Until fairly recently, the dream of donning a headset and dropping into a virtual world belonged purely in the realms of science fiction, like Star Trek‘s Holodeck or The Lawnmower Man. Thanks to the work of companies like Oculus, HTC, and others, that’s no longer the case. But virtual reality’s history goes back a whole lot further than that — so without further ado, here are our picks for eight of the major landmarks in tech history that made the VR dream a virtual reality.