Here are all the geek-y events that happened this week

January 23rd

1970 – OSCAR 5 (Orbiting Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio), Australia’s first amateur radio satellite, is launched.

1993 – The first popular graphical web browser, NCSA Mosaic, was released with version 0.5. Used mostly for browsing the web it also supported FTP, NNTP and gopher. It was not the first graphical web browser, Erwise and ViolaWWW are little known but came earlier, but it was the browser that popularized the web and made way for the browsers of today.

January 24th

1986 – The Space Probe Voyager 2 came within 81 500 kilometers of the planet Uranus discovering the moons Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona, Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, Belinda, Perdita and Puck.

January 25th

1978 – The beginning of the Great Blizzard of 1978 which dropped over 12 inches of snow on Chicago and would last for 3 days. Being stuck inside during the snowstorm prompted Ward Christensen and Randy Suess to invent the first Computerized Bulletin Board System, CBBS.

2005 - Opportunity the Mars Exploration Rover – B, lands on the surface of Mars at 0505 UTC in the Meridiani Planum just 3 weeks after the MER-A Spirit landed.

January 27th

1985 – Launch of NASA mission STS-51-C. It was the first dedicated DoD mission therefore it’s payload and many mission details are classified.

2010 – Apple first generation iPad is announced at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco finally succeeding in the failed tablet market

January 28th

1958 – The LEGO Company of Denmark patents it’s interlocking brick design. They are still compatible with modern LEGO bricks.

1986 – A tragic end to NASA mission STS-51-L 73 seconds after launch when the Challenger Space Shuttle broke apart due to a failure in an O-ring seal on one of the Solid Rocket Boosters.

Events and Observances

January 28th – Data Privacy Day is an annual event to promote awareness and education about best privacy practices.

Make sure you come back next week for more geeky history or subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it!