October 29 · This Day in America
The ticker cannot keep up. On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, sixteen million shares change hands in a single frenzied day — a record that will stand for decades — as prices fall and fall and do not stop. By the closing bell some fourteen billion dollars of value has simply vanished. Fortunes built on borrowed money evaporate in hours; men who were rich at breakfast are ruined by dinner. The decade had told Americans the boom would never end. It ended here. What follows is not just a market crash but a slow, grinding decade of breadlines, dust, and shuttered banks that reaches into nearly every American home. The country will rebuild — with new rules, new safeguards, a hard-won understanding that an economy is also a moral arrangement. But on this day, the music stops, and a generation learns what it costs to forget that.
Source: www.federalreservehistory.org
Also on this day · 1969
Late at night at UCLA, student programmer Charley Kline tries to log in to a computer at Stanford over a new experimental network called ARPANET. He types L. He types O. He starts to type G — and the system crashes. The first thing one computer ever said to another, across the bones of what would become the internet, was an accidental, almost biblical "lo." An hour later it worked. The world has not been quiet since.
Source: www.lk.cs.ucla.edu