The First Practical Typewriter Patented
June 23, 1868
Latham Sholes, Carlos Glidden, and Samuel Soule are awarded a patent for the “Type-Writer” which would become the basis for the first practical and commercially successful…
thisdayintechhistory.com/06/…
Greenwich Becomes Mean
June 22, 1675
King Charles II of Britain decrees the establishment of an observatory at Greenwich for the purpose of finding better ways of determining the longitudinal locations of ships at sea. The…
thisdayintechhistory.com/06/…
Apple Announces Snow Leopard
June 8, 2009
At their World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, Apple announced their next Mac operating system Mac OS X 10.6, known as Snow Leopard. Snow Leopard, the follow up to Mac OS X…
thisdayintechhistory.com/06/…
Launch of Apollo 10
May 18, 1969
Apollo 10 launches from the Kennedy Space Center. It would be the final “dress rehearsal” flight to the moon before Apollo 11 would make the first Moon landing two months later. NASA had…
thisdayintechhistory.com/05/…
Contract Signed to Create ENIAC
May 17, 1943
The US Army and the University of Pennsylvania sign a contract to develop ENIAC, which would become the world’s first fully electronic computer, making the use of vacuum tubes rather…
thisdayintechhistory.com/05/…
First Sports TV Broadcast
May 17, 1939
NBC carries the first broadcast televised sporting event in history, the second game of a doubleheader baseball game between Columbia and Princeton. Only about 400 TV sets were capable of…
thisdayintechhistory.com/05/…
First Demonstration of Hi-Fi Tape Technology in US
May 16, 1946
Jack Mullin, an electrical engineer and US Army Signal Corps veteran in World War II, gives the first demonstration of a high-fidelity tape recording in the United…
thisdayintechhistory.com/05/…
Deep Blue Defeats Kasparov in Tournament Match
May 11, 1997
The IBM computer and artificial intelligence Deep Blue defeats reigning chess champion and one of the greatest chess players of all time, Garry Kasparov, in the 6th and…
thisdayintechhistory.com/05/…
Commodore Assets Purchased out of Bankruptcy
May 4, 1995
German company Escom AG purchases the rights to the name, patents, and intellectual property of Commodore Electronics, which had declared bankruptcy in 1994. Commodore was…
thisdayintechhistory.com/05/…
The First Mass Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, i.e. Spam
May 3, 1978
Gary Thuerk, a marketing representative for Digital Equipment Corporation, sends out an e-mail promoting an open house for the company’s latest computer systems…
thisdayintechhistory.com/05/…
Microsoft Registers Their Domain Name … Finally
May 2, 1991
Microsoft registers the microsoft.com domain name. For such a major technology company, this was notably over 6 years from when the domain name system was created and…
thisdayintechhistory.com/05/…
Justice Department Blocks Microsoft Purchase of Intuit
April 27, 1995
The US Justice Department sues Microsoft to block its acquisition of Intuit, Inc. In October of 2014 Microsoft and Intuit had agreed to a $1.5 billion stock…
thisdayintechhistory.com/04/…
Buried E.T. Cartridges Discovered by Archeologists
April 26, 2014
As part of the filming of the documentary, Atari: Game Over, a team of archaeologists at a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico uncover the site of an estimated…
thisdayintechhistory.com/04/…
Demonstration of First Practical Electron Microscope
April 20, 1940
Vladimir Zworykin, research director at RCA, holds a public demonstration of the first practical electron microscope. While the electron microscope had…
thisdayintechhistory.com/04/…
Zoom Lenses Come to TV
April 19, 1947
The first public demonstration of a prototype Zoomar lens is conducted inside Studio 3H at NBC’s Rockefeller Plaza headquarters in New York City. Invented by Dr. Frank G. Back, and promoted…
thisdayintechhistory.com/04/…
18 April 2023
First Megabit Chip in Commercial Product
April 18, 1986
Newspapers report that IBM’s Model 3090 mainframe has become the first commercial computer to use a megabit memory chip, 4 times the storage capacity…
thisdayintechhistory.com/04/…
The First Vertical Jet Flies April 11, 1957
The Ryan X-13 Vertijet makes its first vertical take off and landing, marking the first time a jet-powered aircraft successfully completed a VTOL flight. Militaries around the world at… thisdayintechhistory.com/04/…
Genesis of COBOL April 8, 1959
Mary Hawes, a computer scientist for the Burroughs Corporation holds a meeting of computers users, manufacturers, and academics at the University of Pennsylvania for the purpose of creating a common… thisdayintechhistory.com/04/…
RFC 1 Defines the Building Block of Internet Communication April 7, 1969
Steve Crocker, a graduate student at UCLA and part of the team developing APRANET, writes the first “Request for Comments“. The ARPANET, a research project… thisdayintechhistory.com/04/…
Pioneer 11 Launched April 6, 1973
NASA launches Pioneer 11, the second of two probes along with Pioneer 10 sent out to explore the outer solar system. Pioneer 11 became famous for being the first man-made object to fly by Saturn… thisdayintechhistory.com/04/…




















