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. It would lose the format war to VHS but find a niche in broadcast production.

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

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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.

In 1984 – Tetris, one of the best-selling video games of all-time, was 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.

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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.

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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 “rats” repeatedly and then the phrases, “There was a young fellow of Italy, who diddled the public quite prettily.”

In 1977 – JVC introduced the open standard for the VHS videocassette 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.

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