May 1, 2011: Twitter Breaks Bin Laden Death, 1964: First BASIC Program Written

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Bin Laden compound
May 1, 2011: Twitter reports Bin Laden death hours before President Obama

2011 – The first tweets on the raid came from Sohaib Athar, a.k.a. @ReallyVirtual. At the time he didn’t know what he was tweeting about, just there was a helicopter hovering over Abbottabad at 1AM. Shortly after, Twitter went a buzz because inside that bunker was Osama Bin Laden. However, it was determined the first tweet actually came from  @keithurbahn (aka Keith Urbahn, Chief of Staff for Donald Rumsfeld).

This caused Twitter to explode and soon after, 14.8 million tweets were posted even before President Obama could take the podium to address the nation.

1964John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz run the first BASIC program at 4 AM in Darthmouth. The duo used a General Electric 225 mainframe computer and ran a simple compiler program.

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