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Daily Tech History: August 22, 1987 — The Legend of Zelda Arrives in North America

Stack of retro NES-era video game cartridges, evoking the gold Legend of Zelda cartridge released in 1987

On August 22, 1987, Nintendo brought The Legend of Zelda to North American shelves for the NES, more than a year after it had already taken off in Japan. Players unwrapped a box with a corner cut away to show off a shiny gold cartridge inside — an unusual bit of packaging that made the game instantly recognizable and turned it into a must-have status symbol among kids trading tips on the playground.

The game itself was just as big a departure. Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto and Takashi Tezuka, who were building it alongside Super Mario Bros. at the same time, Zelda deliberately went the opposite direction from Mario’s linear level-by-level structure. Instead, it dropped players into an open world of Hyrule they could explore in almost any order, hunting for secrets, dungeons, and upgrades at their own pace. That freedom, paired with a battery inside the cartridge that could actually save your progress — a rarity at the time, when most games made you write down a password — meant a sprawling adventure no longer had to be finished in one sitting. It’s a small piece of engineering that changed what a home console game could ask of a player.

The gamble paid off in a big way: Zelda became the first NES game to sell over a million cartridges in the U.S. in 1987 alone, and it went on to move more than 6.5 million copies worldwide. It’s since been inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame and is routinely named among the most influential games ever made, spawning a franchise that’s still going strong nearly four decades later.

Also on this day: August 22, 1989 saw Voyager 2 return images confirming that Neptune has its own system of rings, just days before the spacecraft’s historic close flyby of the planet.

Source: Wikipedia — The Legend of Zelda (video game), Time Extension

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

August 22, 2026 by Mike Williams Daily Tech History 0

Daily Tech History: August 21, 1888 — Burroughs Patents the First Successful Calculating Machine

Antique dark green mechanical calculating machine on display

On August 21, 1888, William Seward Burroughs was awarded four U.S. patents (Nos. 388,116–388,119) for his “calculating machine” — the device that became the first commercially successful adding machine in America. Burroughs, a former bank clerk in Auburn, New York, had grown frustrated watching coworkers grind through hours of manual arithmetic each day, often with mistakes that had to be caught and redone by hand. The existing adding machines of the era were unreliable, so he set out to build one that clerks could actually trust.

The patents, filed back in 1885, capped years of painstaking refinement — Burroughs reportedly worked out some of the mechanical drawings under a microscope to get the tolerances right. A year earlier, in 1886, he had already founded the American Arithmometer Company to bring the machine to market, and within about a year of the patent grant the company had produced around 50 units. The design later paired the calculator with a printer, giving clerks a paper record of every calculation — an innovation that earned Burroughs the Franklin Institute’s John Scott Legacy Medal in 1897.

Burroughs didn’t live to see how far his invention would go — he died in 1898 — but the company he started kept growing. It was renamed the Burroughs Adding Machine Company in 1904, became the Burroughs Corporation in 1953, and in 1986 merged with Sperry Corporation to form Unisys, a company still in business today. It’s a reminder that a lot of modern computing’s corporate lineage traces back to unglamorous 19th-century office equipment built to stop clerks from double-checking their own arithmetic.

Source: EDN — “Burroughs receives calculating machine patents, August 21, 1888”

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.

August 21, 2026 by Mike Williams Daily Tech History 0

Daily Tech History: August 20, 1977 — Voyager 2 Launches Toward the Outer Planets

Rocket launch leaving a bright light trail at dusk, evoking the 1977 Voyager 2 liftoff

On August 20, 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 2 spacecraft from Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop a Titan IIIE-Centaur rocket, after a launch attempt troubled by a pair of computer glitches on the pad. Despite lifting off two weeks before its twin, Voyager 1, it was sent on a longer, more roundabout trajectory — one that would eventually make it the only spacecraft in history to visit all four outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Voyager 2’s instruments captured close-up imagery and data that reshaped our understanding of the outer solar system, from Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere to the icy moons of Uranus and Neptune. In December 2018 it became only the second human-made object ever to cross into interstellar space, following Voyager 1. Nearly five decades after launch, the probe is still transmitting data from beyond the solar system, making it one of the longest continuously operating spacecraft ever built — a remarkable feat for hardware designed in the 1970s.

Also born on this day: John Carmack (1970), the programmer behind id Software’s breakthrough 3D graphics engines that powered games like Doom and Quake.

Source: NASA Science — Voyager Fact Sheet

Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.