James Cook spots the south-eastern coast of Australia and his crew of the Endeavour becomes the first recorded Europeans to encounter its eastern coastline, 164 years after the first undisputed sighting of the western coastline by the Dutch in 1606, and 148 years after the first English sighting. (Ten days later Cook’s expedition makes landfall at a place he called Botany Bay, now known as the Kurnell Peninsula, and made contact with the Gweagal.)

Cook’s expedition is significant because, 125 days, he took possession of the whole Eastern Coast, which he called New South Wales, in the name of the Kingdom of Great Britain which, thereby, became the first European power to officially claim any area on the Australian mainland. And then, a mere 18 years later, the Kingdom of Great Britain started using it as Penal Colony, transporting convicts from the cold, damp, foggy miserable shores of the Northern landscape to the warm, dry, clear, sunny shores of the Southern Australian coastline. Talk about early logistics put to good use! 😉

The Linear B script was formally rediscovered in an excavation in Knossos, Crete. While evidence of the script was discovered as early as 1886, when Arthur Evans of the Ashmolean Museum was presented with a sealstone from Crete by Greville Chester that displayed signs similar to those discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in his work, but that were never identified as writing, until the treasure trove of tablets was discovered it was just a hunch that the language existed. However, after Evans obtained more in 1893, he began to suspect that the stones he obtained evidenced various phases in the development of a writing system and that there might be another lost language.

Linear B is an early syllabic script used for writing Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek that predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. As it is likely that it influenced development of the later Greek alphabet, which would have been designed to simply the script (as a syllabic script requires a lot more base characters than an alphabet script) — which was used to record the works of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle — it was a very important development in the history of written communication and one that should not be forgotten.

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And forty years later we are drowning in their software, including Office which is 25 years old. But, for better or worse, we cannot ignore this milestone. They inspired a lot of other software companies and still do to this day.