Other projects

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

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 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.

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.

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 1984 was published. The book still affects notions of privacy and inspired the conic 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.

In 1954 – Computer science hero Alan Turing killed himself by eating an apple containing cyanide. Turing formulated the famous Turing test and broke code at Bletchley park during World War II.

In 1975 – Sony introduced the Betamax video recorder for sale.

In 1980 – The first U.S. solar power plant was dedicated at the Natural Bridge National Monument, Utah.

In 1933 – The world’s first drive-in movie theater opened in Camden, New Jersey. Richard Hollingshead Jr. had developed the system by using a 1928 Kodak projector mounted on the hood of his car and aimed at a screen pinned to some trees.

1984 – Tetris, one of the best-selling video games of all-time, is released. It was invented by a Soviet programmer, Alexei Pazhitnov and popularized by Hank Rogers who bought the rights and distributed it.

In 1995 – The Los Angeles Times reported that Father Leonard Boyle was working to put the Vatican’s library on the World Wide Web through a site funded by IBM.

In 1833 – Ada Gordon, daughter of Lord Byron (and future Countess Lovelace) met Charles Babbage for the first time. He designed an early computer, and she published a description of his work and wrote the first computer program.

In 1977 – The Apple II went on sale. It had a bus speed of 1 MHz and 64 KB of memory.

In 2002 – Mozilla.org announced the release of Mozilla 1.0, an open-source browser built on the Gecko engine that also powered Netscape.

In 1903 – In one of the earliest examples of white hat hacking, Nevil Maskelyne interrupted a demonstration of the Marconi radio communications system at the Royal Institution, London. Before Marconi’s message from Poldhu, Cornwall could arrive, Maskelyne hijacked the signal sending the word “rast” repeatedly and then the phrases, “There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily.”

In 1977 – JVC’s open standard for the VHS videocassette was introduced in North America at a press conference before the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago.

In 2010 – Falcon 9 Flight 1 launched the maiden flight of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, setting a new benchmark for non-governmental space flight. The rocket put a dummy payload into orbit as a test.

In 1889 – The first long-distance transmission of electricity took place, sending power from a hydroelectric generator at Willamette Falls 14 miles west to 55 street lights at 4th and Main in Portland, Oregon.

In 1948 – Ed Brown Jr., a former Navy pilot, opened a fly-in movie theater near Wall Township, New Jersey. You could also drive in. The theater had space for 500 cars and 25 small planes could land in a nearby airfield and taxi over to the theater.

In 1965 – Gemini 4 launched on the first multi-day space mission by a NASA crew. Crew-member Ed White performed the first US spacewalk.

In 1883 – Thomas Edison and Stephen D. Field built built the world’s first elevated electric railway. It was a narrow-gauge 3-foot-wide track in the gallery around the edge of the main exhibition building of the Chicago Railway Exhibition. It ran nine miles per hour.

In 1896 – Guglielmo Marconi applied for British Patent number 12039 regarding a system of telegraphy using Hertzian waves. We’d call it radio.

2003 – The European Space Agency launched the Mars Express probe from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. It was the fastest planetary probe to be built.

In 1890 – The U.S. Census Bureau began using Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine for the first time. This gave Hollerith the basis to later found his Tabulating Machine Company, which was one of four companies that merged to form IBM.

In 1944 – The Colossus Mark 2 was put into service at Bletchley Park in Great Britain, just in time for the invasion at Normandy.

In 1999 – The Windows version of music-sharing program Napster was released.