The Great Geek Manual

1917
The US government cancels all amateur wireless transmission licenses, the day after declaring war.

1944
Harvard University President James Conant writes to IBM founder Thomas Watson Sr. to let him know that the Harvard Mark I, developed in a cooperative effort, is operating smoothly. In his letter, Conant notes that the Mark I is already “being used for special problems in connection with the war effort.” The project is one of the many examples of wartime collaboration among the federal government, universities, and private corporations.

1957
Bell Laboratories announces the development of magnetic tape machine capable of transmitting one thousand words per minute, sixteen times faster than a conventional teletypewriter machines.

1967
The spacecraft Surveyor 3 is launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida. It will become the second US spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon, where it will study the lunar surface and send more than 6,300 pictures back to Earth. In all, seven Surveyors will be sent to the moon. The photo to the right shows Surveyor 3 on the moon, as photographed by Alan Bean over two years after its landing.

1968
AT&T unveils an experimental telephone at its annual meeting in Boston. The phone is smaller, lighter, and largely electronic. It’s unveiling marks the beginning of the end of the rotary telephone.

1970
The Apollo 13 mission ends safely with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean, four days after the spacecraft aborted its mission four-fifths of the way to the moon. The shuttle was crippled when a tank of liquid oxygen burst. Upon his return, astronaut A.J. Lovell, Jr. becomes the first American astronaut to travel over 700 hours in space.

1979
Knight-Ridder becomes the first US newspaper publisher to announce that it will undertake a videotex project. Videotex is an early information service, bearing a crude resemblance to the Internet. The program is called the Viewtron.

1981
Texas Instruments, Inc. introduces the logo programming language to qualified school districts for the TI-99/4 home computer. It won’t be released to the general public until the Summer Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in June.

1996
Apple Computer, Inc. reports a second quarter loss of US$740 million and the 1,500 more employee lay offs over the next twelve months.

Toshiba releases the Libretto sub-notebook. With a volume of 821.1 cubic centimeters and a weight of just 840g, it is the smallest PC compatible computer yet released.

US Vice President Al Gore visits a high-tech mobile computer classroom called CyberEd. Following the visit, the truck leaves on a 122-day tour to rural regions to expose children to the “riches” of computers and the Internet. The tour is financed by a US$1 million grant from MCI, the Milken Family Foundation, Microsoft, Corp., Corning, Inc., DSC Communications Corp. and the William G. McGowan Charitable Fund.

1997
The Cyber Promotions website is hacked, its front page is defaced, and a password file is stolen.

Microsoft announces its intention to shut down the e-mail services of the Microsoft Network for 24 to 36 hours in order to make changes to effectively double the number of e-mail servers. Within days after the shut down, and the subsequent reactivation, a special sign-up offer is made to consumers.

1998
Raymond Torricelli, known by the handle “rolex”, hacks into NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, California and uploads a rootkit. The rootkit allows Rolex to take control of computers used by NASA to perform satellite design and mission analysis for future space missions, and another used as an e-mail and internal web server. Rolex will use many of the computers to host chatrooms. In these chatrooms, he will invite others to visit a website where they can view pornographic images, from which he earns eighteen cents per visit. At the site’s peak Torricelli will earn approximately US$300-400 per week. At the time of the hack, until his arrest on July 12, 2000, Torricelli is the head of a hacker group “#conflict”.

2000
Aerial Images (www.terraserver.com), based in Raleigh, North Carolina, posts five recently released Russian spy satellite images of “Area 51″ on their website. Area 51 is a United States Air Force test site, formerly known as Groom Dry Lake Air Force Base, popularized by alien abuduction conspiracists. The photos were taken by a Russian satellite called Sovinformsputnik in 1998. By Tuesday, April 18, so many visitors will have hit the website to see the photos, that they will have to be removed until additional hardware can be installed to handle the volume.

US President William Jefferson Clinton visits East Palo Alto, California to inspire young children to get online during a two-day trip focused on extending the Internet into communities, homes, and schools.

The United States State Department reveals that a laptop computer that held classified information disappeared from the Bureau of Intelligence and Research in February. According to Reuters, the computer may have contained “code-word information, a classification higher than top secret, including sensitive intelligence information and plans.”

2001
Python 2.1 is released.

2002
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) unveils the Mobile Athlon XP 1400+ (1.2 GHz), 1500+ (1.3 and 1.33 GHz), 1600+ (1.4 GHz), and 1700+ (1.47 GHz) processors, featuring 200 or 266 MHz bus (1700+ is available only with 266 MHz). The processors are manufactured with a 0.13-micron technology, based on the processor core code-named Thoroughbred.

2003
Square Enix Co., Ltd. releases Final Fantasy XI: Rise of the Zilart for the PlayStation 2 in Japan.

2006
Dreamfall is released for Windows and the Xbox in the US.

2007
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Children of Húrin is released by Tolkien’s son, Christopher Tolkien nearly ninety years after it was first started. The book delves further into the history of Middle Earth, expanding upon a brief story that appears in The Silmarillion.