This Day in History: Jan. 3

Portrait of American businessmen and engineers Steve Jobs (left) and Steve Wozniak, co-founders of Apple Computer Inc, at the first West Coast Computer Faire, where the Apple II computer was debuted, in Brooks Hall, San Francisco, April 16th or 17th, 1977. (Getty Images)

On this day, Jan. 3 …

1977: Apple Computer is incorporated in Cupertino, Calif., by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Mike Markkula Jr.

Also on this day:

• 1521: Martin Luther is excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Leo X.
• 1777: Gen. George Washington’s army routes the British in the Battle of Princeton, N.J.
• 1868: Japan’s Meiji Restoration re-establishes the authority of the emperor and heralds the fall of the military rulers known as shoguns; the upheaval paves the way for Japan’s drive toward becoming a modern power.

File (AP Photo)

• 1938: The March of Dimes campaign to fight polio is established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who himself had been afflicted with the crippling disease.
• 1958: The first six members of the newly formed U.S. Commission on Civil Rights hold their first meeting at the White House.
• 1961: President Dwight D. Eisenhower announces the United States is formally terminating diplomatic and consular relations with Cuba.
• 1967: Jack Ruby, the man who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy, dies in a Dallas hospital.
• 1980: Conservationist Joy Adamson, author of "Born Free," is killed in northern Kenya by a former employee.
• 1993: President George H.W. Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin sign the START II missile-reduction treaty in Moscow. (However, the agreement ultimately would fall apart.)

• 2008: Illinois Sen. Barack Obama wins Democratic caucuses in Iowa, while Mike Huckabee wins the Republican caucuses.
• 2013: Students from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., reconvene at a different building in the town of Monroe about three weeks after the massacre that had claimed the lives of 20 first-graders and six educators. 
• 2014: The secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rules again that the National Security Agency could keep collecting every American’s telephone records every day. 
• 2018: President Trump signs an executive order disbanding the controversial voter fraud commission he had set up to investigate the 2016 presidential election after alleging that voting fraud cost him the popular vote; the White House blames the decision to end the panel on more than a dozen states that refused to cooperate.