The Great Geek Manual

1895
A spectrogram made by American astronomer James Keeler proves that the rings of the planet Saturn are composed of meteoric particles, as predicted by James Clerk Maxwell, who, in 1859, demonstrated that the rings could not be solid because they would become unstable and break apart. If the rings were solid, observations would show uniform rotation. However, Keeler’s spectrogram of light reflected from Saturn’s rings show a Doppler shift indicating a variation in radial velocity. Thus, particles in the inner part of a ring, closer to Saturn, move at a different rotational speed from those in more distance parts of a ring, as predicted by Kepler’s third law. Keeler will publish his conclusions, “A Spectroscopic Proof of the Meteoric Constitution of Saturn’s Rings,” in the May 1895 issue of Astrophysical Journal.

1913
The Danske Statens Arkiv for Historiske Film og Stemmer (Danish State Archive for Historical Film and Sound) is established at the Royal Library in Copenhagen. It is the world’s first film archive. Its function is to collect records of significant events.

1943
A meeting held by Colonel Leslie E. Simon, director of the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen, Professor Oswald Veblen of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and a handful of others. Their agenda is to discuss the memo sent to them by John William Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, “Describing an Electronic Difference Analyzer.” The decision will be made to back the project.

1959
NASA announces the selection of the United States’ first seven astronauts, chosen to participate in the Mercury program, the nation’s first manned space program. The seven chosen are: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard, and Donald Slayton, who were chosen from 110 applicants. The news media quickly dubs the group the “Mercury Seven“. Their training program at Langley consists of a wide range of activities, ranging from a graduate-level course in introductory space science to simulator training and scuba-diving. Project Mercury will be NASA’s first high profile program. The program’s mission is to learn if humans can survive in space. NASA required astronaut candidates to be male, no older than 40 years of age, no more than 5′ 11″ in height, and in excellent physical condition. On May 5th, 1961, Shepard will become the first American in space during the flight of Freedom 7.

1981
The journal Nature publishes the longest scientific name in history. With 16,569 nucleotides, the systematic name for human mitochondrial DNA is 207,000 letters long.

Microsoft holds its first semi-annual company meeting at the newly built Bellevue Athletic Club.

1982
Atari, Inc. opens the offices of Atari Far East Ltd. in Japan, at the Fukide Building, 2nd Floor, 4-1-13, Toranomon, MinatoKu, Tokyo, Japan 105. In celebration, a reception is held at the Hotel Okura hosted by John Farrand, president of Atari’s Coin Games International Division and Rivington Hight, president of Atari Far East.

1997
Disney Online launches the Disney Daily Blast Internet website aimed at children aged 3-12 years.

Kilauren Gibb of Toronto reveals that she surfed the Internet to determine that celebrity musician Joni Mitchell is the birth mother who gave her up thirty-two years prior. By way of Mitchell’s Internet home page, Gibb discovers fourteen “points of comparison” to find confirm her suspicions.

1998
Playboy is awarded US$3.74 million plus court costs in a judgment against a San Diego-based firm called Five Senses Productions and its owner, Francesco Sanfilippo. According to the suit heard in federal court, the commercial Internet company used almost 7,500 Playboy-owned photographs on their service without permission.

Seiko Instruments introduces the world’s first wrist wearable Personal Computer (PC). The watch, planned for release Wednesday, June 10, has been named Ruputer and will sell for US$285. It features a 16-bit, 3.6 MHz processor and 2 MB of non-volatile storage memory, 128 KB of main memory, a full graphic display, and a small joystick. It can download pictures and data via infrared signals from other PCs and will be provided with three applications that run on Windows ’95.

The Stanford University Graduate School of Business, sysadmins install additional disk capacity on their servers. They then reload files from a corrupt backup tape, destroying many faculty and graduate student research files. This very public incident demonstrates yet again the importance of verifying the readability of backups. It also underscores the wisdom of making two backups before attempting to reload a system.

1999
David Herpolsheimer, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) for Bleem!, LLC (www.bleem.com) announces that a San Francisco Federal District Court has rejected a request submitted by Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) to block sales of their PlayStation emulator, BLEEM!, for IBM compatible computers. Sony denies that such a request was submitted to the courts.

The Matrix is released to theaters in Australia.

2001
Intel releases the 850 MHz Celeron processor. Price: US$138 in 1000-unit quantities

2002
Yahoo! launches a new small business site, http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com. The site is a centralized resource for online small business services and solutions. Read the original press release.

2004
One of the .ly nameservers stops responding, causing the other nameserver to go offline, making the domain completely inaccessible. .Ly is the top-level domain of Libya. Service will be restored on April 13th.

Shaun of the Dead, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is released to theaters in the UK. The romantic comedy is a spoof on the zombie horror genre.

2007
Apple announces that it has sold its 100 millionth iPod, cementing it as the fastest selling music player. On average, one iPod has been sold every 1.7 seconds for the five and a half year duration of the device. In total, 10 different versions of the player have been released, and about 2.5 billion tracks have been downloaded from the accompanying iTunes music store. In March, Apple announced the sale of its 90 millionth iPod – evidence of the continued momentum of the product. The product line was reinvigorated when Apple introduced the new iPod Shuffle, one of the smallest MP3 players in the US.

2008
At the RSA Security Conference, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff warns that a cyberterrorist attack could hurt the US as much as the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center and announces the launch of what he describes as a “reverse Manhattan Project” to secure domestic networks. The Manhattan Project developed what was, in its own time, the ultimate offensive weapon, the atom bomb; the goal of a reverse Manhattan Project is to build the ultimate defensive weapon. One of the project’s chief goals is to reduce the number of access points to government systems from thousands to about fifty and to develop a method of monitoring networks in real time and anticipating forthcoming attacks.