Born on January 1, 1992

Grace Hopper found an actual moth stuck in a computer relay and taped it into the logbook. That was 1947. She was a Navy officer and mathematician who helped create COBOL, the programming language that still runs banking systems and government mainframes worldwide. Hopper retired from the Navy as a rear admiral at 79 — the oldest active-duty officer in the U.S. armed forces at the time. They'd recalled her from retirement twice because they kept needing her. The Navy named a destroyer after her. The moth is in the Smithsonian.

The Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic was formally established on January 1, 1919, making it the first constitutionally socialist state in history. The Bolsheviks had seized power fourteen months earlier, but the formal creation of the RSFSR gave the new regime its legal framework. The constitution guaranteed workers' rights and abolished private land ownership. It also stripped voting rights from anyone classified as bourgeois. Russia was inventing a new form of government in real time, during a civil war, with famine spreading. The constitution looked better on paper than in practice.