1856 – Nikola Tesla was born in Smiljan, Lika, Croatia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a Serbian Orthodox Priest and his mother an inventor of household appliances.

http://www.teslasociety.com/biography.htm

1962 – The world’s first communication satellite, Telstar, was launched into orbit from Cape Canaveral on a Delta rocket.

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/telstar.html

1990 – The Electronic Frontier Foundation was formally founded, immediately coming to the aid of Steve Jackson Games, who’s BBS had been seized by the Secret Service.

http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/SJG/?f=eff_creation.html

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1941 – British cryptologists including Alan Turing broke the code used by the German army to direct ground-to-air operations on the eastern front.

http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/enigma-key-broken

1971 – Marc Andreessen was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa. He would grow up to develop the Netscape browser, which powered the explosion of the Web in the late 1990s.

http://www.biography.com/people/marc-andreessen-9542208

1979 – Voyager 2 made its closest approach to Jupiter, coming within 570,000 kilometers of the planet.

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/history/70s/Voyager2_1979.htm

1982 – Disney released the movie Tron, which used the most extensive computer-generated graphics and special effects to that time.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084827/

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1908 – Charles Urban demonstrated Kinemacolor, the first successful color motion-picture process, at a scientific meeting in Paris attended by Auguste and Louis Lumière.

http://books.google.com/books?id=JGoLZrIqa_wC&pg=PA309&lpg=PA309&dq=july+8+1908+kinemacolor&source=bl&ots=txw5pg8N-G&sig=BXNkiUCZrOEpNgbV01fq80SiEwM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=iwGnU6KlFoTZoATB_4KQBA&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=july%208%201908%20kinemacolor&f=false

1946 – The University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering began a summer school course on computing that inspired the EDSAC, BINAC, and, many other similar computers.

http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200208/history.cfm

2011 – The Space Shuttle Atlantis launched on the final Space Shuttle mission.

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/space-shuttle-atlantis-final-flight-launches-florida-struggling/story?id=14024251#.T87MB9VYvmI

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1752 – Joseph Marie Jacquard was born in Lyon, France. The weaver and inventor created the first programmable power loom and the cards he used to program it would be adapted by Herman Hollerith and others for programming the first computers.

http://www.computerhistory.org/tdih/July/7/

1936 – Henry F. Phillips received patents for a new kind of screw and the screwdriver used with it. Endless numbers of computer cases have been held together by it since.

http://www.google.com/patents?id=MINJAAAAEBAJ&printsec=abstract&zoom=4#v=onepage&q&f=false

1981 – The first solar-powered aircraft, Solar Challenger, flew 163 miles from Corneille-en-Verin Airport north of Paris across the English Channel to Manston Royal Air Force Base south of London, staying aloft 5 hours and 23 minutes.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/dryden/news/FactSheets/FS-054-DFRC.html

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1920 – A US Navy F5L seaplane took off from Hampton Roads, Virginia, using a radio compass for the first time. The pilots located and flew to the Battleship Ohio about 94 miles offshore.

http://www.history.navy.mil/today-in-history/july-6.html

1947 – The AK-47 went into production in the Soviet Union– the name stands for Automatic rifle Kalashnikov model of 1947.

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/07/dayintech_0706/

1996 – AOL settled lawsuits in California that accused the company of misleading subscribers about monthly service charges.

https://books.google.com/books?id=8xSECwAAQBAJ&pg=SA4-PA51&lpg=SA4-PA51&dq=july+6+1996+aol&source=bl&ots=-Ld1WBM_Ej&sig=8Vk_JNskkjnxx4VFjboW80Ip_3Y&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiBgPSH-PHbAhVEwlQKHcYrBqMQ6AEIMDAB#v=onepage&q=july%206%201996%20aol&f=false

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