1889 – Nintendo Koppai (Later Nintendo Company, Limited) is founded to produce and market playing cards.
1951 – CBS makes the first color televisions available for sale to the general public, but the product is discontinued less than a month later.
1979 – CompuServe, which was originally founded 10 years earlier as a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance, launched the first consumer internet service, which featured the first public electronic mail service.
1992 – NASA launches the Mars Observer, a $511 million probe to Mars, in the first U.S. mission to the planet in 17 years. Eleven months later, the probe would fail.
And this week in 2008 – SpaceX launched the first private spacecraft, the Falcon 1 into orbit.