established in Paris.

In 1967 – NASA launched Mariner 5 on its mission to fly by Venus.

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In 1925 – Charles Jenkins publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of silhouette pictures and sound, becoming the first person to demonstrate TV in the US.

In 1941 – John Mauchly visited John Atanasoff to see his computer. The two computer pioneers later battled in court over who was the legal inventor of the electronic digital computer.

In 1944 – Germany launched the first guided missile attack in history, sending V-1 rockets into London.

In 1983 – Pioneer 10 became the first human-made object to pass outside Pluto’s orbit and leave the central solar system.

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In 1897 – Karl Elsener received a design patent for his “soldiers’ knife” for use by the Swiss army. The original had a wooden handle, a blade, a screwdriver and a can opener.

In 1936 – The first radio station with 500,000 watt power began testing as W8XAR in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Test broadcasts took place from 1 AM to 6 AM. The station is now known as KDKA.

In 1997 – 3Com Corp. and U.S. Robotics Corp. merged. The two companies combined US Robotics modems with 3Com’s interface cards.

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In 1959 – The first experimental hovercraft, Christopher Cockerell’s SRN-1 made its first trials at Cowes on the Isle of Wight.

In 1978 – Texas Instruments introduced the Speak & Spell, the first electronic duplication of the human vocal tract on a single chip of silicon. It used linear predictive coding to make a mathematical model of the human vocal tract and predict a speech sample.

In 1983 – IRM took its Japan Capsule Computer subsidiary and formed Capcom Company, Limited “for the purpose of selling software..”

In 1997 – Philippe Kahn took the first cameraphone photograph of his newborn daughter and then wirelessly transmitted the photo to more than 2,000 people around the world. He had hacked together a digital camera and a phone. Kahn went on to form the company LightSurf.

In 1998 – Compaq Computer paid $9.1 billion to acquire what remained of Digital Equipment Corporation, the company that had brought the world PDP and VAX.

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In 1943 – Hungarians László and Georg Bíró, while living in Argentina, patented the first successful implementation of the ballpoint pen.

In 1977 – A few days after going on sale, Apple began shipping the Apple II for the first time.

In 2003 – The Spirit Rover launched on a Delta II rocket, beginning NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover mission.

In 2013 – Apple introduced iOS 7 and Apple OS X Mavericks at their Worldwide Develoeprs Conference in San Francisco. They also gave a sneak peek at the new cylindrical Mac Pro and announced their streaming music service called iTunes Radio.

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In 1902 – Joe Horn and Frank Hardart opened the first US Automat at 818 Chestnut St. in Philadelphia. The waiterless restaurant charged a nickel for most dishes.

In 1931 – Robert Goddard received a patent for rocket-fueled aircraft design (U.S. No. 1,809,271). Sadly we do not have a lot of rocket-planes in operation.

In 1986 – The Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center opened to support the National Science Foundation’s NSFNET, which linked five supercomputer centers. NSFNET would eventually allow commercial uses and transition to the open Internet.

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In 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.”

In 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.

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

In 2008 – Apple announced Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

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