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 RMS 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 RMS 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, later founding the NBC network 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, later 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 is demonstrated at the NARTB (later the NAB) broadcast convention in Chicago, Illinois and simultaneously in Redwood City, California. The VT-100 from the Ampex Corporation of Redwood City is roughly the size of a chest 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 (CBS) 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 at the completion of a mission which lasted 162 days.

1961
Manmade element 103, Lawrencium (Lw), is produced for the first time.

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

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

1975
Atari releases the arcade 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. (STS-1)

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

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

US District Court Judge Vaughn Walker makes a ruling in the case of Apple Computer v. Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, stating that most of the elements Apple Computer alleges were infringed upon by HP and Microsoft were either covered by the 1985 licensing agreement signed by Apple or were not covered by copyright law.

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.

Microsoft announces that the number of licensed users of Microsoft Windows has exceeded twenty-five million, making it the most popular graphical operating system in the world.

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 announces a concerted effort to remove all illegal and unlicensed software from its own government agencies, an epidemic of piracy that has cost US software publishers millions of dollars in lost revenues. The government pledges to allot more money to purchase software while empowering law enforcement officials the power to prosecute government employees caught bootlegging software. The announcement is the result of a March accord signed with the United States.

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. The event is attended by 9,827 people.

1997
The Motorola Computer Group announces the StarMax 5000 series of Macintosh-compatible computers. The system features 225 to 300MHz PowerPC 603e processors, 50MHz bus speed, 512KB L2 cache, 50MHz bus, 32MB RAM, ATI 3D Rage II+ graphics, 16X CD-ROM drive, 2.5 or 4.3GB hard drive, 10Base-T Ethernet, Mac OS 7.6, and a 100 MB Zip drive. Price: US$1,999 to US$3,399

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 personal computers and limited rights to other potential platforms. The titles include: Dig Dug, Galaga, Galaxian, Ms. Pac-Man, Pac-Man, and Pole Position.

Phil Harrison, Vice President of Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) Third Party Relations, announces that the upcoming 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.

2000
The heavy metal rock band, Metallica, announces that they have filed suit against Napster, Inc., Indiana University, the University of Southern California, and Yale University. The suit alleges that the parties encouraged computer users to trade the band’s recordings without permission over the Internet.

The three major United States stock market indices reflect their largest one-day point declines in history. The declines mark the peak of a week of investor unrest following the April 3rd court ruling against Microsoft, 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
Apple Computer releases Quicktime for Mac OS and Mac OS X. Visit the official QuickTime website.

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. The project’s goals were to identify all of the approximately twenty-four thousand genes in the human genome, as well as to address the ethical, legal, and social issues that will arise from the release of the genetic information. Visit the official website of The Human Genome Project.

2004
After receiving legal threats from Microsoft, Linspire, Inc. changes the name of its Lindows operating system to Linspire. The system is a full-featured operating systems with an interface very similar to Windows or Mac OS, but they it is based on Linux. Visit the official Linspire website.

Nokia announces the N-Gage QD handheld video game system. The device is an N-Gage Classic redesigned to be about twenty percent smaller and more comfortable to use as a cell-phone. The speaker and microphone i this model are both mounted on the front for easier use, and the multimedia card slot is located on the bottom edge. It’s release date is set for May across most of Europe.

nVidia releases the GeForce 6800 graphics processing unit (GPU), claiming it is the biggest single leap forward in graphics technology the company has ever made. Independent reviews show more than a 100% increase in productivity compared with the next-fastest card on the market. A few weeks later nVidia’s main rival ATI announces the release of the X800, a GPU with nearly a identical performance and feature support.

2005
Microsoft launches a Nupedia-like version of its Encarta encyclopedia which allows anonymous users to submit content for approval by paid editors.

2008
International Business Machines (IBM) demonstrates high-k/metal gate technology for the 32-nanometer microchip manufacturing process that increases processor speeds by as much as thirty percent while reducing power consumption by fifty percent over that of 45-nanometer chips.