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This week in 1861 – Samuel Goodale of Cincinnati, OH patented the moving picture peep show machine. One put in a coin and turned a crank on the side of the ornately decorated box and voila, a flickering movie appeared! There still are peep shows today, but of an entirely different variety.
1957 – Smith-Corona Manufacturing of New York began selling portable electric typewriters. The first “portable” machine weighed in at 19 pounds! Soon, other manufacturers offered similar models, made of lighter-weight plastics, with a lot less of the sophisticated workings inside.
1958 – Explorer I, the first U.S. space satellite, was put into orbit around the earth by a Jupiter-C rocket. Explorer I orbited the earth every 114 minutes at a maximum height of 2,000 miles. This event marked the beginning of discussions, debates and decisions that would lead to the formation of NASA.
1982 – “Elk Cloner”, one of the first PC viruses, was written by 15-year-old high school student Richard Skrenta. The code is 400 lines long and disguised as an Apple boot program. It was originally meant as a joke and was spread by floppy disk.
And this week in 2004 – Facebook, a mainstream online social networking site, was founded by Mark Zuckerberg.