In 1973 – Lexis launched Computerized Legal Searching. It was limited to searching the full text of cases in Ohio and New York.

In 1978 – The patent expired on Swiss inventor George de Mestral’s invention of a hook and loop fastener he called Velcro. Soon children everywhere no longer had to learn to tie shoes quite so early in life.

In 1980 – Microsoft Corporation announced their first hardware product the Z80 SoftCard for Apple. It was a microprocessor on a printed circuit board that plugged into the Apple II and sold for $349.00.

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

In 1976 – Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne decided to change their garage project into a company and formed Apple Computer. It would be incorporated the following January.

In 1997 – Dave Winer changed how he displayed ‘Scripting News’ so that it always showed the last ten days worth of posts. In other words the way every blog does it now. Whether this makes it the ‘first blog’ or not it was extremely influential and is definitely one of the oldest blogs out there, predating the term blog, of course.

In 2004 – In one of the best April Fool’s jokes ever, Google launched a real product. Weren’t expecting that, were you Internet? Gmail launched in invite-only mode, making a Gmail account temporarily prestigious in the geek world.

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

In 1939 – Harvard and IBM signed an agreement to build the Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). It weighed 5 tons and read data from paper tape and punch cards.

In 1993 – Richard Depew accidentally posted 200 identical messages to news.admin.policy while testing some auto-moderation software. It became the first USENET postings to be referred to as spam.

In 1998 – After three years of development and much wrangling with the Warcraft engine it was originally built on, Blizzard released the iconic game Starcraft.

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

In 240 BC – Chinese astronomers observed a new broom-shaped “star” in the sky. It was the first confirmed sighting of Halley’s Comet.

In 1950 – Bell Telephone Laboratories announced the invention of a new kind of electric eye called the phototransistor. Dr. John Northrup Shive invented the transistor, which operated by light rather than electricity.

1951 – The Census UNIVAC System was accepted and subsequently devoted almost exclusively to tabulating results of the 1950 Census of Population and Housing. It was the first UNIVAC and was capable of completing 1,905 operations per second, which it stored on magnetic tape.

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