On 2 November 1988, student Robert Tappan Morris released a program that, he said, was meant to gauge the size of the internet. A design flaw made it copy itself far too often: about 6,000 machines, roughly 10% of the network at the time by contemporary estimates, were overwhelmed. Morris became the first person convicted under a US computer fraud law, and later an MIT professor.
In 1843, inventor Alexander Bain patented a way to send images over telegraph wires using synchronized pendulums. By the 1860s, a commercial fax service was already linking cities. The telephone wasn't patented until 1876, more than three decades after that first fax patent. The fax is really a child of the telegraph age.
On 8 October 1958, in Stockholm, 43-year-old Arne Larsson received the very first implanted pacemaker. The device, designed by engineer Rune Elmqvist and implanted by surgeon Åke Senning, worked for only a few hours and had to be replaced. Larsson went on to receive more than twenty pacemakers in his lifetime. He died in 2001 aged 86, outliving both the engineer and the surgeon.