The Great Geek Manual

1611
The word “telescope” is first used in public by Prince Federico Cesi at a banquet held by the pioneer scientific society, the Accademia dei Lincei, (literally the “Academy of the Lynxes”), which he founded. The banquet is held in honor of Galileo. After Galileo shows the guests the satellites of Jupiter, other celestial bodies, and even an inscription on a building three miles away. Although the name is announced by Cesi to christen Galileo’s instrument, the word telescopio (Italian) may have been devised by a Greek poet-theologian, who happened to be present, from the Greek words tele (far) and scopeo (see). In 1625, another Lincean, Giovanni Faber of Bamberg coined the word “microscope”.

1828
American lexicographer Noah Webster copyrights and publishes the first edition of his dictionary under the title American Dictionary of the English Language. Browse Webster’s original dictionary at Project Gutenberg. Read more about Webster at the official Merriam-Webster website.

1860
The first Pony Express rider reaches Sacramento, California. Read more about the Pony Express at the Gold Rush Chronicles.

1863
The first US patent for a continuous-roll printing press is issued to William Bullock. (US No. 38,200) Two years later, the machine will be the first press built to use special curved stereo-type plates. It is first used by the New York Sun.

1894
The Holland Brothers’ Kinetoscope Parlor opens near Times Square in a former shoe store at 115 Broadway, New York, with ten peepshow Kinetoscopes showing either of two of Edison’s five films for twebty-five cents. Each Kinetoscope is a motorized film loop threaded around a number of rollers in a wooden cabinet. Thomas Edison invented these early motion picture machines to do “for the eye what the phonograph does for the ear.” The first day’s gross sales are US$120.

1912
Lee De Forest premieres the first sound-on-film to a paid audience. The selection of short musical films implement a technology called Phonofilm. The premiere is held at the Rialto Theater in New York.

The Titanic strikes an iceberg four days into its maiden voyage, and over 1,500 passengers drown when the ship sinks early the next morning. The Marconi wireless equipment on board is used to call for help, effectively reducing the loss in life. Lord Samuel, the British Postmaster General at the time, later states that, “Those who have been saved have been saved through one man, Mr. Marconi and his wonderful invention.”

The news of the sinking of the Titanic is broadcast in seventy-two hours of continuous Morse code radio signals. US President Taft issues an executive order to close all other radio communications during the event. David Sarnoff, age 17, is among the telegraph operators who follow events. He picked the distress call of the Titanic relayed from ships at sea: “S.S. Titanic ran into iceberg, sinking fast.” Sarnoff, a telegraph operator managing a powerful Marconi radio telegraph station on top of Wannamaker’s department store in New York, will stay at his post for 72 hours, receiving and transmitting the first authentic information about the disaster. He relays the names of the rescued from the Carpathia telegraph operator to newsmen and frantic family members. Sarnoff will go on to become a pioneer in radio and television broadcasting, founding NBC in 1926, creating an experimental television station for NBC in 1928, and becoming president of RCA.

1932
The first Egyptian talkie, Onchoudet et Fouad, directed by Mario Volpi, premiere.

1953
Twentieth Century-Fox signs an exclusive contract with optical manufacturer Bausch & Lomb to produce anamorphic lenses for the CinemaScope. CinemaScope presentations carry the credit “lenses by Bausch and Lomb”, the original Chretien lenses that Fox acquired proved to have shortcomings, not the least of which is that the primary lens and the add-on anamorphic lens need to be focused separately.

1956
The first videotape is first demonstrated at the National Association of Radio and Television Broadcasters (NARTB, now the National Association of Broadcasters) convention in Chicago, Illinois. It is a the first practical and commercially successful format, called the Two-inch Quadruplex. The two inch wide magnetic tapes move at a speed of fifteen inches per second. A single fourteen inch reel could hold sixty-five minutes of video.

The first practical commercial black-and-white video recorder are demonstrated at the NARTB (now the NAB) broadcast convention in Chicago, Illinois and simultaneously in Redwood City, California. The VT-100 by Ampex Corporation of Redwood City is the size of a freezer with five additional six foot racks of circuitry. The system has four heads on a disc that rotate perpendicularly across the width of the videotape, thus tracing an oblique track pattern. The Columbia Broadcasting System will purchase three of the video recorders later in the year, each of which will cost US$75,000.

1958
The BBC publicly demonstrates the Vision Electronic Recording Apparatus (VERA), the second practical video recorder, which uses three-track heads which read tape at 200 inches per second.

The Soviet satellite Sputnik 2 falls from orbit after a mission which lasted 162 days.

1961
Manmade element 103, Lawrencium (Lw), is first produced in the US.

The first live television pictures from Moscow, featuring the heroic return of pioneering cosmonaut Major Yuri Gagarin, the first man to orbit Earth, are seen in London.

1964
A Delta rocket’s third-stage motor prematurely ignites in an assembly room at Cape Canaveral, killing three people.

1975
Atari introduces the game Indy 800.

1981
The first cordless telephone, which can operate up to six hundred feet from its base, is introduced by Fidelity and British Telecom. Price: £170

The first test flight of America’s first operational space shuttle, the Columbia, ends successfully as the orbiter lands at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

1991
Sunday, April 14, through Tuesday, April 16 the Spring European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) is held at Business Design Centre in London, England. 3,461 people attend.

1992
Sunday, April 12, through Tuesday, April 14 the Spring European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) is held at Business Design Centre in London, England. 3,563 attend.

US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker makes a ruling in the Apple Computer versus Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard lawsuit, stating that most of the elements in Apple Computer’s suit were covered by Apple Computer’s agreement with Microsoft, or were not copyrightable.

1993
British archaeologists unearthed a 7,000-year old seafarer’s village on Dalma island in the United Arab Emirates. They said it was the first major settlement of the Ubaid period in that area.

1994
Turner Classic Movies (TCM) is launched in US with a screening of Gone With the Wind, to commemorate the centenary of the first Edison Kinetoscope “peep-show” parlour in Times Square, New York. Blogger’s Note: See above, 1894.

1995
The Chinese government launches widespread efforts to purge governmental agencies of illegally copied software, a practice that had been costing US software publishers millions of dollars. The plan calls for allotting more money to purchase software while giving an enforcement agency the power to prosecute anyone caught bootlegging software. The announcement follows a March meeting at which China signed an accord with the United States vowing to crackdown on piracy.

1996
JenniCam, a popular website featuring several webcams that allow users to observe the life of a nineteen year old college junior Jennifer Kaye Ringley, goes live on the Internet. Ringley claims that the site is an attempt to document her life, but the site draws a great deal of controversy. Ringley regularly appears on the webcam nude or engaging in sexual behavior. However the site is not explicitly pornographic. Raised as a nudist, Ringley spends much more time talking than engaging in sexual activity. The site will remains online for more than seven years, and at the peak of its popularity, it will draw over five million hits a day.

Sunday, April 14, through Tuesday, April 16 the Spring European Computer Trade Show (ECTS) is held at Olympia in London, England. 9,827 people attend.

1997
The Motorola Computer Group announces the StarMax 5000 series of Macintosh-compatible computers. They feature 225 to 300 MHz PowerPC 603e processors, 50 MHz bus speed, 512 kB L2 cache, 50 MHz bus, 32 MB RAM, ATI 3D Rage II+ graphics, 16X CD-ROM drive, 2.5 or 4.3 GB hard drive, 10Base-T Ethernet, Mac OS 7.6, and a 100 MB Zip drive. Price: US$1999 to US$3399

1998
NetFlix.com, a Scotts Valley, California firm, caters to the Digital Video Disc (DVD) market. Marc Randolph, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) states that over 400,000 DVD systems have been sold and over nine hundred titles are already available.

Scott Hunter and Joe Sousa leave their positions in Third-Party Administration at Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) to work for VM Labs.

1999
Doug Lowenstein, president of the Independent Developers Software Association (IDSA) is named by a number of member software companies to act as spokesperson pursuant to a suit filed Monday, April 12 by the families of three boys slain by a fourteen-year-old. The suit blames a number of software developers and publishers as well as other entertainment companies for influencing the killing behavior.

Hasbro Interactive announces the acquisition of the rights from Namco to publish and distribute eleven classic video game titles for the Personal Computer (PC) and limited rights to other potential platforms. Titles include Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Dig Dug, Galaga, Galaxian, and Pole Position.

Navarre Corporation announces a new agreement with Funco’s Funcoland Stores to provide fulfillment of consumer software sold on Funco’s e-commerce website.

Phil Harrison, Vice President of Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) Third Party Relations, states that the recently announced PlayStation 2 will “retail for less than $1 Million” in an interview conducted by Next Generation Online. Presumably the response is intended to suggest that SCEA is not yet prepared to announce a specific price.

Symantec Corporation names John Thompson, their new president and Chief Executive Officer. Thompson was once a key executive at International Business Machines (IBM), where he worked for twenty-eight years.

2000
Bloomberg News Service reports that PlayStation 2 may contain an integrated hard drive and modem when it is released in the United States. The report indicates that details will be announced at the E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) industry trade show in May.

The heavy metal rock band, Metallica, reveals that they have filed suit against Napster, Inc., the University of Southern California, Yale University, and Indiana University. The suit alleges that the firms encouraged computer users to trade the band’s recordings without permission over the Internet.

Micro Age, Inc. of Tempe, Arizona reveals that it has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in its efforts to reorganize.

The three major United States (US) stock market indices reflect their largest one-day point declines in history. The declines mark the peak of a week of investor unrest following Monday’s Microsoft court decision, growing distrust in over-inflated DotCom values, and a recent US Labor Department report stating that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.7 percent in March.

2001
Nintendo releases Doubutsu no Mori (Animal Forest) for the Nintendo 64 in Japan.

Quicktime is released for Mac OS and Mac OS X.

2003
Byron Spice publishes an article in the Post-Gazette entitled, “Carnegie Mellon psychologist helps build a better mine sweeper – In a low-tech solution, soldiers are taught an expert’s technique and detection soars.” In the article he writes:

“[T]he more significant advance in demining, a practice that must continue for years after the war ends, may be the revamped training that U.S. soldiers have received since last spring. Devised by Jim Staszewski, a cognitive psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, the training program teaches soldiers to use the thought patterns and techniques honed by an expert, a 30-year mine-detection veteran. It builds on the work of the late CMU scientists Herbert Simon and Allan Newell, pioneers in the study of the nature of human expertise. … What was it that made them experts? How do experts differ from everybody else? These were the questions being asked by the Army and the same sort of questions that mesmerized CMU’s Newell and Simon. The CMU researchers were popularly known for creating the first thinking machine, launching the field of artificial intelligence, in the mid-1950s. But this quest to make computers think like humans went hand-in-hand with their efforts to understand how humans think. As a result, the pair had as much impact on the field of psychology as on computer science. “Herb Simon and Allan Newell pretty much got cognitive science off the ground,” Staszewski said. ‘I’d like to think this work is a direct descendant of them’ and other CMU psychologists, including the late William Chase. How to be an expert One of the things they learned is that you don’t have to be a genius to be an expert. In his 1991 book, ‘Models of My Life,’ Simon wrote: ‘Experts, human and computer, do much of their problem solving not by searching selectively, but simply by recognizing relevant cues in situations similar to those they have experienced before.’”

Read the entire story online at the Post-Gazette.com.

The Human Genome Project comes to a successful completion with 99% of the human genome sequenced to 99.99% accuracy.

Sony Computer Entertainment announces an updated PlayStation 2 in Japan, to be available May 15. It will feature support for progressive scan DVD playback, DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW discs, a built-in infrared receiver, a quieter fan, and no IEEE 1394 FireWire port.

2004
Lindows changes it’s name to Linspire. Lindows and Linspire are full-featured operating systems similar to Windows or Mac OS, but they are based on Linux.

Nokia announces the N-Gage QD handheld video game system. The unit is a redesigned N-Gage, about 20 percent smaller, with more comfortable use as a cell-phone. The speaker and microphone are mounted on the front, and the multimedia card slot is located on the bottom edge. It is expected to go on sale in Europe in May.

nVidia releases the GeForce 6800, claiming it is the biggest leap in graphics technology the company has ever made. Independent reviews show more than a 100% increase in productivity compared with the fastest card on the market. Continuing the tradition, nVidia demonstrates Nalu, a mermaid with extremely realistic hair. A few weeks later nVidia’s main rival ATi announces the X800 with nearly the same level of performance and feature support. The card is showcased by the Ruby demo, delivering a smooth real-time rendering of what was previously in the exclusive realm of prerendered cinematics.

2006
ComputerWorld Canada includes an article entitled, “Gaming has some lessons for software developers.” The story includes a picture of Nintendo’s Mario character climbing out of a personal computer monitor.