1973 – The United States launched Skylab, the country’s first space station as part of the Apollo space program.

https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/this-week-in-nasa-history-skylab-launches-may-14-1973

1984 – According to his Facebook profile Mark Zuckerberg was born in Dobbs Ferry, New York. He would grow up to found Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/zuck/info

1992 – Texas Instruments decided to take on the dominance of Intel, announcing its own 486 microprocessor chip. Cyrix corp. designed the chip for TI, but it proved unsuccessful in weakening Intel’s dominance.

http://articles.latimes.com/1992-05-14/business/fi-3052_1_texas-instruments

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1884 – A group of people interested in the new field of electricity met in New York to start the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/AIEE_History_1884-1963

1939 – Franklin Doolittle put experimental station W1XPW on the air, making it the first commercial FM radio station in the United States. The station later became WDRC-FM in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

http://www.wdrcobg.com/history30s.html

1958 – The trademark “Velcro” was registered, protecting the name of the multi-purpose material that manages cables everywhere.

https://trademarks.justia.com/720/29/velcro-72029769.html

1976 – Atari released the video game “Breakout,” making the paddle controller useful for something besides “Pong.

http://www.webpronews.com/play-ataris-breakout-in-google-image-search-with-this-awesome-easter-egg-2013-05

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1936 – University of Washington education professor August Dvorak received a patent for his new more efficient keyboard layout. While widely recognised as superior to the QWERTY layout, the Dvorak keyboard is not widely used.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=WSNkAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1941 – German engineer Konrad Zuse presented the Z3, the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. It succeeded the Z1 which was the first binary digital computer.

http://www.dw.com/en/konrad-zuse-and-the-digital-revolution-he-started-with-the-z3-computer-75-years-ago/a-19249238

2005 – Elijah Wood revealed the Xbox 360 on the MTV Music Awards. Microsoft didn’t announce price or release dates, only saying it would arrive for sale by the end of the year.

http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1501783/new-xbox-designed-customization.jhtml

2015 – Verizon announced it would acquire AOL, including its ISP, advertising and blogging opertions as a wholly-owned subsidiary.

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/verizon-buying-aol-4-4-billion-twitter-reacts/

2017 – Ransomware called WannaCry took advantage of a leaked NSA security tool called EternalBlue and spread to unpatched and out of date Windows installations. It infected more than 200,000 machines in more than 150 countries.

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-39901382

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1951 – Jay Forrester filed a patent application for matrix core memory. Professor Forrester led a team at MIT that developed a three-dimensional magnetic structure code-named Project Whirlwind. It was the first random access memory that was practical, reliable and relatively high-speed.

https://www.google.com/patents/US2736880

1979 – Daniel Bricklin and Robert Frankston gave the first demonstration of VisiCalc, the program that made the Apple II popular with businesses.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/May/11/

1997 – Deep Blue won its final match against Chess master Garry Kasparov, becoming the first computer to defeat a chess champion in match play.

https://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/watch/html/c.html

2016 – Hyperloop One conducted the first test of its linear-electric motors for propelling Hyperloop pods on a test track north of Las Vegas, NV.

http://gizmodo.com/watch-the-first-full-scale-demo-of-the-hyperloop-1776048315

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1946 – The US launched its second V-2 rocket at White Sands Proving Ground, which became the first successful launch of a large rocket on US soil. The rocket climbed straight up then pitched to the north reaching an altitude of 71 miles and impacted about 35 miles uprange.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/449089main_White_Sands_Missile_Range_Fact_Sheet.pdf

1960 – The nuclear-powered USS Triton submarine arrived in Groton, Connecticut, after completing the first completely submerged circumnavigation of Earth.

http://www.navalhistory.org/2011/05/10/uss-triton-circumnavigates-the-globe

2011 – Google announced its Open Hardware Platform and the Google Music service which would eventually become Google Play Music.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/05/google-releases-movie-rental-service-announces-music-service-in-closed-beta.ars

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1896 – Samuel Pierpoint Langley’s Aerodrome No. 5 made the first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft of substantial size.

https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/langley-aerodrome-number-5

1949 – The EDSAC, the first practical stored program computer, performed its first calculation. It operated at a speed of 714 operations per second.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/edsacposter.pdf

2002 – Apple’s Steve Jobs previewed Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar during his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote. It featured a handwriting technology dubbed Inkwell, an iChat instant messenger client, QuickTime 6 integration and more.

http://www.macworld.com/article/1004782/jaguar.html

2003 – Eve Online launched. The massively multiplayer space adventure differed from others in that its storylines were created mostly by the players of the game.

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20080508005957/en/EVE-Online-Celebrates-Years-Unprecedented-Achievements-Online

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1961 – First NASA astronaut Alan Shepard piloted the Freedom 7 Mercury capsule on its 15-minute 28-second suborbital flight.

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/history/features/50_freedom7.html

1992 – Id Software released Wolfenstein 3-D. It wasn’t the original first person shooter, but it launched the form into widespread popularity.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/John-Carmack-Wolfenstein-3D-id-Software-Apogee-FPS,15578.html

1999 – Microsoft shipped Windows 98 SE to manufacturers. The new version included Internet Connection Sharing, Internet Explorer 5, Windows NetMeeting 3.

http://news.cnet.com/Windows-98-SE-released-to-PC-makers/2100-1040_3-225460.html

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1995 – German electronics company Escom AG bought the rights to the name, patents and intellectual property of Commodore Electronics Ltd. for $10 million. Commodore had gone bankrupt the year before.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/May/4/

2000 – The “I Love You” virus spread to 55 million computers around the world, hijacking hard drives and deleting, renaming, or damaging files. The damage reached billions of dollars.

http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/05/04/iloveyou.01/

2004 – Apple announced that Steve Jobs would kick off that year’s Worldwide Developers Conference by talking about Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger.

http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2004/05/04Steve-Jobs-to-Kick-Off-Apples-Worldwide-Developers-Conference-2004-with-Preview-of-Mac-OS-X-Tiger.html

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1884 – Construction began in Chicago on the Home Insurance Building, generally acknowledged as the first steel-frame high-rise skyscraper.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1997-02-20/news/9702200217_1_skyscraper-american-skyline-office-building

1959 – Shortly after construction had begun, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland was officially named in honor of the pioneering rocket scientist.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/about/dr_goddard.html

1964 – Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny of Dartmouth College, launched a time-sharing system using a language meant to be learned quickly, called BASIC.

http://cis-alumni.org/BASIC.html

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1904 – George Stibitz was born. He pioneered the principles of relay-based computing. And named the “model K” design after his kitchen table. His work led to the Complex Number Calculator, the first remotely accessed computer.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/April/30/

1916 – Claude Elwood Shannon was born. He is considered the father of information theory and is the man who coined the term ‘bit’ for the fundamental unit of both data and computation.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/April/30/

1939 – RCA began regularly scheduled television service in New York City, with a telecast of President Franklin D. Roosevelt opening the New York World’s Fair. Programs were transmitted from mobile camera trucks to the main transmitter, which was connected to an aerial atop the Empire State Building. The broadcasting division of RCA was called the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC).

http://www.bairdtelevision.com/RCA.html

1993 – CERN released a statement declaring the software protocols developed for the World Wide Web would be available in the public domain.

http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/birth-web

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