#TodayInHistory – April 4

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April 4 – Some Important Events on this day

655 👉🏼 Battle at Postage Farina, Tunis: English fleet beats Barbary pirates 🏴‍☠️
1460 👉🏼 University of Basel in Swizerland forms
1660 👉🏼 English King Charles II sends Declaration of Breda (freedom of religion)
1789 👉🏼 1st US Congress begins regular sessions during George Washington’s presidency at Federal Hall, NYC (ending 1791)
1818 👉🏼 Congress decides on the US flag: 13 red & white stripes & 20 stars 🇺🇸
1905 👉🏼 1905 Earthquake in Kangra India, kills 20,000 🇮🇳
1949 👉🏼 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) treaty signed in Washington, D.C.
1958 👉🏼 1st march against nuclear weapons (Aldermaston, England)

1968 👉🏼 US civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
His ongoing war against injustice took him in 1968 to Memphis in support of a strike by sanitation workers. While standing with friends on the balcony of his motel he was shot by James Earl Ray, an escaped convict and known racist. He died in hospital an hour later and his death provoking riots across the country. Ray was to be sentenced to 99 years in prison for the crime. Still behind bars, he died in 1998.

1973 👉🏼 World Trade Center, then the world’s tallest building, opens in New York (110 stories). Later destroyed in 9/11 terrorist attacks.

1975 👉🏼 Microsoft is founded as a partnership between Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800.
Paul Allen and Bill Gates were childhood friends from Seattle when they started Microsoft. Allen was working at Honeywell, Inc. and Gates was doing pre-law at Harvard University.
Their idea was to produce an interpreter for the microcomputer Altair 8800 using BASIC programming language. When Gates and Allen sold their interpreter to MITS who distributed it, Microsoft, then known as Micro-Soft, was born.