Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard formally began Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto garage, a founding moment now revered as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.

Engineers at UCLA successfully sent the first data transmission between two computers connected by the ARPANET, the precursor to the internet.

Engineers at UCLA connect the first two nodes of ARPANET, a Honeywell 516 minicomputer and a Sigma 7, launching the network that would become the internet.

Steve Wozniak's refinements to the Apple II's color graphics and floating-point BASIC push the fledgling machine toward the design that would launch personal computing to the mass market.

Apple Computer completes its first batch of fifty Apple I computers, delivering them to the Byte Shop in Mountain View for retail sale.

Seymour Cray's Cray-1, the first commercially successful supercomputer, was delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory, redefining scientific computation.

Apple Computer begins shipping the Apple II, one of the first mass-market personal computers, to retail stores across the United States.

Microsoft released MS-DOS 1.0 to IBM, the operating system that would launch the PC era and make Bill Gates's company a software giant.

Commodore unveiled the Amiga 1000 at a lavish Lincoln Center event, showcasing graphics and sound years ahead of rival personal computers.

Cambridge computer scientists pointed a camera at a coffee pot and streamed the image over the university network, birthing the world's first webcam.

CERN's public web server, hosting Tim Berners-Lee's foundational World Wide Web software, became broadly accessible, letting outside researchers connect for the first time.

Apple introduced the iPhone 5, its first phone with a taller 4-inch screen and a new Lightning connector, at a San Francisco event.