NASA gives rise to a new profession, the Early Bird heads into space and a tech giant is born… It all happened This Week in Tech History.
1959 – NASA announced the selection of the United States’ first seven astronauts, whom the news media quickly dub the “Mercury Seven”. The Mercury Seven created a new profession in the US, and established the image of the American astronaut for decades to come.
1964 – IBM announces the System/360 mainframe computer systems. It was the first family of computers designed to cover the complete range of applications, from small to large, both commercial and scientific
1965 – Intelsat 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral, FL. This was the first commercial communications satellite to be placed in geosynchronous orbit . The satellite was nicknamed “Early Bird” after the adage “The early bird catches the worm.”
1975 – Microsoft was founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
1994 – Mosaic Communications Corporation, later Netscape, was founded in Mountain View, California. Its Netscape web browser was once dominant but lost to Internet Explorer and other competitors after the so-called first browser war, its market share falling from more than 90 percent in the mid-1990s to less than 1 percent in 2006.