The Great Geek Manual

1633
Galileo Galilei is tried for a second time by the Inquisition. At the trial’s conclusion, Galileo’s belief that Earth isn’t the center of the Universe is pronounced heretical.

1888
A French newspaper mistakenly publishes an obituary for Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite, following the death of Albert’s brother Ludwig’s death. The obituary describes him as “a merchant of death,” which shocks Nobel into setting out to change his public image. His efforts will eventually lead to the establishment of the Nobel Prize. Visit the official Nobel Prize website.

1892
The first portable typewriter, the Blickensderfer, is patented by George Blickensderfer of Stamford, Connecticut. (US No. 472,692)

1901
A Mercury arc lamp is first publicly demonstrated in the UK by Peter Cooper Hewitt.

1955
Dr. Thomas Francis, Jr. announces that the polio vaccine developed by Jonas Salk is “safe, effective and potent” after a year of field trials at a press conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on the tenth anniversary of the death of former president Franklin Roosevelt, who suffered from polio.

1959
Washington, D.C. becomes the largest metropolitan area to be fully equipped for direct distance dialing, the ability to place a telephone call without the assistance of an operator.

1961
Yuri Gagarin, age 27, becomes the first man to orbit the Earth aboard the Soviet spacecraft, Vostok 1, which was equipped with a radio, television, and life-support equipment to relay information on his condition. The flight is entirely automated, even so far as Gagarin’s controls are locked to prevent him from taking control of the ship. However, he is provided a key in a sealed envelope to unlock the controls in case of an emergency. He remains in space for one hour and forty-eight minutes before re-entering the atmosphere, ejecting from his capsule, and making a planned descent using his own parachute. The Soviet Union will deny that he descended by parachute in order for the flight to be recognized as a world record.

United States President John F. Kennedy states during the course of his regular press conference that “no one is more tired than I am…” (of seeing the United States second to Russia in space.) “They secured large boosters which have led to their being first in Sputnik, and led to their first putting their man in space. We are, I hope, going to be able to carry out our efforts, with due regard to the problem of the life of the men involved, this year. But we are behind … the news will be worse before it is better, and it will be some time before we catch up… ”

1976
Ronald Wayne, one of the three co-founders of Apple Computer, leaves the company just eleven days after the company was established, relinquishing his ten percent share for US$800. In his short time working with co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, Wayne illustrated the first Apple logo, wrote the company’s partnership agreement, and wrote the manual for the Apple I. He choose to leave the company because the partnership agreement imposed unlimited personal liability on all three co-founders, irregardless of which partner incurred the debt. According to the later book, Apple Confidential 2.0 by Owen Linzmayer, neither Jobs nor Wozniak were financially well-off, and Wayne realized that he “either was going bankrupt or the richest man in the cemetery.” By 1982, a ten percent share of Apple Computer will be worth US$1.5 billion. Read more about Ronald Wayne in an excerpt from Apple Confidential.

1977
Random House publishes Dragons of Eden by Carl Sagan as a hardcover. (ISBN-13: 978-0394410456) The novel, which is subtitled Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence surveys the views of anthropology, biology, computer science, and psychology on the question of how human intelligence came about. Visit the author’s official website. Length: 263 pages

1979
Kevin MacKenzie emails the MsgGroup to suggest adding some emotion to the text of emails, with punctuation such as -) which indicated that the sentence is tongue-in-cheek. Though flamed by many at the time, emoticons will become widely used after Scott Fahlman suggests the use of : – ) and : – ( on a Carnegie Mellon University BBS on September 19, 1982.

1980
Ballantine Books publishes the science fiction novel Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back by Donald F. Glut, the official novelization of the film of the same name, as a hardcover. (ISBN: 0345320220) Length: 224

1981
NASA launches the first shuttle mission, the Space Shuttle Columbia, on its maiden voyage, proving the feasibility of using a series of reusable spacecraft to explore space. (STS-1) During the course of the mission, an HP-41 calculator will be used during the mission to calculate the exact angle at which the shuttle needs to re-enter the atmosphere.

1983
Atari announces that it will start selling video game systems and cartridges in Japan on May 10. Price: US$104 (systems), and US$18 – US$29 (cartridges)

1984
The Space Shuttle Challenger releases the Solar Maximum Mission satellite (“SolarMax”) back into orbit, completing the first orbital satellite repair in history. The satellite, which had been launched on February 14, 1980 to investigate solar phenomena, had been dead three years before the repairs were made.

1988
The first US patent for a living mammal is granted to Harvard scientists Philip Leder and Timothy Stewart for a variety of Oncomouse that is genetically altered to make it highly susceptible to breast cancer. (US No. 4,736,866) It was developed with funding from DuPont, which will hold an exclusive license to the patent.

1991
John Sculley of Apple Computer demonstrates an IBM PS/2 Model 70 running the Pink OS (named randomly for the color of the index cards used during a brainstorming session) to IBM engineers. Pink is an object-oriented OS that makes IBM-compatible computers appear to be a Mac running the System 7 operating system. On July 3, IBM will sign a letter of intent agreeing to assist in the development of the OS and licensing its RISC processor to Apple for use in the PowerPC.

1992
In a jury trial, the Federal District Court in Los Angeles, California, finds Sega Enterprises guilty of infringing on an American inventor’s patent and orders the company to pay US$33 million. The jury finds that the infringement was intentional, which qualifies the judge to triple the fine. The inventor’s attorney will later seek an order barring Sega from selling video games.

1994
Del Rey publishes the fantasy novel The Tangle Box by Terry Brooks as a hardcover. (ISBN-13: 978-0345386991) It is the fourth novel of the Magic Kingdom of Landover series. Visit the author’s official website. Length: 334 pages

The first commercial spam is posted to at least six thousand Usenet message boards using a simple Perl script written by a programmer only known as “Jason,” shortly after the National Science Foundation lifted its unofficial ban on commercial speech on the Internet. The spam is posted by Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, two lawyers married and practicing law together in Phoenix, Arizona under the practice name Canter & Siegel. The script floods message boards with an advertisement of their services available for an upcoming “Green Card Lottery.” The Usenet community vehemently protests the messages. The law firm’s internet service provider will receive such a large number of complaints over the next two days that its mail servers will crash repeatedly, forcing it to terminate the firm’s service. Large-scale implementation of “cancelbots” is launched by Arnt Gulbrandsen within minutes of the firm’s first posts. However, by December 1994, the two lawyer will claim to have successfully solicited one thousand new clients through the ads and “made $100,000 off an ad that cost them only pennies.” Legions of spammers will follow in their footsteps.

1995
Authorities carry out a large-scale crackdown on Canadians pirate boards, following nearly a year-long investigation. Seventy-five Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Officers are involved in the operation, fifteen suspects are arrests, and two hundred thousand dollars of computer hardware is seized. The bulletin board systems busted include: Bad Sector, Beyond Corruption, Jurrasic Park, Lineup, Main Frame, Necronomicon, No BBS, The Notice, On The World, Perfect Crime, Red Alert, Restricted Area, Rubbish Heap, Skull Island, Twins, The Underworld, and Wolf Pack.

1996
Public shares of Yahoo! are offered in the company’s initial public offering (IPO), rocketing the company’s value to US$1.1 billion overnight. The stocks, which are initially offered at US$13, trade for as much as US$43 before settling at US$33 at the close of market. However, industry analysts predict that users have no loyalty to any one search engine, and they predict that Yahoo!’s initial appeal has dubious long-term stability.

1999
The families of three students who were killed by a fourteen-year-old classmate file a US$130 million lawsuit against a number of entertainment companies, alleging that the companies contributed to the boy behavior. The companies named include two Internet sites, a film company, and a wide range of video game publishers, which include: Acclaim, Activision, Apogee, Atari Games, Capcom, Eidos, GT Interactive, id Software, Interplay, Lasersoft, Midway, Nintendo of America, Sega of America, Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), Squaresoft, Virgin, and Williams. The suit will later be dismissed.

2000
International Business Machines (IBM) introduces the 32GB Travelstar hard drive for portable computers. It has a capacity of seventeen billion bits of data per square inch, which is a new record for hard drive areal density. The drive spins at a rate of 5400RPM, partially disabling error correction to allow smoother video playback.

2001
Chinese hackers attack a number of US websites protesting the spyplane incident. Among other sites, they hack the Navy Acquisition system. The incident in dispute occurred when a US EP-3E aircraft flying over the Exclusive Economic Zone waters of China, about 70 miles (110km) from the Chinese island of Hainan, was intercepted by several Chinese J-8IIM fighters, one of which collided with the wing of the EP-3E, forcing it to land on Hainan and killing the pilot of the J-8, Wang Wei.

2005
Ballantine Books releases the fantasy novel A Stroke of Midnight by Laurell K. Hamilton as a hardcover. (ISBN: 0-345-44357-8) It is the fourth novel in the Merry Gentry series. Visit the author’s official website. Length: 523 pages

MareNostrum, the most powerful supercomputer in Europe and the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world, is booted up for the first time at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) in Barcelona, Spain. The system is composed of 2,560 JS21 blade servers, each of which features two 2.3GHz dual-core IBM 64-bit PowerPC 970MP processors and runs the SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 operating system. It has a total capacity of 62.63 teraflops. Visit the official Barcelona Supercomputing Center website.

2006
It’s announced that the Nintendo DS was the top-selling video game system in Japan in 2005, selling 4.32 million units. The PlayStation Portable (PSP) was the second best selling system with 2.07 million units sold, and the PlayStation 2 was the third best selling system with 1.77 million units sold.