1969: The first ancestor of the Internet is born. The world's first communication between computers at separate sites occurs over the ARPANET when Charley Kline, working at UCLA, logs into the computer system at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) at 10:30 p.m. (The first attempt crashes the system when Kline typed the letter G of LOGIN, but eventually he gets through.)

1929: On Black Tuesday the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunges 30.57 points to 230.07, an 11.7% collapse, but at one point during the day the Dow is down 48.31, or 18.5%. Today's trading volume of 16.4 million shares shatters the old record (set just five days earlier) by nearly 4 million; in fact, 3 million shares are traded in the first half hour, more than an entire day's typical volume just a few months earlier. The big gong had hardly sounded in the great hall of the Exchange before the storm broke in full force. Huge blocks of stock were flung upon the market for what they would bringÉ. Not only were innumerable small traders being sold out but big ones too protagonists of the new economic era who a few weeks before had counted themselves millionaires." The carnage does not just strike illiquid stocks like Transamerica Corp. which implodes from $62 to $20.25 but it also mows down such market leaders as AT&T which loses 12.1% General Motors (15.8%) IT&T (19.3%) Standard Oil of New Jersey (20.1%) and duPont (22.7%). The market has now lost 34.45% in just 13 trading days and the Great Depression is settling in."

Barrie A. Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States, 1929-1933 (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT and London, 1985), pp. 15-18;Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1997, reprint of 1931 ed.), pp. 252-253;John Brooks, Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920-1938 (Harper & Row, New York, 1969), pp. 124-127;Phyllis S. Pierce, ed., The Dow Jones Averages 1885-1980 (DowJones Irwin, Homewood, IL, 1982), not paginated