In 1971 – 10 years after the SEC suggested automation could solve the problem of fragmentation in over-the-counter stocks, the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations or NASDAQ index began trading, the world’s first electronic stock market.

In 1996 – The U.S. Congress passed the Communications Decency Act, part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. In part, it attempted to hold website operators responsible for anyone younger than 18 seeing porn on the Internet. That provision was later struck down by the Supreme Court, however Section 230 which provides safe harbor to service providers is still in force.

In 1996 – John Perry Barlow posted “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” written in Davos, Switzerland. He foresaw a “civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.”

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In 1817 – The first public gas streetlight in the US was lit in Baltimore, Maryland at the corner of Market and Lemon streets.

In 1915 – The first completely successful tests of the wireless telephone from a moving train were conducted on the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad. Spoken messages were clearly heard 26 miles from Lounsberry to Binghamton, NY.

In 1984 – Challenger astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart made the first untethered spacewalks.

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In 1957 – MIT introduced the cryotron, the first practical demonstration of superconductivity, invented by Dudley Allen Buck. The Cryotron paved the way for the integrated circuit which used semiconductivity.

In 1959 – Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments filed a patent for miniaturized electronic circuits, the first patent for what we now call integrated circuits.

In 1971 – Apollo 14’s Lunar Module lifted off from the moon returning astronauts Alan Shepard and Edgar Mitchell to the Command Module. Shepard had made extra history by becoming the first human to hit a golf ball on the moon.

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In 1850 – The first U.S. patent for push-key operation of a calculating machine was issued to Dubois D. Parmelee of New Paltz, N.Y.

In 1974 – The U.S. space probe Mariner 10 returned the first close-up images of Venus and became the first spacecraft to use a gravity assist from one planet to help it reach another.

In 1999 – Victoria’s Secret’s online fashion show became the first major webcast, attracting an estimated 1.5 million viewers worldwide. Proving even back then, the Internet is for shopping.

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In 1890 – Thomas Edison received a patent for the first quadruplex telegraph, which could send two messages simultaneously in each direction. One message consisted of an electric signal of varying strength, while the second was a signal of varying polarity.

In 1998 – Noël Godin, a Belgian who made a practice of pie-ing rich and famous people struck a pie against the face of Bill Gates. Gates did not press charges.

In 2004 – Mark Zuckerberg and a few other guys at Harvard launch TheFacebook so Harvard students can look up and hook up with each other. They would eventually expand the service to the world. And drop the “the”.

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In 1879 – Joseph Wilson Swan demonstrated the first practically usable incandescent filament electric light bulb to 700 people at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne.

In 1966 – The Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft landed safely on the moon in the Ocean of Storms. It was the first lunar soft landing and first transmission of photographic data from the Moon to Earth.

In 2011 – The Number Resource Organization announced that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses was fully depleted. The IANA allocated the last of the blocks equally between the five Regional Internet Registries.

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In 1046 – English monks recorded “no man then alive could remember so severe a winter as this was.” Their analog weather blog entry recorded the beginning of the Little Ice Age.

In 1931 – Friedrich Schmiedl launched the first rocket mail (V-7, Experimental Rocket 7) with 102 pieces of mail between Schöckl and St. Radegund, Austria.

In 1935 – Detective Leonarde Keeler, co-inventor of the Keeler polygraph, tried out the lie detector on two suspected criminals in Portage, Wisconsin. Both suspects were convicted of assault.

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In 1951 -TV viewers witnessed the live detonation of an atomic bomb blast, as KTLA in Los Angeles broadcast the explosion of a nuclear device dropped on Frenchman Flats, Nevada.

In 1972 – Hewlett-Packard introduced the first scientific handheld calculator, the famous HP-35 for $395. It was the first handheld calculator to perform logarithmic and trigonometric functions with one keystroke.

In 1985 – Shortly after its founding the November before, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence kicked off. SETI Institute began operations.

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In 1958 – The United States successfully entered the space age with the successful launch of the Explorer I satellite. Data from the satellite confirmed the existence of the Van Allen radiation belt circling the Earth.

In 1961 – The U.S. launched a four-year-old male chimpanzee named Ham on a Mercury-Redstone 2 rocket into suborbital flight to test the capabilities of the Mercury capsule.

In 1971 – Astronauts Alan Shepard, Stuart Roosa, and Edgar Mitchell lifted off on the Apollo 14 mission to the Fra Mauro Highlands on the Moon.

In 2013 – The Consumer Electronics Association announced it was awarding the Dish Hopper co-winner of Best of CES and would begin searching for a new awards partner. CBS had forced CNET editors not to award Dish a prize due to ongoing litigation between the two companies.

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In 1925 – Doug Engelbart was born in Portland, Oregon. He is most famous for his work on the first computer Mouse, but also worked on many other innovations involving graphical user interfaces, hypertext and networks.

In 1975 – Hungarian Interior Design instructor Erno Rubik filed for a patent on his twisty toy cubes. The patent worked out for him. Erno Rubik became the first self-made millionaire from the Communist bloc.

In 2007 – Microsoft released Windows Vista for home use. Though not as many homes would end up using it as other versions of Windows.

In 2013 – RIM announced it was changing its name to BlackBerry and also unveiled BlackBerry OS 10 and the new Z10 and Q10 smartphones.

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Like Tech History? Purchase Tom Merritt’s Chronology of Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.