In 1944 – Harvard University President James Conant wrote to IBM founder Thomas Watson Sr. to let him know that the Harvard Mark I was operating smoothly. It was used in conjunction with the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ships. In 1967 – The Surveyor 3 spacecraft was successfully launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida on...

In 1959 – The programming language LISP had its first public presentation. Created by John McCarthy, LISP offered programmers flexibility in organization. In 1971 – Abhay Bhushan proposed FTP (File Transfer Protocol) in RFC 114. In 1976 – The Helios-B deep-space probe made what was then the closest controlled approach to the Sun at...

In 1452 – Leonardo da Vinci, one of the greatest artist, inventor and engineer in history, was born near the Tuscan town of Vinci. In 1892 – The Edison General Electric Company and the Thomson-Houston Company merge to form the General Electric Company, manufacturer of dynamos and electric lights. In 1977 – The first...

In 1894 – Alfred Tate, a former Edison associate and the Holland Brothers, opened a public Kinetoscope in New York City at 1155 Broadway, on the corner of 27th Street—the first commercial motion picture house. In 1956 – Ampex demonstrated the VRX-1000 videotape recorder at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters Convention...

In 1960 – The United States launched Navy Transit 1-B. It demonstrated the first engine restart in space and more famously the feasiblity of using satellites as navigational aids, proving systems like GPS would work. In 1970 – The crew of Apollo 13 heard a sharp bang and vibration followed by a warning light....