The Great Geek Manual

Today is Earth Day!
1946
CBS successfully transmits color television signals over a coaxial landline from New York City to Washington, D.C. and back for the first time.

The first installment of the popular Japanese comic strip, Sazae-san, one of the earliest examples of manga, is published in the Fukunichi Shimbun, the local newspaper of Hasegawa, Japan. The four panel strip centers around a fictional wife, Sazae-san, as she struggle with the daily tribulations of managing an average three-generation Japanese household.

1953
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. releases the science fiction film Invaders from Mars, directed by William Cameron Menzies and starring Jimmy Hunt, Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Morris Ankrum, Leif Erickson, and Hillary Brooke, to US theaters. In it, a boy discovers that space aliens are taking over the minds of Earthlings. IMDB listing Running Time: 1 hr 18 mins

1968
The United States Supreme Court rules in the case of Ginsburg versus New York that materials that are not obscene for adults can still be obscene for children and, in Interstate Circuit versus Dallas, that film classification schemes are constitutional if they are clearly defined.

1969
The first successful human eye transplant is performed.

1970
The first nationwide Earth Day is celebrated in the United States to promote environmental awareness. The event, which was founded by the efforts of Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, is celebrated by millions of Americans with public events such as marches and rallies for the purpose of reflecting on the importance of conservation. Many historians will later regard this as the beginning of the modern environmental movement. Later in the year, President Nixon will create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to address the issue of pollution.

1972
Apollo 16 astronauts John Young and Charles Duke ride on the Moon in the Lunar Rover.

1982
The Quaker Oats Company announces that it has acquired the home video game assets of US Games Corporation.

1984
Gorizont 9, one of thirty-five geosynchronous Russian satellites, is launched.

1985
Tom Jennings announces in the weekly FidoNews newsletter that FidoNet, a worldwide network used for communication between bulletin board system (BBS), has become too large to be run from a centralized location and will subsequently be broken up into smaller networks to allow for better communication and administration.

1986
The first virus produced through genetic engineering is approved for use in a vaccine by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The virus is designed for use in veterinary medicine to fight a form of swine herpes. Visit the official USDA website.

1989
Del Rey publishes the fantasy novel The Diamond Throne by David Eddings as a hardcover. (ISBN-13: 978-0345356918) It is the first book in the Elenium series. Visit the author’s official website. Length: 448 pages

Intel introduces the Intel 486SX processor, operating at 33MHz, featuring a 32-bit bus, 1.185 million transistors, and the capability of addressing 4GB of memory.

1991
The Intel i486, otherwise known as the 80486 SX is released as a less expensive alternative to the 80486 DX. The fundamental difference between the two is that the SX does not include an on-chip floating-point unit (FPU). Visit the official Intel website.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Qpid” first airs. (No. 420) In it, Q fling the crew into the roles of Robin Hood and his merry men. Memory Alpha entry

1993
Version 1.0 of the web browser Mosaic is released by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). It’s the first software to provide a multimedia graphical user interface (GUI) for internet content. It’s also easy for the average computer user to install and highly reliable, which is why it will become known as the “killer app of the nineties.” The lead Mosaic developers are Marc Andreesen, one of the future founders of Netscape, and Jim Clark, one of the future founders of Silicon Graphics. In the coming year, Mosaic will take the Internet by storm, proliferating at an annual growth rate of 341,634% that of service traffic, becoming the first popular web browser.

1996
The American Museum of the Moving Image opens in Astoria Queens, News York on the former site of the Kaufman Astoria Studios. Visit the official Museum of the Moving Image website.

Juno Online Services launches the Juno free e-mail service. The service generates revenues through advertising that is visible to both the sender and the e-mail recipient.

Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Japan.

1997
Del Rey publishes the fantasy novel Blackgod by J. Gregory Keyes as a hardcover. (ISBN-13: 978-0345403940) It is the second book in the Chosen of the Changeling series. Visit the author’s official website. Length: 559 pages

1998
The hacker group Masters of Downloading (MoD), not to be confused with the eighties group Masters of Deception (MoD) claim to have broken into a number of military networks, including the Defense Information Systems Network (DISN) and the DISN Equipment Manager (DEM), which controls the military’s global positioning satellites (GPS).

The National Semiconductor Corporation says it intends to cut ten percent of its worldwide work force, or about 1,400 people. About 560 of the cuts will be taken from its Santa Clara, California facility.

The Star Trek: Voyager episode Unforgettable first airs. (No. 422) In it, an alien who request asylum aboard Voyager tells Chakotay the strange tale of how he met and then forgot her in the last encounter. Memory Alpha entry

Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Italy. Read the official press release.

1999
An auction for an 1860′s Sir John A. MacDonald bedroom suite (item #91465878) is closed on EBay. Days later, it’s discovered that the winning bid of US$400,000 was actually submitted by a New Jersey teenager who reportedly stole his parents password to the auction site and proceeded to place over three million dollars in total bids. The teenager also placed bids on a 1955 Ford convertible and a Vincent Van Gogh painting.

Connectix ceases shipping its Virtual Game Station software for the Apple Macintosh computer, in compliance with a federal court order. Sony filed a trademark and patent infringement lawsuit against the company in January. The Virtual Game Station allows PlayStation games to be played on Apple computers.

Dr. Carver Mead, a professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, is awarded the US$500,000 Lemelson-MIT Program award for his work on computer chips implementing parallel processing, similar to the workings of the human brain.

2000
Telephone dialing codes in the United Kingdom are updated due to the rapid growth of demands on telecommunications systems in what is dubbed the “Big Number Change.”

The Royal-Canadian Mounted Police reveal that they have charged the father of the fifteen-year-old Montreal high school student named Michael Calce for conspiring to hack and disrupt service to CNN.com for four hours Tuesday, February 8, 2000. The boy, known online by the webhandle Mafiaboy on the Internet, was charged on Wednesday, April, 19,2000.

ZDNet News reports that Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, has quietly shut down Interval Research, a Palo Alto research laboratory focused on broadband applications and services, citing that it had failed to meet “initial high expectations”. Visit the official Interval website.

2002
Compaq announces that two million iPaq computers have been sold in the two years since the line was released. Visit the official iPaq website.

Nintendo announces that the launch price for the GameCube in the United Kingdom will be £129. Visit the official GameCube website.

A team of hackers calling themselves the “Deceptive Duo” uses a common gateway interface (CGI) hack to deface the website of the US Space and Naval Warfare (SPAWAR) Systems Command with a message and screenshots of database files from the systems of Midwest Express airlines and Union Bank. The screenshots, which include what seem to be a flight schedule and passenger manifest for a Midwest Express airline from a Microsoft Access database run on Windows XP Office, had evidently been obtained during the team’s previously undetected past hacking exploits. According to the message, the team had hacked the site to “ensure that the public is aware of the United States of America’s lack of security.” “This situation proves that we are all still vulnerable even after 9/11,” the Deceptive Duo posted. “Tighten the security before a foreign attack forces you to. At a time like this, we cannot risk the possibility of compromise by a foreign enemy.” The Deceptive Duo will later be revealed to be Robert Lyttle, age 20, and Benjamin Stark, age 22. The pair will plead guilty in federal court to several charges involving their hacking exploits on May 19, 2004.

Version 4.2.0 of the PHP programming language is released. Visit the official PHP website.

Version 8.0 of the SUSE Linux operating system is released.

2003
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the Athlon XP 2500+ processor. Price: US$124 in 1000-unit quantities

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) releases the Opteron processor. Visit the official Opteron website.

Apple Computer releases an updated version of the iBook, featuring a 800 or 900MHz G3 processor, a 12.1 or 14.1 inch LCD screen, and a 30 or 40GB hard drive. Visit the official website of Apple Computer.

2004
Version 6.2 of MSN Messenger is released, featuring a larger range of features for mobile users. Visit the official MSN Messenger website.

2005
Make Magazine, a quarterly publication devoted to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) projects and culture, holds the first “Maker Faire” April 22 – 23, 2006 at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. The event features over one hundred exhibits in six pavilions and across a five acre midway. Visit the official Maker Faire website.

The Star Trek: Enterprise episode “In a Mirror, Darkly, Part I” first airs. (No. 418) In it, Commander Archer struggles to overthrow Captain Forrest in the Mirror Universe, when the alternate Enterprise discovers a ship from the future. Memory Alpha entry

2008
Seagate announces that it has shipped one billion hard drives since its founding in 1979, becoming the first hard drive manufacturer to reach the milestone. All told, the drives which it has already shipped would have a total capacity of roughly 79 million terabytes (TB). Further more, the company continues to ship 111,600TB worth of storage daily or an average of 1TB every second. Seagate projects that, if market demand holds, it will ship another billion drives within just five years. In 2007, Seagate was the world’s leading hard drive manufacturer, with a leading market share of 35%. Visit the official Seagate website.