On October 2, 1922, the New York Stock Exchange opened its doors to new offices, in an 11-story building located at 11 Wall Street, thereby rolling a double "11" on 10-2-22.

In the week ending October 2, 1931, the Dow Jones index fell by 13 points (11.8%), from 110 to 97.  It was the worst weekly decline since the catastrophic "Black" days of late October, 1929.

Tech Teams Switch Partners

On October 2, 1989, a company called Quantum, in Vienna, Virginia, had to find a new name for its online service.  The company had created an online service for Apple Computer called AppleLink, but the companies decided to go their separate ways. Quantum still owned the online service, but their right to use the AppleLink name expired on October 2, 1989. The company, run by a young entrepreneur named Steve Case, held a contest to pick a new name. It was Case's own favorite name, America Online, that won the contest and became today's AOL.

Two years later, on October 2, 1991, IBM and Apple announced a joint venture to develop and market the PowerMac.  The new machine and its operating system would run on a specially-designed chip from Motorola based on RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) technology.  The formerly fierce rivals joined forces to counterbalance Microsoft's dominance of the personal computer industry.  The PowerMac was introduced 10 years after the Macintosh.

Grant's Other Tomb

W.T. Grant filed for bankruptcy on October 2, 1975.  After the recession of 1974, the retail discounter had few customers and no earnings.  At the time it went belly-up, W.T. Grant was saddled with over $1 billion in debt, making it the nation's single biggest retailing failure.

Other 20th Century Highlights on October 2

• 1919: President Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke, which was kept secret from the public.
• 1935: Benito Mussolini's Italian army attacked helpless Abyssinia (Ethiopia).
• 1949: A day after Mao's victory, the USSR recognized the People's Republic of China.
• 1950: The first strip of Charles Schultz' "Li'l Folks" (later "Peanuts") appeared in nine papers.  On the same day, Mao Tse Tung told Stalin that China would intervene in Korea.
• 1959: Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone" premiered on CBS-TV.
• 1967: Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as America's first black Supreme Court Justice.

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