In 1973 – Larry Page was born in East Lansing, Michigan. He would go on to help invent and co-found Google.

In 1976 – Queen Elizabeth II sent the first royal email, from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in Malvern as a part of a demonstration of networking technology.

In 1999 – The “Melissa” worm showed up in a file on the alt.sex usenet group and became the first successful mass-mailing worm. The worm’s creator, David L. Smith, apparently named the worm after a lap dancer in Florida.

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

In 1925 – John Logie Baird gave his first public demonstration of his ‘Silhouette Television’ at the Selfridges department store, Oxford Street, London. It was part of the stores birthday celebration.

In 1979 – The first fully functional space shuttle orbiter, Columbia, was delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center in preparation for its first launch.

In 1995 – Ward Cunningham installed the First Wiki, WikiWikiWeb on a $300 computer someone gave him. He connected it to the Internet, using a 14.4-baud dial-up modem.

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

In 1802 – Richard Trevithick and Andrew Viviane of Camborne Parish in the County of Cornwall, enrolled a patent for a steam engine that could power a full-sized road locomotive. He had previously demonstrated it by driving up a hill in a car he called the “Puffing Devil”.

In 1896 – A. S. Popov supposedly made the first radio transmission in human history. Popov is said to have transmitted the words “Heinrich Hertz” from one building to another on the campus of St. Petersburg University, though the assertion was not published until years later because of the need for military secrecy.

In 2001 – Apple released its new operating system Mac OS X, code named Cheetah, with a retail price of $130.l

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

In 1857 – The first department store elevator for passengers was installed at E.V. Haughwout & Co. in New York City. This was a significant development towards the building of skyscrapers.

In 1996 – The U.S. space shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir for the third time, and for the first time dropped off a U.S. astronaut. Shannon Lucid began her record-breaking stay on the space station.

In 2001 – The final commands to light the engines of the Progress supply ship were sent to the Russian Mir space station, which then broke up in the atmosphere before falling into the southern Pacific Ocean near Fiji.

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