#OnThisDay September 9, 1947, engineers at Harvard University discovered something unusual inside the Harvard Mark II computer. Not a coding mistake, not a glitch… but a real bug.

Read the full thread to know the story of the first computer bug ... While running diagnostics, the machine suddenly malfunctioned. Upon inspection, engineers found a moth trapped inside one of the computer’s relays. The insect had literally caused the failure.

#OnThisDay September 4, 1998, Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students at Stanford University. What began as a research project became one of the most influential tech companies in history.
Read full 🧵 👇 Larry and Sergey’s mission was simple yet ambitious:

“To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”
Their search engine quickly outperformed existing ones by ranking pages based on links (PageRank).

#OnThisDay August 8, 1902, Paul Dirac was born — one of the greatest theoretical physicists of the 20th century.
He predicted the existence of antimatter and reshaped quantum theory with a blend of logic and beauty that stunned the scientific world.
A thread 🧵 Dirac was known for his mathematical elegance and minimalism — both in his equations and in speech.
His 1928 Dirac Equation unified quantum mechanics and special relativity, and predicted a particle identical to the electron but with a positive charge — the positron.

#OnThisDay July 29, 1818 — French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel submitted his "Memoir on the Diffraction of Light" to the French Academy of Sciences.
It would become one of the most influential papers in the history of optics. 🧵⬇️ At the time, the particle theory of light, championed by Newton, still dominated. Fresnel, however, built on Thomas Young’s earlier work to argue forcefully for wave theory—using mathematics, experiments, and brilliant insight.