In 1859 – US Patent no. 25,076 was issued to Nathan Ames of Saugus, Mass. for the first escalator-type moving staircase.

In 1927 – Computer pioneer Marvin Minsky was born in New York City. Minsky grew up to become a pioneer in Artificial Intelligence research and wrote the book “The Society of Mind.”

In 1995 – Netscape Communications staged an IPO. Shares opened at $28 and shot up to $75 per share in one day, becoming one of the indicators of the beginning of the dot-com boom.

In 1876 – Thomas Edison received a US patent for a mimeograph, which combined with an invention by A. B. Dick led to the first widely successful mimeograph machine.

In 1908 – For the first time in public, Wilbur Wright showed off the Wright Brothers’ flying machine at the racecourse in Le Mans, France. French doubts about the Wright Brothers’ claims to flight were put to rest for the time being.

In 2007 – Barbara Morgan became the first educator to safely reach space on the U.S. Space Shuttle Endeavour.

In 1944 – IBM officially presented the Mark I computer, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, or ASCC, to Harvard. The computer produced reliable results and ran continuously.

In 1955 – Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering released Japan’s first commercially produced transistor radio, the TR-55, sold under the company’s new name, Sony.

In 1966 – Jimmy Wales was born in Huntsville, Alabama. He grew up to co-found Wikipedia.

In 1943 – Jon Postel was born in Altadena, California. He created the Internet’s address system, and administered it for 30 years as director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA). 20 years after his birth, Kevin Mitnick was born in Van Nuys, California.

In 1991 – Tim Berners-Lee posted a short summary of his WorldWideWeb Project to alt.hypertext and pointed to a simple browser and a Web page describing the project. Thus the WWW became a publicly available service on the Internet.

In 1997 – At MacWorld in Boston, Microsoft announced it would invest $150 million in Apple, and continue to make Microsoft Office for Mac for at least five years. The two companies also ended their lawsuit.