In 1931 – Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took man’s first trip into the stratosphere when they rode in a pressurised cabin attached to a balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet.

In 1959 – After almost a decade, MIT shut down its Whirlwind computer. It ran 35 hours a week at 90 percent utility using an electrostatic tube memory.

In 1986 – Dragon Quest was released in Japan. It combines the the full-screen map of Ultima with the battle and statistics-oriented screens of Wizardry and paved the way for RPG games.

In 1969 – Apollo 10 returned to Earth after a successful eight-day test of all the components needed for the manned moon landing.

In 1981 – Satya Pal Asija received the first U.S. patent for a computer software program. It was called Swift-answer. The patent took seven years to issue, and the validity of software patents has been debated ever since.

In 1995 – Bill Gates authored an internal memo entitled “The Internet Tidal Wave” calling the Internet the most important development since the IBM personal computer. Microsoft soon got to work on its own Web browser.

In 1945 – Arthur C. Clarke began privately circulating copies of his paper ““The Space-Station: Its Radio Applications” which suggested geostationary space stations could be used for worldwide television broadcasts.

In 1949 – Josef Carl Engressia, Jr. was born in Richmond, Virginia. He would later go by the name Joybubbles and develop a talent to whistle at 2600 Hz, allowing him to control phone switching equipment.

1994 – CERN hosted the first international World Wide Web conference, which continued through May 27.

In 1844 – Samuel Morse sent the message “What hath God wrought” from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol to the Mount Clair train depot in Baltimore, Maryland. It was the first public demonstration of the telegraph.

In 1935 – General Electric Co. sold the first spectrophotometer. It could detect two million different shades of color and make a permanent record chart of the results.

1961 – Wes Clark began working on the Laboratory Instrument Computer (LINC), at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory. It was one of the earliest examples of a user-friendly machine that you could communicate with while it operated. It’s credited with setting th standard for personal computer design.