The Great Geek Manual

1882
Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter demonstrate the photophone, a device in which a mirrored silver disc is made to vibrate by speech from a speaking tube. Light reflected off the disc is captured in a parabolic dish and focused onto a selenium cell, where variations in the reflected light are converted into the electrical signals that are carried to headphones. The laser disc and CD of the seventies will work on a remarkably similar principle.

1900
Guglielmo Marconi is granted a patent for a system of tuned coupled circuits that allow simultaneous transmissions on different frequencies, allowing adjacent stations to operate without interfering with one another. (UK patent 7777)

1906
The first film screening in Hawaii takes place.

1949
Look magazine says radio is “doomed” and that television will overtake it within three years.

1960
IBM sends out a press release on its IBM 7030, otherwise known are the Stretch supercomputer. “The $10-million-and-up class computers are the world’s fastest and most powerful. They are similar to the STRETCH computer which IBM is now completing for the Atomic Energy Commission at Los Alamos, New Mexico. IBM will now contract with business firms and government agencies to build STRETCH type computers. They can complete 100 billion computations in a day. The new machines are seventy-five times faster than the large-scale IBM 704 computer”

1962
NASA’s Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon after sixty-four hours of flight. The probe’s mission is to rough-land a seismometer capsule on the Moon, to collect gamma-ray data in flight, to study the radar reflectivity of the lunar surface, and to continue testing the Ranger program for development of lunar and interplanetary spacecraft.

1983
Tandy introduces the TRS-80 Model 4 computer, featuring a 4MHz Zilog Z80A processor, 16kB RAM, a cassette interface, a keyboard, and an 80×24 text 12-inch monochrome monitor. Price: US$1000 or US$2000 with 64 kB RAM and two 180kB 5.25-inch floppy drives

1985
The Federated Group of Electronics Stores (Videoland) open their sixteenth Texas store in a thirty-five thousand square-foot facility (an old O.G. Wilson catalog showroom) in the Prestonwood Shopping Center in Dallas. Spokesperson Donald A. Thomas, Jr., is quoted in the April 25th issue of the Dallas Times Herald as stating that plans to expand or move all existing Videoland locations to “Federated-size” locations is eminent.

1986
In Pripet, Russia, the Chernobyl nuclear plant’s fourth reactor explodes in the world’s worst civil nuclear catastrophe, sending a cloud of radioactive dust over Europe. Radioactive fallout resulted in the evacuation and relocation of 336,000 people. Fifty-six people die in the explosion, and thirty-one people, mostly firemen, are killed immediately after the explosion. Several thousand more inhabitants of the region will die from radiation-related illnesses.

1991
Nintendo EAD releases an enhanced version of the classic PC game Sim City for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

1993
The Space Shuttle Columbia is launched on the second German sponsored D-2 Spacelab Mission. Eighty-eight experiments conducted before the shuttles return on May 6th will cover life sciences, technology applications, Earth observation, astronomy, and atmospheric physics. Two hundred forty tadpoles and two hundred forty fish larvae are carried aboard to test how they adjust to weightlessness in space. Most of the specimens will die in orbit. During the mission, specialist Dr. Bernard Harris set up the first intravenous (IV) line in space, injecting payload specialist Hans Schlegel with saline as part of a study to replace body fluids lost during weightlessness. This mission will bring the shuttle program’s cumulative flight time to one year.

1994
Physicists announce first evidence of the top quark subatomic particle to the public.

1999
eBay, Inc., announces an agreement to acquire Butterfield & Butterfield, an auction house best known for antiques and fine art. The terms of the agreement include US$260 million to be paid in eBay stock.

Last release of the Nemesis, an operating system designed by the University of Cambridge, the University of Glasgow, the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and Citrix Systems is made public.

Nintendo releases the Super Smash Bros. game for the Nintendo 64 in the US.

Red Hat Linux 6.0 (”Hedwig”) is released.

The thirteenth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, CIH/Chernobyl Virus erases disk drives and hard drives and throughout Asia and Europe. Turkey and South Korea report three hundred thousand downed systems. The virus originated in Asia during the previous summer. Mikko Hermanni Hypponen of Data Fellows, Ltd., will report to the Reuters news service that some people calling his service were in tears. One woman had just completed an entire book of poetry before the virus erased it completely. This is the first known virus to target the flash BIOS.

2000
Hundreds of corporate systems in South Korea are hit by the Chernobyl virus. The Ministry of Information and Communication announces that it has received nearly two thousand complaints about the virus striking on the fourteenth anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Ukraine.

2001
US Senators Joe Lieberman and Herb Kohl introduce the Media Marketing Accountability Act (H.R. 2246 or S. 792), government legislation intended to give the Federal Trade Commission authority to prosecute those in the entertainment industry who market adult-rated products to children. The bill will ultimately not pass into law, due to concerns over its constitutionality. Read the full text at the Library of Congress’s Thomas database.

2002
Federally recognized US Indian tribes become eligible to register under the .gov top level domain.

JavaScript 2.0 (draft 4) is released.

Microsoft reduces the price of the Xbox by £100 in the UK, and by a corresponding amount throughout the rest of Europe, just a month and twelve days after the console’s initial launch. To avoid frustrating early adopters, they offer any two current games and an extra controller for free to any purchaser who can provide a sales receipt showing the original higher price.

2005
Capcom releases the Resident Evil Outbreak File #2 for the PlayStation 2 in the US.

Universal Studios uploads a trailer for the film Serenity to the Internet as part of a viral marketing campaign. By April 28, the video tops the Yahoo Buzz Index. It is one of five short videos that will be released on the Internet, called the “R. Tam sessions,” in which the character River Tam is being educated in a facility only known as “The Academy.”

Vivendi Universal releases Empire Earth II for Windows.

The Walt Disney Company announces the summer 2006 release of Pirates of the Caribbean Online, coinciding with the release of the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.

2006
According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft is set to acquire developer Massive Incorporated for over $400 million. Massive Incorporated is an advertising company that creates the software and services required to dynamically host advertisements within video games.

The comic Tron: The Ghost in the Machine issue number one is released. The comic is the first based of a series based on the Tron 2.0 computer game, which was in turn based on the classic film Tron.

A team of researchers working for IBM publishes the results of a pattern discovery analysis of “junk DNA“. In contrast to expectations, they discovered similar patterns in “junk DNA” and DNA sections containing genes. Read more at the BBC.