1931 – Auguste Piccard and Charles Knipfer took the first manned trip into the stratosphere when they rode in a pressurized cabin attached to a balloon to an altitude of 51,800 feet.
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.
1986 – Dragon Quest was released in Japan. It combined the full-screen map of Ultima with the battle and statistics-oriented screens of Wizardry and paved the way for RPG games.
Read Tom’s science fiction and other fiction books at Merritt’s Books site.