In 1935 – A Time magazine article described the use of the pattern of capillaries in the retina as a means of identification called eye prints. Hello biometrics!

In 1947 – John Bardeen and Walter Brattain applied two closely-spaced gold contacts held in place by a plastic wedge to the surface of a small slab of high-purity germanium. It was later called the Transistor.

In 2002 – Creative Commons formally launched, unveiling Machine-Readable Copyright Licenses and a revamped website.

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

In 1953 – Dudley Buck entered the idea for the Cryotron into his MIT notebook. The cryotron is a four-terminal superconductive computer component.

In 1965 – Gemini 6A, crewed by Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida. Four orbits later, it achieved the first space rendezvous, with Gemini 7.

1994 – Netscape shipped version 1.0 of the Netscape Navigator Web browser.

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

In 1900 – German physicist Max Planck published his theory that radiant energy is made up of particle-like components, known as “quantum.” And quantum physics was born.

In 1972 – Eugene Cernan ended a 7 hour and 15 minute EVA, climbed back aboard the Apollo 17 Lunar Module and became the last person to walk on the moon.

In 1996 – John Tu and David Sun, the founders of Kingston Technology took $100 million from the sale of their privately held enterprise and gave it to employees — a spontaneous gesture to those who had helped make the memory-module company a market leader.

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

In 1962 – NASA “Relay 1” launched, the first active repeater communications satellite in orbit.

In 1977 – Young Bill Gates was arrested for traffic violation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, leading to one of the most famous mugshots ever.

In 1977 – Robert Metcalfe et. al were awarded a patent for “Multipoint data communication system with collision detection” AKA ethernet.

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In 1896 – Guglielmo Marconi amazed a group at Toynbee Hall in East London with a demonstration of wireless communication across a room. Every time Marconi hit a key a bell would ring from a box across the room being carried by William Henry Preece.

In 1973 – Founder of LinkExchange, CEO of Zappos, and promoter of customer-centric business, Tony Hsieh was born.

In 1980 – Apple’s stock was initially offered for sale. Regulators in Massachusetts prohibited individual investors in the state from buying the stock, as it was deemed too risky.

In 1991 – Paul Kunz sets up the first website in North America. It searched particle physics literature at Stanford.

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