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...

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...

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....

In 240 B.C.E. – 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...

In 1941 – 80% of US AM radio frequencies were reassigned to new channels as part of the North American Radio Broadcasting Agreement. In 1945 – German soldiers blew the launch tracks for the V-1 rocket site near Letelle, Netherlands, ending the rocket attacks. In 1974 – NASA’s Mariner 10 became the first spaceprobe...