The first powered airplane flight takes off, the last person walks on the moon and a flawed processor halts shipments of PCs… It all happened This Week in Tech History.
1903 – The first successful powered airplane flight took place near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. First Orville, then Wilbur Wright kept their invention flying … each flight lasted just under one minute. Although they were not the first to build experimental aircraft, the Wright Brothers were the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible, and are credited with giving birth to the aviation industry.
1962 – NASA’s Mariner 2 became the first spacecraft to fly by Venus. Mariner 2 was the first robotic space probe to conduct a successful planetary encounter.
1972 – US astronaut Gene Cernan became the last person to walk on the moon, after he and Harrison Schmitt completed the third and final extravehicular activity of the Apollo 17 mission.
And this week in 1994 – IBM stopped shipments of personal computers that contained Intel’s flawed Pentium chip, saying the processor’s problems were worse than earlier believed.