1964 – The precursor of the European Space Agency, ESRO (European Space Research Organization) is established per an agreement signed on June 14, 1962.
1969 – The inaugural message was sent over the first Internet,
then called Arpanet. The first message ‘login’, was typed in l…o… the autocomplete (a term from the distant future) was supposed to fill in the rest, but a memory buffer overflowed, crashing the system. A increase to the buffer size, and the first
connection was successfully made. A contract led by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern United States (UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, UCSB, and the University of Utah) after being turned down by AT&T and IBM as being “impossible” was awarded to Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN) of Cambridge, MA. They had $1 million and less than a year to turn theory into a working system. The system went operational in December, 1969.
1959 – Project Horizon. An Army task force was formed to develop a plan for establishing a manned lunar outpost by the quickest practical means. Soon after the Horizon study was completed, NASA was formed and assigned all space exploration tasks. The Von Braun team that led Horizon were transferred to NASA.
1727 – English physicist/astronomer Sir Isaac Newton died in London at age 84.
“I don’t know what I may seem to the world. But as to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a
prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” — Sir Isaac Newton