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This Week in Tech History: First “Peep Show” and birth of wildly popular social networking site.

On this edition of This Week in Tech History, Chris tells us of the first peep show. Also, the birth of one of the most popular social media sites.

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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.

il_570xN.423776521_bly61957 – 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.Facebook-2006

And this week in 2004 – Facebook, a mainstream online social networking site, was founded by Mark Zuckerberg.

Written by Chris Graveline

Chris has covered consumer technology for over 20 years. He is the host of This Week in Tech History as well as a regular co-host on "Into Tomorrow with Dave Graveline" and our Technical Director.

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