The Great Geek Manual

1635
The first public school in the United States, the Boston Latin School, is founded in Boston, Massachusetts.

1827
William Rowan Hamilton presented his Theory of Systems of Rays at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. Although he is still only a 21 year old undergraduate, his work will become one of the important works in optics, providing a single function that unites mathematics, mechanics, and optics. The theory will lead to the wave theory of light, which establishes that light is a form of energy that travels in waves.

1867
The Zoetrope is patented by William E. Lincoln of Providence, Rhode Island. (US No. 64,117) The device is the first animated picture machine. It creates the illusion of animation to a sequence of pictures lining the inside wall of a shallow cylinder, with vertical slits between the images, when spun.

1896
The first movie shown to a paying theater audience in the US is presented using Thomas Edison’s Vitascope. The movie features a series of short scenes, and is part of a series of acts at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, in New York City. The film scenes include a ballet performance, a burlesque boxing match, waves on a sea shore, and a comic allegory, “The Monroe Doctrine,” all of which are projected at about half life size.

1924
In England, King George V broadcasts from the opening of the British Empire Exhibition to a record audience of 10 million people. It’s the most people ever addressed by a head of state.

1940
The first leak-proof “sealed in steel” dry cell flashlight battery is patented in the US by Herman Anthony. (US No. 2,198,423) It will be released by Ray-o-Vac.

1962
The American satellite that will be the first to reach the lunar surface, the Ranger IV, is launched at 3:50pm from Cape Canaveral, Florida. As intended, it will impact on the Moon three days later at 7:50pm on April 26, at a speed of 5,963 MPH. The launch vehicle is an Atlas-Agena B rocket, 102 feet high and 16 feet in diameter at the base.

1964
The National Bureau of Standards retires the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC), the first computer to use stored-program and all-diode logic (a technology more reliable than vacuum tubes) in the United States. The SEAC was built in Washington fifteen years earlier for testing components and systems for setting computer standards.

1965
The first Soviet communications satellite, Molniya 1, is launched by the USSR into geostationary orbit. Once established in an orbit, it will be used as a television relay for television signals between Moscow and Vladivostok, a distance of 6,200 miles.

1981
Artificial skin is first transplanted in the US on patients at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The combination of cowhide, shark cartilage and plastic was developed by Ioannis V. Yannas and a research team at MIT. This material makes it possible to treat burn patients whose injuries might otherwise be fatal.

1994
Physicists at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory discovered the subatomic particle called the top quark. It is the most massive of known elementary particles.

1996
Microsoft releases the Internet Explorer 2.0 web browser for the Macintosh, on systems running System 7.0.1 or higher.

1997
After the decline in the popularity of bulletin board systems in the late nineties, Cott Lang ceases development of the once popular Renegade BBS and passes it on to two Renegade BBS utility authors, Patrick Spence and Gary Hall. Renegade is a bulletin board system written in Pascal for IBM PC-compatible computers running MS-DOS. It will remain one of the most popular systems on the internet through the mid-nineties. Visit the official Renegade page.

1998
The seventh to last episode of Seinfeld, “The Frogger,” airs on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) network. (No. 918) In this episode George Costanza, played by Jason Alexander, reminisces about his day playing the Frogger arcade game when he was younger at the local pizza parlor, where he has achieved the high score. When he learns that the restaurant is going out of business, he buys the machine, but is left with the problem of transporting it without unplugging it. Due to a strange turn of events, he is forced to move the arcade machine across a busy street in an imitation of the game in order to plug it in before the battery dies. Hasbro Interactive claims that the episode’s release following their November 1997 release of Frogger 3D for the PlayStation and Windows is coincidental.

1999
The Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Emergency Response Team warns computer users that a new virus called the CIH, also known as Chernobyl or Spacefiller may strike Monday, April 26 and essentially erase data on disk drives and hard drives.

Miramax releases the science fiction film eXistenZ, directed by David Cronenberg and starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jude Law, Ian Holm, and Willem Dafoe, to 256 US theaters in a limited release. The film centers around a virtual reality game. In it, a game designer on the run from assassins must play her latest virtual reality creation with a marketing trainee to determine if the game’s organic hardware has been damaged. Produced on a budget of US$15 million, it will gross US$810,262 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: R) Running Time: 1 hr 30 mins

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) files another Temporary Restraining Order against Bleem, LLC, developer of the PlayStation emulator BLEEM! for Personal Computers.

The University of Washington website is hacked by “global hell”.

2001
Intel releases the 1.6GHz Pentium 4 processor. Price: US$294 in quantities of 1000

Intel releases a 1.7GHz Pentium 4 processor. The 1.7GHz Pentium 4 will sell for US$352 when it debuts, with PCs incorporating the chip selling for just under US$1,800, with monitor. Price cuts on the 1.3GHz, 1.4GHz and 1.5GHz processors slated for the following week will drop the base price of computers using the chip under the US$1,000 mark. Just one year prior, a 1GHz chip alone cost US$1,299. Price: US$352 in quantities of 1000

Yahoo! launches Yahoo! Broadcast.

2002
A team of hackers knowns as the “Deceptive Duo” hacks into a server belonging to the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California NASA and the US Department of Transportation website.

The Mobile Pentium 4M is released. The processor includes Intel’s SpeedStep and Deeper Sleep technologies, but not Hyper-Threading.

2003
Registration of .pro top level domains, including .cpa.pro, .law.pro, and .med.pro.

2004
Version 5.8.4 of the Perl programming language is released. Visit the official Perl website.

2005
At the Celebration III fan-convention, George Lucas announces that two new Star Wars television series will be produced. The first will be a fully 3-D, half-hour length series that picks up where the Clone Wars cartoon left off, produced by Lucasfilm Animation. The series is scheduled for a Fall 2007 debut. The second series will be an hour-long live-action show, set between Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope. It will focus on very minor characters from the films, with the possibility of cameos appearances by some of the main characters. The live-action show is expected to make its debut sometime in 2007 or 2008.

2006
PC-BSD Software releases version 1.0 of the PC-BSD operating system. PC-BSD is designed to be an easily installed Unix system with a graphical installation. Visit the official PC-BSD website.

Sony announces that it has sold twenty-four HDCAM high definition digital television cameras worldwide, including its CineAlta range, since the format’s launch in 1997.

2007
NASA releases the first 3D images of the Sun, which had been taken by the Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites.

Spider-Man 3 premieres in the UK at the Odeon Leicester Square.