The Great Geek Manual

The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.

- Classic, Romantic, Modern by Jacques Barzun, 1961.

1833
Oberlin College in Ohio becomes the first coed institution of higher learning in the United States, with fifteen women and twenty-nine men enrolled.

1896
Dr. Herman Hollerith incorporates the Tabulating Machine Company, the predecessor of the later International Business Machines (IBM), to manufacture and sell the sorting machine he had invented. The corporation’s main offices are in Georgetown, Washington.

1904
The Jovian moon Himalia is discovered by Charles Dillon Perrine at California’s Lick Observatory.

1922
The first successful Technicolor film, The Toll of the Sea, was released to theaters.

1937
The Dandy, the world’s longest-running comic, is first published. While the Dandy is in no way, shape, or form geeky, its unprecedented popularity greatly contributed to proliferation of comic strips in the early half of the century.

1947
The point-contact transistor is invented by researchers John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain working under physicist William Bradford Shockley at Bell Laboratories. Transistors would go on to replace vacuum tubes and mark the beginning of the “second-generation” of computers. They were cheaper to construct, faster in their operation, and more energy efficient. The first computer to feature transistors would be MIT’s TX-0 in 1956.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

1927
The first Ford Model A automobiles are unveiled and sold at New York City’s Waldorf Hotel and in thirty-five other cities around the US, Canada, and Europe. The Phaeton sells for US$395 and the Tudor Sedan sells for US$495.00.

1942
A team led by physicist Enrico Fermi initiates the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois as part of the Manhattan Project.

1953
BBC Television introduces a new on-screen logo, which is the world’s first moving logo for a television service.

1954
The Naval Ordnance Research Calculator (NORC) is presented to the United States Navy at the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia by International Business Machines (IBM). The machine was built at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory under the direction of Wallace Eckert. At the machine’s inauguration, John von Neumann gives the keynote speech and the machine calculates pi to 3,089 digit as a demonstration of its capabilities.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

The only way of finding the limits of the possible
is by going beyond them into the impossible.

- The Lost Worlds of 2001 by Arthur Clarke, 1972.

I’ve seen a LOT of fan videos, and this is far and way the best I’ve ever come across. It’s hilarious.

I would love to know how long this took to piece together. I could name the episodes the Star Trek footage was pieced together from right off the top of my head, but remembering the bits of dialogue and fitting them together so tightly must have taken weeks.

1877
Construction begins of a working prototype of a phonograph from a set of drawings made by Thomas Alva Edison.

1835
Hans Christian Andersen publishes first book of fairy tales.

1878
A telephone is first installed in The White House, in Washington, DC, by Alexander Graham Bell himself, for the use of President Rutherford B. Hayes administration. The first call made on the telephone is between Hayes and Bell, thirteen miles away. The first call made on the telephone is between Hayes and Bell, thirteen miles away. The first words he speaks into the phone are, “Please speak more slowly.”

1898
Danish electrical engineer and inventor Valdemar Poulsen patents the first practical magnetic sound recorder, the Telegrafoon, using magnetized piano wire as a recording medium.

1913
The Ford Motor Company opens the first moving assembly line in Highland Park in Detroit, Michigan. Using the assembly line, the factory is capable of producing a car every two minutes and thirty-eight seconds. The method will become so successful that the Ford will rapidly become the world’s largest car manufacturer.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

Dare to be gorgeous and unique.
But don’t ever be cryptic or otherwise unfathomable. Make it unforgettably great.

- Amiga Intuition Reference Manual by Robert J. Mical, 1986.