In 1949, the EDSAC performed its first calculation The EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator) was an early British computer that is considered to be the first stored program electronic computer. It contained 3,000 vacuum tubes and used mercury delay lines for memory. Learn more

In 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, aboard Freedom 7. Freedom 7’s suborbital mission lasted 15 minutes, 22 seconds and reached an altitude of 186 kilometers (116 miles). Soviet cosmonaut Yuri A. Gagarin was the first human in space, having orbited the

In 1989, NASA launched Magellan to Venus. The Magellan spacecraft was named after the sixteenth-century Portuguese explorer whose expedition first circumnavigated the Earth. It arrived at Venus on August 10, 1990. Learn more at http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/magellan/fact.html

In 1978, the first documented spam email was sent. A marketer at the now-defunct computer firm Digital Equipment Corporation sent an email to 393 users of Arpanet, the computer network that eventually became the Internet. The recipients were not happy. Read more at http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13777

In 1981, Radio Shack re-released Model III TRSDOS 1.3 with 2 fixes Originally released on May 1st, TRS-DOS was able to accept input/output commands that worked with disk files rather than the cassette tapes that were used by most other TRS-80 systems. Learn more at

In 1964, the first BASIC computer program was run at Dartmouth. BASIC stands for Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. It went on to be the most widely used computer language in the world. Learn more at http://www.dartmouth.edu/~vox/0304/0503/basic.html