1996: The Standard & Poor's 500-stock index closes above 700 for the first time, finishing the day at 701.46.

David M. Blitzer, chief investment strategist, Standard & Poor's Corp.

1957: The USSR launches the Sputnik, the world's first orbiting satellite, setting off panic that the US is falling behind in the space race. In the next 12 trading days, the Dow Jones Industrial Average loses 9.1% of its value. But over the next year, the market goes into orbit itself, soaring 15%.

John R. Dorfman, "Sputnik Launch Spooked Stocks";Wall Street Journal, Oct. 7, 1996;Phyllis S. Pierce, ed., The Dow Jones Averages 1885-1980 (DowJones Irwin, Homewood, IL, 1982), not paginated

1903: John Vincent Atanasoff is born just west of Hamilton, N.Y., to Ivan Atanasoff, a Bulgarian-born electrical engineer, and math teacher Iva Purdy. From 1939 through 1941, working at Iowa State with a $650 research grant, he develops the world's first electronic digital computer.

David Alan Grier, "Statistical Laboratories and the Origins of Statistical Computing";Chance: A Magazine of the American Statistical Association, vol. 12, no. 2 (Spring, 1999), pp. 18-19