The Great Geek Manual

1946
The first commercial ship to be equipped with a radar system, the SS African Star, goes into service.

1953
Professional wrestler Freddie Blassie first coins the term “Pencil neck geek.”

1961
NASA launches the Explorer 11 spacecraft into Earth orbit equipped with the first gamma ray telescope aboard a Juno II rocket. Its mission marks the beginning of gamma-ray astronomy. Visit the official NASA website for the Explorer 11.

1970
At an American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., the discovery of element 105, Hahnium. The discovery was achieved primarily through the work of Albert Ghiorso of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The element has an atomic mass of 260, and it was named for the German physicist Otto Hahn.

1981
Xerox introduces the Xerox 8010 Star Information System, featuring a bitmapped screen, Ethernet, the first computer mouse, a laser printer, the Smalltalk language, a WYSIWYG word processor, and software for combining text and graphics in the same document.

Xerox PARC introduces the computer mouse.

1986
John R. MacDougall, better known by the handle Captain Midnight, hijacks an HBO satellite at 12:32am to transmits his own message to HBO subscribers in the United States’ Eastern time zone. MacDougall, who works at the Central Florida Teleport, a company that uplinks services to satellites, was overseeing the uplink of the movie Pee-wee’s Big Adventure on the night of the hack. At the end of his shift, he swung the dish back into its storage position, pointing directly upward, which happened to be the location of Galaxy 1, the satellite that transmits HBO. As a protest against the introduction of high fees and scrambling equipment, he transmits a signal onto the satellite, overriding an HBO showing of The Falcon and the Snowman. The signal contains a text message that reads, “GOODEVENING HBO FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT $12.95/MONTH ? NO WAY ! [SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!]” MacDougall chose the name “Captain Midnight” from a movie he had recently seen, On the Air Live with Captain Midnight. After media pressure forces the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to act, MacDougall will be charged and sentenced, per a plea bargain, to a US$5,000 fine and one year’s probation.

1987
The San Jose Mercury News features an article by G. Pascal Zachary, entitled “Atari’s Back and Cost-cutting ignites Atari’s new takeoff.” Leonard Tramiel, Allan Pratt, and Dave Staugas are pictured in a featured photo. Trip Hawkins, president of Electronics Arts of San Mateo, California, is quoted in the article as stating, “Atari has been very shrewd. They were able to get a running start in Europe – before taking on the big guys in the United States.”

1990
Square Co., Ltd. releases Final Fantasy III for the Nintendo in Japan.

Touchstone Pictures releases the science fiction comedy film Spaced Invaders, directed by Patrick Read Johnson and starring Douglas Barr, Ariana Richards, Royal Dano, Gregg Berger, and Wayne Alexander, to 1,821 US theaters. The “B movie” is a comedy in which dim-witted Martians choose to invade a small American town on the same night that the local radio station rebroadcasts Orson Welles’ 1938 “War Of The Worlds”. The title is a play on the title of the classic video game, “Space Invaders.” It will gross US$4,474,336 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing Running Time: 1 hr 40 mins

1995
The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) files suit against software giant Microsoft to block the company’s proposed acquisition of the financial software developer Intuit. In its suit, the DoJ alleges that the purchase would lead to higher software prices while diminishing market innovation.

The Sega Saturn game system is released in Canada.

1997
The website of the the British Conservative Party is hacked by the “Circle of Deception”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

The website of Kvällsposten is hacked by “WHiZKaZ och dUPLO / fR0LiC!”. View an archived version of the defaced website.

1998
At 4pm, Koko, a twenty-six year-old female gorilla care for by the Gorilla Foundation in Woodside, California, joins a chat session hosted by America Online (AOL). During the session, which is joined by approximately eight thousand users, AOL members ask questions which are then translated into sign language by Dr. Francine Patterson. Koko’s responses are then relayed back to the chat room by Patterson through an AOL facilitator. Koko is able to communicate over a thousand words using American Sign Language (ASL) and is able to understand approximate two thousand words of spoken language. The event is the world’s first chat session between two different species. Read an archived transcript of the chat session at the Internet Archive.

1999
Ken Hamidi, age 51, is banned by a California state court judge from sending bulk email to Intel employees. The former Intel engineer lost a workers’ compensation claim the previous year, and he was sending bulk emails to Intel employees in an attempt to disrupt their work. The judge ruled against Hamidi, who claimed that the emails were an expression of free speech protected by the First Amendment.

Nintendo releases the Super Smash Bros. game for the Nintendo 64 in North America. Visit the game’s official website. ESRB: E (Everyone)

Robot Wars, LLC announces that they are suing Battlebots for attempting to cause “enormous economic harm” to the Robot Wars franchise by holding conflicting events.

2000
Google launches the first comprehensive wireless search engine for mobile phones. Visit the official Google Mobile website.

Jerry Sanders, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), announces the June release of the new Duron processor. The company claims that the new chip will available in consumer grade personal computers priced under the one thousand dollar threshold, while offering clock speeds superior to the company’s own K6-2 processors. Visit the AMD website for Duron processors. Code-name: Spitfire

Philip Tkacz, age 23, of Versailles, Kentucky, is held on charges that he had made threats online against one or more high schools in central Kentucky. Tkacz participated in online chats using the handle “Schoolshooter 2000″.

The promotional trailer for The Lord of the Rings film trilogy is first released online. It will shatter records, recording 1.7 million hits within just the first twenty-four hours of its release. The trailer’s soundtrack uses a music from the soundtracks of the films Braveheart and The Shawshank Redemption.

2001
New Deli police report that a high school student has been arrested for allegedly building a pornographic website. This is reportedly the first legal case in India related to the publication of obscene material on an Internet website.

Warner Bros. Pictures releases the drama film The Dish, directed by Rob Sitch and starring Sam Neill, Kevin Harrington, Tom Long, and Patrick Warburton, to 6 US theaters. The Australian film tells the true story of how the Parkes Observatory was used to relay the live television of man’s first steps on the moon, during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hr 53 mins

2002
NASA receives the last successful telemetry from the Pioneer 10 space probe. The signal loss is the result of its distance from Earth and a diminishing power source, not a hardware or software failure.

2005
Adobe Systems releases Illustrator CS2 (version 12) for both the Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. The name CS reflects its integration with the Adobe Creative Suite. Illustrator CS is the first version of Illustrator to include 3-dimensional interaction that allows users to extrude or revolve shapes in order to create simple 3D objects. Visit the official Illustrator website. Code-name: Zodiac

A Court of Appeal in Paris decides that it is illegal for video distributors to encode protected works with an anti-copying devices without making it fact sufficiently clear on the packaging. The court’s decision is based on the “three-stage test” in EU Directive 2001/29 which dictates that the creation of a private digital copy of a work does not prevent the normal commercial exploitation of the work or prejudice the copyright owner’s rights. Therefore, applying means to prevent any the private copying infringes on consumers rights.

NASA invests US$11 million over four years with Rice University to develop an experimental power cable dubbed a “quantum wire” with ten times the conductivity of copper wire and only one-sixth the weight. Made of carbon nanotubes, the wire would have the potential to reduce the weight of next generation shuttles.

2006
The animated film Thru the Moebius Strip is premiered at the Second International Animation and Cartoon Festival in Hangzhou, China. It is the first 3D CGI Chinese animated feature film made in mainland China. The story is based on a sci-fi adventure comic from artist Jean Giraud.

The French national audiovisual archives, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), makes ten thousand hours of television program material, or about 100,000 items, available online to the general public. The files include three thousand hours of television news from the past thirty years. The releases represent about a third of all French public television archives. The INA also announces its intention to make all of its holdings available online by 2015.

News breaks that, with expensive Blu-ray and Cell processor technology in the PlayStation 3, Sony’s Game Division is expected to lose US$872 million by the end of the fiscal year.

Nintendo announces that the official name of its impending fifth home video game console will be “Wii.” Not “Nintendo Wii,” just “Wii.” In its release, Nintendo explains that, “Wii sounds like “we,” which emphasizes this console is for everyone. Wii can easily be remembered by people around the world, no matter what language they speak. No confusion. Wii has a distinctive “ii” spelling that symbolizes both the unique controllers and the image of people gathering to play.” The system had previously been referred to by the code name “Revolution”. Visit the official Wii website.

2007
Paramount Pictures releases the science fiction film Next, directed by Lee Tamahori and starring Nicolas Cage, Julianne Moore, and Jessica Biel, to 2,725 US theaters. The film is based on the short story The Golden Man by Philip K. Dick. In it, a Las Vegas magician who can see into the future is pursued by FBI agents seeking to use his abilities to prevent a nuclear terrorist attack. It will gross US$7,133,049 domestically in its opening weekend. IMDB listing (MPAA Rating: PG-13) Running Time: 1 hr 36 mins

Sony releases the PlayStation 3 video game system in India. Visit the official PlayStation 3 website.