1883 – US and Canadian railways adopted five standardized time zones to replace the multitude of local times scattered across North America. It was called “The Day of Two Noons” as each railroad station clock was reset as standard-time noon was reached within each time zone.

1928 – Steamboat Willie premiered at Universal’s Colony Theater in New York City. It was the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks. It was also the first official appearance of Mickey Mouse. Happy birthday Mickey, now give us back a reasonable public domain date.

1977 – A startup called Microsoft, fresh off developing its own version of FORTRAN, won the right in arbitration to license its version of BASIC, previously licensed exclusively through MITS, makers of the Altair.

2012 – The Nintendo Wii U launched in North America. The console did not yet feature it TVii service but did require a 5GB download which took over an hour to update the console’s software.

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1790 – August Ferdinand Mobius was born in Schulpforta, Saxony. The mathematician, astronomer and physicist is most well remembered for the discovery of the Mobius strip, a 2-dimensional object with only one side when embedded in 3D space. Poor Johann Benedict Listing also discovered it at the same time but Listing strip just doesn’t have the same ring.

1947 – Walter Brattain dumped a semiconductor experiment into a thermos of water and unexpectedly saw a large amplification of electricity. Working with John Bardeen they developed it into a new amplifier that would eventually be called the transistor.

1970 – The Soviet Union landed Lunokhod 1 on Mare Imbrium on the Moon. It was the first roving remote-controlled robot to land on another world.

1971 – The Kenbak-1 desktop computer was advertised for sale in ComputerWorld for $750 It had first been advertised in Scientific American in September. The 8-bit computer had 256 bytes of memory and was dubbed the world’s first commercially available personal computer by a panel of experts involving Steve Wozniak.

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1904 – Sir John Ambrose Fleming went “scudding down Gower Street” in London on his way to patenting the “oscillation valve” which we fondly call the Vacuum Tube. His patent was later invalidated by the US supreme court, but that didn’t stop Fleming from being Knighted and receiving a medal of honor from the Institute of Radio Engineers.

1965 – The Soviet Union launched the Venera 3 space probe toward Venus. It would become the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet, though it failed to return data.

2000 – ICANN announced its decision to include 7 new top-level domains giving birth to the .aero, .biz, .coop, .info, .museum, .name and .pro, TLDs.

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1926 – The National Broadcasting Company radio network opened with 24 stations. It was a joint creation of RCA, General Electric and Westinghouse. AT&T provided the spark for the network by selling WEAF to RCA.

1971 – Intel released the world’s first commercial single-chip microprocessor, the 4004 with an advertisement in Electronic News, though the chip may have been delivered earlier in the spring to some customers. It was the first complete CPU on one chip.

2001 – Microsoft entered the game console war with the first Xbox going on sale in North America. It pitted Microsoft against Sony’s PS2 just three days before Nintendo’s GameCube went on sale.

2013 – Sony’s PlayStation 4 game console went on sale with a big event in New York where Sony rented out the entire Standard Hotel.

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1922 – The BBC sent its first daily transmission from station 2LO at Marconi House London. Arthur Burrows, first Director of Programmes, read the first newscast.

1971 – The American space probe Mariner 9 began orbiting Mars becoming the first spacecraft to successfully orbit another planet.

2007 – The last Direct Current electrical distribution system in the US was shut down by Con Edison in New York.

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1851 – The first public message was sent on the submarine telegraph cable under the English Channel between Dover, England and Calais, France.

1982 – 15-year-old Scott Safran of Cherry Hill, New Jersey set the world record score on Asteroids. His record stood for 27 years, the longest-running high score in videogame history.

1983 – The MIT TX-0, an experimental transistorized computer, was brought back to life for the last time at The Computer Museum in Marlboro, Massachusetts.

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1946 – The US Army held a contest between an abacus used by Kiyoshi Matsuzaki from Japan’s postal ministry and an electric calculator operated by Private Thomas Nathan Wood. The abacus won 4 to 1.

1970 – The Oregon Highway Divisions made an ill-advised attempt to destroy a dead whale by blowing it up with explosives. The results, documented by local news, eventually became Internet gold as the “exploding whale” video.

1990 – Tim Berners-Lee published a formal proposal for a hypertext project. The proposal referred to a “web of information nodes” and implementing “browsers” The project eventually became the World Wide Web.

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1675 – Gottfried Leibniz demonstrated integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of good ol y=f(x). That is, if you believe what he wrote in his notebooks.

1930 – Albert Einstein, yes that Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard received a US patent for a refrigerator that required no electricity, just a heat source. Electrolux bought up the patents.

2006 – The Sony PS3 went on sale with a built-in Blu-ray player and hard drive.

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1983 – Fred Cohen demonstrated a way to insert code into a Unix command in order to gain control of systems. His academic adviser, Len Adelman (the A in RSA) compared the self-replicating code to a virus. It wasn’t the first code of it’s kind, but it’s the one that inspired the name.

1983 – At the plaza hotel in New York, Bill Gates announced Windows. It originally was called Interface Manager until Rowland Hanson convinced Gates to change the name. It would take two years before Microsoft would put it on sale.

2001 – The first Apple iPod went on sale. Analysts agreed that the price of $399 was too high, and Apple was too inexperienced in consumer electronics to make it a success.

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1967 – NASA launched a Saturn V rocket carrying Apollo 4, a test craft launched from Cape Kennedy. It was the first launch in the Apollo program and the first time using the Launch Control Center at Kennedy Space Center.

1979 – The NORAD computers detected a massive Soviet Nuclear Strike. Thankfully raw data from satellites were reviewed along with early warning radar, proving it was a false alarm. A technician had loaded a test tape but failed to switch the system status to “test”. Oops!

2004 – The Mozilla Foundation released Firefox 1.0. It featured tabbed browsing and a popup blocker.

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