In 1926 – Robert Goddard conducted his first successful launch of a liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Massachusetts.

In 1999 Sony released Everquest the Massively multiplayer 3D world where you could play as a wizard, rogue or knight. It followed two years after Ultima Online would be followed several years later by World of Warcraft.

In 1999 – Mac OS X Server 1.0, the highly-anticpated precursor of OS X desktop version (code name Hera) was released.

In 1813 – John Snow was born to a labourer’s family in York. He would go on to develop a ‘germ theory’ that helped combat cholera, and made great advances in anesthesiology.

In 1959 – The first atomic reactor built in the US for medical research, achieved criticality at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

In 1985 – Symbolics, a Massachusetts computer company, registered the Internet’s first domain name, symbolics.com. The domain is now owned by an investment company who uses it as a marketing device. The remains of the original Symbolics company survives in altered form at symbolics-dks.com.

In 1839 – Sir John Herschel presented his ‘Note on the Art of Photography, or the application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the purposes of Pictorial Representation’ to the Royal Society, likely the first use of the word ‘photography’.

In 1879 – Albert Einstein was born in Ulm in Württemberg, Germany. He would grow up to work in the Swiss patent office. And reinvent physics.

In 1994 – Linus Toirvalds posted to comp.os.linux.announce that Linux kernel release 1.0. had arrived.