1: 1941: Birth date of Federico Faggin, inventor of the Z80, an 8-bit microprocessor that dominated its market from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s.

3: 1924: Birth date of John Warner Backus, an IBM Fellow who helped develop several computer languages, including FORTRAN and ALGOL. 


7: 1972: Apollo 17, the final moon mission of NASA’s Apollo program, is launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. 


10: 1901: The first Nobel Prizes are presented by the King of Sweden, in accordance with inventor Alfred Nobel’s will. 


17: 1903: Wilbur and Orville Wright complete the first successful motor-powered and piloted airplane flight at Kill Devil Hills, N.C. 


3: 1906: The first two-way trans­atlantic wireless telegraphy is initiated between Brant Rock, Mass., and Machrihanish, Scotland. 


8: 1914: Birth date of Thomas John Watson Jr., IBM’s president from 1956 to 1974. 


9: 1894: New England Telephone and Telegraph (an early predecessor of AT&T) puts the first battery-operated telephone switchboard into operation. 


17: 1706: Birth date of Benjamin Franklin. 


21: 1904: The first military radio experiments at the Eiffel Tower are conducted. Gustave Eiffel offered the French army use of his structure to save it from destruction after its initial permit expired.


28: 1886: Birth date of Hidetsugu Yagi, whose eponymous directional shortwave antenna is now an IEEE Milestone. 

 

1: 1972: Hewlett-Packard introduces the HP-35 pocket calculator, the first to compute trigonometric functions and logarithms. 


6: 1959: Jack Kilby files a patent application for the integrated circuit. He received the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics for its invention. 


14: 1876: Alexander Graham Bell files a patent application for the telephone. 


17: 1911: Charles Kettering delivers his electric starter to Cadillac Motor Co. in Detroit. It debuts in 1912 and is rapidly adopted by other auto makers to replace hand-cranked starting. 


15–21: IEEE Meeting Series in Phoenix.


28: 1837: Birth date of Herman H. Hollerith, inventor of punched-card equipment for data processing and founder of Tabulating Machine Co., a predecessor of IBM.